SPECIAL ISSUE!
SPECIAL ISSUE!
EDITORIAL
WIN-Zimbabwe
Founder and Director, Beaven Tapureta
We joyfully welcome you to our special issue of the
WIN Newsletter. Reaching this 100th issue has really been a
motivating and passionate journey which we started few years ago. We thank
everyone for the support. We are indebted to our former and current board
members for the guidance and patient love, to our membership for the
commitment, and to our many writing friends. It’s something existing within us,
this that pushes us to read and write anywhere anyhow. We thank you very much
for the support. We love our literature and we are strong. It is satisfying
that we have not stopped reading and writing no matter the challenges. We are
hopeful 2017 is bringing us more opportunities to realize the dreams we have for
our growing membership. We thank the Lord for bringing us thus far with yet
more energy to cross over into the new seasons…Enjoy!
HARARE
BOOK CLUB ENCOURAGES READING
The regular Harare Book Club meetings have been
intellectually fun-filled and educative. Every month, the club members have enjoyed
reading and discussing books by local and international authors. A book is
selected and for some days members circulate the few copies available among
themselves to allow everyone a chance to read. Afterwards, the members meet for
a discussion.
The next book club meeting will be in January 2017 and
will focus on discussing The Help by
Kathryn Stockett. The venue and exact date will be announced soon. For more
details on how to be part of the club, write to sunanda28@hotmail.com
LITFEST
IN IMAGES
From November 30 to December 3, 2016, LitFest Harare (International
Literature Festival) inspired artists with a number of activities which
featured comedy, discussions, spoken word, music and many more. The festival
ran under the theme ‘We write. We Speak. We inspire.’ Below are a few images
from LitFest:
Poet Philani
Nyoni (right) rendering a brilliant opening act, here he is captured performing
with this young woman he picked from the audience
Memory Chirere
reads from Bhuku Risina Basa Nokuti
Rakanyorwa Masikati during a ‘Poet to Poet Conversation’ on December 3.
With him are Joseph Woods and Mbizo Chirasha
Mbizo Chirasha
the Black Poet ‘dances’ with his powerful poetry on stage
A CONVERSATION
WITH WRITER ALECK KAPOSA
Pumulani Chipandambira
Aleck Kaposa
Pumulani Chipandambira
Aleck
Kaposa (AK) is an author who from
his budding days was one of the active members of Norton Branch of the Budding
Writers Association of Zimbabwe (BWAZ). For the time it existed the
organisation played the role of a ‘writers’ college’ as it imparted writing
skills to aspiring authors. Kaposa and hundreds of other BWAZ members spread across
the country participated in writing skills training workshops and competitions,
from which poems and stories were born and were to be ‘foundational bricks’ to
some of the beautiful scripts being published today by those who passed through
BWAZ. Today, BWAZ is no longer there but there is us, WIN-Zimbabwe, designed
specifically for budding writers and there are also various other
long-established writers’ organisations that were formed almost at the same
time with BWAZ. Kaposa, now a published author, is a member of WIN-Zimbabwe,
helping aspiring writers and poets in various ways. Below, he is being
interviewed by Pumulani Chipandambira (PC),
a member of WIN-Zim. Enjoy some insights into Kaposa’s writing life experience
and different issues. Chipandambira is a
voluntary WIN newsletter reporter whom WIN is proudly mentoring. This is his
first assignment.
PC: Kaposa, reading your book titled A Bag of Memories was for me quite an experience. Oftentimes I have
seen that a number of the characters, although fictional they seem ‘too’ autobiographical.
I also wondered why in this book these characters face painful or tragic
deaths. Are your memories littered with death or funerals? For example, the
untimely death of your brother Willie, the death of your friend Panga, Laina
the prostitute and a toddler son shot by the overzealous law enforcers, the
death of Dhikondo. Why death?
AK: I was not aware of my obsession with
morbidity until someone pointed it out after reading my short stories over the
years in the school magazine. Maybe I should analyse my background
psychologically. It’s a fact that my brother died in 1982 when I was about 7 years
old and then two years later papa died. Mother was sick throughout, even up to
now and so to me death hovered above us and I feared it. Perhaps my theme stem
from this close-range experience. I also read many terror/ horror stories in my
formative years. Locally, the Sunday Mail featured plenty of short
stories by writers such as Stephen Alumenda, Wonder Guchu, Chemist Mafuba and
others and very often the subject was death. I believe that's how it caught up
with me. I am trying to break out of that cocoon but I guess death is always
around us. Somewhere down the lane, the street, the village there is a funeral.
If you look around, death lurks somewhere, waiting, like a vulture, to pounce
on us....
PC: You mentioned Wonder Guchu, Chemist Mafuba and Stephen
Alumenda. I don’t have their works in my
home library. It’s hard to even get works of some prominent writers in the local
bookshops. Do you have any idea why their works are becoming extinct?
AK: I think some of these writers' works are not being found because
of a number of reasons. The publishing houses might have closed shop or scaled
down, and when the available copies were sold out there were no reprints for
posterity. Or the writers left it to the publishers to decide the fate of their
works. Or publishing hard copies is now expensive compared to e- books/
internet so the publishers/writers could not make money to sustain publishing
or making reprints.
PC: Are these the same reasons why you stopped publishing your 2008
NAMA nominee The New Voices Magazine
that you had founded and edited since 2004?
AK: I started publishing The NVM after
BWAZ was not able to take my proposal to publish a magazine for Norton due to
lack of funding. We wanted to give a voice to new writers, to provide a regular
outlet for new writers. There had been the Tsotso
Magazine published by Grassroots Books and I sort of grew up on it, then it
died a natural death. There was a vacuum, so I challenged myself and went on to
publish the magazine at national level. Subsequently it was nominated for the NAMA
awards. The magazine attracted interest from all over Zimbabwe and in some
African countries. After 4 years I stopped publishing it due to economic
hardships. Things were grinding to a halt everywhere back there.
PC: Coming back to A Bag of
Memory, I think your voice is esoteric, you protest although you seem to
have hope? Like the Italian writer ltalo Calvino, in your stories there is
conflict between your creative characters and their environment. For example,
the political environment pre-determined the death of Dhikondo and even the
fate of a mother who died in a squatter camp.
AK: It might be protest, yes; it’s my protest against what I see as
injustice, it’s also a record for posterity. I try to infuse my writing with
hope otherwise life would be tragic!
PC: In the book you wrote about your Mother when she used to recite
verses from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.
Do we still have mothers like your mother who read?
AK: I think generally reading has gone down as compared to my
mother's generation. They used to read elementary literature. A lot of it was
European literature, Shakespeare in particular. These days you hardly find adults,
children or even teenagers reciting local writings from the heart.
PC: I have only been able to read your
Soliloquies Of A Mangy Dog and this A Bag of Memory. Do you have any other published
books?
AK: Yes, I have The Magician & Other Stories, children’s
stories collection published in 2013 by Essential Books Publishing Co.
PC: What advice can you offer to the budding writers like me!
AK: I would encourage upcoming writers to work hard, to avoid copying
other writers' styles. They should be original, innovative and read a lot.
Practise writing a lot. I repeat, be original. Write to influence society
positively. Avoid vulgar language by all means.
PC: Thank you very much Kaposa, wishing you the best in your writings.
AK: Thank you.
THE
YOUTH PERSPECTIVE
With
Mimi Machakaire
The Best Things In Life Happen Unexpectedly
The Best Things In Life Happen Unexpectedly
I
like to believe that the best things in life happen unexpectedly. Meaning that
you can make all the plans in the world but not everything will go according to
plan perfectly. Something will be different along the way and it'll be the
thing that you've been waiting for. You just don’t know it yet until it
happens. It takes going through life with the right attitude and having just
enough patients to get the results you’ve been waiting for.
You
can tell yourself you will go to school exactly in order. Primary, High school,
College and University but maybe in-between that time you might meet the love
of your life and decide to settle down early or you might find your dream job
half way through college and you no longer see the point in going to
University. In a different scenario, you might be happy living where you are
now but someone might come and offer you a job that puts you in a whole new
environment and you find yourself being perfectly happy moving and starting a
new life.
Life
in all its unpredictability changes who you are as a person but it's the energy
you put out into the world that the world will give back to you in return. In
other words, if you put out positive energy into the world and be kind to
others always even when it feels like your hurting or they may not deserve it
God will continue to bless you with more and more each day.
This
doesn’t mean overwhelming the public with unrealistic optimism but simply
having a good attitude to the events that happen to you in the day. Respecting the
space of the people around you and at the same time knowing how to make sure
that your friends, family and loved ones are taken care of with not just their
physical needs but emotional needs as well.
Above
all be yourself. Live the life that you’ve always wanted, do things that make
you happy not for the sake of others but simply because you enjoy it. Don’t put
too much emphasis on what people think of you cause at the end of the day it’s
what you think of yourself that matters the most. If something happens that
wasn’t part of the plan, don’t panic. Rather find a way to make the best of it
and don’t be afraid to show the world how truly unique you can be because as I
mentioned once before the best things in life happen unexpectedly.
WIN-Zimbabwe is happy to welcome its new volunteer
Liberty Farai Chaza, a self-taught, freelance photographer and budding writer
who will help strengthen the impact of our blog.
Liberty holds a National Diploma in Mass Communication
(HEXCO) with a deep passion for photography. He also did computer programming
from 2002 to 2004 and in his writing career he has composed beautiful puns
which are yet to be published. As a member of the WIN online media crew, his
experience will bring creativity to the blog which also believes in telling
stories through the art of photography.
As a voluntary photo journalist in the WIN online
media team, Liberty will be responsible for covering all WIN events and other
writers’ events.
UNIVERSITY
OF ZIMBABWE MEGA BOOK LAUNCH
About seventeen titles were officially launched by the University of Zimbabwe in November this year. For more details, visit the following link: ACADEMICS URGED TO PUBLISH MORE
Writer Memory
Chirere holding one of the books launched, a Shona poetry collection Gwatakwata Renhetembo (2016, Secondary
Book Press) edited by Munyaradzi Gunduza. With Chirere is fellow writer Clever
Kavenga who has poems in the anthology.
Some of the poets who were published the two Shona
anthologies Gwatakwata Renhetembo and
Hodzeko Yenduri (2016, Secondary
Press) also edited by Munyaradzi Gunduza
VOICE OF THE GIRL CHILD
With
Dear Young Lady
It's an honour to pen my heart to you
young lady. May these sentiments find a deep, secure place in your heart and
may they mean everything to your tender and vigorous mind. In humility,
steadiness and diligence you establish yourself. Let these three be forever in
your company and never let them slip away. Your construction to be a levelled
lady requires great determination, focus and exceeding sacrifice. It is a defining
and refining process which will bring out the best in you if taken with utmost
dedication.
"Intelligence is inborn, diligence
is a choice." These words should serve as guidelines to guard your
moulding steps. In your heart it should be engraved deeply that choosing to be
diligent will produce the finer lady in you. Intelligence is well-carved and
portrayed after diligent efforts and sacrifices.
Purity and decency have taken pivotal
roles in nurturing dignified ladies in all times. Upholding purity has been a
struggle amongst young women and even older women today. It is that special
property that you only find in outstanding fine ladies. It is slowly becoming a
rare quality. I therefore earnestly impel you to uphold purity and decency as a
young lady. Possessing such qualities will boost your self-esteem and personal
inner beauty. Let your apparel be dignified. You are most likely to be
confident when dressed comfortably. Dressing is very important as it is an important
aspect when you are being judged.
Discretion and maturity are important
spices in the dish. Critical analysis of situations is primarily vital before
any attempt to reaction. All crucial decisions are to be made in a sober state.
Your speech and talk should be composed and have substance. Your words should
be scarce, so as your voice not be heard everywhere. However let your graceful
smile radiate your inner beauty such that when you open your mouth opportune,
sweet words flow.
Above all, a spiritually upright young
lady with a true experience with God will ever be joyful. God is the best
prescription one could ever give or be given to change lives. Young lady, I
wish you the best of experiences in becoming a fine lady with substance in the
New Year. Take care.
PETINA
GAPPAH LAUNCHES ROTTEN ROW
Girls on the move: (From
left) Paula Hawkins, Chipo Chung and Petina Gappah
Renowned writer Petina Gappah turned December 3 evening into a magnificent literary occasion when she launched her third book Rotten Row (2016, Faber) at Reps Theatre in Harare.
The launch, which had international writer Paula
Hawkins as guest of honor, was dubbed “The
Girl on the Train meets Rotten Row’. The
event was vibrant with the talk between Hawkins and Gappah, the performance and
recital of extracts from Gappah’s new book.
Writer,
reader and WIN Director Beaven Tapureta with author Paula Hawkins after the
book launch
SERIALIZATION
OF A NOVEL IN 2017
The WIN blog will, starting next year, serialize a
novel written by Amanda Ranganawa titled Born
of Blood. This is the second time we have tried to serialize a novel. The
first time we tried we did not have the experience as we wanted some guarantee
in matters of protecting the work. We are hopeful and confident that this time
you will enjoy Born of Blood in our
next newsletters without any hiccups.
Amanda Ranganawa is an Honors graduate in
Theatre from the University of Zimbabwe and is Best Female Alumni Student from
the institute. She is also a first year International Relations and Diplomacy
student at UNISA. She is an award winning and several times nominated Theatre student.
Amanda is a Scriptwriter, Director, Actress, Choreographer, Music Composer and
former Radio Producer. She has written four plays, all which have been
performed within Zimbabwe and is currently writing novels and has four feature
films which she wishes to direct one day. Born and bred in Mutare, Amanda is a
self-motivated go-getter who was fortunate to get entrance into the prestigious
American Academy of Dramatic Arts school based in Hollywood, America. However, she
has not gotten enough funds to get her to attend the Academy. The young lady
hopes to use her writing talent to make a big name for herself in order to pave
way for her acting career abroad.
ANOTHER
STEP FORWARD IN COPYRIGHT PROTECTION
We bring you some images from the Licensing and Copyright Development Workshop held on December 6, 2016, at Monomotapa Crowne Plaza, Harare. The event was organised by Zimcopy in partnership with the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisation (IFRRO). For some details about the event, follow this link: WRITERS END YEAR IN STYLE
Dr. Samuel Makore
making welcoming guests]
Caroline
Morgan, the Chief Executive and Secretary General of IFRRO, speaking about the
benefits of educational licensing to curb photocopying of copyright works in
schools, colleges and universities
Elisha Ndanga
presented on Technology Protection for Copyright Licensing
Writer Monica
Cheru was the emcee
Olav
Stokkmo, Special Advisor to International Federation of Reproduction Rights
Organization (IFRRO) also talked about Public Lending Rights
A participant
makes a contribution
Celebrated
playwright Stephen Chifunyise performing a Shona folktale during break
POETRY
Watch
this space for a review of this new collection from South Africa based poet
Catherine Magodo-Mutukwa!!
MAY THE GOOD LORD BE WITH YOU IN THE NEW YEAR 2017!
Thank you
Thank you
