Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, "The Creation of Half-Broken People" (House of Anansi, 2025)

Sep 27, 2025

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker, dives into her novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People, blending African Gothic with rich themes of colonialism and mental illness. She shares her approach to polyvocal storytelling and the significance of a nameless protagonist. Ndlovu explores the intersections of madness and historical context, reflecting on classics like The Yellow Wallpaper. She also discusses reader reactions to unsettling narratives and hints at her next project featuring interconnected vignettes across four decades.

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INSIGHT

Character Spark: Elizabeth Chalmers

Elizabeth Chalmers arrived first as a character and anchored the novel's early arc.
Her constrained mobility revealed colonial gendered controls shaping women's lives and stories.

INSIGHT

Why Multiple Voices Matter

Ndlovu prefers multiple perspectives because a single voice cannot contain the global South woman's experience.
Multiple voices reveal how colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy intersect across generations.

INSIGHT

Intertextuality Gives Language

The novel consciously dialogues with canonical 'mad woman' texts to name violence that lacked language.
Intertextual references (The Yellow Wallpaper, Beloved) gave Ndlovu tools to understand patriarchal-colonial harms.

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In this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu about her phenomenal novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People. (House of Anansi Press, 2025).

Stupendous African Gothic, by the winner of Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize

Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.
Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.

With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present through people “half-broken” by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her characters against the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic.

SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and filmmaker. She is a 2022 recipient of the Windham–Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, won the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2019. Her second and third novels, The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy, were shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. After almost two decades of living in North America, Ndlovu has returned home to Bulawayo, the City of Kings.

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