Composer Philip Miller tells Percy Zvomuya and Yunus Momoniat about the ethical consideration of making music from human tragedy.
Wole Soyinka is the latest African playwright to be celebrated by local director James Ngcobo, writes Percy Zvomuya.
The South African Human Rights Commission says it may go to the Equality Court to enforce its ruling against the Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ) for holding meetings at which white people are not allowed. It has rejected the FBJ’s assertion that it had been ambushed.
While most eyes in Southern Africa were glued to the unfolding drama in Zimbabwe this week, Botswana remained true to its reputation as Africa’s most stable country, quietly transferring power from one president to another. On April 1, Festus Mogae, president for the past decade, handed power to his hand-picked successor.
Zimbabwe’s opposition may be celebrating a historic win over President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, but many people inside and outside the country are wondering how the election could have been this close. How did Mugabe, who has reduced Zimbabwe to an economic and human-rights basket case, garner close to half the vote?
The political and economic future of Zimbabwe is resting on a razor’s edge as hard-line military commanders and a more moderate faction of Zanu-PF leaders vie to win over a defeated Robert Mugabe. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is legally bound to release the results of the presidential election by Friday.
Percy Zvomuya looks at Zimbabwe’s literary enfant terrible Charles Dambudzo Marechera’s ambivalent place in African literature.
Four scenarios confront Zimbabweans as they prepare to go to the polls at the weekend: a Robert Mugabe victory, the most likely outcome; a second round of voting; a victory for the majority faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) under Morgan Tsvangirai; and a disputed election.
Award-winning Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou — a previous winner of the Sub-Saharan Africa Literary Prize and the Prix Renaudot — has been hailed by a French journal as a writer to watch out for in this century. Percy Zvomuya is impressed by the English translation of Mabanckou’s <i>African Psycho</i>.
The inspiration for Angolan Ondjaki’s book <i>The Whistler</i> could easily have been the avant-garde duo of Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Sony Labou Tansi, acolytes of Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, writes Percy Zvomuya.