Zimbabwe, officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and Mozambique to the east. The capital and largest city is Harare, and the second largest is Bulawayo. A country of roughly 15 million people, Zimbabwe's largest ethnic group are the Shona, who make up 82% of the population, followed by the Northern Ndebele and other smaller minorities. Zimbabwe has 16 official languages, with English, Shona, and Ndebele the most common.
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.
Everyone's Child is a 1995 film directed by author Tsitsi Dangarembga who became the first black Zimbabwean woman to direct a feature film. The script is based on the 1989 novel Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya and stars Elijah Madzikatire, Momsa Mlambo, and Walter Maparutsa. Produced by Zimbabwe's Media for Development Trust (MFD), Everyone's Child was originally conceived as a training video for community-based orphan care programs. Given the explosive growth of AIDS orphans on the continent--at the time of the project's development, predicted to reach 10,000,000 by the year 2000--it was determined that a feature film would have more of an impact in building awareness on the issue.
Neria is a Zimbabwean film made in 1991, written by the novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. It is directed by Godwin Mawuru and the screenplay was written by Louise Riber. It is the highest-grossing film in Zimbabwean history.
Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi was a Zimbabwean musician, businessman, philanthropist, human rights activist and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Southern Africa Region.
White Zimbabweans are Zimbabwean people of European descent. In linguistic, cultural, and historical terms, these Zimbabweans of European ethnic origin are mostly English-speaking descendants of British settlers and a small minority of them are either Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Afrikaners from South Africa and/or those descended from Greek and Portuguese immigrants.
Charles Lovemore Mungoshi, was a Zimbabwean writer.
Nervous Conditions is a novel by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988. It was the first book published by a black woman from Zimbabwe in English. Nervous Conditions won Best Book of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989.
Articles related to Zimbabwe include:
Mutoko is a small town in Mashonaland East province, Zimbabwe. It was established as an administrative station in 1911. It lies 143 km from Harare. It is named after the local chief, Mutoko.
Adrian Igonibo Barrett is a Nigerian writer of short stories and novels. In 2014, he was named on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Following his two collections of short stories – From Caves of Rotten Teeth (2005) and Love Is Power, or Something Like That (2013) – his first novel, Blackass, was published in 2015, described by the Chicago Review of Books as "Kafka with a wink".
Mount Pleasant is a residential suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe, located in the northern part of the city. Originally a farm, the area was developed for housing in the early 20th-century and was a white suburb until Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. Today, Mount Pleasant is a multiracial community and is one of Harare's more affluent suburbs.
The Southern Rhodesia Communist Party was an illegal, underground communist party established in Southern Rhodesia which was formed in large part due to the minority settler rule, which had an immensely repressive structure. It emerged in 1941 from a split in the Rhodesia Labour Party. The party consisted of a small, and predominantly white, membership. During the parties existence it had links to other communist parties such as the Communist Party of South Africa and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The party disappeared in the late 1940s, with the exact date of its dissolution not being known. Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing author of various works including “The Grass is Singing,” is the most well known member of the Southern Rhodesian Communist Party.
The Future Library project is a public artwork that aims to collect an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114. The works will remain unread and unpublished until 2114. One thousand trees were specially planted for the project in the Nordmarka forest at its inception; the 100 manuscripts will be printed in limited-edition anthologies using paper made from the trees. The Guardian has referred to it as "the world's most secretive library".
Lily G. N. Mabura is a Kenyan writer known for her short story How Shall We Kill the Bishop, which was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2010.
Zimbabwe has an active film culture that includes films made in Zimbabwe during its pre- and post-colonial periods. Economic crisis and political crisis have been features of the industry. A publication from the 1980s counted 14 cinemas in Zimbabwe's capital city, Harare. According to a 1998 report only 15 percent of the population had been to a cinema. European and American films have been made on location in Zimbabwe as well as Indian films. American films are popular in Zimbabwe but face restrictions limiting their distribution.
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwe-born novelist and filmmaker.
This Mournable Body is a novel by Tsitsi Dangarembga which was published by Faber and Faber on 16 January 2020.
Joyce Simango is a Zimbabwean author. She became the first female Shona novelist when she published Zviuya Zviri Mberi, or "Good Things are Ahead", in 1974.
