Like very good dark chocolate this is a delicious novel, with a bitter-sweet flavour. Vimbai is a hairdresser, the best in Mrs Khumalo's salon, and she knows she is the queen on whom they all depend. Her situation is reversed when the good-looking, smooth-talking Dumisani joins them. However, his charm and desire to please slowly erode Vimbai's rancour and when he needs somewhere to live, Vimbai becomes his landlady. So, when Dumisani needs someone to accompany him to his brother's wedding to help smooth over a family upset, Vimbai obliges. Startled to find that this smart hairdresser is the scion of one of the wealthiest families in Harare, she is equally surprised by the warmth of their welcome; and it is their subsequent generosity which appears to foster the relationship between the two young people. The ambiguity of this deepening friendship - used or embraced by Dumisani and Vimbai with different futures in mind - collapses in unexpected brutality when secrets and jealousies are exposed. Written with delightful humour and a penetrating eye, The Hairdresser of Harare is a novel that you will find hard to put down.

The Hairdresser of Harare

Literature & Fiction

Huchu, Tendai

Literary

Weaver Pr

By late 1975, in the détente that followed the coup in Portugal, the guerilla war in Rhodesia was almost at a standstill. But so were the talks about a negotiated settlement. In January 1976, frustrated with the failure of the politicians to make progress, the Zimbabwe People's Army (ZIPA) resumed the war. ZIPA brought together fighters from both of the guerilla forces, ZANLA and ZIPRA. One of its commanders was Wilfred Mhanda, known more famously during the liberation struggle as Dzinashe 'Dzino' Machingura. His story tells of Zipa's bold attempt to provide a more unified, radical and focussed leadership for the struggle at a time of the assassination and arrest of key nationalist leaders, intense nationalist party rivalries, and a range of imperialist interventions in the region. It also provides the most comprehensive description to date of Robert Mugabe's rise to power in ZANU-PF. Dzino is a compelling blend of the personal and the political, and makes an invaluable contribution to the country's written history.

Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter

Biographies & Memoirs

Mhanda, Wilfred

Historical

Zimbabwe has cast a powerful regional and international shadow since it became independent in 1980 and more recently, through the crises of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The 2000s were a decade of combined political, economic and social crises in Zimbabwe following what had been a relatively successful twenty years of independence since 1980. The scale, depth and severity of the crises evolving since 2000 have been as dramatic as they have been unexpected. While there has been substantial coverage of the internal consequences of Zimbabwe's crises less attention has been paid to its regional and cross-border consequences. In explaining the ongoing processes stemming from the crises, this book looks at three neighboring countries - Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia - to depict how, over time, they have experienced and interpreted events in Zimbabwe, how they have dealt with Zimbabweans entering their territories, and how they have or have not formulated policies and developed practices to cope with the arrival of new and mainly undocumented Zimbabwean immigrants.

In the Shadow of a Conflict: Crisis in Zimbabwe and Its Effects in Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia

History

Africa

Bones is a powerful, heart-rending novel that provides a sensitive evocation of Marita, a farm worker, whose only son joined the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe's war of liberation. He does not return after the war and Marita is determined to find him or find out what happened to him. This is perhaps a single clear theme in a landscape where women, particularly the poor and the marginalised, suffer many layers of oppression. Marita's courage and endurance are reconstructed through the memories of those who knew her in a language steep in poetry and Shona idiom. 
Bones, which won the Noma Award in 1989, was Chenjerai Hove's first novel in English.

Bones

Hove, Chenjerai

Classics

Without adequate protection and consideration from the state, women were left out of Zimbabwe's Fast Land Reform Programme at the turn of the century. Leaving them to fight for land in a murky, convoluted system will not address women's rights to it. Giving specific ethical and legal attention to women's rights and needs is the only way to guard against land and other resources begin co-opted by the privileged and those with the requisite social, financial and political capital. Some commentators have argued that Zimbabwean women were better off identifying with Zimbabwean men as as blacks in taking land from the former white farmers than to concentrate on their needs as women during the FTLRP. The primary battle was to take the land from the white farmer, after which a secondary battle by women to take land from men would ensue. Twenty years after the commencement of the FTLRP, the question remains whether the secondary battle by black women to take over land from black men has started and whether there are any chances that such a battle will ever be fought and won.

Women, Law and Power: Perspectives from Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Programme

Business & Money

Makonese, Makanatsa

Real Estate

ELEVEN JESUITS SET OUT FOR THE INTERIOR OF SOUTHERN AFRICA BY OX-WAGON IN APRIL I 879 ON A MISSION TO PREACH THE CHRISTIAN GOSPEL TO THE PEOPLE BEYOND THE LIMPOPO RIVER; WITHIN A YEAR AND A HALF, THREE OF THEM WERE DEAD. 
They shared the same ignorance of Africa as their European contemporaries concerning disease, geography, culture, religion and the political rivalries of the people among whom they came. They also shared a narrow frame of reference towards the continent and the failure of imagination that went with it. Further, as people of their time, they saw - and were seen by - other denominations as rivals, and far from co-operating, the churches indulged in an unseemly competition. 
And yet these men were, in their own way, heroic and faced the difficulties eagerly, even joyfully. Their failures and disappointments far outweighed the little progress they appear to have made but they laid the foundations for what was to follow after 1890 when the colony of Southern Rhodesia was established. This event inaugurated a ninety-year period, when relations between church and state waxed and waned. The missionaries welcomed the order - even if it could not be called peace - and the infrastructure the colonisers introduced. The speed of travel, for instance, went from about 15 km a day by ox-wagon, to 30 km an hour by train. 
But the Church - and the Jesuits were for long the drivers of what we mean by Church - never managed to decide on a coherent policy vis-a-vis the white government until it was too late. They were divided; the majority of Jesuits worked with blacks but there was a sizeable number who worked exclusively with whites. So, while we can document the enormous and fruitful work that was done over the decades after 1890, we have to acknowledge the failure to give a united witness in confronting the nakedly racialist policies of the state. If we had been able to do this in the 1920s and '30s we might have contributed to the evolution of a more harmonious society and avoided the terrible bloodshed of subsequent years.

A Mission Divided: The Jesuit Presence in Zimbabwe, 1879-2021

Harold-Barry, David

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