Home Unlabelled updates: Author Moyez Vassanji's mbeya visit this week

at Wednesday, June 22, 2011
By Mpeli Nsekela 
of Globu ya Jamii, Rungwe

Rungwe Misison in Rungwe District, Mbeya region,  has a number of documents relating to German East Africa and the history of the Moravian Church in Tanzania and a number of Nyakyusa, Ndali and other tribes’ arts, crafts, tools,  handicrafts and histories .

MG Vassanji at Rungwe Mission
20.06.11 researching a planned book. 
  Mbeya has the uncanny luck of being visited by world famous authors. Evelyn Waugh who visited in 1960- quoted by another author, Paul Theroux, who visited Mbeya in 1965 and 2000, is said to have remarked "Mbeya is a little English garden-suburb with no particular reason for existence ... a collection of red roofs among conifers and eucalyptus trees.”

Theroux himself- in Mbeya in 2000 on a trip from the Cape to Cairo- paid the town a number of questionable complements in Dark Star Safari such as ‘’a habitable ruin’’ , “...because it was a place I had visited thirty-five years before. I wanted to see what time had done to it. I had seen from the moment my eyes had laid eyes on it that time had not improved it, though it had certainly changed it. Instead of the garden-suburb with conifers, Mbeya was now big and bare and run-down...” and as he left for Malawi he reports “...I was happy. Mbeya was behind me...”

Moyez Vassanji-- Kenyan-born, Dar-Es-Salaam-raised-and-schooled, US MIT- trained nuclear-physicist, turned multiple-award-winning-Canadian-fiction-author of Indian stock—is in Mbeya and on 23rd June 2011 he will be hosted by Mbeya Club. I cannot help feeling proud about hosting him; but I also feel trepidation about what this famous author might say. 

I don’t know; but, we will find out on the 23rd June 2011 at 7.30pm at Mbeya Club. Moyez Vassanji will be reading passages from his stories, talking to us, taking and posing questions that evening.

A few copies of some of his titles (Uhuru Street, The Book of Secrets and The Gunny Sack) will be available for sale. 

Tanzania Distilleries Limited has kindly sponsored 
the event to lubricate participants’ flow of literary thoughts. Karibu!


To know more about  M.G. Vassanji CLICK HERE
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Tanzanian blog operating since 2005, covering International news and Local News, including Politics, Fashion, Social Scenes, Interviews, Movies, Events, personalities and anything positive happening worldwide. Written in Swahili and English targeting both Swahili and English readers.

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  1. AnonymousJune 23, 2011

    Thank you Kiongozi for this useful information.
    Be blessed.

    Mdau
    London

    ReplyDelete
  2. MbeleJuly 03, 2011

    Ndugu Nsekela, thank you very much for this report. I have no idea how I failed to catch it on the day it was published, but, as the saying goes, better late than never. I am also surprised that I missed the subsequent ones as well, only discovering them later. Vassanji is a famous writer, and Mbeya was very lucky to be visited by him. If I may speak only as a Tanzanian, I have to say that through his fiction, he has done a great job of representing our country. I remember conducting a workshop at Colorado College about six years ago on Vassanji's "The Book of Secrets," and we really enjoyed that work.

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