Catherine Buckle


Catherine Buckle or Cathy Buckle is a Zimbabwean writer and blogger living in Marondera, Zimbabwe.

Biography

She and her former husband bought "Stow Farm" in Marondera in 1990 and managed to make the farm productive and viable. However, in 2000 they lost their farm during the chaotic Land redistribution programme to a group of "war veterans" who claimed rights to her land.
She trained as a social worker at the University of Rhodesia and graduated in Social Work in 1979. She later trained as a librarian and worked as the School Librarian and Head Counsellor at a Harare girls senior school.
Buckle writes not as an academic, an expert or an historian but as an ordinary woman living in a small town in Zimbabwe.

Books

Buckle has written four books for children, one of which was selected as a set book in 2017 for English Literature students in Zimbabwean senior schools. In 2001, African Tears, the non fiction account of Zimbabwe's land invasions, was re-published in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Books; it was serialized in the UK's The Sunday Times and South Africa's Femina magazine and Rapport newspaper. Beyond Tears chronicles eyewitness accounts of anarchy, harassment and intimidation in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2002. In 2009, Innocent Victims: Rescuing the Stranded Animals of Zimbabwe's Farm Invasions was published by Merlin Unwin in the UK. Buckle has published a series of four books of her collected Letters From Zimbabwe: "Can You Hear the Drums 2000 - 2004", "Millions, Billions, Trillions 2005 - 2009", "When Winners are Losers 2009 - 2013", "Finding Our Voices 2013 - 2017". Her story of a Zimbabwean's encounters in the Diaspora "Sleeping Like a Hare" was published in 2015. Her wildlife and conservation memoirs include: "Imire. The Life and Time of Norman Travers" and "Rundi. Hand rearing baby elephants".