ISBN 9781779220011
Pages 100
Dimensions 216 x 140 mm
Illustrations B/W Illustrations
Published 2002
Publisher Weaver Press, Zimbabwe
Format Paperback

Palaver Finish

by Chenjerai Hove

Hove is highly regarded as a novelist, poet and essayist in Zimbabwe and internationally. A politically engaged writer, he has also turned to journalism. This timely volume brings together a series of articles, which have previously appreared in his weekly column in The Zimbabwe Standard. Hove, publishing in Zimbabwe, believes the voices of the nation's politically engaged writers - in tune with the mood of the people and the times - are crucial in the current climate of political violence and censorship. To outside media and observers trying to ascertain the truths of the political situation, his writings offer insights from a black Zimbabwean writer and critic.

Hove writes for and about Zimbabwe from a perspective that acknowledges recent history, and debates around culture, tradition and democracy. His criticism is uneqivocal, his portrayal of Zimbabwe's politics, damning and unforgiving. His case is that Zimbabwe is a police state, which has inherited pre-indepedence totalitarianism; members of the Government are in politics for reasons of personal gain - they are unsophisticated, poorly educated and have no notion of public office. He believes that the army and police - whom he compares with those of apartheid South Africa, are the politicians' personal weapons, committing acts of crime and terrorism in the President's name and in their own.

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Reviews

'This is an impassioned polemic from a writer agonisingly aware of the catastrophic path his country is taking and doing his utmost to alter that course.'

The New Internationalist

'Palaver Finish is [Hove's] most important commentary of current events in Zimbabwe.'

The Australian Review of African Studies

'Palaver Finish is worth elevating to the top rack of your bookshelf'

African Review of Books

About the Author

Chenjerai Hove

Chenjerai Hove is an award-winning Zimbabwean novelist, poet, essayist and journalist whose work has been translated into numerous languages. Educated in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Hove's publications include the novels Bones (winner of the prestigious Noma Award, Baobab Books, Harare, and Heinemann, England, 1988), Shadows (Baobab and Heinemann, 1988), and Ancestors (Macmillan/Picador, England, 1996); such poetry collections as Up In Arms (Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1982), Blind Moon (Weaver Press, Harare, 2003), and Red Hills of Home (Mambo Press, Gweru, 1984). He is also the author of the collection of essays Shebeen Tales (Baobab Books, Harare, and Serif, London, 1994). Hove, who has published several volumes in his indigenous language of Shona, has worked as a columnist, translator, editor and lecturer in Zimbabwe and numerous other countries. Currently on exile in Norway, he has lived and taught in Kenya, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Switzerland, France, and the United States. He recently completed the translation of Shakespeare's King Lear into Shona. 

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