Zimbabwe's Dangarembga receives German peace prize

VIENNA — Accepting a prestigious German prize Sunday successful grant of her work, Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga called for a “new Enlightenment,” saying a cardinal displacement is needed to flooded the structures of radical hierarchy that person led to unit successful her location state and crossed the world.

“What we tin look to is to alteration our thought patterns connection by word, consciously and consistently implicit clip and to persevere until results are seen successful the mode we bash things and successful the outcomes of our actions,” she said Sunday astatine St. Paul’s Church successful Frankfurt.

Dangarembga is the archetypal Black pistillate to triumph the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which is endowed with 25,000 euros ($29,100) and has been awarded since 1950.

In her remarks, Dangarembga spoke astir Zimbabwe’s assemblage past and the assorted forms of unit achromatic colonialists inflicted connected its Black inhabitants successful the 19th and 20th centuries. That unit continued erstwhile Zimbabwe became autarkic successful 1980, she added.

“These kinds of unit are structured into the planetary bid that we unrecorded successful and person their basal successful the structures of Western empire that began to beryllium formed implicit fractional a millennium ago,” she said.

As a result, Dangarembga said the satellite is successful request of caller ways of thinking. She said bringing astir existent alteration volition necessitate not “miracle cures,” but hard, conscious enactment connected behalf of those who person benefited from occidental powerfulness structures.

Dangarembga is known for her works including the bestselling novel, “Nervous Conditions” and its sequel, “This Mournable Body.” Announcing the prize earlier this year, the assemblage said she is “not conscionable 1 of her country’s astir important artists but besides a wide audible dependable of Africa successful modern literature.”

Auma Obama, a sociologist and activistic and half-sister of erstwhile U.S. President Barack Obama, introduced Dangarembga. She said the writer and filmmaker has fought “against each odds” and “with each imaginable means” for “the voiceless and for state of expression” successful Zimbabwe.

“You presented a differentiated representation of the African continent worldwide,” Obama added.

In summation to the Peace Prize, Dangarembga has besides been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize and the PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression this year.