Tayla: 

Both your books are rooted in very particular places: Tsitsi, in the neighbourhoods, families, and histories of Harare; Tej, in the everyday realities and social complexities of Zambia. Yet both stories also explore what happens when people cross boundaries, whether geographical, cultural, or personal. How have your experiences of these places shaped the stories you tell? 

Tej:

I grew up in big East Coast cities: New York, Boston, and Washington, DC. I moved to Zambia when I was twenty-nine, and one of the first things I noticed was the way people were connected, a different kind of hospitality than what I knew, and the value put on humans and relationships. I saw this in the importance of the initial greeting, before getting to ‘the point’. Americans like me can focus so much on the transaction over the people involved, and Zambia reoriented me.

One of my first experiences was driving my VW to a friend’s house for lunch. I arrived at the wrong house and met a Zambian family who invited me for lunch. I was there; why not stay? I was touched by the offer, in contrast to my experience growing up in busy, impersonal cities. In my novel Salaula Sisters (Salaula means second-hand), I tried to capture this feeling of hospitality and the way Zambians take the time to greet and know each other. In America, lunch lasts an hour or two; in Zambia, it’s an all-day affair.

In Lusaka, when I go to the grocery store or the dentist's office or the gym or even a gas station, I bump into somebody I know, and somebody who knew my husband when he was a child. This net of connections and histories makes me feel safe and seen. There is a shadow side to the small town, too. Secrets don’t remain secret for long. Mistakes and faults are generally known, and yet there is an atmosphere of forgiveness; a certain kind of peace is forged so we can all live together, forging an imperfect truce. One of the unusual things that happens in my novel is the two women, Mara and Loveness, join forces to manage the man they share. This eventuality is not unusual in the context of Zambia, where a man often keeps a second family, a ‘Plot B’.

Tsitsi:

My answer to this question may differ depending on what I am writing about, but when it comes to Ndima Ndima, I wrote the novel from a perspective of wanting to understand things in depth: why they happened and why they are happening. Questioning things in this way also refers to crossing boundaries, boundaries that often result in severe consequences. This could apply to events in the past or the present.

Ndima Ndima is a novel-in-stories that explores themes such as war, cultural traditions, religion, feminism, and relationships. If I were to focus on setting as a way of touching on one or two of these ideas, Mutare served as the past that needed to be revisited, a conflict that needed to be resolved. Cape Town was a place where one of my main characters could escape, while Harare represented the possibility of change for my characters.

At the beginning of the book, we learn that the Taha family has just moved to a new suburb in Southgate 1, Harare. I crafted the setting so that the place itself would stand as a character in the novel, and it did. It brought challenges to my characters, giving me the opportunity to explore religion, cultural traditions, and feminist issues without holding back. Quite often, when we talk about crossing boundaries, we think of the phrase negatively. However, my novel explores this idea from both negative and positive perspectives.

If I were to admit that my own experiences shaped this story, it would be because some of my favourite characters were inspired by people I loved deeply. I wrote these characters while desperately wanting to reconnect with them through words on a page, because some of them are no longer here with me. As for the rest of the novel, it is drawn largely from what I observe from afar.

Tayla: Tej, your debut novel, Salaula Sisters, has only recently been published. In your acknowledgements and in one of your Zoom interviews, you mentioned that it took 20 years to find a publisher for your novel. Can you tell us about that? Why did it take so long?

Tej: 

To be fair, it took a long time to write it. I started writing in 2004, and by writing it, I learned how to pull different threads from my life and observations and people and braid them together. It took me dozens of drafts to figure it out while I was raising children and working as a teacher, journalist, and for humanitarian organizations. I wrote the novel in the edges of my life and have written six more while I was searching for a publisher.

I found it difficult to convince American publishers to judge the book on its content instead of my skin color. Rejections from fellow New Yorkers would state, ‘I could never publish a white person writing about Africa.’ I wondered if they had bothered to read the text, if it mattered that I had lived there for a decade or had read many other wonderful Zambian writers, including Namwali Serpell, Mulenga Kalimamukwento, and Ellen Banda-Aaku. There are many paradoxes in the current publishing climate; one is that publishers might reject Zambian authors for equally superficial reasons, or choose to have no books about Zambia in their portfolio.

I believe, along with Zadie Smith, that fiction is about empathy at its core, about imagining what it’s like to view life from other perspectives. The waters get muddied pretty fast. I can write about an Italian, ostensibly because we are both ‘white’, but not a Tunisian. Is it permissible for a POC to write a white character, but not the reverse? It has to be based on the quality of the writing itself, and if you eliminate writing from various points of view, you risk eliminating fiction.

Tayla: And Tsitsi, your debut novel, Ndima Ndima was published in 2023. Was your experience of publishing similar to Tej's?

Tsitsi: 

At some point, yes. I wrote Ndima Ndima while studying for my master's degree at the University of Auckland in 2019. It took almost a year to complete the novel, and when I finished it in 2020, I gave the manuscript to my agent, Nadine Rubin Nathan. She approached several publishers. Some liked the story, while others did not, for various reasons. That's normal and happens often in publishing. To cut a long story short, the novel eventually ended up in Jessica Powers' hands at Catalyst Press in 2022.

I would say that every writer's publishing journey is different. If there is one thing I wish were easier, it would be the length of time many writers spend searching for publishers. But with Ndima Ndima, I was fortunate not to spend years waiting, and I was also fortunate to have readers who connected deeply with the novel. Even so, publishing is not an easy journey, whether you are new to the field or have been in it for years.

I say this because my poetry collection, which I wrote while studying for my bachelor's degree in 2018, took seven years to find a home at Carnelian Heart Publishing House. When I emailed the manuscript to Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure, I assumed she would reject it, just as other publishers had done before. I am incredibly grateful and excited that the collection will finally reach its readers. I hope they will love it as much as they have loved Ndima Ndima.

Tayla: Both of your novels are set in Southern Africa. Tsitsi, your story is set in Zimbabwe and South Africa, while Tej, your story is set in Zambia and the United States. What was it like, or what is it like, to write about a place you have left?

Tej: 

When I moved from Washington, DC to Zambia in 1999, one of my biggest surprises was that I missed mundane things I had not paid much attention to before––certain parking lots, certain street corners, unremarkable foods, the pleasure of a hot coffee in a paper cup with a lid. I was somehow more invested in my home in its absence.

André Aciman, the Egyptian author of Call Me By Your Name and other best-selling novels, calls this emotional triage, describing the way that allegiances and attachments to a place grow in exile. So too with Lusaka, as I was working on Salaula Sisters. Most of the novel was written when I was living in Dubai or Senegal or Rome, and in a way, this made me more attuned to the mashed-potato scent of a certain tree and other sensations of a city I had left behind.

I moved back to Zambia this March 2026, and as I was going through the final edits, I found a few geographical corrections. In my memory, I had transposed streets or cafés, and I was grateful for the timing of my return to make a truce with reality. I have written so many drafts that I often commit emotional triage, conflating the real with nostalgic puddles.

Tsitsi: 

Writing about a place I left years ago was intentional. It felt as though I were revisiting my childhood, especially through the joyful experiences my characters have in the novel. In some ways, we write about places we have moved away from to reconnect with what is missing from our lives, but also to remind ourselves that we have never entirely left those places behind. They belong to us, and we belong to them.

Tayla:  It's fascinating how both of you explore place and belonging in your work. What are your thoughts on crossing borders, both literally and in terms of writing? How do you navigate the joys and challenges of writing across culture?

Tej:

The short answer is, I don’t. Ultimately, I can only see things through the cultural framework I have developed to understand the world, so one might say that my novel can be reduced to ‘how an American sees Zambia’.  Currently, I am doing teacher training for creative writing at a school in an under-resourced area in Lusaka. I notice that my techniques for teaching are reinterpreted through a Zambian lens, and on a good day, we might find some kind of middle ground. The idea that all children have a voice and something to say is a bridge to cross. I guess that’s the best I can hope for in my novel.

As an American, I am critical of my own country’s politics and cultural blind spots. Many Zambian writers are the same with their own country and tend to focus on the negative. As an outsider, I observe aspects of Zambia that it takes an outsider to appreciate, pulling away from the idea of a single story that Chimamanda Adiche references. The main character in Salaula Sisters is an American woman, and I write from her point of view.

I have lived in six countries in my adult life: Zambia, Senegal, UAE, Italy, Ethiopia, South Africa, and in each of them, unexpected life-changing experiences unfolded. None came from something I thought I was pursuing. One of the joys of travel is allowing chaos to flow. Circumstance presented me with opportunities which I either seized or rejected. Through this, I have developed parts of my personality that might not have emerged if I never left home. One of them is being a connector across cultures; another is being an entrepreneur. In Lusaka, at a book-and-record store in a beautiful garden on Leopard’s Hill Road, I am selling literary novels from two women-owned publishers––Modjaji and Catalyst––in addition to my own books.

Tsitsi:

Whether it is about my writing or not, for me it is a matter of exposing myself to knowledge I did not have before, while approaching other people's values with respect. By doing that, you form a lasting relationship, one that connects us through our shared humanity.

The challenges arise when people withhold information because they fear they will be portrayed negatively in your writing. For me, however, it has never been about that. If I ask you for information, it means I respect you, and I would never publish something you did not approve of. Sometimes it is simply a matter of balance, finding the right proportion of detail to bring out both the good and the bad. After all, we are human beings, and we will always make mistakes. The most important thing is that we learn from them and strive to do better.

As for the joys, they come from bringing something new into my writing. When I do that, it is fulfilling in so many ways. It reminds me that every connection I have made throughout my life is part of a larger chain of connection. In a sense, my ancestors did the same, even though they are no longer here. Through those connections, their presence continues to live on.

Tsitsi Mapepa is a writer known for her poetry, short stories, and novels. She studied at Manukau Institute of Technology and earned a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. Her debut novel is titled Ndima Ndima.

Tej Rae is an award-winning writer and former English teacher based in Lusaka. Since 1999, she has lived in Zambia, Senegal, the UAE, Italy, and Ethiopia with her husband and two children. Her bilingual children's book Sirens, set in Addis Ababa, came out in 2021. It led to a feature on BBC Amharic the following year. A second Amharic-English children's book, Spaced, followed. Her action-adventure film script, Abyssinia Steel, has won three awards. In 2025, she published Tigerfish, an illustrated middle grade chapter book set in Zambia. It became the number one bestseller at two Exclusive Books outlets in South Africa that summer.

These days, Tej is growing Lusaka's literary scene through LIT LSK. She runs writing workshops and pop-up book events featuring Catalyst and Modjaji titles. She's also completing an MFA at the University of Cape Town. Salaula Sisters is her debut novel.