Mabasa, Ignatius T.
 Ignatius Tirivangani Mabasa (1971-), born at Karanda Mission Hospital in Mount
Darwin and grew up at his grandfather’s farm, is one of the most powerful
emerging literary voices of post-independent Zimbabwe. He is a performing poet,
novelist, storyteller and newspaper columnist. He has become a household name
in the Zimbabwean literary scene with his trendsetting debut satirical novel,
Mapenzi (fools). Mapenzi won the Zimbabwe Book Publishers’
Association award in 1999 and was recently nominated as one of Zimbabwe’s
75 Best Book of the 20th Century by the Zimbabwe international Book Fair.
Commenting on the novel in a paper titled, Mapenzi and the Craft of
Leaving the Centre, Memory Chirere, a literary critic with the University of
Zimbabwe’s Department of English says:
Ignatius Mabasa's Shona novel Mapenzi (1998) is not considered an ordinary
novel in Zimbabwe. In fact, Mapenzi is not a novel if one considered the multiple
potentials of its themes, language and, especially its style and structure.
Before Mapenzi, Charles Mungoshi's Kunyarara Hakusi Kutaura? (1988) was, broadly
speaking, the most innovative and eccentric novel in the Shona language (Shona
is the mother tongue for 10 of Zimbabwe's 13 million people). My paper sets
out to outline and interrogate the development of the Shona novel since its
inception in 1957 to the present day, on one hand and the special stylistic
and thematic attributes of Mapenzi, on the other. Among these attributes, Mapenzi
is the first Shona novel in which sexual intercourse is graphically described.
Mapenzi could be the first novel of its kind to work with the technique I have
begun to call 'sublimation', i.e. a technique where character stands outside
itself in describing what is inside/out.
In 1999 to 2000, Mabasa was a visiting Fulbright scholar in Illinois at North
Central College and College of DuPage where he taught Zimbabwean literature
in English. He became well known in and around Naperville area for his storytelling
and poetry performances.
At home, he has been judge for the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Award which honours
writers across genres annually. He has worked extensively with the Budding Writers
Association of Zimbabwe giving workshops to aspiring writers as well as assessing
their manuscripts. With his current employer British Council, a cultural relations
organisation, Mabasa has been active in managing the Crossing Borders creative
writing programme which is a cross-cultural distance-learning project for young
African writers working in the fields of poetry, prose, fiction and children’s
writing.
Mabasa mainly writes in Shona and like Ngugi waThiongo, he feels strongly about
the use of his vernacular language. He says thus, “there is need to decolonise
the mind of our people and make them realise that there is no language that
is superior or that expresses issues better than another. The education system
has inherited a curriculum that exalts English and promotes the English perspective
at the expense of our languages. The result is a sad one where we deny ourselves
and end up talking to our children in a foreign language in our very own homes.”
Mabasa is currently finalising two novels in Shona and also working on a translation
of one of Zimbabwe’s leading and celebrated female writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s
groundbreaking novel, Nervous Conditions. He says the novel is “a
beautiful story that must be made accessible to a number of women out there
who can’t read English.”
Selected publications:
Tipeiwo Dariro, 1993, College Press (Poetry Anthology)
Mapenzi, 1998, College Press
Tamba Mwana Tamba, a folktale column in the local vernacular newspaper
Kwayedza
Muchinokoro Kunaka, 2005, Zimbabwe Publishing House (forthcoming)
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