Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

This book is intense. There are so many layers to understand and relate to things we are able to connect to our world today. It’s about strength, it is about family and tradition but most of all it is about love and learning to move forward even with pain. It teaches the story of change and embracing it even when it hurts! My granddaughter is reading it as a freshman. We have talked about in many chapters. Whether you read this book at 15 or later in life,each phase of life will see it differently. I

It's a timeless letter from a Zimbabwean mother to her daughter, a student at Harvard. Each chapter contains a conversation from the mother to her daughter, giving her some life lessons, family history, folk lore so she doesn't lose her roots, her culture, and the values her family and village have instilled in her before her flight to America. She shares the lessons she learned growing up in Zimbabwe when it was Rhodesia, the segregation between the blacks and the whites, her disappointments and her hopes. What it means to be a proud citizen of Zimbabwe. She shares what she learned from her mother-in-law on her wedding day in what it means to be an African woman. She writes of the struggles by the men and women who fought for Zimbabwe's independence, including Zenzele's father, an activist lawyer and Zenzele's Aunt Linda, a guerilla fighter, and a cousin who was a spy while working as a maid. The reminiscences are poignant as they are vivid. You feel so much love flowing from each sentence you want to reach out and embrace the woman writing them tightly to your heart.

I went through so many different emotions but the overarching one was a sense of pride that I was a Zimbabwean woman. Thank you Nozipo!

The book is very good and the condition of the book was as advertised (not sure if this is supposed to be a review of the text of the quality of the transaction) shipped on time and arrived on time. but the book itself is very moving, It did start off a bit dull for my taste, but once it hit it's stride there was a vigor that you fell in love with.

I love everything about this book!!! It should be a must read for every young black woman before they venture off into the world.

This is a phenomenal book, it brought me to tears. I hope one day if I have a daughter to pass this book on to her as my mom did to me. This is a fairly quick but thought provoking and engaging read.

I absolutely loved this book! Its beautifully written from the perspective of a mother who has witnessed so much change and has a bright and remarkable daughter. Many pearls of wisdom to be taken from this book and it also conveys how colonialism affected Africans in Zimbabwe. A lovely book that I will definitely reread!

In the format of a letter to her daughter who is headed for am American university befo , the writer informs her daughter--and all of us--about life and customs in Zimbabwe during and after its struggle for independence. In the process, author J. Nozipo Maraire raises questions about what Westernized Africans owe to their homeland.

Brauchte ein paar Seiten bis ich reinkam aber danach zog es mich immer mehr hinein.

Excellent book

Beautifully written. Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Lots of life lessons learnt. Highly recommended.

Very very interesting read

I read a library copy and I loved it so much that I wanted my own copy to give to my daughter.