‘We kept going’ Indie publisher marks 25 years of telling tales

When the Zimbabwean editor Irene Staunton and her husband Murray McCartney set up their publishing business in 1998, it seemed natural to call it Weaver Press. Their modest HQ, in the back garden of their home in Emerald Hill, a northern suburb of Harare, looked out on the many intricate nests of the weaver bird that peppered the landscape.

- Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Last week the company celebrated its 25th birthday. The location has not changed and the team has rarely exceeded the staff of two. But in the words of one distinguished Zimbabwean scholar at the University of Oxford, Weaver Press has “quietly shaped post-independence Zimbabwean literature”.

Weaver Press’s early days coincided with the country’s economy going into an accelerated decline just before a series of strikes and a constitutional referendum that dealt a blow to the then-leader, Robert Mugabe.