salaams from mbeya club

Mbeya city today.
Photo by Mbeya Yetu Blog

Mbeya has the uncanny luck of being visited by world famous authors. Evelyn Waugh who visited in 1960- quoted by another author, Paul Theroux, who visited Mbeya in 1965 and 2000, is said to have remarked "Mbeya is a little English garden-suburb with no particular reason for existence ... a collection of red roofs among conifers and eucalyptus trees.”

Theroux himself- in Mbeya in 2000 on a trip from the Cape to Cairo- paid the town a number of questionable complements in Dark Star Safari such as ‘’a habitable ruin’’ , “...because it was a place I had visited thirty-five years before. I wanted to see what time had done to it. I had seen from the moment my eyes had laid eyes on it that time had not improved it, though it had certainly changed it. Instead of the garden-suburb with conifers, Mbeya was now big and bare and run-down...” and as he left for Malawi he reports “...I was happy. Mbeya was behind me...”

So although it is with pride that I announce that Mbeya will be presently visited by another renowned author, Moyez Vassanji-- Kenyan-born, Dar-Es-Salaam-raised-and-schooled, US MIT- trained nuclear-physicist, turned multiple-award-winning-Canadian-fiction-author of Indian stock-- and that he will be hosted by Mbeya Club; I cannot help feeling a touch of trepidation about what he might say. To find out, please join us on the 23^rd June 2011 at 7.30pm at Mbeya Club. Moyez Vassanji will be reading from his books, talking to us, taking and posing questions.

A few copies of some of his titles will be available for sale. Tanzania Distilleries Limited has kindly sponsored the event to lubricate participants’ literary thoughts. Karibu!

Simon Kahemele

CHAIRMAN

Mbeya Club