Quote by Yvonne Vera: “Silence is the only language the powerless know.”

When people have no access to platforms, no protection from retaliation, and no power to make their words matter, silence is not a choice — it is the only option left. This is not about those who choose not to speak; it is about those for whom speech carries too high a price. Understanding this difference changes everything about how we hear — and do not hear — others.

Nehanda was published in 1994, as Zimbabwe's post-independence political landscape was becoming increasingly authoritarian under Mugabe. Women's voices in particular were marginalised in both official political culture and nationalist historical memory. Vera was working to recover and fictionalise the stories of women who had been erased from that history.

Zimbabwean novelist whose lyrical and often disturbing fiction addressed silence, violence, and the interior lives of Zimbabwean women. Her 1994 novel Nehanda drew on the life of the spirit medium who led the First Chimurenga uprising against British colonisation. She received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa and died in Toronto at forty in 2005.