A Lesson in Englishness

There are only five other black girls in our class of twenty-six... ________________________ From the author of the critically-acclaimed House of Stone, listed for the Folio Prize, is a short story about growing up in Zimbabwe ________________________ A country school girl attends the prestigious Girls' College in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and she learns how to be English. She learns pronunciations, learns to pour, sip, and hold tea, and even learns to laugh the English way- Hahaha!...Hahaha... Haaaaa haaaaa haaaa... But things begin to change for the pupils of Girls' College when Zimbabwe's new president calls for 'A' grade schools to enrol more black pupils.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the critically acclaimed novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place, shortlisted for the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and longlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize. Tipped by the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) as a defining voice of her generation, she has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at Oxford University and the Nordic Africa Institute. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a native of Zimbabwe and has lived in South Africa and the USA.