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To help the Sunday Independent celebrate its relaunch, Zebra Press is giving away three hampers, each containing three of the most fascinating political reads of the past year: Through the Darkness by Judith Todd; A Life in Transition by Alex Boraine; and White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party by Christi van der Westhuizen.
You have until 11pm tonight (Monday, 4 August) to enter the competition, via SMS.
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Journalist Geoff Hill was born in 1956 and grew up in Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe, where he became fluent in the Shona language.
In 2005, he published What Happens After Mugabe? – a book that deserves the attention of everyone with an interest in the outcome of the recent elections in Zimbabwe.
What Happens After Mugabe? is meticulously researched, with material drawn from hundreds of interviews inside Zimbabwe and among exile communities in Britain, the US and South Africa. This gripping, incisive book discusses many relevant issues and asks serious questions, including:
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ANC MP Kader Asmal came to the launch of Judith Todd’s Zimbabwe memoir, Through the Darkness, to make a statement. He made several, which had his audience alternately breathless and cheering.
For here was a rare instance of a high-ranking member of the ANC – Asmal is an ex-cabinet minister, a sitting MP, and a member of the party’s most important policy and leadership body, the National Executive Committee – denouncing, in plain language and without prevarication, the Robert Mugabe regime and its despoilation of Zimbabwe.
We take great pleasure in inviting you to the launch of Judith Todd’s searing memoir of the first 25 years of Robert Mugabe’s rule in Zimbabwe, Through the Darkness.
Prof Kader Asmal, MP, will introduce Todd and her book. To download an excerpt (Chapter 22), please click here.
Todd, the daughter of Sir Garfield Todd, erstwhile prime minister of colonial Southern Rhodesia, spent eight years in exile in Britain as an opponent of white minority rule in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. She returned to Zimbabwe shortly before independence in 1980, and soon realised that, far from being the solution to Zimbabwe’s ills, Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu (PF) party were increasingly becoming the problem.
Ever since going into exile in the United States in 2004, Zimbabwean Geoffrey Nyarota has been looking forward to returning home. But whenever his country’s president, Robert Mugabe, sticks his tongue out at critics angling to see him retire, Nyarota knows – better than most – that that moment remains all too remote.
Before he left Zimbabwe, Nyarota was editor of the Daily News, the country’s only independent daily newspaper. His book, Against The Grain, is a first-hand account of how those who expose what’s happening in Zimbabwe are treated by Mugabe’s autocratic government.
As a young man, Nyarota hoped his children would enjoy living in the kind of democracy that he had been denied under colonial rule. But when Mugabe took power in 1980 after the war of liberation, Nyarota discovered that many of the celebrated freedom fighters were more interested in enriching themselves than helping the millions of poor in the country.
Judith Todd’s new memoir, Through the Darkness, takes readers from her family’s ranch outside Bulawayo to the inner sanctum of Robert Mugabe’s cabinet – and from there through a landscape of silenced people, who rely on a daily mix of courage, humour and hope to get by.
Her book is due out from Zebra this May.
Todd is the daughter of former Rodesian prime minister Sir Garfield Todd – and a noted “chimurenga” liberation struggle activist. As director of the Zimbabwe Project Trust, she worked for many years with the so-called “war veterans”, members of the former liberation armies. In 2003 she became one of the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans stripped of their citizenship by the Mugabe regime.
Zukiswa Wanner is the author of the hilarious comedy of manners, The Madams, which is a featured book of Durban’s Time of the Writer festival this year.
She was born in Lusaka, Zambia to an exiled South African father and a Zimbabwean mother. After Zimbabwean independence, she lived in Zimbabwe and was schooled there. She attended Hawai’i Pacific University in Hawaii for her undergraduate studies, and now resides and works in what she describes as the cultural capital of the world – Johannesburg, of course!
A sneak preview of The Madams:
