Five top books about Zimbabwe

Panashe Chigumadzi is a Zimbabwean-born novelist and essayist. Raised in South Africa, she is the author of Sweet Medicine (2015), which won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. She is the founding editor of Vanguard magazine, a platform for young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. A contributing editor to the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, The New York Times, Transition, Chimurenga, Washington Post and Die Ziet. These Bones Will Rise Again (June 2018) is her first book to publish in the UK.

One of five of the best books about Zimbabwe Chigumadzi tagged at the Guardian:

No novelist has dealt more extensively with Zimbabwe’s history than Yvonne Vera, who died aged 40 in 2005. In her fifth and final novel, The Stone Virgins (2002), Vera writes of two sisters who suffer and survive the violences of Gukurahundi, the 1980s massacres of more than 20,000 Ndebele “dissidents” by the Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwean armed forces. Dense and opaque at times, Vera’s interrogation of the suppression of memory and language in “the years of deafness and struggle” invites us to explore how we listen to the silences that continue to echo in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s violent past and present.

Read about another book on the list.

Also see Petina Gappah's top ten books about Zimbabwe.

--Marshal Zeringue