Petina Gappah

“I get irritated by the term 'African writer', because it doesn't mean anything to me.”

“These are the kinds of names that Zimbabweans like: names that have positive qualities. Like, Praise is a very popular name; Loveness is a very popular name.”

“People always ask me how I manage to find humor in so much bleakness. I think this is almost a necessary skill to have.”

“I was one of the first six black kids to integrate a formerly all-white school. I remember being looked at all the time and people laughing at my hair. I was also very self-conscious about the food I had for lunch. I had egg sandwiches, and the other mothers gave kids fancy stuff like bologna and Marmite. It took about a year to settle in.”

“I always say to people that Zimbabweans are the funniest people in Africa; we even laugh at funerals. And it's true. I mean, there are so many jokes about funerals. There are so many jokes about AIDS. We find ways of coping with pain by laughing at it and by laughing at ourselves.”

“On April 18, 1980, the last outpost of empire in Africa died. From Rhodesia's ashes rose a country that would take its place among the free nations as Zimbabwe, the last among equals. And men and women leapt to embrace this dream called Zimbabwe.”

“I see myself in public service in Zimbabwe. I would prefer an advisory role - cabinet secretary, minister of trade or the arts, or something like that. I don't want to be just a writer.”

“I'm not even sure that I want to go back... The Zimbabwe that I really loved, the Zimbabwe that I grew up in, just isn't there anymore, and I'm not sure about the country that has replaced it.”

“A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe's finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.”

“My grandfather was a polygamous man, and he had two wives, and between him and his two wives, we are about 200 or so in our family.”

“I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages.”

“There's a Shona saying: 'chakafukidza dzimba matenga' - 'What covers the home is the roof,' or 'Every home has its secrets.'”

“If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.”

“Like the worthless dogs that are his countrymen, my husband believed that his penis was wasted if he was faithful to just one woman. - At the Sound of the Last Post”

“This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.”

“Each heartbreak is a little death, all the same.”

“'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?”

“Zimbabwe is an unusual case study in African colonialism in that it was invaded by a private company under Royal Charter.”

“I guess you could say I'm lucky because I've known a Zimbabwe that didn't have Robert Mugabe leading it. One of the saddest things about Zimbabwe is there are so many hidden casualties of the Mugabe government's misrule. They're not just casualties that you immediately see.”

“Ian Smith thought his Rhodesia would last 1,000 years: it lasted less than 15.”