Sprawling to the south east of the revered Hararethere is a place millions call home, Chitungwiza as in that olden track, mushamukuru, wakaenda kupiko, Chitungwiza. It is Zimbabwes biggest village, that became a town, that became a city, that became our own Soweto Zimbabwes biggest suburb yet also Zimbabwes Hollywood. It has produced or groomed Zimbabwes creatives and creative industry from film, by the book, poets, musicians, entertainers, academia, media practitioners, sculptors and those involved in other visual arts. In this anthology, Chitungwiza Mushamukuru: An Anthology from Zimbabwes Biggest Ghetto Town, we have work from 1 artist and 11 writers who have called this Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe home, or have wrote home about this place, or have created artworks which highlight the culture, identity, lives, and position Chitungwiza in these matrixes or beyond those highlighted above.
This book comprises 19 creative non-fiction pieces and essays centred around the topics of language, thought, art and existence seen through the prism of practising artist in contemporary Africa. The collection continues with Zimbabwes Tendai Mwanakas creative non-fiction ideology of presenting non-fiction in a creative, fresh, easy reading, simple language. With most of the essays driven by personal stories, the author ably renders them accessible to a wide spectrum of readers from the scholarly to the journalistic and the general. The pieces are grouped according to the topics, with the language essays starting the book, followed by thought, existential, and art essays. In tune with the adage the personal is political, Mwanaka lets the personal drive these essays as he tries to investigate and conversationally navigate his thoughts, beliefs, feelings and experience on language, existence and art. This is an invaluable contribution to the academic establishment, social theorists, linguists, literary theorists, journalists, activists and the general readership.
Over 600 poets have been given voice in this series which was started five years ago, making it an important archive of new African poetry. Every year space is given to as many poets as can be accommodated; it takes at least 10 years to make a poet! The greatest positive aspect of this series is the poems received from writers who contribute each year: Archie Swanson, Chaun Ballard, Chengetai Mhondera, Troydon Wainwright, Tendai Rinos Mwanaka and Soberano Canhanga, and several who have poems in the 2016, 2017, and 2018 anthologies, and so many new ones. Many poets have gone on to publish their first collection and more, several have won prizes all over the world, some have become academics, some influential performers of their work and some have travelled all over the world presenting their work. This years Best New African Poets 2019 Anthology there is 197 poems from a more than one hundred poets (including collaborations) writing in English, Portuguese, French, and a whole host of African indigenous languages. Featured are poems which deal with love, relationships, politics, governance, spirituality, existence, identity and place. We invite you to this years anthology to engage with the most important new African poets writing from the continent and the diasporas and enjoy this African pot-pouri of art and life.
Africa as the cradle of human civilizations, has over 2000 languages, not to talk of distinct dialects, or part languages, so it's important that language and social science practitioners in Africa do the best they can to preserve the languages. Language is the heartbeat of the culture of a people, and in language we pass off, or down contain relevant survival information. In language we collect and create a sense of identity. If you are wondering why East Europe; it is one of the regions of the world that still communicates in indigenous languages; East Europe kept to its identity and didn't take to the dominant languages like English, French, Spanish etc... in Love Notes: Everything is Love, we have work from 36 contributors (including translators) in several languages including among others Russian, Croatian, Macedonian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Turkish, Idoma from Nigeria, Igbo from Nigeria, Shona from Zimbabwe, Bemba from Zambia, Tonga from Zambia, Shingazidja dialect of Shikomori language of The Comoros, Chewa from Malawi etc... from writers residing in among others, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, Zimbabwe, North Macedonia, Macedonia, Turkey, Malawi, Zambia, Kenya,, Nigeria, and The Comoros, writing around Love.
From 2015 to 2023 we have been able to issue out, yearly, an anthology of Africa poets, through 9 years of publishing this beautiful anthology of the best contemporary African poets and in the process we have published and archived over 1000 African poets. And this year without fail we offer you Best New African Poets 2023 Anthology which comprises several dozens of African poets from the Portuguese, English and French speaking African countries. We expect the anthology to continue into another decade but also to seed into other forms of poetic expressions starting from next year. We intend to work on Best New African Poets International Festival of the Arts, an event that will bring together all these poets we have been able to publish the last 9 years to showcase their talent in a week of festivities in Harare, Zimbabwe. This year's anthology has poems that cover the usual gamut of issues: love, unrequited feelings, relationships, death, poetry making, politics, and we were excited to see Mashigo tackling the ongoing Israel/Hamas war, and the ill-treatment of the Palestinian people for generations under the Israeli government; culture, religion, spirituality, identity, belonging, memory, individuality and all sorts of other existential dilemmas that the young African poets deal with day to day.
This book comes to educate, re-enlighten, entertain curious minds, and stiffly challenge traditionalism in the academia - all at the same time. It is frantalkist (calls a spade a spade), crisebacological (balanced critical thinking), expibasketical (experience-based learning and taeching) and highly informative. It aims at reversing the abstract-learning trend by relating education and living to people's day-to-day realities. It brings to the entire world the Immaculate Freedom, Unity and Development Theory from Africa that is anchored on the trinity of Crisebacology, Frantalkism and Giveantakism. You wouldn't expect to hear everything here from me, of course. Better go inside where I have actually done the lecturing and discover the treasure for yourself!
Zimbolicious Anthology: An Anthology of Zimbabwean Literature and Arts is the 6th yearly volume of Zimbabwean Literature and the arts. This year's anthology is extra-special in that we feature Zimbabwe's upcoming young visual artists who recently won or got highly recommended and exhibited their artworks through the National Art Gallery, in a competition sponsored by Morgan & Co and in association of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. These artworks varies from installation, mixed media, drawings, paintings and tackled the issue of being "Masked", resultant of Covid 19 pandemic. These artworks are accompanied by Tinashe Muchuri's illuminating critical reception essay. Chrispah Munyoro's artworks are personal and are of struggle, and Tendai Rinos Mwanaka's artworks deal with a number of issues such as US racism, the issue of Jihad terrorism, climate change and global warming. The poetry section tackles a gamut of issues from governance, spirituality, environmentalism, love, relationships, etc... and the fiction section has 4 bittersweet short stories dealing with illegal mining mob deaths (Mathew T Chikono), coming of age love story (Christopher Kudyahakudadirwe), a slice of bus travelogue (Nicole Kazembe), writing mother's body (Oscar Gwiriri). The nonfiction has two essays; Chipo Martha Bute deals with a personal journey to discovery and worthiness and Tendai Rinos Mwanaka deals with Zimbabwe's politics.
My work takes the nature of interactive, collaborative and multidisciplinary. I work across several art fields, including among others literary (fictions, novels, essays poetry, play, short stories, songs...), musical (composition, singing, reciting, mbira, marimba, keyboards, a little guitar...), and visual (drawings, paintings, photography, collages, mixed media, installation etc...) I am interested in connection, convergence, community and cooperation, following disparate sometimes disfigured experiences, seeing how they can come together or shy away from each other to create new wholes. The baobab trees are ancient trees, some might be thousands years old, imagine the people who have stayed in these dwellings, who have ate the fruits of these trees, who have used its leaves as relish(we create mashed okra relish with baobab leaves), the ailments treated by its buck....every part of this succulent tree is useful. In this photo journey I learned a lot more about these beautiful souls: they have a tendency to create musical lines, mostly linear, it's like one tone starting it, fading and letting the next tone to take over and this will fade and let another tone to take over, such that you can see the lines, how they conjoin to create music beyond human understanding. And most of the Baobabs, I realized, inhabit the same place in numbers, and usually they are on high grounds, like Gods who love elevated dwellings, and they look down upon other small humans (small trees, humans etc...), but there are also some singular baobabs that inhabit lower grounds and most of these are solitary and from my memory growing up here, these don't bear fruits. And whilst I was photographing the Baobabs several story strands in my head converged around one far much more important issue, the issue of Climate Change and Global Warming. In Registers of Loss I encourage working together as human beings to arrest Global warming and climate change the way the baobabs work together to communicate in linear notes, or in community thoughts.
Weaving stories has been primarily women’s domain since time immemorial. When women write, they speak from their hearts; emotion flows and carries the readers with the powerful currents. Women directly bear the brunt of family life fall outs, be it oppressive family and social rules and confinement or physical abuse when they don’t comply and submit. Even if they remain silent, submissive, their very existence makes them get intimidated. This volume, Writing Woman Anthology: Personal Essays and Short Stories, Volume 3, has exceptional stories from 13 African and Asian writers that brings together the diverse themes that humans struggle with in order to reconcile with emotions and conditions, which are depicted with realistic verve. Each story has a compelling narration of women’s pain and suffering.
Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology has 251 pieces from 131 poets and artists in 7 languages (English, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans, Shona, Yoruba and Kiswahili) from 24 African countries and Diasporas, with South African and Angolan poets dominating the list. We also have a healthy number of poets from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Moçambique, Ghana, and Nigeria. The nationalist sense is the one that most predominates with its pink, blue and gray tints that are expressed in parallel with existentialist perspectives that in turn go hand in hand with love, desire, hankering, joy, sensuality that transports us to epic, lyrical, utopian contexts without being lost in fantasy, they are artistic lines sometimes with traditional and sometimes more innovative touches. However, in contrast and to a lesser extent, almost as if there were resistant and with restraint we also find desolation, pain, negation that can be so sweet or so bitter that it allows the imagination to stop in a lament or end in resignation.
