Drop charges against Dangarembga, argue writers
INTERNATIONAL authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Carol Ann Duffy and Philippe Sands have called for charges against the Booker prize-shortlisted writer Tsitsi Dangarembga (pictured) to be dropped ahead of her latest appearance in a Zimbabwe today, saying that any other conclusion would be “an outrage”.
The Zimbabwean novelist was arrested during anti-corruption protests in Harare and charged last month with intention to incite public violence.
Her hearing has been delayed twice, after prosecutors failed to appear on both occasions, with a new date set for today.
Duffy, the former poet laureate, said she hoped the support from writers in the UK would provide “some comfort and solidarity”, and urged the United Kingdom ambassador Melanie Robinson “to urgently pass on this support and concern to the Zimbabwe government”.
“Peaceful protest is a human right and, particularly in circumstances where it takes courage to exercise, we must all challenge its suppression,” Duffy said.
Author and president of English PEN, Philippe Sands, added that Dangarembga “is entitled to be a peaceful protester, to assemble and express her views, entirely free from fear of arrest or persecution”.
“That is her right under the law of Zimbabwe and international law,”
Sands said.
“All charges should be dropped immediately, she must be allowed to walk free.
Now. Anything else is an outrage.” Duffy, Sands and Ishiguro joined authors including Sebastian Barry, Eimear McBride and Mario Vargas Llosa alongside Stephen Page, the chief executive at Dangarembga’s publisher Faber, to demand Dangarembga’s acquittal.
“By joining together and raising our voices,” Page said, “let the power of our collective call effect change.”
The delayed hearing comes three weeks after Dangarembga’s latest novel, This Mournable Body, was shortlisted for the Booker prize.
The final volume in a trilogy that began with the work Nervous Conditions, the novel follows Tambudzai as she struggles to make a living in 1990s Harare. he Booker judges called it an “arresting novel from a mercurial writer”. Dangarembga’s arrest took place on July 31 after hundreds of police and soldiers were deployed on the streets ahead of planned demonstrations against President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government.
Residents were ordered to remain indoors after officials described the protests as a “planned insurrection”. “There was a deathly silence in the streets, where neither cars nor pedestrians moved. There were no groups of demonstrators,” Dangarembga wrote for PEN, describing her arrest.
“Although people in Zimbabwe want change, we do not yet have the capacity, material or psychological, to create it.” She said that after meeting a friend and walking towards town, she stopped at a junction, where “a strange man came up and filmed our placards without asking for our permission”.
When the riot police arrived, the author was told her demonstration was illegal.
“There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution. My friend and I climbed into the vehicle. Minutes later, we were sitting on a concrete floor in Borrowdale Police Station.” “Change in Zimbabwe is a tall order, but it is necessary or else the country will become another chronically failed state which will not recover in this age. We are squandering our potential,” she said.