Percy Zvomuya

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.

Only last month Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe appeared to have crushed all internal opposition when his party backed his bid for a sixth term as president, but it now seems that he finds himself having to put down a fresh internal party rebellion.

The traffic intersections of our major cities have two permanent fixtures: there are the intrepid, streetwise vendors, who, ducking cars, can persuade you that the cheap sunglasses, cellphone chargers and many other wares they sell are the genuine articles. Less combative, but an equally insistent presence, are the beggars, from other Southern African countries, who operate as individuals or as teams.

The unbanning of the ANC, the return of its leaders from exile and the dawn of democracy marked a reversal of migration patterns. Until then apartheid South Africa experienced tens of thousands of its people going into exile, but post-1994 saw the country becoming home to exiled organisations fighting for autonomy, freedom, democracy and separate states.

Until the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the post-colonial world had never witnessed, in terms of primitive brutality, a tragedy in which a million people (Tutsis) were killed in just 12 weeks by their foes (Hutus). Yet, a lesser known, equally harrowing war took place between 1967 and 1970 following the decision by Nigeria’s south-eastern region to secede from the federal state.

One of the upshots of the Zimbabwe crisis is the number of books deciphering it. Writers go there, spend a few months and decide, after seeing so much crazy stuff going on, that they can write a book. The results, mostly, have been at best half-ignorant books telling us what we already know and, at worst, downright inaccurate fantasies that feed into racist stereotypes.

Helen Oyeyemi is without doubt a very intelligent writer. Comparisons to Ben Okri, Chinua Achebe and others are not empty literary plaudits. Aptly for a writer tastefully compared with giants such as these, Oyeyemi takes risks.

Bernard Nzimbi, head of the Anglican Church in Kenya, entrenched his anti-gay position by consecrating Anglican clerics Bill Atwood and Bill Murdoch as bishops last Thursday in Kenya. Atwood and Murdoch, from the United States, oppose gay unions, which have been authorised by certain Anglican dioceses in North America.

As South African President Thabo Mbeki prepared to present his progress report on the mediation process in Zimbabwe to regional leaders gathered at this week’s Southern African Development Community summit, Zimbabwean Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa was insisting that there was no need for political reform in Zimbabwe.

It’s a reminder that we live in a global world when in Britain you are as likely to be treated by a South African or a national of another developing country as you are by a British nurse. It’s a trend that the South African government is preparing to take steps to reverse, starting with Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s imminent trip overseas aimed at encouraging South African nurses to come back.

Tendai Biti is the secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai and Paul Themba Nyathi is the secretary general of the MDC led by Arthur Mutambara. The <i>Mail & Guardian</i>’s Percy Zvomuya speaks to both men about the future of the party.

True freedom will come the day the aphorism “talk is cheap” becomes literally true. With that in mind I checked out the various pre-paid cellphone packages to see who offers the best deal. Virgin Mobile is a recent addition to the cellphone family. It shook up the market last year when it based all its offerings on per-second billing.

As tantalising as titles and book covers go, I can’t remember one that comes close to Shimmer Chinodya’s <i>Strife</i>. When I saw the cover of silhouetted people, arms flailing in the air, and a yellow flame, I thought of the oppressed getting fed up with a dictatorship and rising up in anger.