Ignatius T. Mabasa's The Mad reviewed by Pat Brickhill in the Zimbabwe Review

Getting through the 1990s

The 90s were a vibrant time of political and economic shifts. The 25-year-old State of Emergency was lifted and the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) was implemented. A new generation of young Zimbabweans had initiated radical ferment, students at the University of Zimbabwe “dared to dream of a freer world” and post independent writers emerged onto the literary scene. Among them was a young man named Ignatius T. Mabasa, who would write Mapenzi, a novel written in his mother tongue chiShona, which used the state of madness to ponder and reflect on the state of Zimbabwe. Mapenzi was published by College Press, Zimbabwe in 1999.

The Mad, which was launched in Harare at the National Gallery in October 2025, is an English translation of Mapenzi. It has been described as a novel that uses reality, poverty, irony, humour and ridicule to paint a poignant picture of the struggles of Zimbabweans in the 1990s. The protagonist and central character is a war vet named Hamundigone. I found it fascinating that his Chimurenga name Hamundigone can itself be translated to characterise the protagonist as one who cannot be subdued or conquered; he can be described as a notorious character – someone who wins against overwhelming circumstances usually caused by the community around him.

Fired

The story opens with Hamundigone having been fired from his role as a teacher because of his actions. He is accused of being unstable, or being mad (The fact that he impregnated a schoolgirl does not appear to have been a factor in his dismissal). Hamundigone is travelling to Harare in a kombi. He speaks, sometimes to his fellow travellers, and sometimes he just speaks and the reader discovers more not only about him but also about the world around him.

“As you see me, I have been through much and much has been through me.

Zimbabwe has mauled me so that even today the wounds remain unhealed

and septic like the scars I brought back from Mozambique after the war. 

Zimbabwe has scooped out my spirit, the same way you do as when digging a grave.”

Using madness

People who are deemed to be ‘mad’ are unwanted travelling companions. I commend Ignatius Mabasa in his use of madness to transcend the self-censorship of many early post-independence writers. He presents us with a strong and often intimidating character who has no filter in what he says and whose utterings have the ability to generate empathy, exasperation and dislike from the reader in equal measure. At the same time we see him as a vulnerable human being reduced to eating from a rubbish bin.

Other characters like Magi, Bunny, Maud, VC, Mai Jazz and Kundai are first introduced then woven into the story. We discover titbits of information about their lives. We read about the struggles of financially unsupported university students and the lengths to which they go to survive. The connections wax and wane as the story moves forward and the reader discovers they are linked in a variety of ways that continue to evolve.  

Humour is included in the bleakness as we meet Salisbury, a white-owned dog who is left to Mai Jazz after his owners have fled the newly independent country. 

Learning to survive

Mai Jazz becomes the political commissar in a ZANU(PF) Women’s League Branch and when the city is renamed Harare, Salisbury the dog becomes Harare as well. His life changes dramatically but he soon learns he must survive or die and starts to eat sadza and to find food where he can.

While the writing has been accused by some as being fragmented and confusing at times I did not find it so. I immersed myself completely in The Mad. And as I read I remembered the crazy 1990s. At times the memory was painful: the beginnings and subsequent devastation of AIDS were so frightening. Rumours about the ‘short illness’ spread through Harare, and death became more and more familiar. Zimbabweans had to learn to hustle. The Mad is the terrifyingly familiar past of those who lived, and continue to live in Zimbabwe. 

'Sanity is a very strange commodity'

Critic Kizito Muchemwa once said: “Sanity is a very strange commodity in the fictional world created by the new generation of storytellers.” Mabasa uses Hamundigone’s madness to allow him to ‘fearlessly blame the government’ and to speak openly and honestly about ‘the mental and physical anguish experienced by Zimbabweans in the 1990s, where the impact of the beginnings of the economic decline affected everyone. My son Liam, who was a pupil at Blakiston Primary School in Harare, told me that he and fellow students used to scratch out certain letters on their Eversharp pens so that the pens read ‘ESAP’. It is a sobering experience to look back on those times. 

The Mad reminded me that even in the most difficult of times people are resiliently trying to live their best lives. One of the many strengths of this novel is that, through this story, I feel that I have ‘time travelled’ back to those times. 

Captivated

I was fascinated to read that the original novel Mapenzi had been translated twice – once by author Tendai Huchu and now by Joyce Tsitsi Mutiti. I believe she succeeded in her task “to ferry the spirit of the book”. As a non-Shona speaker I am unable to comment much on aspects of translation except to note that it was Mutiti’s translation that ‘spoke to Mabasa’s heart’, as the author has stated in an interview. 

As I finished reading The Mad I was so captivated by the book that I immediately sent a message to publisher Jane Morris to let her know that I found it to be an incredible read. I believe it to be a book that should be widely read – and I would recommend it thoroughly. My only regret is that I am unlikely to ever be able to read the original Mapenzi. 

The Mad is co-published in the United Kingdom and in Zimbabwe by amaBooks Publishers and Carnelian Heart Publishing. 

It is available in Zimbabwe through Book Fantastics (@bookfantastics), and in the United Kingdom through Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Mad-Ignatius-T-Mabasa/dp/1914287967) or through Carnelian Heart Publishing (https://carnelianheartpublishing.co.uk/product/the-mad/)

John Eppel at the Bulawayo Book Club

John Eppel will be at the Bulawayo Book Club on 29 November to discuss his novel Hatchings.

It is New Year in Bulawayo, and anybody who is anybody is out celebrating.

Based on Alexander Pope's dictum that 'those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous', Hatchings sets out to ridicule people of all races who abuse power - behind the pulpit, the podium, and the paint brush.

The novel, whose central metaphor is baby-dumping, is set on New Year's Eve for good reason: it's the time when powermongers are at their most self-indulgent, most exposed. It is precisely the time when we see how much alike they are. In Hatchings, this similarity between the left and the right, between church and state, between black and white - so obsessed with their own moral worthiness, so quick to inflict their sanctimony on us all - is demonstrated by the fact that they all, quite literally, dance to the same tune.

'Beneath the scurrility, this is a profoundly romantic novel, it tells of a touching love story between a young white couple who are saved from the prevailing Philistinism and corruption by two things - a love of English literature and a love of the Matopos.'

Terence Ranger in The Zimbabwean Review

'The book is about exploitation, meanness; and it's about loveliness'

Southern African Review of Books

amaBooks are fortunate to have published two novels, Hatchings and the translation into English of Ignatius Mabasa's Mapenzi as The Mad, that were chosen in the Times Literary Supplement as two of 'the most significant novels to have come out of Africa.

 

Mabasa, Vazhure carry Zimbabwean art to the world

Elliot Ziwira's article in The Herald on the launch of Ignatius Mabasa's The Mad and the opening of Samantha Vezhure's exhibition Nzwisa.

https://www.heraldonline.co.zw/mabasa-vazhure-carry-zimbabwean-art-to-the-world/

THERE are moments when Zimbabwe’s creative spirit refuses to be contained; instants when its words, colours and rhythms transcend borders, languages, and the limits of genre.

The past two weeks offered two such moments.

These are the launch of “The Mad”, Ignatius Mabasa’s English translation of his 1999 Shona classic “Mapenzi” in Harare on October 10, and the opening of “Nzwisa”, the debut solo exhibition by bilingual writer and painter Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure, a week later.

Though different in medium, with Mabasa’s in the printed word and Vazhure’s in textured acrylic, both events celebrate the same thing. It is the unrelenting will of Zimbabwean artists to speak in their own voices, on their own terms, and to the world at large.

The artists insist that literature and art are not parallel roads but intersecting paths in the ongoing conversation about identity, collective memory, and belonging.

When Mabasa stood before the audience at the launch of “The Mad” book lovers knew that he was not simply introducing a translation. He was introducing a movement.

For a man who did his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis at Rhodes University, South Africa, in Shona to “decolonise knowledge” and let it “speak to the people,” the translation of “Mapenzi”, his audacious, surrealist exploration of post-independence disillusionment, into English is not a retreat from that principle.

Rather, it is its extension.

Mabasa began writing “Mapenzi” as a student at 22, during the radical ferment of the 1990s at the University of Zimbabwe. Those were the years of radicalism, when students dared to dream of a freer world and writers sought new idioms.

The novel’s title, “The Mad” captured that spirit. It is a kind of madness that equates to rebellion—madness as muse, madness as resistance, and madness as truth-telling.

It reflects on how mental illness, though sensitive and serious an issue, emerges beyond affliction to become a metaphor within the imaginative and often anarchic world of artistic expression.

For both spectacle and insight, artists, especially modernists, like Mabasa, find something almost seductively resonant in the idea of losing one’s mind. 

Madness, in the creative consciousness, is not simply a breakdown of the rational self. It is a way of seeing, an alternative mode of perception that unveils hidden truths.

It offers the artist a lens through which to dissect a diseased society, peel back the veneer of order, and expose the chaos bubbling beneath. In this light, madness is not a condition but a commentary.

As critic Kizito Muchemwa (2002) puts it, “Sanity is a very strange commodity in the fictional world created by the new generation of storytellers.”

This strangeness is rooted in the dissonance between the polished appearance of modern life and its deeper, more fractured reality. To speak truthfully about the human condition today, its loneliness, alienation, and existential disillusionment, artists often turn to madness, both as a theme and a symbolic tool.

Modernists are obsessed with fracture, loss, and dislocation. Their worlds are dream-like, fragmented, sometimes terrifying, and often riddled with the psychic debris of failed utopias.

In Zimbabwean literature, this obsession is profoundly felt. Writers like Memory Chirere, Ignatius Mabasa, Shimmer Chinodya, Clement Chihota, Robert Muponde, Stanley Mupfudza, and Brian Chikwava, among others, channel modernist impulses to probe national identity, despair, and deferred hope.

Their literary worlds are littered with ghosts of colonialism, war, economic quagmire, and betrayed dreams.

That is why Tsitsi Mutiti’s translation of Mabasa’s “Mapenzi” is crucial. 

In “The Mad”, rendered into English by Mutiti after earlier efforts by Tendai Huchu, the madness is not lost but is rather reimagined.

Mutiti explained that her task was “to ferry the spirit of the book,” not just its words.

That phrase alone captures the soul of literary translation: the delicate act of carrying tone, rhythm, and cultural memory across linguistic borders without draining it of its pulse.

Mabasa confessed that early translation drafts felt “too clean, too careful,” stripping away the absurdities that gave “Mapenzi” its wild energy. 

However, in the final version the balance between fidelity and freedom is restored. The English language becomes a new drumbeat for the same song: raw, unpredictable, and deeply Zimbabwean.

Memory Chirere called Mutiti’s translation of “Mapenzi” a “great piece of work” that stands “on its own the way an original piece does”.

He added: “Mutiti’s work is amazing when you realise that she is coming from the sciences, and has little or no training in translation.”

Therefore, the launch of “The Mad” marks more than a literary milestone.

It positions Zimbabwean literature squarely within the global conversation on translation, identity, and decolonial aesthetics. For too long, African literature in English has been framed through the gaze of the outsider—what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once called “the single story.”

Mabasa’s act of translating his work, guided by his own vision, asserts agency over that narrative.

It tells the world that Zimbabwe’s stories do not need to be discovered. They only need to be heard.

On October 17, another Zimbabwean voice spoke across continents. This time in colour, texture, and rhythm. In the tranquil setting of PaMoyo Gallery in Harare, Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure unveiled “Nzwisa”, her debut solo exhibition which ends today.

The title itself, “Nzwisa”, invites the audience into a meditative space where art becomes a form of hearing as much as seeing. Vazhure, a self-taught painter and bilingual author, merges the sacred landscapes of Zimbabwe with the pastoral quiet of the Welsh countryside where she now lives.

In her canvases, past and present, home and exile, converge like echoes in a valley.

Each painting carries a story through visual poems that speak to identity, spirituality, and love.

In “Munhu Wangu” (2025), she captures tenderness and intimacy as communion rather than possession, while “Iwewe neni” delves into togetherness beyond the physical, suggesting a spiritual tether that defies space and circumstance.

Her piece “In the Embraces of Struggle” (2025) revisits Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”, turning his haunting words into a visual metaphor of intertwined histories in which black and white, coloniser and colonised, are locked forever in an unfinished embrace.

Yet, as in Marechera’s prose, there is resilience in the chaos.

In “Vapfuri Vemhangura” (2025) Vazhure honours skilled artisans of ancient Zimbabwean societies. The artwork celebrates craftsmanship, labour, and ingenuity, positioning metallurgy as both cultural heritage and a symbol of human inventiveness through the transformation of raw elements.

In traditional lore, the Soko Vhudzijena clan are praised as expert iron smelters (mhizha) who migrated from Hwedza, Mashonaland East. Similarly, the Shumba clan are said to have travelled from Mutoko through Hwedza to settle in Chivi—possibly Soko descendants who adopted the Shumba totem for strategic reasons.

Drawing inspiration from these ancestral migrations, which coincided with the southward spread of Iron Age farming, the painting depicts three men departing an iron-smelting site under the watchful protection of Chapungu, the sacred Bateleur eagle.

Though modest in scale, “Silence” (2024) communicates deep emotion through texture and tone. Set against a warm yellow background, the composition features a pair of lips—still, yet echoing the weight of words left unspoken. To one side, a mosaic of orange, red, mauve, and violet-blue textures evoke the richness and intricacy of African artistic expression.

The contrast between the vivid detailing and the muted backdrop creates an atmosphere of quiet intensity, suggesting that silence itself can carry strength, depth, and layered meaning beyond what speech can capture.

“Ziroto” (2025) speaks powerfully to Zimbabwe’s cultural psyche. Inspired by the prophecy of Chaminuka, who foresaw the coming of Europeans (those without knees), the artwork becomes a lament for historical silence.

“Who controls remembrance?” the painting seems to ask. “What happens when even our descendants no longer recognise us?”

Vazhure’s art, much like Mabasa’s writing, is an act of remembrance. It is a reclamation of the narrative from erasure. That her limited-edition prints are made from 3D scans of original paintings speaks symbolically to preservation; the attempt to retain texture and authenticity even in reproduction.

Her journey, from literary activist, author and publisher to painter since 2022, testifies to the interconnectedness of Zimbabwe’s creative spheres. Just as Mabasa moves between orality, prose, and translation, Vazhure moves between page and canvas, word and colour, as well as past and future.

Placed side by side, Mabasa’s “The Mad” and Vazhure’s “Nzwisa” demonstrate that Zimbabwe’s arts are entering a new epoch that refuses to separate literature from visual culture, intellect from emotion, or the local from the global.

Both artists confront the politics of visibility. Mabasa translates himself into English not for validation, but to occupy space in a language that once claimed ownership of his world.

On the other hand, Vazhure paints the landscapes of her memory, transforming nostalgia into resistance. In both cases, art becomes both expression and reclamation.

Their works explore a growing recognition that Zimbabwe’s literary and artistic output cannot thrive in isolation.

Collaboration between writers, translators, painters, musicians, and cultural institutions is what builds sustainable creative economies. Live music by Hope Masike at “Nzwisa” provides a sensory bridge between sound and sight—a fitting echo of Mabasa’s call for knowledge that “speaks to the people.”

Both events are crucial cultural signposts, showing how Zimbabwean art is reinventing itself as both local and global, traditional and experimental, as well as reflective and confrontational.

When one listens carefully, as “Nzwisa” urges, and reads deeply, as “The Mad” demands, one realises that both Mabasa and Vazhure are engaged in the same sacred act of translating Zimbabwe’s soul.

Indeed, creativity, like memory, is never static. It shifts form, crosses oceans, and speaks in tongues. Whether through a translated novel that carries the rhythms of Shona madness into English syntax, or through brushstrokes that merge ancestral prophecy with modern abstraction, the message is the same.

Zimbabwe’s stories still matter, and they are still being told, boldly, beautifully, and in full colour.

Even though the applause may fade at book launches and gallery openings, the larger work continues. The collective task is to sustain spaces like the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and PaMoyo Gallery to nurture publishers like Carnelian Heart, to support translators and editors such as Mutiti who make language porous, and to celebrate writers who, like Mabasa, keep pushing the boundaries of possibility.

In the end, every page turned and every canvas unveiled carries a quiet command—listen. Listen to the voices of those who dare to translate dreams into being. Listen to the madness that births meaning, and listen to Zimbabwe speaking to both itself and the world.

The Mad is co-published in Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom by amaBooks Publishers and Carnelian Heart Publishing.

Copies of the book are available in Zimbabwe through Book Fantastics (contact through @bookfantastics on Instagram, or @Book_Fantastics on X) and in the UK through Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mad-Ignatius-T-Mabasa/dp/1914287967/) or through carnelianheartpublishing.co.uk. It will be available next year in North America through the University of Georgia Press.

Ignatius Mabasa nominated for the 2026 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Storytelling

 

Renowned Zimbabwean author and storyteller
Ignatius Mabasa has been nominated for the 2026 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for storytelling. 

The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is an international children's literary award established by the Swedish government in 2002 to honour the Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002) and to promote every child's right to great stories. This global award is given annually to a person or organisation for their outstanding contribution to children's and young adult literature.

The prize is five million SEK (about US$500,000), making it the richest award in children's literature and one of the richest literary prizes in the world.

Photos from the Launch of 'The Mad'

Photos thanks to Samantha Rumvidzai Vezhure, Hope Masike and others.

Amongst those present and featured in the photos are: Aaron Chiundura Moyo, Albert Nyathi, Batsirai Chigama, Brain Garusa, Chirikure Chirikure, Conelia Mabasa, Ignatius Mabasa, Memory Chirere, Raphael Chikukwa, Tinashe Muchuri, Tsitsi Mutiti and representatives of Wisrod (who sponsored the event)

 

Celebrating the Launch of Ignatius Mabasa' s ‘The Mad’

Reproduced from https://munyori.org/2025/10/mad-about-mabasa-a-celebration-of-the-mad/

by Beaven Tapureta

In the cool evening of October 10 a gathering of ‘the mad’ writers, publishers, artists, arts journalists, academics, friends and family enjoyed the memorable official launch of The Mad, a newly co-published English translation of Ignatius T Mabasa’s 1999 Shona novel Mapenzi, a classic.

A charming mood prevailed at the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe as mbira songbird Hope Masike livened up the event with her spiritually powered music.

Although the waiting for the new baby is now over, the story behind it is of a devoted team of ‘doctors’ that withstood the hiccups yet cherished some positive experiences in its process of birth.

Guest speaker Aaron Chiundura Moyo, who is a renowned writer, playwright and actor, left everyone in stitches as he congratulated The Mad author Mabasa for drawing a crowd of ‘the mad’ in the room.

Speaking after Mabasa’s wife, Conelia, had told of how the Mapenzi draft manuscript became Ignatius’  ‘bait’ to win her love, Chiundura Moyo said artists in their budding years generally do that. One can imagine the young Mabasa walking up to the girl with that special ‘I am-a-writer-babe’ pride, flashing the manuscript in front of her like a sweetener, giving his all for love.

But Mrs. Mabasa’s story reminded Chiundura Moyo of a time he also once lured and excitedly shared one of his manuscripts with a girl who never returned it. Nobody knows if she read it and worse still, she never mentioned she loved him too! 

Chiundura Moyo went on to touch on very serious issues pertinent to the business of translation, warning that in the absence of a clear cultural understanding of the original language, translators may kill our literature instead of promoting it globally.

Though the needs of non-Shona speakers must be considered, the translated version must have oneness of the original aura, the intrinsic value of the original language, he said.

He applauded Mabasa for his commitment to the preservation of African culture through language and Joyce Tsitsi Mutiti, The Mad translator for demonstrating that translation is not completely an academic exercise but also an activity done out of passion.

The major challenge generally faced by translators is how best a translated book, targeting a new audience, can balance with the inspiration that produced the original. Writers or artists are known to have personal habits in their work of creating. These habits are inseparable to their creations, they are a part of the unwritten context.

Indeed, a translator is not a re-writer, yet, without certain knowledge, some contextual meanings are lost when word-by-word translation is unnecessarily stuck to.

For instance, said Chiundura Moyo, an owl (zizi in Shona) could have considerable symbolical meaning when viewed from an African viewpoint whereas for a foreign audience, it’s simply a bird.

Culture, however, he said, should not be a limitation for translators, only that a certain alertness of the original purpose is demanded of those involved in the translation.  

For writer and publisher Samantha Vazhure (Carnelian Heart Publishing Ltd), it was a great honour to be asked by the long-established amaBooks to co-publish The Mad with them.  

Ignatius Mabasa could not help introducing himself to the gathering through a gripping story from his next novel which he said is titled Death of a Storyteller.

He re-traced the path Mapenzi has walked since the days he authored it when he was a student growing among ‘the radicals’ at the University of Zimbabwe.

His reflection of Mapenzi’s ups and downs, before and after it was published, was enough to justify the decision to avail it internationally.

At one time writer, Tendai Huchu was engaged to do the translation while publisher Irene Staunton and celebrated literary critic and researcher Flora Veit-Wild helped with ideas and suggestions. Although Huchu completed the translation, it was Tsitsi Mutiti’s translation completed a few years before Huchu’s that spoke to Mabasa’s heart.

Speaking at the launch, the translator Mutiti said she was intrigued by Mabasa’s style of characterization which very well captures the social milieu.

“I fell in love with Hamundigone’s personality who (Memory) Chirere describes as uncensored and sometimes utterly warm and likeable. I loved Bunny’s and Magi’s introspection. I loved all the characters because they are so relatable. These are not people to be pitied but strong people living their lives the best they can. They are people making the most of whatever resources are available to them to live their lives,” said Mutiti.

As reiterated by Chiundura Moyo in his presentation, that language is the backbone of a culture, likewise Mutiti discovered the inherent power of mother languages. 

“The other thing I learned is how much we take our mother language for granted. Its words are so deeply imbedded in our minds that we usually don’t really think about the concepts these words represent. When translating, this analysis becomes necessary so that a fitting word or phrase can be found. Sometimes this is a simple process, other times it’s a wrestling match. Language is a patchwork made with words, culture and other beliefs peculiar to the speakers of language,” she said.

Mutiti’s engagement with The Mad was enlightening especially in matters to do with ‘cultural differences between original audience and target audience’.

“Language and culture are so closely intertwined that any work in a particular language is also a reflection of that culture.  A culture likely to be foreign to the targeted reader. This presents a problem of how to handle these cultural differences. I think writers of sci-fi and fantasy who create worlds that have their peculiar cultures and rules also experience the same problems of how to convey these worlds to their readers in a way that the readers will understand,” said Mutiti. 

Later, an open discussion led by writer Memory Chirere was held to give those present a chance to ask Mabasa and Mutiti some questions. Wisrod, a registered microfinance company, sponsored the book launch.

The Mad reviewed in The Financial Gazette

  'We are all the richer for the penetrative insights and experiences this important novel can give us.'

Read the full review by Diana Rodrigues on p31 of The Financial Gazette of 9 October 2025: (https://epaper.fingaz.co.zw/subscriber/read-mac-publication/205#Thursday%209%20October%202025/31).