Quote by Yvonne Vera: “Silence can be a shield or a weapon.”

This suggests that choosing not to speak can protect someone from harm or, conversely, it can be used to inflict damage or control others. Silence is a powerful tool with dual potential.

'The Stone Virgins' explores the Matabeleland massacres of the 1980s in Zimbabwe, a period of state-sponsored violence and systematic silencing. The book highlights the consequences of enforced silence.

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.