Petina Gappah
Petina Gappah (born 1971) is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer celebrated for her sharp, lyrical stories that probe memory, justice, and identity. Her works include An Elegy for Easterly, The Book of Memory, Rotten Row, and Out of Darkness, Shining Light.
Introduction
Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean author, journalist, and international lawyer whose fiction and essays have gained global acclaim. She writes primarily in English, while drawing on her native Shona linguistic and cultural sensibilities. Her work is characterized by incisive insight, moral clarity, verbal wit, and a deep engagement with social history and personal memory.
Though her writing has earned literary awards and international readership, Gappah continues to navigate dual identities—lawyer and storyteller, Zimbabwean and cosmopolitan—and to dig at the tensions, silences, and histories that define modern Africa.
Early Life and Background
Petina Gappah was born in 1971 in the Copperbelt Province, Zambia, where her parents had moved before her birth. When she was still an infant, her family returned to Zimbabwe, and she grew up there.
In Zimbabwe, her family lived in Harare (formerly Salisbury). After independence, they moved to a formerly white-designated area, and Gappah became one of the first black children to attend a primary school previously reserved for white pupils.
From early on she showed a passion for stories and language. According to Gappah, she began writing seriously in youth; her first published school story appeared when she was about fourteen.
Her upbringing in a linguistically hybrid environment (English and Shona) and her exposure to Zimbabwe’s sociopolitical transformations would later become central motifs in her writing.
Education, Legal Career & Literary Beginnings
Academic Formation
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Gappah earned her law degree from the University of Zimbabwe.
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In 1995, she went to Austria to pursue doctoral studies in international trade law at the University of Graz, while also doing a master’s at Cambridge University.
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From 1998 onward, she began working as an international lawyer, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Her legal training sharpened her analytical faculties, sense of structure, and sensitivity to rights, power, and accountability—elements that echo in her fiction. In interviews, she has said that being a lawyer disciplined her “chaotic” interests, teaching her “the gift of dispassion.”
Literary Entry
Gappah has spoken about starting to write in earnest around May 2006, after experimenting with short stories in online writing spaces (e.g., Zoetrope Virtual Studio), gaining confidence, and seeking a publisher.
Her first book was An Elegy for Easterly (2009), a short-story collection that captured varied facets of Zimbabwean life—urban, rural, elite, marginalized. That collection won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009.
In interviews, she has resisted being labeled “the voice of Zimbabwe,” emphasizing the distinction between writing about a place and writing for a place.
Major Works & Themes
Notable Publications
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An Elegy for Easterly (2009) — a collection of short stories exploring Zimbabwe’s social landscapes.
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The Book of Memory (2015) — a novel narrated by an albino woman, Memory, on death row in Zimbabwe, writing her life as a plea for clemency.
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Rotten Row (2016) — another collection of short stories, capturing tension, humor, and the darker edges of Zimbabwean contemporary life.
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Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019) — a historical novel about the transport of David Livingstone’s body across Southern Africa, told from African perspectives.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light was nominated for an NAACP Image Award (2020) and won Zimbabwe’s National Arts Merit Award for Outstanding Fiction.
Recurring Themes & Style
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Memory, narrative, and truth: A central concern is how memory is selective, flawed, and contested. In The Book of Memory, for example, the narrator reconstructs her life in fragments, aware of gaps and ambiguities.
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Justice, marginalization, and power: She interrogates institutional injustice (courts, prisons, colonial legacies) and the cost paid by individuals.
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Ordinariness & human interiority: Her stories often zoom into the lives of “ordinary” individuals—families, domestic spaces, social invisibility—with empathy and irony.
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Linguistic hybridity & cultural collision: Gappah writes in English but integrates Shona idiom, sees Zimbabwe as a layered, multilingual society, and often probes what is “authentic” in a postcolonial context.
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Dark humor & resilience: Even when dealing with brutality or tragedy, her work often bears wry humor, human resilience, and moments of compassion.
Personality, Vision & Influence
Gappah is intellectually restless—she has described her mind as “pretty chaotic” given her wide interests—but that chaos is harnessed by her legal and literary discipline.
She embraces multiple roles—lawyer, storyteller, public intellectual—and often uses journalism and essay writing to engage directly with politics, social issues, and history.
In interviews, she highlights her commitment to telling “the stories of everyday normal people” who endure injustice yet preserve their dignity.
Gappah has also been a resident artist (e.g. DAAD fellowship in Berlin) and has delivered lectures on historical memory and African voices.
Her writing, both popular and academic, contributes to postcolonial African literature by asserting that Zimbabwean stories are not monolithic, and that the margins often carry histories suppressed in “official” narratives.
Notable Quotes
Here are a selection of memorable lines attributed to Petina Gappah, reflecting her perspectives on life, writing, and society:
“There’s a Shona saying: ‘chakafukidza dzimba matenga’ – ‘What covers the home is the roof,’ or ‘Every home has its secrets.’”
“My grandfather was a polygamous man, and between him and his two wives, we are about 200 or so in our family.”
“We are not allowed to talk about bad things that go on in families.”
“A lot of my writing is triggered by something true, either something I read in the papers, something I overheard … things that no one believes are real.”
“If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.”
From The Book of Memory (via Goodreads):
“I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine.”
“When we talk of fate, when we talk of a fatalistic vision of human experience, what we mean is that the most important forces that shape human lives are out of human control.”
These quotations reveal her concern with secrets, memory, truth, and the tension between what is spoken and what is hidden.
Lessons from Petina Gappah
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Writing with moral curiosity
Gappah shows how fiction can illuminate injustice, history, and interior lives—without reducing complexity to stereotype. -
Dual identities enrich voice
Balancing the roles of lawyer and writer, she brings analytical rigor and moral urgency to storytelling. -
Memory is contested terrain
Her works remind readers that memory is never neutral; it’s shaped by power, language, and social constraints. -
The everyday is worthy
She gives dignity to unnoticed lives—family disputes, domestic strife, social invisibility—showing that large themes often live in small rooms. -
Humor in darkness
Even in scenes of trauma or oppression, her voice often draws on irony or humor—an assertion of human spirit against despair.
Conclusion
Petina Gappah stands as one of Zimbabwe’s most vibrant literary voices of the 21st century. Her work bridges the personal and the political, combining legal insight with narrative sensitivity. Through her stories, she excavates silences, revisits contested histories, and affirms the humanity of those pushed to society’s margins.