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"Zambia Fiction."
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The old drift : a novel
On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. Here begins the epic story of a small African nation, told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man's greatest nemesis. The tale? A playful panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction. The moral? To err is human.
Book
Five Nights Before the Summit
It is 1979. The first Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit on African soil is due to take place in Zambia, graced by Queen Elizabeth herself. Barely a week before this much anticipated event, a white British couple, Henry and Laura Hinckley, are brutally killed on their farm on the outskirts of the capital city, Lusaka. The unknown perpetrators are at large, their motive unclear. Fearing a media backlash, the British government applies pressure on the Zambian authorities to bring the culprits to book, threatening to cancel the Queen's trip altogether - a move that would result in huge embarrassment for the Zambian government. Detective Maxwell Chanda, head of the Special Crimes Investigative Unit, is the man tasked with leading the investigation. He is a wise, steady hand, but will he be able to piece together the seemingly disparate evidence in just five days? Will he be able to hold firm under the intense political pressure which insists on putting expediency above accuracy?Five Nights Before the Summit offers a rich tapestry of context and character in a story that engages the reader in the pursuit of justice.
eBook
Matsotsi: The Migrant Detective and the Postcolonial State
Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.
Journal Article
At Home in the World? Re-Framing Zambia's Literature in English
This article seeks to problematise and question the conventional critical stance on Zambia's writing in English (which casts it as aesthetically sub-standard and 'underdeveloped'), by recasting it as the embodiment of a local literariness of crisis. For much of its history, written literary texts from Zambia have been produced by a tiny cultural elite, which was prevented (by economic and political circumstances) from specialising in, or professionalising, the practice of producing English-language literature. Furthermore, the economic, political and cultural determinants of Zambia's decolonisation and its postcolonial history have given rise to a body of work in which the aesthetic functioning of texts is often integrated with pronounced non-aesthetic functionality. This is to say that, in this part of south-eastern Africa, the presence of nationalist pedagogy in literary works produced immediately after independence (which will surprise no one) frequently shades into other kinds of pragmatism, which may entail religious and spiritual moralism - and that this kind of literariness continues today, when Pentecostal Christianity exerts a strong influence on all kinds of local texts and meanings. Relying in part on terminologies related to world literature and new cosmopolitanisms, I argue that such texts should, nevertheless, be regarded as participating in a specifically shaped system of literariness and literary value, and illustrate my argument with readings of strategically selected moments in the history of Zambian fiction in English: the path-breaking work of Lusaka's New Writers' Group and novels by Dominic Mulaisho and Grieve Sibale.
Journal Article
Legends of Modern Zambia
This article problematizes the terminological apparatus put forward by Karin Barber's paradigm-making \"“Popular Arts in Africa\"” by showing how it is interrogated by the cultural and social positioning of a Zambian literary archive from the early postcolonial period. The archive in question is the body of work published between 1964 and 1975 in the Lusaka-based journal New Writing from Zambia (NWZ), produced and circulated by members of a literary collective called the New Writers Group. The journal published poetry, short fiction, plays, essays, and book reviews in English. The following article outlines the social and literary conditions of the journal's publication, and argues-—relying in part on the methodological procedures inscribed in Barber's later work-—that these conditions were productive of a cultural and textual attitude that may be described as local cosmopolitan. It then traces how the notion of local cosmopolitanism is articulated by some fictional texts published in NWZ, especially through the manner in which these texts imagine the notion of social change central to \"“Popular Arts.\"” Key examples (drawn from the fiction published in NWZ in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of which the story \"“Legend of Modern Zambia\"” by the transnational Southern African author Bill Saidi is emblematic) are provided by readings of two strategically selected stories: Winston C. Mulalami's \"“Taken for a Ride\"” (1969), situated in the city, and Maybin Siciliyango's \"“Tazara and Dawn\"” (1974), set in a rural environment.
Journal Article
A Special Librarian Creates a Special Library
What was nice at that time was the solid training in reference services, social services - the traditional ways of librarianship - but we were also exposed to new technologies in courses system analysis.
Journal Article