Upcoming Events
Date For Your Diary
2012 Annual fundraiser will take place at the stunning Inner Temple on 8 October, 2012. More details to follow.
Past Event(s)
2010 Fundraiser - Zimbabwean Writers Attract Large Audience to RGS Annual Homes In Zimbabwe Lecture
In September 2010, over 500 people filled the Royal Geographical Society’s iconic Ondatjie Theatre where once Livingstone, Stanley and many other great explorers spoke to enraptured audiences. They had come to hear two of Zimbabwe’s leading writers Lauren St John and Brian Chikwava.
As a 12 year old Lauren arrived in Rhodesia at the height of the Bush Wars. Her father was moving his family from the safety of the Eastern Cape to Rainbow’s End, a farm close to Gatooma where only months earlier the previous owners had been brutally murdered by terrorists. Fast forward to l987 when Lauren moved to England to work as a journalist. She says “I soon learned never to talk about my life in Africa. If I told people that we had lived on a farm out of paradise and I had a giraffe called Jenny, people would look at me like I was a liar or a fantasist.” Every year Lauren returned to Zimbabwe and by 2000 was struck by the vibrancy of the country which was booming. She returned to the UK and within weeks heard on the radio of the first white farmer to be murdered. Lauren felt the need to confront her past, to ask herself how far were her ancestors who came out to South Africa way back in l820, responsible for the destruction that was going on in the 21st century? How much was her father responsible? Could she be held responsible, even though she had only been a child during the war of independence? And so she sat down and wrote her powerful and haunting memoir, Rainbow’s End. Since then Lauren has enjoyed enormous success with her works of fiction which, she says, can be the most potent form of truth telling.
Like Lauren, Brian Chikwava has been driven by a need to draw on and face up to his past. Brian explained the important role that fiction and memoirs play in recording the past: “The past is not just the preserve of historians but it also preoccupies the most ordinary minds of society.” Historians, he believes, are the architects of our wider historical narrative but there is no doubt their work can be contaminated by the political orthodoxies of the day. He went on: "What Scholars today call patriotic history will in time be seen as mythmaking because it is the establishment of the day shaping the past in order to try to shape the future.” For this reason, Chikwava suggests, the collective memory should always be treated with scepticism and more credence given to the mosaic of collected memories, stories told by individuals. Like the anti-hero of his novel Harare North, Brian believes that people who come to the UK seeking refuge all too often fail to accept the reality of being in a different environment and they long to go back to a place where they feel they belong.
The talk was followed by a fundraising dinner for 160 at the Royal Thames Yacht Club.We were very fortunate to have Nick Bonham as our auctioneer this year.
A huge thank you to everyone who so generously donated prizes and of course to all those who who bid for them. The evening raised OVER £30,000 and every penny will be spent in Zimbabwe. Without your continuing support, we could not continue our life-saving work.
