Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.ulawayo is Zimbabwe’s second city but it was once a dominant urban centre with a network of railways and a flourishing industrial base.
The ingenuity of Madenga’s contribution to the series is that she offers us a biographical portrait of Vera through her love of plants, gardens and nature. It is a book that is personal and intimate, an original foray that opens new spaces in our appreciation of Vera, beyond the tragic themes of her fiction.
Throughout her life, Vera found not only solace, but literary inspiration, in Matabeleland. She was a writer of place and space.As Madenga observes, Vera’s garden letters reveal an unruly side. The garden is an architectural fixture of the postcolonial Zimbabwean suburban home. It is not for everyone, though. A well-tended garden signals wealth and extra space. It is an aesthetic expression of good living.
We engage with Vera in a new way, not just as the writer of taboos about generations of black African women. Vera in her fiction invented lovable, but tragic, female characters, victims of, or dealing with, rape, infanticide, abortion, suicide and murder. These characters emerged from the pastoral paradise their author inhabits. is a book to be savoured. Sketching out a writer’s history with place, its text is as lively and informative as its subject is absorbing.