Taurai Valerie Mtake

Typography and type design have always been of particular interest to me, and I’ve long harboured a desire to create something that could benefit my homeland of Zimbabwe, Africa and the wider world through norm creativity. I imagine how it could have looked if it were not for the Latin or Roman alphabet. The Shona written language is beset by a number of problems, such as the absence of a consistent way of spelling words across all dialects. The current orthography fails to represent the spoken form of the language accurately, which makes it challenging for writer-speakers to convey their ideas effectively.

I am eager to explore typography in Zimbabwe and reimagine how my language could have looked if it had not been colonised. Being a speaker of chiShona, my mother tongue, I am intrigued by the possibility of developing a script for my language and finding effective methods to teach it.