Salif Keita to Perform in Zimbabwe!
Yay! Yay! Yay! Salif Keita is coming to Zimbabwe. The Mali-born music legend will perform at this year’s Harare International Festival of the Arts.
We’re blown away, totally.
Sam and Owen buried in Harare
Filed under: Music & Dance, Zimbabwean diaries, Zimbos who rock
Sam Mtukudzi and Owen Chimhare who died in a car crash on Monday morning (15 March 2010), were laid to rest at Warren Hills Cemetery in Harare this afternoon.
Speaking at a service held earlier in the day, Sam’s mother said that she had been robbed of two sons. Her husband, music superstar Oliver Mtukudzi said that Sam and Owen were great children and never gave their parents too many headaches.
Many of those present, including some of the artists that Sam had worked with, broke down intermittently during the service and wept for their friend departed.
Sam Mtukudzi, Owen Chimhare to be Buried in Harare
Sam Mtukudzi and his friend Owen Chimhare will be buried side by side at Warren Hills Cemetery in Harare tomorrow.
The Mtukudzi family has decided not to bury him in their rural home so that he can be interred with his friend.
More about the burial arrangmements
Sam Mtukudzi is No More
Sam Mtukudzi (1988-2010)
Sam Mtukudzi is no more. The young music star passed away in the early hours of this morning on his way home in Norton from Harare.
He and his sound engineer Owen Chimhare both died on the spot when their car veered off the road along Bulawayo Road, in the Kuwadzana Extension area.
Carl Joshua Ncube takes piracy fight to the streets
Zimbabwean animator and graphics artist Carl Joshua Ncube will from this afternoon live on Harare’s First Street for a week to raise awareness of the seriousness of piracy and to convince Zimbabweans to buy original products to support the artists.
Amelia’s Inheritance
Filed under: Books & literature, Entertainment, Arts & Culture, News you won't find elsewhere, Other Entertainment, Topical issues
Amelia
Paperback 204pp, Lion Press, 2010
Zimbabweans are picky readers and even pickier book-buyers. Who can blame us, considering that a considerable portion of the literature that has been churned out over the last two decades has been about the Chimurenga or the more recent political conflict? In a country where professionals earn $100 a month, who really wants to spend $10 on a book about how bad Rhodesia was or how repressive the present regime is? We know all that already.
How refreshing then to come across Sarudzayi Mubvakure’s second and latest literary offering, Amelia’s Inheritance! Set mostly in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, this is the story of Amelia Gruber, the daughter of a German immigrant man and a mixed-race woman of unknown parentage, who had been raised as an orphan. As a child, her peers mark her as an outcast, and perhaps this pushes her from the psychological and social fortress the White settlers built around themselves and allows her a glimpse of the rest of the world. Her father loses his wealth and dies a broken man, leaving the family to cope as best as they can as one of Rhodesia’s best kept secrets; the Poor Whites. Amelia’s mother loses her mind, and her younger sister elopes leaving Amelia to hold on to precious little else. Sisi, their maid, stays with her.
Speaking of secrets, boy are there plenty! The people she meets along the way seem to know a lot more about her past than they should, and it seems less and less a coincidence that they have come in to her life. Amelia is also learning about the wider world, she is crossing the racial and social barriers of Rhodesia. She makes friends with a Black activist. Through their relationship, we are reminded of a fact that doesn’t seem to get mention by other writers; that the dispossession of indigenous Black people’s lands by White Settlers did not end with the Pioneer Column but continued well in to the last days of that ignoble racist political system. Like I noted, Mubvakure doesn’t take up too much prose telling us what we know already. In a suspense-filled, pacy narrative, Amelia becomes part of the process to break down those barriers and the secrets of her past become unlocked in a stunning conclusion.
Mubvakure has marked her own territory on the Zimbabwean literary landscape. Amelia’s Inheritance reminds me of Dickens’ Great Expectations, Oliver Twist etc in that she has a hero whose circumstances are set to change as the mystery of their past unfolds. However, despite her many shortcomings, the most glaring being her poverty and the breakdown of her family, Amelia is hardly a passive subject to the whims of fate. And there may be a bit of Catherine Cookson in the style, too. But Mubvakure’s style is original and establishes her as one of the most exciting new authors on the scene.
Available through Lion Press Ltd’s website and their growing list of distributors worldwide, and the major online bookstores.
