PVPF 2024

A Modest Publisher in Zimbabwe That Helped Launch Great Voices is Closing Down

Explore Weaver Press's 25-year legacy shaping Zimbabwean literature. Discover the impact, challenges, and voices silenced as this Harare-based publisher bids farewell
on Jan 02, 2024

Over the course of 25 years, the Harare-based couple-run Weaver Press has published hundreds of Zimbabwean fiction and nonfiction publications.

Valerie Tagwira, a Zimbabwean author, made the shift from doctor to published author in 2006, when a small but supportive publisher picked up her first novel, The Uncertainty of Hope.

Tagwira, who was based in the UK at the time, had sent her book to 13 UK and Australian publishers and received 13 rejections. It got one of Zimbabwe's National Arts Merit Awards, the country's top distinction in arts and culture, two years after it was released by Weaver Press. She is still grateful to that publication, Weaver Press.

"When nobody else would, Weaver Press gave a voice to the stories that I felt compelled to tell as a novice writer," Tagwira told Al Jazeera, praising the publishing house's publisher and editor, Irene Staunton. "Irene's patience and expertise as an editor inspired me and brought to fruition my long-held dream of becoming a published writer."

The Harare-based independent publisher, however, will close its doors at the end of this year, foreshadowing a bleaker literary scene for the southern African nation.

Weaver Press is headquartered in northern Harare's Emerald Hill, a previously whites-only enclave during the colonial era that is scarcely a logical location for the country's most lively and varied publishing house.

However, since its inception in 1998 by Staunton and her husband Murray McCartney, who has served as its director, it has raised the voices of up to 80 fiction and over 100 nonfiction Zimbabwean writers. The home has had interns and, for a short time, a full-time staff over the years, but it has primarily been handled by the two.

On December 7, the authors Shimmer Chinodya, Petina Gappah, and Chiedza Musengezi, as well as poet and retired university lecturer Musaemura Zimunya, former education minister and memoirist Fay Chung, and retired priest and writer David Harold-Barry, gathered for a 25th anniversary celebration.

Even if it went unspoken at the time, the birthday party was also a funeral.

"Weaver Press will go dormant at the end of the year," Staunton stated in an interview at their home office, referring to the impending closure.

"It seems a little strange, but it's true," her husband said of the oddity of a death notification during a birthday party. Much has changed throughout time. We can't survive only on book sales; we make more money from freelance editing jobs. And it does not have to be Weaver Press."

Getting By in Zimbabwe

When the husband-and-wife pair created Weaver Press, the country was on the verge of a sociopolitical and economic disaster, precipitated in part by former dictator Robert Mugabe's decision to take white-owned farms.

A hyperinflationary atmosphere ensued, rendering most businesses, let alone a publishing house, unviable. They got by by working on individual projects. "For the first few years, we were more like an NGO than a publisher in that we tried to find funding for projects to get us off the ground because we ourselves didn't have any capital except our time," Staunton, whose publishing career spans four decades, stated.

Staunton was the editor and co-founder of Baobab Books, which published prizewinning works by late novelists Yvonne Vera and Chenjerai Hove, as well as posthumous writings by famed writer Dambudzo Marechera.

"In the last twenty years," Staunton observed, "the publishing scene has changed dramatically." Nowadays, many people self-publish, and for obvious reasons, our best writers are published outside of the country. They receive far higher advances, royalties, and promotion, and they establish an international reputation. If I were them, I'd do the same."

In the last decade, a new generation of Zimbabwean writers has developed, who are more well-known overseas than at home. Noviolet Bulawayo, whose two books, Glory and We Need New Names, were both nominated for the Booker Prize, is among them. Weaver Press was the first to publish Bulawayo's Caine Prize-winning story, which evolved into We Need New Names.

The publishing and reading culture of the 1980s, which contributed to Zimbabwe's status as one of Africa's most educated nations, has long since passed: Most schools do not have libraries, and fewer and fewer students are taking literature as a subject in school, while government subsidies that allowed most schools to purchase textbooks and novels have long since evaporated. Furthermore, unauthorised book photocopying has reached epidemic proportions in the country, making a viable publishing industry untenable.

Staunton noted that in the 1990s, if one of their products was a set book on the school curriculum, they could sell up to 250,000 copies.In instance, it took four years for Weaver Press author Shimmer Chinodya's novel Tale of Tamari to sell 2000 copies when it was on the school curriculum between 2018 and 2022.

The flaws of Weaver

But it wasn't just the difficult political climate and economic condition - which peaked at 80% inflation - that made it hard for them to continue. "Weaver Press has never been particularly good at marketing and publicity," McCartney said. That I will admit. That is not our forte."

Farai Mudzingwa, a South African-based Zimbabwean writer whose short fiction was first published by Weaver Press in 2014, told Al Jazeera that he is appreciative for the role the publishing house has played in his writing career.

"Weaver Press appeared resolute on moribund local print publishing within Zimbabwe, with no financial incentive for the writers, but my focus was set on international sales, beyond Zimbabwe and the continent, and with an eye on foreign language translation, film, audio and other extended rights and formats," said the publisher.

Avenues by Train, Mudzingwa's debut novel, has just been published by Nigerian publisher Bibi Bakare-Yusuf's Cassava Republic Press.

Whatever the publishing couple's flaws, Weaver Press has played an unrivalled role in defining Zimbabwe's 21st-century publishing environment.

Fay Chung's major war book Re-Living the Second Chimurenga, late war veteran Dzinashe Machingura's authoritative autobiography Memories of a Freedom Fighter, and numerous short story collections are among their famous publications.

The Stone Virgins, a novel by Yvonne Vera, won the Macmillan Writers' Prize for Africa in 2002. Seventh Street Alchemy, Brian Chikwava's short tale that won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2004, first appeared in a Weaver short story collection. Two of the stories in Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009, were also first published in Weaver short story anthologies.

Tagwira, meantime, has gone to Namibia, where she works as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

With Weaver Press being defunct, the next novel by Tagwira, who published two under them, is likely to be published in South Africa. It is a victory for that country and will almost certainly bring financial benefit to Tagwira, but it is unquestionably a setback for Zimbabwe's publishing culture.