The Black Man Cannot Write: Storytelling is My Other Mother by Ignatius Mabasa

 Reproduced from  Writing in Practice, Volume 11, March 2025. 

CrossRef DOI: 10.62959/WIP-11-2025-06

Ignatius Mabasa

Authorial Reflections on Indigenous Language, Education and Creative Writing in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT
Before the introduction of books, radio, and film through colonisation, folklore functioned as a vital form of home-schooling for the indigenous people of Zimbabwe. When creative writing in Zimbabwean indigenous languages began, the first Shona novel, Feso (1956), was widely regarded as a written folktale. Forty-three years later, in 1999, the author’s debut Shona novel, Mapenzi, also bore the strong imprint of folklore. This autoethnographic paper reflects on the enduring influence of oral storytelling during Zimbabwe’s transition from a traditional to a modern society under British colonial rule, and examines how this oral tradition shaped the author’s creative writing career in a context that lacked – and continues to lack – formal writing schools.

Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theory of the “third space,” the paper explores storytelling as a powerful tool for education, cultural preservation, language development, and creative expression. It concludes by advocating for the revival of Zimbabwe’s storytelling heritage, not merely as a means of transmitting traditional knowledge, but as a platform for co-creation – one that fosters the emergence of new, hybrid identities and bodies of knowledge.

KEYWORDS
English, Shona, Folklore, Colonization, Co-creation, Storytelling, Knowledge, Identity, Decolonial, Pedagogies, Autoethnography.

Introduction

I am a Shona language storyteller and writer, born nine years before my country, Zimbabwe, gained independence from British colonial rule in 1980. I use the term “storyteller” to refer to the oral traditions of non-literate societies, where imaginary worlds and lived experiences were created and shared through forms such as “folktales, myths, ballads, fables, medieval romances, fabliaux, exempla, local traditions” (Finnegan 2012: 312).

As an author, I primarily write in my indigenous language, Shona, because it was the language that first introduced me to words, songs, stories, characters, and sounds – long before I knew that there was a foreign language called English, a language that was to metaphorically instruct me to kill my mother so that it could adopt me. Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of the British South Africa Company that spearheaded Zimbabwe’s colonisation in 1890, “never doubted the superiority of whites” (Rotberg 1988: 688).

To him, everything English was superior. To me, however, this claim was senseless, because Shona was the language that named the foods I ate, the birds, mushrooms, and trees I encountered, and the different kinds of rain that fell in various seasons and forms.

To this day, I am often asked by my own people why I wrote my PhD thesis in the Shona language. This attitude shows the depth of the colonial problem which can be best expressed in the Shona language idiom, “chakabaya chikatyokera” (it pierced and broke leaving a part lodged inside).

To some Zimbabweans, my decision is a form of epistemic disobedience because to them knowledge is legitimized by the English language. Yet, I sometimes feel violated when I fail to find the English words for things that I know in my language. It makes me feel that if indigenous people are to have a place in this modern life, they must forsake their mother tongues. It becomes a herculean task in the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” (Freire 2000) to claim the right to think, dream, and imagine in our own tongues (wa Thiong’o 2025) especially in the face of globalization.

If knowledge is power, the source, nature and language of that knowledge must inform the liberation of the oppressed because as wa Thiongo in Feng (2025) put it, “all languages have the best knowledge of the environment they come from.” Therefore, where one would expect that “reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text,” (Smith 2008: 36), there are problems, too, when we do see ourselves in a Shona PhD thesis, but think that our languages don’t deserve to be on such esteemed platforms.

A child of storytelling

Shona is both a people and a language. When my parents divorced, I was three years old and enveloped in the fog of early childhood. My mother quietly returned to her people, while my father remarried and moved on, leaving me in

the care of my grandparents. Parentless, I remained on my grandparents’ remote farm – far removed from city lights, roads, shops, and modern sophistication. I first grasped the concept of money when I moved to the city at age seven. Mishler (2013: xix), quoting Jacob Grimm (1815), writes:

Although there is almost no district which is completely devoid of folklore or stripped of it, nevertheless, it is provincial towns rather than big cities; and villages rather than provincial towns; and among the villages, the ones which are most of all quiet and impassable, located in the forests or in the mountains, it is these which are most endowed and blessed with folklore.

Far from the distractions and glitter of city life, my grandmother’s songs, idioms, and folktales adopted me and gifted me with an early awareness of language, culture, values, and wisdom that no formal schooling could match.

As a result, I began telling stories before I could read or write – before I knew about writing boards, pens, ink, and books. I am a child of storytelling – storytelling is my other mother.

My grandparents’ farm was located in what the British colonial government called African Purchase Areas. There, I had the rare opportunity to observe and interact with the very animals featured in folktales. I studied them closely and understood their characteristics and behaviours intimately.

Whenever a story involved Hare, Baboon, Tortoise, or other animals, my close proximity to their world made those tales vividly real and relatable. These animals weren’t just characters; they became my friends and kin. In Shona folktales, many animals are addressed with familial terms – such as “uncle” – and they use human relational titles among themselves, rendering them members of the extended family.

There is adrenaline, magic, intrigue, peace, and more in the storyteller’s voice as she conjures worlds, people, places, and emotions. As one folklorist noted, “Hearing and telling the tale has allowed me the luxury to live inside of it. I am part of its habitat...” (Mishler 2013: xx). My grandmother’s grass-thatched hut was the theatre, and the dying embers from the evening fire provided the lighting.

I remember evenings when the stories were so intense that it became difficult to leave her hut. Stepping out meant facing the dark and shadowy world filled with unsettling sounds – chirping insects in the grass, the eerie whistle of nightjars, hooting owls, and the distant barking of dogs – all turning our homestead into an extension of the grotesque landscape of the folktale.

Identity

My identity as a writer is rooted in folklore – in the world of the spoken word. The novel, short story, and written poetry are all recent literary forms and do not originate from Africa.

One former Native Commissioner even declared, “the black man can’t write,” yet conceded, “but if he can’t write, he has a very rich unwritten literature” (Worthington, 1940: 9). Today, 45 years after Zimbabwe gained independence from British colonial rule, the country has twenty universities – yet none offer a degree programme in creative writing or indigenous literature.

We are losing both the borrowed art of writing and our own rich, unwritten literature. Countries need national narratives, because they carry unique cultural, emotional, and historical contexts that can’t be fully conveyed in another language, especially in English (Mizumura 2015).

Zimbabwe was colonised by the British in 1890 and renamed Rhodesia after the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. In 1894, the colonial administration established the Native Affairs Department, which was responsible for overseeing the welfare of black Africans living on tribal trust lands.

Native Commissioners, tasked with administering tribal districts, sought to understand indigenous cultures in order to manage them effectively. These cultures included spiritual beliefs, practices, and everyday life.

Because black Africans didn’t write, colonisers created the written narratives that described, interpreted, and guided African life. The absence of a written African counter-narrative allowed colonial interpretations to flourish – erasing, silencing, and undermining indigenous worldviews.

Jeater (2001) quotes a Shona man who was educated during the colonial era as saying, “When a friend of mine was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, he was forbidden to speak chiShona, his mother tongue, at school. Violations were punished by severe beatings from the teachers.” One of the long-term effects of this colonial strategy is that postcolonial Africans have internalized and perpetuated the silencing of their own languages, stories, songs, and cultural frameworks.

This tragic phenomenon is illustrated by the celebrated Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, who chose to write in English rather than Shona. He explained, “It never occurred to me. Shona was part of the ghetto demon I was trying to escape. Shona had been placed within the context of a degraded, mind-wrenching experience from which apparently the escape was into the English language and education” (Veit-Wild 1988: 7).

Marechera, who studied at Oxford University, not only spoke with an Oxford accent but reportedly disrespected fellow authors who wrote in indigenous languages. On one occasion, he is said to have ordered the renowned Shona writer and cultural activist Aaron Chiunduramoyo out of a writers’ gathering, declaring: “Take him out; he isn’t a writer! Munyori, not an author” (Mushava 2021). Yet, prior to colonization and the elevation of English as a superior language and race (Rotberg 1988), oral poetry and performance were widely embedded in Shona society. “The recitation of oral poetry was widely diffused in Shona society. There were certain social occasions which demanded and encouraged it, and certain social relationships which received appropriate expression by means of it” (Fortune n.d.: 41). Shona people were verbal artists. They expressed gratitude, celebrated achievements, courted lovers, and even greeted one another using poetic and idiomatic expressions. Where an English speaker might say, “Thank you very much,” I remember my grandmother would thank me using totemic titles of honour before launching into a praise poem lasting two or three minutes.

That did wonders to my self-esteem and encouraged me to be a poet too where “Ordinary men and women had to be their own poets if they were to be fully members of their society and cooperate adequately in the social occasions which demanded poetic expression” (Fortune n.d.: 41). That was the society I grew up in. Ordinary people chose to greet, praise, grieve, and amuse through poetry and metaphor. I particularly remember one villager who regularly used to pass through our homestead from beer drinking. The chap was exceptionally fluent and lucid in imagination and expression. Now I know why I positively responded to his creativity – he too was my mentor and inspiration.

As a young boy at my grandparents’ farm, I wasn’t aware that my artistic identity and destiny had already been placed in the oven and begun to bake. Even those around me never hinted that they could smell the sweet aroma of the artist that I was becoming. But the folktales my grandmother shared with us each evening around the dying embers of the fire enchanted me into the world of storytelling – a world where I felt at home, where I could travel to strange lands and meet peculiar characters and fantastical happenings.

Although my grandmother told her stories to a group of children, I believe I was the one most deeply captivated and shaped by them. I retold her tales to my nephews and nieces, and in doing so, added my own twists, colour, and drama. My love for storytelling grew to the point that I broke the taboo that forbade telling stories during the day. Among the Shona, this prohibition existed because they believed that stories were so enchanting such that listeners could become spellbound and unproductive. And for us cattle herders there was a risk of becoming so engrossed resulting in letting cattle wander into and destroy crops.

The liberation war

In 1976, as the liberation war that began around 1966 intensified, my father was killed. Our lives at the farm were turned upside-down. There were guns, refugees, deaths, displacements, and danger everywhere. Schools were closed, and evening storytelling sessions with my grandmother came to an abrupt halt due to the wartime curfew.

This curfew required all people to put out fires and go to sleep before 6 p.m. During this curfew, Rhodesian security forces were authorized “to shoot on sight anyone violating the curfew” (Darnton 1976). After my father’s burial, my aunt took me to the city, where schools were still open despite the war. In the city, I deeply missed my grandmother’s folktales and the rural life. City life felt cold and unfriendly; I was ignorant of urban ways and not streetwise. However, I found a connection to my rural past and my grandmother’s stories by retelling them to my city cousins. We had no television. I soon became known as the family storyteller.

I now had more freedom to remix and reinvent the tales, retelling them in my own style when I couldn’t remember all the details, confirming the view that, “A story lives and is reborn each time a storyteller makes it his or her own and passes it on to an attentive audience” (Riddington 2013: x). It was through these informal storytelling sessions that I stepped onto the path of creative writing.

Formal schooling

Eventually, I began formal schooling. A new world opened up – books, letters, vowels, consonants, printed words, numbers, and captivating illustrations. The illustrations, especially, fascinated me. I would study a single image for a long time, eventually creating my own stories around it.

Learning to read and write in Shona at school was easy and enjoyable. As soon as I mastered reading and writing, I read anything I could find. Unfortunately, there was little relevant or age-appropriate reading material in either Shona or English.

One major source of stories for me was the Bible, which my Grade 3 teacher read aloud with great skill. In a way, her dramatic voice replaced my grandmother ’s and took me through new story worlds – Jericho’s streets where Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Jesus, and where blind Bartimaeus shouted, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

When we began writing our own creative compositions at school, I loved it. But because I came from a strong storytelling background, I initially wrote as if I were speaking. This presented challenges. My teachers expected stories to follow formal written conventions – not the lively and fluid rhythms of oral storytelling. They were second-language English speakers themselves, not creative writers, and were prescriptive and unable to guide me through the transition. What they failed to see was the birthing of something between the oral and the written which Homi Bhabha (1994: 55) calls the third space where people are “free to negotiate and translate their cultural identities in a discontinuous, intertextual temporality of cultural difference.”

Learning to read had opened a new world for me. I discovered Shona novels that were beginning to appear in greater numbers, particularly those published by the Rhodesia Literature Bureau. Whenever I found books – whether from neighbours, friends, or during visits to relatives – I would ask to borrow them. Most were in poor condition, with missing pages or covers.

I remember reading books that started on page twelve without any idea what had occurred prior. Yet the human mind is remarkable. Even when a story started midstream, I could piece together the plot, imagining the missing parts, and most of the time, it worked well because I was also creating a “third space” by bringing my experiences from the storytelling world of my childhood. The story was being my “escort” as observed by Achebe (1987).

I read aloud to my cousins the novels that I had hunted and gathered. My background as an oral storyteller had prepared me well to read with fluency and expression, as well as imagine and anticipate the diverse story worlds we encountered. Again, the third space was transforming “the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future” (Bhabha1994: 55–56). I didn’t enjoy English books as much as I did the Shona ones.

English books were often difficult, alien, and sometimes confusing. Besides, I didn’t have a dictionary or anyone at home to ask the meaning of new words, let alone how they were pronounced. Many English poems and stories described cultural norms and behaviours that felt far removed from my reality. For example, the nursery rhyme “Little Jack Horner” left me puzzled: “Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in a thumb and pulled out a plum, and said, ‘What a good boy am I.’” I wondered: Why would Jack sit in a corner? What was a Christmas pie? Why would he stick his thumb into it? What exactly was a plum? And why was he praising himself?

Other English nursery rhymes were equally perplexing. There was one about an old woman who lived in a shoe and had many children. Looking back, I see that my discomfort with English stories stemmed from a lack of comprehension of the language, and encountering unfamiliar cultural objects and contexts.

When I moved on to secondary school – after Zimbabwe had gained independence – I was delighted to discover that we had a teacher dedicated to teaching Shona only.

Finally, after years of being tossed by English in the storms of education, I felt recognized and dignified. For our very first assignment, the teacher asked us to write a creative composition in Shona. That exercise officially marked my entry into the world of creative writing.

I wrote a story that the teacher singled out as exceptional. She had me read it aloud to the entire class – and because of my storytelling background and experience of reading to my cousins I had them enchanted.

There was a mini riot as some of my classmates protested, insisting that a Form One student couldn’t possibly write so well. The teacher then took me to the staffroom, where I read the same story to a roomful of teachers. I received a standing ovation.

That moment gave me creative wings that couldn’t be clipped. The worlds of storytelling and creative writing were merging in a fantastic way that I had never imagined.

From then on, I approached writing with a conscious and serious attitude. I became more aware of language, of text, of voice – of the power and texture of words. I began writing both Shona and English short stories and poems, sharing them with my teachers and reading them during school assemblies. I also illustrated some of my own stories. For years I wrote without being published, guided only by the storytelling foundation laid by my grandmother and encouragement from my language teachers. Eventually, I met Solomon Mutswairo, the pioneer novelist of Shona literature.

Meeting the Pioneer

From colonization in 1890 up to 1920, the only provision for native education in Zimbabwe was through mission schools (Hadfield Report 1925). In their quest to find relevant content for African learners, missionaries collected and incorporated well-known indigenous folktales and folk characters into the reading materials they developed for native education (Mabasa 2023). Creative writing by indigenous people only began to emerge after a small number of Africans had received missionary education and were introduced to reading and writing. The books produced for Africans between 1890 and 1920 were primarily authored by missionaries.

The first generation of Zimbabwean writers were predominantly teachers and priests educated in mission schools (Veit-Wild 1992). Despite the formal introduction of literacy, Zimbabwean creative writing in indigenous languages only truly began 66 years after British occupation. The first Shona novel, Feso by Solomon Mutswairo, was published in 1956 – 15 years before I was born. According to Mutasa (1999), Feso “marks a transition from oracy to a new mode, the written word.”

Three years later, Mutswairo participated in the compilation of the first collection of Shona poems. Shona poetry made its book debut in the 1959 collection Madetembedzo Akare Namatsva (Old Traditional and Modern Poems), which contained examples of traditional oral poetry in written form. However, the bulk of the content was original, composed directly in written form – a relatively new and unfamiliar medium for a genre that was deeply rooted in oral traditions.

As Fortune (n.d.: 41) observes, these works were “composed in the medium of writing, a medium relatively new and strange to an institution which [was] very ancient in its oral form.” Whether original or adapted from oral traditions, these early published creative works – novels and poems alike – demonstrate the enduring power and influence of oral culture. This oral resonance is similar to what one senses in the written versions of Beowulf or Selma Lagerlöf’s The Treasure – that offer a reminder of how aesthetically rich the original art forms were.

I first read Feso when I was around 13 years old, but at the time, I never imagined that my path would one day cross with that of its author – Solomon Mutswairo, the founding father of Shona literature. I met Mutswairo when I was 19, having gate-crashed a Zimbabwe Writers Union meeting held at a local hotel. I had hoped to meet a sympathetic published writer to whom I could show my work, in the hope of receiving guidance or even an invitation to join the esteemed company of Zimbabwe’s literary giants. The venue was filled with famous writers whose works I had read but whom I had never met in person. Before I had the chance to approach anyone, a remarkable opportunity arose. The master of ceremonies asked if anyone in the audience wanted to share a sample of their new or in-progress writing. None of the established writers responded. I raised my hand and was invited to the podium. I can’t recall what I was wearing or how I appeared, but I remember vividly that it was my first time in a hotel, my first time using a microphone, and my first time reading my poetry aloud in public outside a school setting. After reading the two Shona poems, I received a standing ovation from the assembled writers. Mutswairo, moved by my performance, offered to publish my poems in a literary magazine produced by the then African Languages Department at the University of Zimbabwe. A few days later, the national newspaper The Herald ran a story celebrating the discovery of a new voice in Zimbabwean creative writing. A year later, I enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts General degree at the University of Zimbabwe, and the legendary Solomon Mutswairo became my lecturer. This was 32 years after Feso was published, and 101 years after the British raised the Union Jack to mark their occupation of Zimbabwe. Mutswairo taught a course titled “Shona Traditional Literature and Thought,” which allowed me to connect more formally and deeply with the roots of traditional storytelling.

Forty years after Feso was published, my debut Shona novel Mapenzi (The Mad) came out and it was described by Chiwome (2001) as one of “the most significant books to have come out of Africa,” in an article published by The Times Literary Supplement of 17 August 2001.

Mapenzi was translated and published in English as The Mad in 2025. While Mutasa (1999) describes Feso as a literary work that marks the transition from oracy to writing, Mutasa and Muwati (2008: 159) comment about Mapenzi saying, “Mabasa establishes a link with oral traditions which function as the vital nourishing supplement to his creative act.” They go on to observe that orature has transformative power “if responsibly and effectively used in literary art.” I take this as an acknowledgement of the potential of storytelling in the establishment of the third space. As a third space force, stories are powerful vehicles of ideology and socialization, and as Loomba (2005: 26) asserts, “Ideology doesn’t, as is often assumed, refer to political ideas alone. It includes all our ‘mental frameworks’, our beliefs, concepts, and ways of expressing our relationship to the world.”

And these ways of expressing our relationship to the world involve hybridization or innovative ways of revisiting, appropriating, reimagining, translating, rehistoricizing and reading anew (Bhabha 1994). As a third space force, Feso was banned by the Rhodesian government “because the plot seemed to be an allegory of the British- settler – Zimbabwean conflict,” (britannica. com). When I wrote Mapenzi, I didn’t consciously try to incorporate oral forms – riddles, proverbs, folksongs, and anecdotes – but my DNA as a child of storytelling naturally infused the text with those elements, proving that third spaces can also be organic rather than intentional.

In Mapenzi, the third space’s “transformative potential where people aren’t restricted to adhering to one or other set of dominant values and traditions” (Tatham 2025: 870) is seen at play. I can single out Harare the dog character that I later discovered I unconsciously used to extend the role played by folktale animal characters in stories. Harare isn’t just a metaphor; he engages in conversations with human characters in the same way animals do in folktales. Additionally, the protagonist of Mapenzi is fond of telling folktales within the novel, embedding the traditional tale within a modern literary form.

It’s now 69 years since the first Shona novel was published. Compared to when the Literature Bureau of Rhodesia was established in 1953, Shona literature has stopped being vibrant and ubiquitous because “Some of the more traditional publishers have scaled down their operations,” (UNESCO 2025: 240). The Literature Bureau of Rhodesia was “a government-funded agency that promoted indigenous languages through subsidized publications,” (UNESCO 2025: 238) but the establishment was taken over by the Zimbabwean government at independence only to close in 1999, leaving a huge void in the publishing of indigenous language novels. Today, self-publishing is in vogue and “Retail outlets and individual booksellers have largely replaced traditional bookshops, which have dwindled significantly since 2000 as a result of economic challenges...” (UNESCO 2025: 240). The closure of the Literature Bureau shows how even at government level Zimbabweans “look down on literature published in indigenous languages” (Gudhlanga and Makaudze 2007). Forty-five years after independence, Zimbabwe still lacks a coherent language policy. While Japanese writer Minae Mizumura is concerned that “non-English literary traditions and languages – like that of modern Japanese – are being gradually hollowed out by English’s global dominance” (Feng 2025), some African governments like that of Zimbabwe are complicity in facilitating the English hegemony.

While back in 1940, Frank Worthington observed that “the black man can’t write,” before adding that “but if he has no history worthy of the name and can’t write, he has a very rich unwritten literature” (Worthington 1940: 9), today we face a much more concerning scenario: the black man can write – but is forgetting and despising his language and stories. He has become detached from his identity, and has lost the third space agency to explore how cultural signs and pedagogies can be translanguaged, rehistoricized, and reimagined through storytelling – something I have been experimenting with for the past twenty years.

I have used the Shona traditional template to create children’s stories The Market Superman (2010) and Rehdiyo yaTsuro (2012). The re- imagination in both stories is disruptive of the traditional story world in a beautiful and hilarious way. In The Market Superman (2010) a boy sacrifices his dignity to save his little deaf brother at a vegetable market. He goes back home having lost his clothes save for his Superman underpants. In Rehdiyo yaTsuro (2012) when Hare buys a radio and takes it to his colleagues in the forest, they offer mixed reactions to the new foreign product. The conflict is beautiful because it creates great dialogue on the binaries of traditional/modern and rural/urban. The two English stories Goats (2014) and Snakes and Venom (2014) are a further exploration of the third space drawing from the folktale to facilitate dialogue in managing and resolving conflict.

When I created Chipo neChipopayi (2017) – it was a performed piece that I later turned into a film script. It won the best short film award at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival in 2017. Again, Chipo neChipopayi uses the traditional folktale template to create a Zimbabwean hybrid version of the American cartoon character Popeye, a modern setting and playful language. In all these productions, I created a third space which enables negotiation and re- signification across cultural boundaries.

Conclusion

I hate to see my storytelling heritage wasted, knowing its power to inspire future creators. My identity as an artist has largely come from my culture, and there is great potential to use that knowledge to create accessible third spaces. Drawing from ‘Southern Theory’ by Raewyn Connell (2007) which examines the global dominance of ‘Western’ social theory and argues for the importance of non-Western perspectives in understanding the world, I have a dream of teaching traditional folktales as a living template for the co-creation of hybrid stories that respond to social change.

Through that approach I won’t only honour indigenous epistemologies but also enact Bhabha’s theory of the third space in practice. Traditional folktales have always been adaptive, oral, and performative – the stories changed with context, audience, and teller. Fixing them in written “authentic” forms is a colonial imposition. Using folktales as templates rather than sacred texts returns them to their flexible roots. Besides, hybridity thrives on negotiation and Bhabha’s third space where cultures, generations, and knowledges meet becomes a great theory to contextualize my dream. Co- creating new stories with elders (custodians), educators (facilitators), and youth (critical inquirers) creates a discursive site of negotiation, breaking binaries of old/young, traditional/modern, or rural/urban.

I see the ultimate outcome as a pedagogical transformation that enables the rewriting or hybridizing of stories that engage young people as active meaning and solution-makers, not passive recipients of inherited tales. Participants won’t be confined to following a single dominant set of values or traditions.

Rather, the third space offers a generative environment where individuals and groups can construct their own identities by drawing from multiple discourses.

This approach aligns with decolonial pedagogies that value translanguaging, situated knowledge, and critical engagement.

It will stoke the storytelling tradition fires so that they aren’t treated as a fixed museum object. The stories will have agency, countering the long-term effects of colonialism while recovering lost indigenous knowledge and languages.

BIOGRAPHY

Ignatius Tirivangani Mabasa is a Zimbabwean storyteller, writer, and academic who primarily creates in his mother tongue, Shona. His deep love for storytelling was nurtured from an early age through traditional oral narratives and folktales. Mabasa is notably the first person in Zimbabwe to write a PhD thesis in Shona, completed at Rhodes University in South Africa. His literary work engages themes of identity, culture, and social justice, drawing from his lived experiences under colonialism and during Zimbabwe’s journey to independence.

A celebrated author, Mabasa’s debut novel Mapenzi was described in The Times Literary Supplement (17 August 2001) as one of “the most significant books to have come out of Africa.” Mapenzi was later translated and published in English as The Mad in 2025. He has taught English Literature and Creative Writing in Zimbabwe, the United States, and Canada. A former Fulbright Scholar and writer/storyteller- in-residence at the University of Manitoba, Mabasa continues to champion indigenous storytelling.

For over two decades, he has revitalised Shona folktales through film and digital media, making them accessible to new generations. His work contributes to the preservation and evolution of African knowledge systems, while inspiring creative hybridity in literature and performance.

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Mutswairo, Solomon. (1982). Feso. Harare: Longman Zimbabwe.

Riddington, Robin. (2013). Foreword. In The Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale (Mishler. Craig). Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Rotberg, Robert. (1988). The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. New York. Oxford University Press.

Smith, Linda. (2008). Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books Ltd.

Tatham, Christina. (2025). A systematic literature review of Third Space theory in research with children (aged 4-12) in multicultural educational settings. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. Vol. 33, No. 3, 867–886.

UNESCO. (2025). The African Book Industry. Trends, Challenges and Opportunities for Growth. Paris: UNESCO.

Veit-Wild, Flora. (1992). Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature. London: Hans Zell Publishers.

Veit-Wild, Flora. (1988). Dambudzo Marchera: 1952-1987. Harare: Baobab Books.

wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. (2025). Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas. New York: New Press.

Worthington, Frank. (1940). African Aesop. London: Collins.

INDICATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhabha, Homi. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

This is a collection of essays that examine concepts like mimicry, ambivalence, and the “third space” of cultural negotiation, arguing

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that these spaces of hybridity challenge fixed notions of identity and power.

Achebe, Chinua. (1987). Anthills of the Savannah. Oxford: Heinemann.

Set in the fictional West African nation of Kangan, the novel explores themes of political corruption, power struggles, and the impact of post-colonialism on African society.

Connell, Raewyn. (2007). Southern Theory: Social Science And The Global Dynamics Of Knowledge. Cambridge. Polity Press.

This book critiques the dominance of European and North American perspectives and advocates for recognizing the intellectual rigor and political relevance of theories emerging from the peripheries.

Freire, Paulo. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

This book emphasizes the importance of education in empowering the oppressed to challenge and overcome their situation.

Mabasa, Ignatius. (2010). The Market Superman. In Stories that Talk 2. South Africa: Heartlines.

This is story of a boy who sacrifices his dignity to save his little deaf brother after an accident at a vegetable market.

He goes back home having lost his clothes save for his Superman underpants.

Mabasa, Ignatius. (2011). The Novel Citizen. In Writing Free. Harare: Weaver Press.

This is a story about a writer who meets a character who has escaped from a novel into the real world following a sharp disagreement with the author of a novel. The character tells his story and the “new” writer writes the new story.

Mabasa Ignatius. (2012). Redhiyo yaTsuro. Harare: Bhabhu Books.

This story is in the Shona language. Hare buys a radio and takes it to his colleagues in the forest, they offer mixed reactions to the new foreign product. The conflict is hilarious, but critiquing colonisation.

Mabasa, Ignatius. (2014). Goats. In A Family Portrait. Harare: Icapa Publishing.

This is a graphic story of emotional and physical abuse, where an old woman is humiliated in the presence of her grandchildren by a male neighbour after her goats escape and destroy his maize crop.

Mabasa, Ignatius. (2014). Snakes and Venom. In A Family Portrait. Harare: Icapa Publishing.

This story explores the pain that a mother whose daughter is mentally challenged has been raped by a known powerful individual.

After being denied justice, she takes that matter into her own hands.

Mabasa, Ignatius. (2023). Chave chemutengure vhiri rengoro. Harare: Edulight Books.

The book in Shona explores the changes that the Shona folktale has gone through, and how the Shona people theorized colonialism through a song composed around 1890.

Mizumura, Minae. (2015). The fall of language in the age of English (M. Yoshihara & J. W. Carpenter, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

The Fall of Language is built around Mizumura’s personal experience: as an aspiring bilingual novelist who, in her youth, chose to reclaim her native Japanese instead of writing in English

Rotberg, Robert. (1988).The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. New York. Oxford University Press.

This book is based on seventeen years of research and offers the definitive biography of Cecil John Rhodes, a British imperialist who is considered one of the most controversial figures of the nineteenth century.

Smith, Linda. (2008). Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books Ltd.

This book critiques Western research practices and their historical entanglement with colonialism. It proposes a framework for decolonizing research by centering Indigenous perspectives and knowledge systems.

Veit-Wild, Flora. (1992). Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature. London: Hans Zell Publishers.

This book tracks the epochs in the history of Zimbabwean literature in English, Ndebele and Shona. It does this by looking at three main categories – the generation of writers who were trained by missionaries as teachers and priests, as well as the “rebels” who departed from that path.

wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. (2025). Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas. New York: New Press.

This is a collection of essays that explores language, culture, and power, particularly in the context of colonialism.

It emphasizes the importance of African languages for cultural identity and resistance against both the psychological and material effects of colonialism.

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Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? He Grew Up

 Reproduced from https://bryonyrheam.blogspot.com/2026/04/whatever-happened-to-rick-astley-he.html

Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? may be an unusual title for a book of short stories set in Africa. Western expectations of African literature demand something more exotic, something at least with connotations of heat, dust and hardship.  Like every place, Africa has more than one side to it and there are as many different experiences as there are people and places. 

Growing up in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, my life was an interesting mixture of experiences.  I lived on a gold mine out in the bush.  There were snakes and scorpions – and fear. It was an unstable time politically in post-Independence Zimbabwe.  Not everyone wanted the ruling party, ZANU-PF, in power and, in retaliation, the government sent North-Korean trained soldiers to Matabeleland to ‘sort them out’. This time of anxiety left an indelible mark on me. In other aspects, my life was ‘normal’ by Western standards.  I went to school, played sport, belonged to the library and watched television. 

Once a week, I listened to Sounds on Saturday, an hour of music videos of the ‘latest hits’ (some of them weren’t quite the latest), incorporating both Zimbabwean and Western music.  It was on Sounds on Saturday that I first saw Rick Astley with his shoulder pads and his jackets and his baby face, taking the steps two at a time and singing. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down …’

Did I adore Rick Astley? Not at all.  Did I like him?  Not particularly.  I was never one to hero worship celebrities. Did he leave any impact on my life whatsoever? No.  So why then did I decide, not only to write a story entitled Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? but to make that the title of my collection of short stories? 

It was a Friday evening. My sixteen-year-old daughter was out a friend’s party, and I was trying desperately to stay awake until ten o’clock, when I had to fetch her. I was drinking jasmine green tea and flicking through Facebook, catching up on who was doing what with whom.  There were the usual posts about food and weight loss; pictures of children and pets and the occasional potted plant; adverts for Indian take aways and plumbing services.  And that’s when it hit me: this was life at forty-five.

              There was a time that does not feel so long ago in memory, yet is at least thirty years ago, that I would never have been found at home on a Friday night.  Never.  If it wasn’t a party, it was a film we went to; if not a film, coffee with friends.  Then, when I was older, those dreaded night clubs, pubs and bars. Friday night was THE night to go out.  Nobody who had an ounce of life in them stayed at home on a Friday night.

              My teenage self swore a million times that I would not end up like my parents when I was older.  No, I would be one of those people who partied their way through life.  Not marriage, not children, not a position or a job was going to stop me, and yet there was nothing more comforting than coming home at the end of an evening and finding my mum still up, pottering around in her blue dressing gown.  An enduring image I have is of her sitting at the kitchen table eating a strawberry yoghurt and flicking through copies of Women’s Weekly.

              Of course, I did change – and I am glad I did.  I discovered I wasn’t half the socialite I thought I was. It’s not just that the thought of being out a night club in my forties, mother of two children and a school teacher to boot, sounds horribly dangerous (I can think of nothing worse than being one of those people who tries to hang around with people half their age, knocking back tequila and pretending they are having the time of their lives), but even parties and barbecues fill me with a kind of dread.  Truth is, I don’t even want to go out to the movies and, if someone would like to pop by for coffee, they are most welcome – as long as they are gone by nine thirty.

              I was therefore surprised by what I felt that night whilst sipping my jasmine tea and planning what I would make for lunch the next day.  I felt fear. Real, hard, cold fear, and it wasn’t because I longed for the past, or that I felt there was something else I should be doing with the present.  It was the next stage that frightened me.  The future. The ‘what now?’

              I had always thought of myself as quite an aware sort of person, not the type to be surprised by sudden revelations about my character or the direction of my life path.  I found I was not at all prepared for the changes I faced in my late forties.

              The first major change was my mother’s death six years ago, something I struggled to come to terms with. My father’s mental health deteriorated as dementia set in. On top of the sadness of witnessing this, I felt I had lost both my parents, and for someone who had always been a ‘home baby’, enjoying living near my parents and having them around as my own children grew up, this was very difficult.  For a long time, I floated in a strange sea of grief, not knowing how to move on.

              Empty nest syndrome loomed as my older daughter began to plan what she would do once leaving school.  It was a couple of years away still, but I began to think about it more.  I struggled to imagine what it would be like not to have children at home.  As much as increased time on my own, the freedom to come and go as I please and a reduced laundry pile were appealing, I felt a terrible emptiness, a death almost.

              Throw in the perimenopause and I was a wreck.  The most overwhelming thing was feeling the change in my life both physically and mentally and knowing there was nothing I could do about it.  I couldn’t stop the world.  I had to go on.

              I could have asked whatever happened to Boy George or Jon Bon Jovi for that matter, but it was exactly Rick Astley’s fresh-faced, unsullied, not-yet-disillusioned mien that made me pick him. What had become of him, and could that kind of optimism stand the years?  Where would I find him?  Had he ditched in his career, or had it ditched him?

              When I googled him, I was interested to find out that, unlike many other pop sensations, Rick Astley had given up his career to bring up his daughter.  A noble move for anyone, a man in particular, and especially someone who could have gone on and on to greater heights – or could he?

              Astley knew when to get out, when to make a change and when to do what he wanted to do.  It may be argued he had the money and the means, but he still managed to make a break and do what he truly wanted.

              Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? is the last story in my collection, and its positioning is deliberate. The anthology brings together twenty years of short stories, from my first story published,The Queue, to more recent ones, such as Moving On. Zimbabweans like to dwell on the past.  We talk about it, long for it, idolise it.  We constantly look back to a time when we were richer, happier and healthier. We are afraid of moving on because there is no clear guidance as to what the future holds. We cannot look forward because that future is hazy; we don’t know if it includes all of us or just the chosen few.

              It is understandable then that our literature also dwells in that gulf between the past and the
future, that uneasy present moment of loss and often despair, that reckoning between what has gone
and what is yet to come.
              I like to think that, like Rick Astley, Zimbabweans are due for a comeback and, as a result, our literature is changing direction.  We are exploring new areas and writing new stories. Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? is an acknowledgement of the past and the power it as to shape us, but it is also marks a turning point for me. As I enter a new phase of my life, I am apprehensive yet excited about what is to come. 

Bryony Rheam, April 4 2026

Interview with the University of Georgia Press's editors of African Language Literatures in Translation

Reproduced from https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2026/03/22/allt-interview/

North American Cover

Zimbabwe/UK cover

Erik Beranek in conversation with Alexander Fyfe and Nate Holly

'We see the translation as a creative practice, in the same way that the original is. We want the translators to do their thing. And for that to be something that readers will engage with too.'

Earlier this month, Hopscotch editor Erik Beranek sat down with two of the editors of the University of Georgia Press’ new African Language Literatures in Translation series to discuss the origins and goals of the series and the importance of translating literature from African languages. The series’ first publication—Ignatius T. Mabasa’s Mapenzi, translated into English as The Mad by J. Tsitsi Mutiti—published in North America on April 1, 2026. 

Erik Beranek: Thank you both again for joining me to discuss the University of Georgia Press’s new African Language Literatures in Translation series. I think the series will be really interesting to many of our readers. And it is especially exciting for me, since I also work at a university press. I’m always interested to learn more about what other university presses are doing with translation and how it fits into their publishing.

But for starters, would you tell us a little bit about the origins of the series. How did the idea initially come about? Where did it originate? And what does it take to get a series like this started?

Alexander Fyfe: Sure. I think in some ways it’s a fairly mundane beginning. I was at an event where the director of UGA Press, Lisa Bayer, was tabling for the press, and we got chatting about the possibility of a series publishing translations of African literary works, a prospect about which Lisa was very enthusiastic.  After that, I was put in touch with Nate as a potential series editor. I already knew Chris, so I approached him about being a co-editor. And from there, we went through the long process of putting together a series proposal, and putting that through peer review—which I think probably took a little over a year, if I’m remembering correctly—and then getting together the advisory board, which also took some time.

And from there, getting the first few titles into the production pipeline. Which really brings us to where we are now, with the first one coming out very soon, in the next few weeks.

Erik Beranek: Yeah, The Mad is coming out very soon, on April 1st. Oh, look at that! [Nate holds up an advance copy of The Mad.]

So, yeah, I guess the origins of projects like this are often somewhat mundane, as you say. I find it interesting, probably just because I straddle these two worlds of translation and university press publishing, but maybe for readers who aren’t aware of how series like this are structured and run—would one of you want to speak to that and say a bit about the different roles involved? Alex, you’ve already mentioned an advisory board. And you and Chris are the series editors, while, Nate, you are the acquisitions editor for the series (among other things) at University of Georgia Press. Would one of you mind speaking to how all the work gets organized and distributed in running a series like this?

Nate Holly: I imagine Alex and I will have different answers, or slightly different overlapping answers. I don’t want to bore people with peer review stuff, but part of what separates university press publishing from, you know, a press like Two Lines or other presses that publish a lot of translations is peer review. And, as Alex mentioned, we also peer reviewed the series proposal. I looked at the first draft of the proposal in December of 2021, and the series was under contract in January of 2023, so… I mean, that’s not bad. But peer review was a challenge, especially at the start, and I can tell you a story about the peer review of this translation [The Mad] a bit later if you want.

But Alex mentioned that we have five translations under contract at this point. We didn’t want to announce it until we had a number of projects in the pipeline. And so, the first few years of this has been Alex and Chris pounding the pavement and reviewing submissions. We have a form that interested translators can fill out, and that’s how almost all of these, if not all of them, have come to us—the translator proposes them.

And then once Chris and Alex get that form—and it took us a couple of tries to get that form right, I think—they share it with me, and I—you know, I’m the bass player in the band, I keep things moving from here. Alex and Chris get involved at a couple of different points after that. They’re involved when the translation comes in. We all read the translation and we have it reviewed by an outside reader, and then we all communicate with the translator to get the translation in order.

And the series advisory board, each series has one, and they do different things on different series. This one… well, Alex and Chris would be better positioned to say why they assembled the group that they did. But I think part of it is just that Africa is a big continent with a lot of languages, and we wanted to have that coverage for resources to figure out who would be best to read a particular translation, who would be best to read a Swahili translation or a translation from another language. Even Chris and Alex might not have all that expertise, right? But they have the network that does. So that’s part of what we see the series advisory board doing, and they’ll also occasionally review a translation themselves. Anyway, that’s the quick and dirty version.

Alexander Fyfe: The advisory board members also help connect us to translators and to other potential texts that are out there to be translated. And also, potentially, to co-publishing agreements with publishers on the African continent. Several of the people with whom we work on the board either have their own presses or have been integral to getting previous translations published.

Those networks have been really valuable, particularly if the long-term goal with the series is to create a sustainable environment for the translation of African language texts that doesn’t just rely on them being published in the United States. We want there to be a kind of feedback loop to the continent. And we want this to ultimately be a collaborative endeavor between translators, literary practitioners, publishers, and writers. And so, the board is really key for that, and we plan to expand the board in the future as the direction of the series develops.

Erik Beranek: Yes, I definitely want to ask you to say more in a minute about your ambitions to create a sort of feedback loop, as you put it, because that’s really exciting to hear. It’s so important, and I think a lot of publishers who are working in global publishing are trying to figure out the best ways to do something like this, so I’m really intrigued to hear your plans there.

Before we get to that specifically, would you mind saying a bit about the general goals and the scope of the series? I know some of this is already up on the series website, but just for the sake of our readers—I know you already have certain books under contract, and I’m sure you have your sights on some others. Are there particular regions, countries, languages that you’re finding are coming up more often than others right off the bat? Are you finding yourselves needing to put in extra work to diversify the set of languages that you’re encountering and being pitched? And is that an explicit goal right now, or maybe something you expect to emerge as an explicit goal as you get farther along?

Alexander Fyfe: Yeah, sure. I think this is quite an exciting moment for the translation of African writing. There are more and more translations being published by a wider variety of presses. See, for instance, David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu’s translation of Baalu Girma’s Amharic novel, Oromay (Soho Press) and Jay Boss Rubin’s recent translation of Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Swahili novel, Rosa Mistika (Yale University Press). And several series being launched by other university presses that focus on translations from Africa in one way or another [see the list of resources below]. But we felt from the beginning that it was really important to have a series that focused on translations into English of texts originally written in African languages. And that’s obviously a category that means different things to different people, but we mean particularly languages from Africa that don’t already have a lot of venues for translation. There are already routes to translation for texts written in French, for instance. We decided we wanted to try and at least create one place where African language texts could be published in translation.

So, we get a lot of submissions related to Swahili writing, which has been really exciting, and we have three texts forthcoming that are translations from Swahili. There’s a lot of really exciting, innovative fiction in Swahili, a lot of it with a speculative angle. Which is also very confluent with where the current field of African literary studies is and will likely generate a solid audience. But we want to represent as many languages as possible. And so, partly with the help of the advisory board, partly through people that Chris and I meet at conferences, or things we see online, we try to seek out and encourage translators to submit their proposals to us. But really, we’re really open to anything. We want the direction of the series to be determined by the people who become involved with it.

Erik Beranek: Great. And so, French, as you say, and obviously English, but probably also Portuguese and maybe Arabic—these more globally represented languages, and often if not always colonial languages, will not be the focus. It’s going to be the indigenous African languages that have much less exposure and have a harder time finding translators and publishers globally.

Alexander Fyfe: Yeah, and that’s obviously challenging, because there needs to be more of everything, right? There are great Francophone texts that, unfortunately, are not always getting translated. But, in terms of the series having an identity, and also focusing on one area that we really think we could add to, this made the most sense.

Erik Beranek: I love that you mentioned the translators being, so far, the primary vehicles by which projects are getting to you. I had a note to ask about this, basically in exactly those same terms. Having done a few translations myself, I find it interesting that it’s not talked about more often, how one part of the work of being a translator is almost like that of an acquisitions editor at a press. When developing and pitching a project, you’re thinking about comp titles, you’re thinking about who the readers will be and what the market for the book will be, and you’re thinking about what presses would be best to get the work to the right audience—so, you’re thinking about the project in terms that are really similar to what an acquisitions editor at a press is thinking about. Anyway, the idea of translators as a sort of scout for these projects is, I think, really interesting and something that people don’t talk about too often.

You’ve touched a bit on linguistic diversity, and clearly there are going to be certain languages that come up more often than others, and you can find ways to push to help increase the inclusion of others. Are there other types of diversity that you are pushing for with the series? For instance, is gender diversity—among the translators, among the authors—something that has come up in discussions, so far? I’m not so familiar with the various literary scenes in Africa, so to speak, so I guess just out of curiosity, are there other ways that you are thinking about the distribution of authors and translators, are there other issues of identity and diversity that have come up for the series?

Alexander Fyfe: It’s something we’ve discussed extensively, and I think the first couple of years really have been about just getting some great work out there, which we can hopefully then use to attract more people. To get more people to come and work with the series. And as we get on more people’s radars, through the work itself and through opportunities like this interview, we’ll hopefully be inundated with more and more translations, and that will let us begin to take more of those factors into account.

Thinking about the spread of where our translators, where our writers come from, and the different kinds of experiences that they have, and that they bring to their work, I think that will be more and more important as we continue building this archive.

The other kind of diversity that we try to think about is the literary forms that the series publishes. And that’s sort of tricky, because we made a decision early on to focus primarily on narrative works. Partly in order not to compete with other series, but also to focus on texts that we think are likely to be assigned in college classrooms, and likely to generate enough interest to keep the series viable. And narrative has a great deal of diversity within it. So, we don’t want to become only a venue for speculative fiction, for instance, or the realist novel, or any other narrative mode. And so, that is something that we’ve tried to take into account as we’ve said yes or no to projects that have been pitched to us.

Erik Beranek: Yeah, trying not to have all of the books fall into one single form, one type of work, but to diversify that from the beginning.

Alexander Fyfe: Absolutely. And sometimes we’ll be offered what sounds like a really fascinating novel, but it might fall a little close to one or two things that we’re already doing. And we want to reflect the variegated nature of the literary field as much as we can.

Erik Beranek: A couple of questions about the translators. Do you find that the translators, so far, are predominantly coming from the regions and languages that are being translated? Are a lot of them working and translating in Africa, or has it been predominantly translators from the U.S. or from English-language countries? And is there a desire to be working primarily with translators working in Africa? Again, at this point, I’m sure the main goal is to get the projects going, first and foremost, but will that be a consideration eventually?

Alexander Fyfe: For the projects we’ve seen so far and for the initial books that we’re publishing, yes, we have mostly seen interest from translators based in the U.S. We’re… I mean, I should sort of back up and say, the journey through which these things sometimes get to us can be a little convoluted, and so we may initially start talking to somebody about one project and then they’ll put us onto a different one. You know, the story of how we got to The Mad is actually quite a long one, which initially began with us speaking to a different translator from Zimbabwe about something else, and then it emerged that there was this other project happening that was already tied to another press, which had the rights for a different territory.

But yes, certainly, moving forward and working with the advisory board, we do want to work with translators in the African continent. And that shouldn’t necessarily mean translators from a particular place translating writing from a particular place. We’re very interested in the kinds of transnational connections, within the African continent and beyond, that translation can facilitate and create. So, the answer is yes.

Erik Beranek: I’m also interested to hear about some of the aims and standards that are going into how you think about evaluating the translations themselves—obviously with the help of the advisory board and peer reviewers and everyone else. In translation theory, there’s long been the distinction between domesticating and foreignizing translations. There are those translations, probably the majority of them, that aim to take a work of literature from another place, another language, another way of thinking, and to bring it into a new language and a new context in a way that is familiar and, maybe, more easily digestible for readers of that language—maybe aiming for familiar standards of literary merit, for instance.

On the other hand, there are people who argue that a translation should, at least in certain cases, really lean into the fact that the language of the translated text is truly foreign, and that its foreignness should come across even in the translated, English-language version of the work. I don’t know if there’s a neat answer to this, but is that something that has come up in discussions around the series in general or certain translations more specifically? The series seems like an interesting venue for this. Translations from French can obviously also do this, but when you’re talking about languages that get significantly less representation globally, the foreignness of a foreignizing translation could be significantly more.

Alexander Fyfe: Nate, do you want to speak to the question of evaluating the translations, since you’ve been really involved in that?

Nate Holly: So, from a philosophical perspective, I’m not a translator, I’m an editor. So, I defer to Alex, Chris, and the translator. I don’t know if this was the plan initially, but it’s become what we do on all these books: we have each translator write a translator’s note that explains the choices they made on this specific question. But also, in one book, They Are Us, a whole section was moved, because it didn’t make sense where it was, and that gets explained. And in one I was looking at today, Swallowers of Bones is the translated title, there’s a lot of poetry in there, and some of the poetry was left out, because the translator couldn’t find a way to translate it and keep the narrative flow and make it make sense. You know what I mean? There are always those challenges that we ask translators to speak to, because that’s part of this too. And when these books hopefully end up in classrooms, that’s a discussion that we envision people having, about what the translation does, and why it does it.

As I alluded to before with The Mad, the translation of The Mad underwent traditional peer review. It went out to two readers, who reviewed the translation. One of the unique things about this one is that Mabasa, the author, was directly involved with the translation. So, it was an authorized translation. But one of the peer reviewers didn’t know that and criticized some of the choices that the translator made but that Mabasa also made and authorized. And, of course, there’s no way the reviewer could have known that (and they also made some suggestions that the translator did make), but we were able to use that internally to make this what we at UGA Press call a “mandated series,” where there’s still outside review, but it’s not the sort of outside review that our faculty editorial board has to approve. A translation like this isn’t scholarship, or it’s not the same kind of scholarship. Translation of fiction is an art. An art that we still have reviewed. But incorporating the suggestions from those reviews is up to the translator and editors in a way that it might not be for traditional scholarship. In most cases so far, those outside reviews have really shaped the “translator’s note” that accompanies each of the published books. So, what we do now is Alex, Chris, and I come up with one outside reader, who is either a writer themselves, or they speak and read both the original language in question and English, and we send them the translation, we send them a PDF of the original, and ask them to review it using specific questions that we want them to answer. And it’s not just to clear hurdles but to make the best translation possible, and make sure the translator has considered these things, and maybe they want to polish some stuff, or revisit, or make sure they address something in their translator’s note. So, just because it’s not formally peer-reviewed doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the usual university press outside reader review. And that’s especially necessary for these sorts of translations. We do other translations at University of Georgia Press, translations of scholarship, and that’s a different process. But this is translated fiction, and that’s a different animal, I think.

Alexander Fyfe: We see the translation as a creative practice, in the same way that the original is. We want the translators to do their thing. And for that to be something that readers will engage with too. That’s why the translator’s note is important, because with that, even someone who doesn’t know the original language can get a sense of the choices that have been made and what might be at stake in them. And that will let them undertake an informed reading of the translation. We put the translators’ names on the covers, and we want their take on the text, and the linguistic choices that they’ve made, to be part of the conversation about these works.

Erik Beranek: That’s fantastic. That was another question I was going to ask, about translators’ prefaces. It seems so important, I would argue it seems so important with basically any text, but, you know, with a language that has less of a history of being translated and thought through into English-language texts, it seems even more important to familiarize readers with some of the challenges that come up during the process. That’s why at Hopscotch, one of our favorite categories of texts that we publish are the unpublished translator’s notes—giving translators the opportunity to write about their work and the difficult and exciting decisions they’ve made, when they weren’t given the space to do so in the published book. So that’s music to my ears—and great also, obviously, that you put the translators’ names on the covers! The translation community thanks you for these great decisions.

I would love to hear more about the plans you have for, as you put it before, creating a sort of feedback effect, and about how you hope that having these translations come out in English here will be able to turn into a positive effect back in the literary communities and the literary markets in Africa. It’s a really important question and great that you’re asking it from the beginning. In The Language of Languages, the book by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, he makes a distinction between enabling and disabling translations when thinking about translating work and thought from marginalized languages into dominant, colonial languages like English or French. A disabling translation might be when a writer or thinker from a marginalized language chooses to translate him or herself into a dominant language. Because doing so might create much greater exposure for that person’s thought, and they might be a great spokesperson for their language and home and history, but in translating themselves into the dominant language, they deprive the marginalized language of an opportunity to grow and live and expand. That aspect was particularly important to Ngũgĩ’s own work. But a translation can also be disabling when it treats the dominant English-language market as the most or only important one, and is just expanding what is on offer for us, getting “world literature” into our market for our pleasure and for our profit. And, of course, on an individual level, an author stands to benefit from being translated into a dominant language, and that can give them the opportunity to be a good spokesperson, but there’s also the question of using a translation into a dominant language to facilitate new connections for the marginalized languages and to create new opportunities of those languages to live and grow. Ngũgĩ mentions using existing English translations of Western classics to translate them into Gĩkũyũ, or using English to enable a conversation between Korean and Gĩkũyũ.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when planning for this discussion, so it was great to hear, right away, before I even got to ask the question, that you’re already thinking of the series in terms of enabling translations, if not in exactly those terms, and that you’re thinking about how these translations might facilitate connections between different languages on the African continent. Would you say a bit more about how you’re thinking about this feedback effect, as you called it, whether more philosophically, so to speak, or just in terms of some concrete plans you have for the series and what you’re hoping to achieve?

Alexander Fyfe: Thanks. That is something we take very seriously, and it is an issue we will be revisiting as we move into the next phase of the series. I think one of the things that I wasn’t necessarily prepared for when we began this was how different each project would be. Every single one involves a different configuration of a translator (or sometimes more than one translator), somebody who holds the rights, maybe an original language edition that was published some time ago, and sometimes another press that’s already involved and wants to publish it in a particular territory. And so, I think it’s in our careful involvement in those processes, without ever wanting to push anybody out, that these things come to the fore. So, we’ve worked… and Nate will have more to say on the nature of our collaborations here, but we’ve worked with amaBooks, which is based in Wales and Zimbabwe. That was on The Mad. And with Mkuki na Nyota, the famous Swahili-language publisher based in Tanzania. And so, it is about listening to who is involved with the text and, as far as possible, pursuing collaborations to make sure that either the translation we’re producing is widely available to as many people as possible, or that we’re also facilitating the creation of other editions. And I think one of the exciting things about The Mad is that there are now two editions of this translation, with different paratexts, circulating in the world. Which I think is relatively unusual, at least recently, for an African language text. And so, embracing the plurality of different editions, and making sure that, as far as possible, our involvement means that Africa-based presses can also be involved in the publication is really important.

Erik Beranek: In addition to the English language versions that you’ll be publishing and trying to get those available globally to the greatest extent possible, are the originals—I mean, I’m sure this is going to be case-by-case too—but are the original language editions available in print, typically? And is there any way in which you’re hoping to, if not now,  maybe eventually, try to facilitate the greater availability, maybe over here, or globally more generally, of those texts?

I suppose I’m asking just because of how constantly shocked and dismayed I am by how difficult it is for me to even get a book that was published abroad in a big international literary market, and in a dominant, well-represented language like French or Spanish. It’s hard to get even those. I recently tried to buy a book that was published in France within the past five years, and I was being asked to pay $70 for shipping. And the fact that that’s still the case with the international shipping of books, even between Europe and North America, where there’s such constant shipping and commerce, it’s going to be even harder when you’re thinking about South America or Africa. So, from that perspective, I’m wondering if that, if making African-language original texts available more widely is something that’s on your radar, or even something that’s been talked about or possible?

Alexander Fyfe: That is something we thought about and take very seriously. We don’t pursue translations that aren’t already published in the original language. Sometimes someone will approach us and say, I’ve written this novel in this language, and I want to get it translated and published. But we do not want to create a situation where texts written in African languages are only circulating in English. That said, some of the originals of older works that we’ve translated may not currently be in print. And I hope that as we continue, we can begin to facilitate opportunities for those texts also to circulate in their originals, or at the very least to support that. It will be interesting to see if the interest that’s generated by the translations maybe does encourage the original text to be reprinted or republished. That’s something we’ll be keeping an eye on and adapting our practices accordingly.

Erik Beranek: Nate, I’d like to come back to the university press-specific questions for a second. I’m interested in your thoughts on the place of university presses in publishing literature. As you’ve already alluded to, it falls outside, a little bit outside of the standard operating procedures of a university press, and yet I feel like more and more university presses are turning towards literature in one way or another. Peer review is one thing that sets university presses apart, as you’ve said, but also being mission-driven publishers, right? I’d be interested to hear how, for you, or from the discussions you had leading up to this series for University of Georgia Press, how publishing literature and especially literature in translation fits into your mission.

Nate Holly: Yeah, so, as you might imagine, I have a number of thoughts about this sort of thing. But I think being a mission-driven press—and our mission, by its very nature, is pretty wide-ranging—is about… well, being the University of Georgia Press, it’s about publishing the stories of the people of Georgia and the South, right? But it’s also about partnering with our university community. Partnering with our global research university community, including people like Alex, to do things like this. Things that often are not possible at non-mission-driven presses. There’s a reason why this series didn’t exist until 2020-whatever, right? Well, there are many reasons, but, you know, one of them is that the big trade houses aren’t going to do this, because they’re not going to sell 30,000 copies of The Mad. We know that, we don’t sell 30,000 copies of very much, and that’s okay. That’s more than okay, that’s part of our mission, too. Maybe not specifically University of Georgia Press’s mission, but part of University Press missions more generally, and my mission, is that because we are not driven by profit—which is not to say we don’t need to make a profit, but, you know, it’s not the number one factor—we can do these sorts of things that are important for reasons beyond… capitalism. And that’s the case, whether it’s translation or somebody’s memoir or a creative nonfiction project that maybe twenty years ago would have been firmly on one of the Big Five’s mid-lists, and now they’re not even looking at them because they don’t have enough TikTok followers, or whatever. So, it’s an opportunity for us.

The challenge, especially with this series, is that translations are not cheap. In any way. We have to acquire the rights, which cost money, and cost future money if royalties are part of it. Especially if we’re acquiring the rights from a publishing house. We also want to be fair to the African publishing houses. We don’t just want to take from them, right? I think we’ve only had one case where we negotiated the rights with an author retaining the rights, and that ended up not working out for a bunch of reasons. So, the rights cost money, then paying the translator. Their names are on the cover, but they need more than just a name on the cover. And so we have to be creative. In our case, or in the case of African Language Literatures in Translation, that means making royalties a part of it. That way, translators make more money the more books get sold. So, they’re incentivized to continue to be involved after the book is published.

But also, like any other nonprofit, the way this works, and this is another way we’re able to leverage our mission, is that these books are all supported by donors. People are donating money to the press explicitly for African Language Literatures in Translation. So, I mean, that’s just part of the reality, and part of how we can play with our fine margins enough to publish this [holding up The Mad] and make it available to the English-reading public. And because we’re a university press, we have distributors on every continent, including Africa. Our preference would be for an African publisher, to work with them to get the rights so that they can distribute the book within their networks that we don’t know as well. But they’re going to have to be published first, in most cases, for them to see that as even an option. And I don’t know how that happens without being at a mission-driven press, whether that’s a university press or another sort of independent press.

Erik Beranek: I think it’s really important to talk about the challenges publishers face and about the literary market in general when talking about literary translation. And yeah, the consolidation around the Big Five has created a lot of challenges, for sure. But it’s great to see initiatives like this filling important gaps in the profit-driven model. I mean, there are a ton of really wonderful, wide-ranging, small independent presses out there doing incredible work. I think independent publishing in the United States right now is just a beautiful thing, despite how embattled those presses are. And it’s wonderful to also see more university presses joining into that. Because you’re absolutely right that without indie presses and university presses and other mission-driven, nonprofit publishers, this literature doesn’t get published.

Well, before we sign off, is there anything I missed, anything I didn’t ask about that you’d like to cover? Nate, did you get to tell the story you wanted to tell about The Mad?

Nate Holly: Yeah, it was a little frustrating, but we ended up being able to use the peer review of The Mad to tweak the peer review process a bit and make it more effective for fiction translations. All the sort of stuff that Alex and Chris don’t need to worry about, but that I get paid to worry about. So, yeah, that ended up being good in the end, but it was supremely frustrating. Like, what are we supposed to do with this? And then the other thing, too, is especially with two… at least two of the projects under contract, the authors are dead… they’re not around anymore, right? So, they’re not able to do what Mabasa did with The Mad and quote-unquote authorize the translation. So, what do we do in those cases? You know what I mean? But that’s not particular to this series. That’s the nature of translation.

Erik Beranek: Well, The Mad looks beautiful, and it’s so exciting that it’s coming out in just a matter of days. So, congratulations to you all! I can’t wait to see where the series goes.

One last question before we sign off. Would you mind giving our readers some resources to start exploring and thinking about African literature in the contemporary moment? Maybe some books or articles that have influenced your work? Or links to some of the partners you’ve mentioned here, or to other presses or organizations working in this space? I already mentioned Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Language of Languages, published a couple of years ago by Seagull, and I’ll also take the opportunity to shout out Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s From Language to Language, published in English translation this past fall by Other Press. But please feel free to add to the list, books or otherwise—I’m sure our readers would find it really useful.

Alexander Fyfe:

A list of 14 African books published in English translation in 2024:

https://brittlepaper.com/2024/12/14-translated-african-books-that-deserve-all-the-flowers-in-2024/

Wendy Laura Belcher’s list of books published in English-language translations from African languages:

https://wendybelcher.com/african-literature/translated-african-language-novels/

Ruth Bush’s Translation Imperatives: African Literature and the Labour of Translators

Nate Holly:

Here are a few of the African Publishers we’ve worked with so far:

Mkuki Na Nyota: https://mkukinanyota.com/

Jonathan Ball Publishers: https://www.nb.co.za/af/humanrousseau

East African Educational Publishers: http://www.eastafricanpublishers.com/

amaBooks: https://amabooksbyo.blogspot.com/

And here are a couple of examples of other recent UGA Press translations:

Teresa Benguela and Felipa Crioula Were Pregnant: Motherhood and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Lorena Féres da Silva Telles (tr. Anthony Doyle)

Feline Cultures: Cats Create Their History by Éric Baratay (tr. Drew S. Burk)

Other university press series related to the translation of African literature:

Global Black Writers in Translation (University of Vanderbilt Press)

The African Poetry Book Series (University of Nebraska Press)

Modern African Writing (Ohio University Press)

CARAF Books (University of Virginia Press)

Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and African Studies at the University of Georgia. His work focuses on the relations between politics and literary form in modern African literatures, and his book, Writing the Noncolonial Self: Modern African Literatures and the Politics of Subjectivity, is forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press in 2026. He co-edits the African Language Literatures in Translation series for University of Georgia Press with Christopher Ouma.

Nathaniel Holly is editor-in-chief of University of Georgia Press, where he acquires books in history, food studies, sport studies, Appalachian studies, and more. He received his PhD from William & Mary, having written a dissertation on the urban lives of Cherokees in early America. His favorite translation is Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (tr. Olena Bormashenko).

Originally published on Hopscotch Translation

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Outside of North America, The Mad is copublished by amaBooks Publishers and Carnelian Heart Publishing