SHEBEEN TALES: Messages From Harare by...

SHEBEEN TALES: Messages From Harare by Chenjerai Hove (Serif/Baobab Books: $10.95; 121 pp., paperback original). A prominent African journalist, Hove wrote these columns about life in Zimbabwe for a Dutch newspaper. He describes the pleasures and difficulties of life amid discordant juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, modernization and tradition, hope and despair: “The real Harare is a city of alleyways. For every bright street, lit day and night, colourful with flowers and artificial trees, there is, right behind, in the shadows, the alleyway, the byway which seems immune from municipal by-laws, tucked away like the shadow of a dead man.” Hove’s lively vignettes make a distant city seem close at hand.