Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The perfect children's story set in Africa.
She writes children’s books too – The White Giraffe is one of them – and those work really well because of the sense of the country. Rainbow’s End is about the lost dream, I suppose. You can be from anywhere, she says, but not from Africa, not if you’re white.
These memoirs all sound sorrowful.
The Happy Nation Index has just come out, it’s a survey from a UK-based think tank called New Economics Foundation, and, of 143 nations surveyed, Zimbabwe is the unhappiest. Life expectancy for women in Zimbabwe is 34.
That is presumably a survey of people living there now, through the crisis. The books we’re talking about are by ex-pats, but there is a real feeling of sorrow in what you’re saying. A kind of Gone With The Wind feeling.
It is like that. Last time I went back, for my best friend’s funeral, I had a camera crew with me making a documentary and I was wandering around my house in Harare, the house I used to live in, and there is a pale patch on the carpet where the grand piano used to be. There is maize drying on the veranda where I used to give huge dinners for 25 people. I gave the house to my gardener. I said; ‘I haven’t got the deeds, but have it if you want it.’ Peter wanted his next book to be more optimistic but I don’t think it will be.
Actually, I have chosen a specifically ex-pat book next - Harare North. Harare North is London in the book and it’s in the first person about this Green Bomber, the youth militia for ZANU-PF, and he now lives in Brixton. It’s this cynical, subversive book and a story about the underclass in London that most people don’t even notice – here illegally, doing cash-paid jobs. Eventually he goes completely mad.
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Georgina Godwin is a journalist and broadcaster now based in London. She is the founder of NicoPipe Ltd and in her home town of Harare, Zimbabwe, she was for 10 years presenter of the prime time Good Morning Show for Radio 1 of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, and the inaugural presenter of AM Zimbabwe, the first breakfast television show in the country. She is a co-founder of the Harare International Festival of the Arts, Hifa.
