I’m not even sure that I want to go back… The Zimbabwe that I really loved, the Zimbabwe that I grew up in, just isn’t there anymore, and I’m not sure about the country that has replaced it. Petina Gappah Read Quote
People always ask me how I manage to find humor in so much bleakness. I think this is almost a necessary skill to have. Petina Gappah Read Quote
I always say to people that Zimbabweans are the funniest people in Africa; we even laugh at funerals. And it’s true. I mean, there are so many jokes about funerals. There are so many jokes about AIDS. We find ways of coping with pain by laughing at it and by laughing at ourselves. Petina Gappah Read Quote
The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa’s former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same. Petina Gappah Read Quote
Ian Smith thought his Rhodesia would last 1,000 years: it lasted less than 15. Petina Gappah Read Quote
Only al-Jazeera is allowed to report from Zimbabwe, but it is unwatchable. Their Zimbabwean reporter Supa Mandiwanzira was one of Zanu-PF’s praise-singers at the reviled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. Petina Gappah Read Quote
It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, ‘What is it that I want from my life?’ This question kept haunting me: ‘Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer? Petina Gappah Read Quote
I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages. Petina Gappah Read Quote
What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere. Petina Gappah Read Quote
