Tsitsi Dangarembga, the award-winning Zimbabwean novelist who was nominated for the long list of Booker Awards earlier this week, was arrested during anti-corruption protests in Harare.
Dangarembga, whose novel This Mournable Body was long-listed for the UK’s first fiction prize alongside Hilary Mantel and Anne Tyler, documented her arrest in the suburb of Borrowdale on Twitter. After protesting on social media about the arrest of journalists in Zimbabwe, he tweeted earlier today: “Friends, here is a beginning. If you want your suffering to end, you must act. Action comes from hope. This is the principle of faith and action. “
An hour later, she said she had been arrested. She continued to tweet after her arrest, saying “It looks like it was civilian work” and that she was being transferred before adding, “You may not be able to tweet for a while.”
A report by Agence France-Presse said that she and her friend had been “grouped together in a truck full of police armed with AK-47 rifles and riot gear”, with Dangaremgba’s husband Olaf Koschke confirming the arrest.
Dangaremba’s first novel, Nervous Conditions, is seen as a modern classic and was named by the BBC as one of the 100 books that shaped the world.
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has cracked down on anti-government protests, with hundreds of police and soldiers deployed on city streets across the country amid widespread anger at state corruption, rising prices and inadequate public services.
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