Women From Zimbabwe

"The future of Zimbabwean athletics lies in the hands of junior athletes, but if they are not promoted then who will lift up the sport in the coming years? We are growing old and as we retire who would come next?"

"They really need discipline, to be objective, to know what they really want in life. If you train with the mind of winning you always win, if you train with a weak mind, no I am just doing it for the sake of running then something is wrong somewhere."

"You know you will disappear. Like you’re causing trouble. You can’t go to the village and start asking these sorts of questions without causing trouble. Many activists in Zimbabwe have, you know, disappeared or paid the price. But for me the structure of House of Stone mirrors exactly what you’re talking about… the difficulty of excavating history"

"I think we also underestimate just how difficult it is to talk about this history and work through it. We need structures, we need state support. It cannot just be people looking through history. We need help as to how to look at that history and how to heal from that history"

"I remember during my writing of House of Stone, I went to therapy, and I took the book for therapy, I needed to also make sense and work through what excavation this issue was doing to me, to my psyche, to my body, my emotions"

"The massacres are horrible when you read the transcripts. They speak of torture, starvation, families being forced to kill their family members, bury them, dance on their graves, it’s really atrocious. What’s really horrible is that there’s been no reckoning with that. The victims have gone unacknowledged. They did not receive any help, any social… and I’m thinking of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as a comparison. So we have a lot of wounds. So that’s really what I wanted to sit with. And make sense of and try and understand"

"Zimbabweans and Nigerians are famous for just having PhDs PhDs, but that really opened my eyes to the importance of teaching, right, and not just teaching fiction, the craft of fiction but art is also a way to think together to build empathy, diversity, right? I think the humanities are really good at that and cultivating stewardship, citizenship, and that’s really what I’m interested in in the classroom"

"Fiction allows me to make up events that happened but feel emotionally true…House of Stone took me six years to write, about 17 drafts. My aim was to fail spectacularly rather than succeed safely"

"Relaying ordinary narratives was a way to reclaim that space in the national identity for ordinary citizens and born-frees. If I’m going to do Zimbabwean history some justice, I need as many perspectives as possible"

"Even though there was no petrol, people were driving. Even though the country was experiencing hyperinflation, my mother was able to secure chicken portions with her whole salary, without doing anything illegal"

"I heard the stories from my father, passed down to him by his father, my grandfather, and which I shall one day pass down to my children."

"And now, the valour of our people and the glory of the Mthwakazi Nation lives on not in any history book, or in any official account, where we are nothing but savages without culture, without history or glory or anything worth mentioning or passing on"

"The seventh lesson that I learnt is to always keep on learning. I believe in learning all the time, I’m a life-long learner… I also believe in re-learning, because there are always new things coming out. My kids are teaching me things today"

"One of the things I noted in my country was that women were not getting the opportunity to get formal employment, in particular the many widows and the single mothers due to HIV/Aids. Today our company is arguably the largest employer of permanently employed women. We employ over 1,000 women, contributing at least 25% of our workforce"

"For me, failure teaches self-confidence and tenacity"

"In our company we believe in celebrating success because it creates, and maintains, momentum,” she noted. “Everyone celebrates even the little things that we succeed in doing, and we have a jolly good time. That is how people look forward to winning and being successful. Because they know there are rewards of celebration"

"Pay it off, don’t pay it forward. Or put simply: be frugal"

"One of the key features in any business leader is execution… and it is a critical block in building a successful enterprise"

"I have learnt that earning by working hard is the way to go"

"I have ensured that I aligned their personal goals with their business goals and that makes everybody go in tandem with each other. I try to know almost all my 4,000 employees: their families, their aspirations, their worst fears and so on"

"Success depends on employees. For me knowing and connecting with my employees is very important. I have done that very well"

"And creating value, giving the best value… is the way we built loyalty"

"I always knew that treating the customer as the boss was the key thing"

"I thought there was a gap in the industry. Companies that were there were not living up to the needs of the clients. The industry was renowned for wild cat strikes and guards generally were perceived as the lowly-paid in any sector. I wanted to change the perceptions and create a niche in which people could carve out a career and I knew I needed to go in with a different approach and that approach was going to make the difference, the people had to be key or central feature of the vision"

"Let me say that right from a tender age, I had always told myself and everyone that I was going to start and run my own business, which I always envisioned as a large business. I enrolled in an entrepreneurial development program in 1995 and this sharpened my entrepreneurial competencies. I learned elements like opportunity seeking, goal setting, business planning, networking, and more"

"The business idea was after the realization of a gap that I had noted in the market for a service and quality-oriented security services provider"

"Have a game plan and execute it with passion, determination and focus. Never mind that you are a woman. Do not think about that except as a competitive advantage. No one is going to give you anything on a silver platter. You have to work twice, thrice, five times as hard and do not lose focus. Work with your passion, it will keep you going and once you have a footing in your business, make the most of it and create the momentum and that will get rid of all the little challenges that may bog you down. Lastly, choose your team carefully and get rid of non-performers soon enough.”"

"“If you want a certain future, go out and create it. Conquer your fears as that is what enslaves most women. Opportunities are now galore. We just need to roll up our sleeves, lift our feet, and walk through the door as no one will carry us."

"“My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is start with an end in mind, know exactly what you want to achieve and start to work systematically towards the goal, exercising some patience. Know the industry you want to get into, its internal and external environment."

"“never tire in well doing, because, in due season, you shall reap if you faint not”. “I believe that every good deed is a door opener hence I always try to be as good as I can to others, my word being my bond, as the key to my success is loving and connecting with people which are always the seeds of great things to come. I believe in playing by the rules all the time and most importantly upholding my personal integrity as this gives me good night sleep.”"

"“Most of the women that we employ here are single mothers, we targeted them primarily because we knew that they were not going to get an opportunity from anybody and they would not be able to look after their children. So this is an opportunity for them to have a livelihood and to educate their children. We employ close to a thousand women now, about 900+ and to me that’s one of the happiest things I’ve done in my life as a person because I have impacted very positively on women who would have not have had an opportunity, who would be eking out a living and possibly even going out to sell their bodies to make a living.”"

"Conquer your fears as that is what enslaves most women"

"“Success depends on employees. For me knowing and connecting with my employees is very important.”"

"My greatest satisfaction is championing women economic empowerment initiatives in mentorship, linking women businesses to corporate supply chains for their growth."

"My advice to women all the time is:"If you want a certain future, go out and create it. Conquer your fears as that is what enslaves most women. Opportunities are now galore. We just need to roll up our sleeves, lift our feet, and walk through the door as no one will carry us.""

"Women entrepreneurs have to work twice as hard to succeed... the best thing to do is to remain resolute, focused, ethical and preserve your integrity."

"...Irene Sabatini created two unforgettable fictional characters who leapt off the page.—Bernardine Evaristo"

"Allow this book to take you on a journey that will capture both your head and your heart."

"But that’s what’s great about books- they carry you up, out and away, lifting you away from the mundane to the extra ordinary."

"I think that literature, when it’s good, as opposed to journalism, gives you the freedom to be the characters, to enter into their lives, their psyche and so their experiences become, in a way, yours."

"The writing seemed to just spiral out of me, and if I had to pick a time when I really started this journey it would be that wonderful quiet morning on a verandah so many years ago in the Colombian countryside..."

"How my imagination soared — the moon seemed so close that I felt I could reach out and touch it. And then my mind wandered: what are those noises outside?"

"But some may have stopped singing for one or two reasons but like any other sectors it needs commitment and the will to reach the sky"

"We have quite a number of female musicians that have led bands in the country and sometimes it’s better to make a date with them and share their experiences"

"It’s not bad being a backing vocalist, but it takes a lot of commitment to lead a band, hard work and the will to reach the greatness"

"By her own admission in the author’s note, the poems are designed to affirm, to confront the silence we so often feel comfortable with and to give voice to those things that have remained unspoken."

"Hope speaks out about the issues of womanhood in the rapidly changing Zimbabwean culture."

"One of its most talented and famous performers and teachers is Hope Masike, a 35-year-old woman from Harare, the country’s capital. Born into a large family of eight children, Hope devoted herself to studying the culture of her people, diving into a wide range of subjects from anthropology and ethnology to jurisprudence, never losing the love for her roots and the dream of an emancipated and peaceful Africa."

"Hope Masike is a Zimbabwean vocalist, mbira player, percussionist, songwriter, fashion designer, painter and dancer. She is known as The Princess of Mbira and her music has its roots both in traditional and modern African culture. She is also the lead singer for transnational band Monoswezi."

"And that always put me under a lot of pressure to do much better every time when I am on stage"