“The old tree is still full of life”: The first Tsotso editorial
Tsotso is a little magazine of new writing with a serious purpose. Like the twigs of a well-established tree, its contents indicate a fresh start, a budding, the promise of ever new attempts to demonstrate that the old tree is still full of life. Just as a tree needs care and encouragement to ensure that the sap rises in due season and pushes out new shoots, so does the imaginative life of society.
The aim of Tsotso is to provide a regular outlet of a forum for those who write and anyone interested in what is being written. There are a great many people writing at present. But what are they writing? What guidance do they get? What encouragement?
The best encouragement for a young writer – and many an older practitioner – is to see his work in print, to hear what others think of it, and then to go back to his writing-pad a little wiser and more confident. At present there are not many ways of finding that kind of exposure. Tsotso hopes to help provide it.
That has been the driving purpose which has brought the editors together. The editors themselves are mostly teachers with a long-standing interest in writing, and in this venture they regard themselves as middle-men moving between the writer and the reader – and as the Contents page shows they are sometimes both of those as well.
Writers published in this issue and readers will have already noticed that the magazine has the appearance, the price and the feel of a down-market production. One reason is economic, but the important reason is the editors want an informal and democratic magazine. Its price must not be a hindrance. Its contents are more important than its appearance, and it is hoped that the poems and stories published here being available to a wide spectrum of the public might be discussed at the bus-stops, in classrooms, on the street-corners, and might provoke the more hesitant writer to send in a few poems. Whatever the outcome, the critics will have a bone to chew on.
The magazine makes no claim to compete with existing outlets or writers’ groups. There are full-colour magazines on the market which give space to poems and short stories and indeed pay writers for what is published. Tsotso is more like a practice ground at a rural growth point, not the stadium. Nobody gets paid for playing here. This way writers can feel free to submit whatever kind of imaginative writing they are working on.
As we see in this issue, there is bound to be a mixture of conventional and experimental writing; some writers stress the intensely personal, others – and there is a discernable trend in this – are developing a protesting voice. The editors are not predisposed to one or the other; they welcome work which is coherent and whose energy merits an audience or reflects in some way something of what it means to be living in Zimbabwe today.
Tsotso magazine was founded in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1989 and ran until 2001. This editorial was published in the first edition of Tsotso. Read a selection of poems from Tsotso, published by Poetry International in April 2012, along with an introduction by Joyce Chigiya here.
