President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe at the African Union summit in Egypt on June 2008. Photo courtesy of the Pan-African News Wire via Creative Commons’ flickr.
Kieron Williams/Staff Writer
The African and African Diaspora Studies Program will address tactics used by the president of Zimbabwe to seize the majority vote in a roundtable discussion on Nov. 8 with keynote panelist Chenjerai Hove, an award-winning writer exiled from Zimbabwe.
The roundtable will be held in the Green Library, room 100A.
The event will provide insight into President Robert Mugabe himself as well as a discussion about a failed petition submitted by the Movement for Democratic Change, a political party in Zimbabwe that was formed in 1999 to oppose Mugabe’s campaign.
Hove is an award-winning poet and writer who has been exiled from Zimbabwe, his home country. Hove was selected in 2008 by Brown University to be the writer-in-residence for their International Writers Project. He has written various novels, including “Masimba Avanhu,” a novel written entirely in his native language, Shona. However, his history with Zimbabwe is not so decorated.
“When he was very young, Hove’s sister Agnes was taken away,” said Reyni Valerio, program assistant for the AADS. “Only later did he find out that his father had sold Agnes into marriage to a man that was old enough to be her grandfather.”
Hove’s family worked very hard and sold all their valuables to help Agnes flee, but the practice is still very common in Zimbabwe.
“After he found that out, he just couldn’t sit by,” Valerio said. “He had to take action.”
The School of International and Public Affairs will be hosting this roundtable to discuss the re-election of Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and the tactics he utilized to seize the majority vote, including allegedly stopping people from voting at the polls while “assisting” hundreds of thousands of other voters through the voting process.
The roundtable will also discuss a failed petition submitted by the Movement for Democratic Change, a Zimbabwean political party formed in 1999 to oppose Mugabe’s campaign.
In collaboration with The Betsy-South Beach and the University’s Exile Studies Program, Hove has held many different events over the last two months at the University, but this will be the first talk to center around Zimbabwe politics.
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