Book Launch: ‘The mentalist’

Mazuba Mwiinga is a vibrant writer, Ngoma Award Winner for Best Drama Writer 2012 and SIGNIS-CEPACS Award Winner for Africa Best Creative Writer 2003 and ardent and experienced journalist, radio broadcaster, TV and Radio Producer, Public, Communications & Media Relations Specialist and Media Trainer.

He went to various Primary Schools in Southern Province of Zambia before attending Secondary education at Mukasa Minor Seminary in Choma. He studied Mass Communication, Public Relations and Literary Criticism at University of Zambia and Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He also studied Law, Diploma Level at University of Zambia. At Danish School of Journalism and Media in Arhus, Denmark, under DANIDA scholarship he studied Community Radio Journalism. At Swedish Radio Media Training Centre in Stockholm, Sweden, under the scholarship of SIDA he studied Public Service Broadcast Management, while at Kenya School of Monetary Studies in Nairobi, Kenya under the Reuters Foundation scholarship, he read Reporting Elections in Africa. At Nordic-SADC Journalism Institute (NSJ) in Grahamstown, SA he studied Broadcast Media Management.

He has worked for various media organizations among them: Mazabuka Times, Radio Mazabuka, National Mirror, The Confidential, The Sun, Radio Chikuni, SKY Fm, MARCH Zambia (NGO), Muvi Television, Prime Television and Yatsani Radio. At the time of writing this book he was a Project Coordinator/Media Trainer for Free Press Unlimited Project at ZAMCOM in Lusaka, Zambia.

The Mentalist (2015) is his third completed prose writing. Others are: SECRETS OF MY HEART – Power of Thought (2014), Born Of Silence (2005). He has numerous unpublished literary works, plays: [Taste of Own Medicine – unpublished 2004, The First Born – unpublished 2005 and One Dark Night – unpublished 2012] and movie scripts. He is 2003 First Prize winner of The SIGNIS-CEPACS, Africa Catholic Radio Script Writing Competition for a short story Behind The Stranger, as well as 2006 African Best 12 Finalists for BBC; ‘How Radio Has Changed My World’ Writing Competition. He also won a Ngoma Award for Best Drama Script in 2012 for the play The Ultimate Nightmare later re-titled One Dark Night (unpublished 2012).

The Mentalist – “Sometimes he would pick pieces of paper and read to himself like one possessed with some naughty demon. From a distance he was indeed a village maniac. His mother feared he will never see him grow as a normal adult with a normal life like any other normal village human being of his age. Time was running fast on him but he never seemed to change for the better. He was the usual loudest, funniest, sometimes most foolish boy around. Yet if you peeped into his brains, and poked a bit of his thoughts, some gold were seen packed logically in the frames of his skull. He never seemed to grow as fast as his age mates, yet his reasoning was sharper than their heights. Most often he escaped class punishments by his aforethought statements, much to the amazement of those in ear shot.”

The boy goes against all odds in search of himself. The excursion takes him through the twists and turns of life; they call him the maniac, some say he is mad, others he is queer. Love fades quickly, joy drops easily, and jobs cut snappily, yet his brains are sharper than a double-edged sword. He blames everyone and everything. This drives him into his unknown epic of mental squabbles and only realizes later how his thoughts are in-fact his own worst enemy and saboteur of his success.

Author’s Comments on the book, The Mentalist

I have been asked by a lot of people on what the book is all about. My answer has been, and is “I don’t know”. They find the answer hard to comprehend. But that’s the best I can give because, each reader has his or her own story he or she gets from this book. I don’t create characters in the book to tell the story, but characters themselves lead me where to take the story. That’s my unique way of writing. This is not a novel about literature where you are taught to have plots and characterization that qualifies to the norms of literary criticism that make the best principles of literature. I have had a wonderful privilege to have read quite a lot about those guys who created these norms that we today follow as the best ways of writing; and my own personal analysis is that, they were good in their own ways, but that doesn’t mean their way of writing is the only and best way of telling a story. This to me is the best way I CAN tell a story. It is a unique simple novel, written in a simple and straight fast-forward way for any canny mind to understand. It’s not a novel about depiction. It’s a novel about musing. And only those who want to learn and be able to be whom they were meant to be; will be willing to want to know and discover the missive. It’s a novel about ignorance; and how its discovery in our personal lives can be a marvel of our living. This is a five day work written in 229 pages. But whenever I go back to it, I am always tempted to continue writing the story. Then I realize, there is no end to any story, because life never dies. It just evolves…

Thank you so much.

Mazuba Mwiinga

Author – The Mentalist