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Muthi on the rise

A decade-and-a-half ago, Muthi Nhlema was like many Malawians today—a religious reader of Malawian newspaper and a critic at heart. He filled the literally columns with red ink and often criticised them for lack of originality, creativity and imagination.

“But the thing is I didn’t do any writing myself—I felt I didn’t earn the right to criticise anyone for something that I had not tried out myself. It is easy to criticise, but creating something from nothing is even harder,” said Nhlema.

Nhlema: It is easy to criticise, but creating something from nothing is even harder
Nhlema: It is easy to criticise, but creating something from nothing is even harder

So in 2010 he stepped out of his cocoon to make a difference with his first non-fiction piece Make HIV Testing Mandatory, which was published in The Nation. Since then, Nhlema has written over 30 non-fiction articles that have been  published in the newspaper.

As a prose writer, Nhlema came out with a short story Journey of Restoration in 2012 which was published on www.malawiwrite.org, an online publication which was being managed by Switzerland-based Malawian writer Stanley Onjezani Kenani.

Now he anticipates a publication of his short story One Wit’ This Place, which will be featured in Shadreck Chikoti’s Imagine Africa 500 anthology due at the end of the year.

Nhlema is fast becoming a force to reckon with among the new generation of writers.

His piece Ta O’reva has been selected to compete in an international long story contest administered by freeeditorial.com, an online publisher.

The literary award is valued at $20 000 (K10 million) with the winner carting away $15 000 (K 7.5 million ).

The winning stories will be judged based on literary quality and number of downloads from the online website.

The contest ends on June 4 with the final announcement being made a month later.

Ta O’reva is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction thriller about a troubled young black man who brutally murders an Afrikaner farmer in modern-day rural South Africa.

This murder triggers a series of events which leads to Nelson Mandela being brought back to life in a post-apocalyptic future where he is forced to question his legacy and face what maybe the hardest decision of his life: should he save South Africa again?

Nhlema says he was inspired by the fuss that surrounded Mandela’s sickness.

“There was concern, mostly from white South Africans, that there would be genocide of whites if Mandela died because Afrikaners believed that Black South Africans didn’t retaliate for what had happened during apartheid because Mandela was still alive. I found that quite fascinating and so, out of interest, I started researching this phenomenon called ‘white genocide’—the mass killing of Whites,” said Nhlema.

While digging for facts, the writer found information that made him question what Mandela would think or feel if the fears that some white South Africans had actually come to fruition. The question “what would Mandela do?” gave birth to Ta O’reva.

“As I was researching this I found more information about Mandela that I didn’t know. One thing that I read that stuck with me was something he said ‘I have never been comfortable with my depiction as a demigod’. So when he was dying, I would watch people on TV staying up all night and day in vigils praying for Mandela not to die.  I found such prayers cruel because I thought Mandela had lived a full life and he had earned his right to move on to the next life and that South Africa had to move on from that and accept it. It all felt like a kind of surreal hero worship with Mandela being this reluctant hero who couldn’t escape all this admiration from people who adored him. I felt sorry for him rather than sad to be quite honest,” said Nhlema.

The writer, who confesses his admiration for JM Coetzee, Stephen King, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Habila Helon, says he reads a lot and that his style is as a result of his many idols.

Nhlema acknowledges that literature landscape in Africa is experiencing a massive, plate-tectonic shift.

“New voices are emerging from all over the continent because of new opportunities and outlets for expression and exposure. And the world is taking notice. But very little of it is being felt in Malawi. If it wasn’t for the selfless efforts of writers like Shadreck Chikoti and Stanley Kenani, who themselves are part of this new wave of African writers, then Malawi would have remained a literature wasteland,” he observes.

He said it is not that Malawians do not read, but rather they read foreign material because they find it interesting.

“People will ask you ‘have you read the latest Grisham or Patterson?’ but you will rarely if ever hear ‘have you read the latest Chikoti or Phiri?’. It tells you that we need to start giving people better stories that people will enjoy,” said Nhlema.

Nhlema, who is an engineer by profession, was born in Lilongwe on August 29 1980. He joined Likuni Boys Secondary School in 1993 until 1997 when he sat for his MSCE. He then went to the Malawi Polytechnic in 1998 to pursue a degree in civil engineering up to 2003. Currently, the writer is on a Canon-Collins Scholarship and is studying towards an MBA with Heriot-Watt University through their distance learning scheme since 2012.

Nhlema, who aspires to be part of a movement that gets people reading Malawian content again, appeals to people to freely download his story Ta O’reva on www.freeditorial.com/en/books/ta-o-reva.

“The more people download my story, the more my chances of winning,” he said. n

 

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