Quotes from Petina Gappah

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

You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.

Zimbabweans, I've come to believe, we are very passive-aggressive people. We don't like conflict; we don't like confrontation, so we find all sorts of ways of avoiding that conflict and confrontation. We are not allowed to talk about bad things that go on in families.

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

I don't want to write because I have to; I want to write because I want to. Sometimes, when writers write because they have to, the results are disastrous.

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

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

The first thing I remember when I moved to a school in the suburbs was, 'My gosh, all these books!' The classroom and school had a library; I'd never seen so many books in my life! It was something we didn't have in the township.

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.

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 was eight when independence happened. I remember my mum and dad getting dressed up to go to the independence concert to go listen to Bob Marley. Independence was such a wonderful time; we had so many expectations of the kind of country we would become. The vision of the government then was a wonderful vision.

I wonder why people commit crimes that are premeditated - to gain love, because of hatred, or for financial reasons.

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 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.

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

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

It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, 'What is it that I want from my life?' This question kept haunting me: 'Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?

The struggle for Zimbabwe lit up the imagination of people around the world. In London, New York, Accra and Lagos, bell-bottomed men and women with big hair and towering platform shoes sang the dream of Zimbabwe in the words of the eponymous song by Bob Marley: Every man has the right to decide his own destiny.

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.

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.

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

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.

The painful truth may be that Zimbabwe, the youngest of Africa's former colonies, has simply followed where the continent has led, treading the well-worn path beaten out of the lie that taking power from the colonialists and delivering democracy to the people are one and the same.

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.