One of Zimbabwe’s most iconic novels is coming to English-language readers. Mapenzi is the Shona-language classic by Zimbabwean academic Ignatius T. Mabasa and has been translated into English as The Mad by J. Tsitsi Mutiti, with cover art by Lovemore Kambudzi. The translation is the first title in a new series African Language Literatures in Translation (ALLT) from the University of Georgia Press.

The English language edition will be published in the United Kingdom on July 29 by amaBooks and Carnelian Heart Publishing, and will be released in Zimbabwe in August. The UK edition is available for preorder [here]. The novel will be released by UGA Press early spring next year.

This publication launches ALLT’s effort to bring landmark works of African literature written in African languages into English for the first time. Mapenzi is a great place to begin such a project. The novel was first published in 1999 and follows Hamundigone, a mentally scarred former freedom fighter whose personal disintegration is use to examine the wider challenges of Zimbabwean society in the 1990s. The Times Literary Supplement called it “one of the most significant books to have come out of Africa.” It won the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association award for best Shona novel and was honored by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2004.

Though Ignatius Mabasa has been established in the Zimbabwe’s literary world for nearly three decades, many may have first encountered his name when in 2021 he made headlines for writing the first-ever PhD dissertation in Shona. We even published his Shona essay on Marechera a year later. But long before that viral moment, Mabasa had built a career as a poet, novelist, children’s author, and champion of indigenous language publishing.

In a recent interview, Mabasa positioned Mapenzi as part of a lineage of Zimbabwean literary resistance.

“The Mapenzi story is important for my people’s pedagogy and emancipation, because it encapsulates the historical, cultural and social identity of a nation. It is a kind of extension of Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger and a version of Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Getting Mapenzi translated into English is a coup, because our efforts and works in our own languages are a way of refusing to let the world dominate and silence us ideologically.”

The ALLT series is helmed by Alexander Fyfe (University of Georgia) and Christopher Ernest Ouma (Duke University). More titles are on the way, but The Mad is a great start. Pre-order The Mad here and follow  Carnelian Heart on Instagram for more updates.