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Inside/Out with journalist Percy Zvomuya
Kubatana.net
October 27, 2006

Describe yourself in five words?
Five words are not enough!

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
It was from my high school English teachers Tasiyana Jabangwe, Manyakaidze and Kudzai Ngara who encouraged me to read, read and read.

What's the most ridiculous thing you've ever done?
Turning up at a cousin's wedding in jeans when everyone was dressed formal. Afterwards I had to buy a suit.

What is your most treasured possession?
My library.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
When someone you love is in trouble and you can't do anything to help..

Do you have any strange hobbies?
People always find it strange that I can play golf. They say "what are you doing in a sport divorced from the ‘people'?" I am a soccer guy, an Arsenal and Caps United fan who happened to frequent the golf course and learnt to play.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?
I wear specs, they make me look nerdish.

What is your greatest extravagance?
Buying replica shirts of obscure football teams, even from South America, I guess.

What have you got in your fridge?
Water, milk and yoghurt and lots of tomatoes, I have not done much cooking lately. You will almost never find fizzy drinks.

What is your greatest fear?
Being unable to write, perhaps what the literary folks call a writer's block.

What have you got in your pockets right now?
An empty wallet and my house keys.

What is your favourite journey?
It would be this journey of life.

Who are your heroes in real life?
James Baldwin, an American writer for the grace of his prose and the clarity of his vision, the French soccer team, people like Patrick Vieira, Lilian Thuram, Zinedine Zidane, Titi Henry and all those people whose parents arrived on the French shores and worked hard on the docks and elsewhere to be what they are now and people out there, market people, vendors on street corners, Bob Marley and others who try to give a better life to their families and Arsene Wenger, as an Arsenal fan, for what he has done for the club.

When and where were you happiest?
A recent experience would have been in the Drakensberg at the source of the Tukela river, so natural, so tranquil that I slept on a rock as a flood of water ran down from a cliff nearby.

What's your biggest vice?
As I know a bit about European soccer I do the occasional soccer bet and win.

What were you like at school?
At once bookish, fun loving, naughty and sometimes difficult. But when I meet some of my teachers now they like me so I could not have been that naughty.

What are you doing next?
Try to make some film, there are 12 million stories to be told out there.

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