Aaron Chiundura Moyo, the highly regarded Zimbabwean novelist and television producer, has love-hate memories of the Literature Bureau but pictures it as a potential stimulus for the country’s rundown book sector.
Moyo’s from journey a raw village wordsmith to one of the foremost names in Zimbabwean writing started at the Literature Bureau, which operated as the default incubator for writing talent from its inception in 1953 to its closure in 1999.
He credits the Literature Bureau, set up within the Native Affairs Department of the Central African Federation to promote writing in indigenous languages, as the midwife of many Ndebele and Shona classics but criticises it for mutating into an instrument of censorship.
With the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education bent to the drawing board to revive a present-day equivalent of the bureau, Moyo and other household names in publishing weigh in on how the second coming can be gainfully realised.
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