“A lot of writing about Zimbabwe happens outside its borders, and those publications are geographically scattered; there’s more material on Zimbabwe in the New York Public Library, they say, than in Harare’s and Bulawayo’s libraries. This is a fugitive literature. The country’s younger generations have been “systematically disenfranchised from their own histories.” Mushakavanhu and Mutiti want to reclaim those histories and connect them to “new narratives” — “the idea, the imaginary, the place, the people” of Zimbabwe past, present, and future.”
Shannon Mattern writes about fugitive libraries, the Reading Zimbabwe residency, and more at Places Journal.