Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga is the recipient of the German Book Trade Peace Prize.
Dangarembga is the first Black woman to win the award, which is endowed with 25,000 euros ($29,100) and has been awarded since 1950, per AP.
Dangarembga, 62, was honored for her writings but also for her political activism. Her book, “This Mournable Body,” was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Dangarembga was arrested in July during the Harare protests against Mnangagwa’s government and for the release of journalist Hopewell Chin’ono.
She was charged with incitement to commit violence and breaching anti-coronavirus health regulations.
In her acceptance speech, she called for the dismantling of old hierarchical ideologies.
“The solution is to undo the racialize and other hierarchical modes of thinking based on demographics such as gender, sex, religion, nationality and class. And any other that were and continue to be the building blocks of empire throughout history and throughout the world,” she said during her speech at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt.
“What we can look to is to change our thought patterns word by word, consciously and consistently over time and to persevere until results are seen in the way we do things and in the outcomes of our actions.”
During an interview with Al Jazeera, she addressed the limitations women writers still face in her home country.
“Women who are sufficiently educated to write in English, if that was the ambition, would also want to conform, having put themselves out on a limb so far anyway. I do not think they would want to go further. We had women writing in other languages in Zimbabwe before then and those languages did not require that level of formal education,” she explained.
“I had English up to O level. I did not have a high level of education. I think the kind of person who would say: ‘I don’t care, I’m going to write my story,’ would not be the kind of person who excelled in the education system because it was a system that was geared to produce certain products and not those products who would go out on a limb. This applied even more to women. It was only after I decided that mainstream occupations were not for me that I started writing seriously.”
