Pakatanga vanhu kunyora mabhuku muAfrica nyaya dzacho dzaive dzekupesana kwaivepo pakati pezvechirungu nezvechivanhu makare muAfrica. Zvino munyaya yenyu kupesana uku kuinoitikira muchirungu makare.

Ichokwadi kuti vanhu vava kuenda mhiri kwemakungwa mazuva ano vava ma ‘economic migrants’. Vazhinji varikushupika uye vanoonerwa pasi nevamwe vavo , havana ‘economic basis’ yekuti vave nedado ['pride'] . Kwavabva kune nhamo , saka zvishoma kana kuti hapana chekuvhaira nacho. Vano dadirwawo nevaridzi venyika yavari.

Nyaya yenyu yandifadza !

Farai

When is the book coming?

If the depiction of the rape is strong, it is meant to be!!! Actually, I was a screenwriter before a novelist-so I tend to be quite graphic at times. The idea is to horrify you and shock you-then if you have the stomach to read on I portray how these things can happen to a society that likes to brag about its “unhu”.

There is always that problem as a contemporary artist of when addressing a bold subject, one can be seen as pandering to Western prejudices etc. But the novel is written in ChiShona, and will come out in KiSwahili, Hausa and other Pan-African languages first before a single European reads it. And at the same time, I feel that people are free to take it any way they can.

I was at a boarding school, and it may seem strange but I was not aware of any sexual abuse there until I left-then I found out it had been rampant. And to think that I actually protected one of the perpertrators from bullies-come to think of it, those boys may have wanted to beat him up because they knew what he was doing. In my novel I did touch on male rape.

However, the novel is not about rape, but what happens after. Dermot is a side plot. There is an orphaned servant girl who is gang-raped by her employer’s son and his friends and left for dead. When the matter is brought to the court, they get away with it. Her life is shattered, and she has no one to turn to except a very strange woman with a very strange religion. From there, the novel is horror a la Stephen King.

I am in the process of making final adjustments to the manuscript, perhaps you would care to see the final draft? I appreciate your comments, you have looked at aspects I had not considered.

Many thanks

Rape is a difficult subject. How high a moral hurdle does one have to climb to perpetrate such an act. In the black context it has reverberations across time and cultures. The bad Mr Thabo Mbeki said whites always looked at black men and saw rapists. The explosive spread of HIV in Africa was associated with racial commentary about Africans and violent sex. The breakdown of law and order in Zim has been accompanied by rape. The cultural grounding of acceptance of rape, especially with the kind of publicity child rape gets in South Africa means you have chosen to tackle an area where there will be a lot of scrutiny of how you handle the issue. Do African women look at African men and see rapists.

I am sure you are aware about the general outcry in the west about child abuse and paedophilia and child trafficking etc. A lot of it has been around institutions and institutionalised people. Was Dermot abused at boarding school ? I was at boarding school in the sixties in Zim during my primary school years. Kids knew then that they were vulnerable to sexual abuse from bigger boys and men in the institution and always tried to be careful not be at risk\.

You raise many issues that Shona writers have not explored to any meaningful extent and that is very exciting. You refer to that in your reply above.
Well done

I am of the school of thought that African literature does not appeal to the book-buying public is because it has not been allowed to expand beyond the genre established by Christian Missionaries. My writings shatter these boundaries.

Yes, SiNdebele is “other African languages”. There is a large number of SiNdebele-speaking readers living abroad-my targetted readership is the people living abroad who can afford to buy books from amazon etc.

Thanks for the interest, and keep up the work to save our languages. One day, soon, English will be purged from our culture!!

How are you getting it into other african languages ? It is hard enough getting books from other languages into Shona and there is a great debate about how the literature in other African languages is being sidelined its writers in favour of English which has a bigger audience. There is a sense that African language literature is not maturing because its readership is mostly school level readers.

Does ‘other African languages’ [for your book include] Ndebele ?

Farai

And all this has awakened in me a hunger to learn more more about the psyche of our brethren- what survives, and does not, what is born and what dies, who and what they create etc- this would be a goldmine worth exploring in both fiction and non- fiction across all artistic genres.

It’s good to see more and more writing coming from some of them- and for those too busy wheeling and dealing there, or simply worn out by the toll of eking a living to support themselves and the folk back home, to write- those of us who can should telling these stories.