Nigerians, you need to read this short African story by Petinah Gappah ASAP

Longlisted for the prestigious Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction some months back, badass Zimbabwean writer Petinah Gappah just published a beautiful African story on NewYorker.

In an interview with The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Gappah says the idea to write “A Short History of Zaka the Zulu” came to her about four years ago, when she was invited to give a speech at an old school’s prizegiving. She was so inspired and touched by "the closed and insular world of boarding school, and about the choices that teenagers can make in the arrogant belief that they know everything".

'A Short History of Zaka the Zulu’ by Petinah Gappah

"He was always a bit of an odd fish, Zaka the Zulu, but he was the last boy any of us expected to be accused of murder. Not a wit, a sportsman, or a clown, he was not a popular boy at our school, where he wore his school uniform every day of the week, even on Sundays. Of course, we could have admired him for his brains.

In the high-achieving hothouse that was the College of Loyola, which won the Secretary’s Bell Award fifteen years in a row, we admired any boy we labelled a razor. Zaka, though, made such a song and dance about his sharpness that you’d have thought he was the only razor in the school.

He became even less popular when he was made head prefect. In a school like Loyola, where the task of keeping everyday order is entrusted to the prefects, being head can bring out the tyrant in even the nicest chap, and Zaka brought to the position an obnoxious self-importance that made him absolutely insufferable.

As head prefect, he issued demerits for the slightest offenses, marking down boys who did not wear ties with their khaki shirts at Benediction, making spot checks for perishable goods in our tuck boxes and trunks, sniffing for beer on the breath of every boy who had snuck out to Donhodzo, the rural bottle store in the valley below our school, and, from the strategically placed Prefects’ Room, making forays at unexpected times to see if he could catch anyone smoking outside the library."

“A Short History of Zaka the Zulu”  is from her forthcoming collection Rotten Row which will be published by Faber and Faber in November.

According to Books Live South Africa, Rotten Row is named after the street in Harare where the Criminal Division of the Magistrate’s Court is based, and is made up of 20 stories about crime, from different perspectives.

Read the story on New Yorker

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