Rewriting the historical epic: African women writers go big
For more than two decades, wherever the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah went, the colonial explorer David Livingstone seemed to follow.
She found Livingstone – his papers, his diaries, his biographies – in Melbourne and Cape Town and London. She discovered Livingstonia wedged into boxes at Zimbabwean flea markets and tucked onto high shelves in Irish bookshops. Livingstone followed her to estate sales and book fairs and antique shops splayed across nearly every continent.
She couldn’t shake her fascination with his story – a “heroic failure,” she called him, searching in vain for the source of the
