Silent Book Club (SBC) Harare recently hosted its ninth Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) meet-up at Mara Mara restaurant in Belgravia. The open, free-registration event invited participants to bring a book and read in silence.
Billed as a gathering “Where solitude meets community —”, the concept quietly subverts social norms and is subtly transforming Harare’s social landscape.
Founded in 2012 by Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich in San Francisco, Silent Book Club is a global community of readers with chapters in over 60 countries. The movement is free to start and operates through volunteer-driven community organising.
In Zimbabwe, the first SBC was launched in March 2025 by Thuthukani Ndlovu, creative/art director and consultant at The Radioactive Blog.
Ndlovu is the Harare Chapter organiser and has been involved with the launching of the Bulawayo and Chinhoyi chapters by assisting with graphic design for their digital flyers and organising WhatsApp communities.
SBC Harare has held meet-ups at different locations where attendees sign in, grab a drink if they want to and find a seat.
It is an inclusive club where one can bring any kind of reading material, including e-books and audiobooks.
Members are allowed to bring a cushion, picnic blanket or chair if they want to.
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Seating arrangements are not prescribed. Readers may sit on the ground and lean against the wall, a tree or a post.
Some prefer to lie on their back, others on their stomachs with a book on the ground between their elbows.
Reading goes on for just an hour. After the initial distractions while settling in, habitual readers will find that when the eyes lock on a page, ambient noise becomes a soothing blur of background sound.
The whole body relaxes, breathing becomes slow and deep and the soul is anchored in the present moment.
To a passerby, it may look like the site of an alien ritual! Undeniably performative and "staged" the reading can be seen as a form of rebellion and protest in the quest to retain and reclaim intellectual sovereignty.
Books become confessions. Some bring beloved old favourites; others arrive on awkward first dates. One reader immersed herself in Mpoomy Ledwaba’s How Did We Get Here? (A Girl’s Guide to Finding Herself), appearing to conduct a public therapy session. Studious readers leaned towards titles such as Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America and Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need.
Recreational readers turned to light and thrilling fare such as Norah Roberts’ Stars, Jill Mansell’s Take a Chance on Me, Jack Higgins’ The Judas Gate, James Patterson and Neil McMahon’s Toys, and Irving Wallace’s The Pigeon Project. A metaphysics enthusiast explored Michael A Singer’s The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself. Self-development titles ranged from Lois P Frankel’s Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office to Jerry More Nyazungu’s The Chartered Vendor and Bob Goff’s Love Does.
A philosophically curious reader brought Xavier Rubert de Ventós’ Dios, entre otros inconvenientes. Pan-African political thought surfaced in Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983–1987. Inspiration radiated from Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry. Parenting anxieties found solace in Herbert Zirima’s The Parenting Handbook. A brave young reader tackled Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.
Zimbabwe’s literary legacy was honoured through Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger.
Fashion, too, played a role. Readers arrived in chic floral dresses, denim dungarees, yoga pants and carefully curated beauty looks that shattered the tired stereotype of the frumpy bookworm. Men, well-groomed yet understated, seemed content to let the women command the visual stage.
Whether by chance or design, one reader made a fashion statement with red lipstick and nail varnish that complemented her Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power. And there was a girl with a pearl earring, as if from Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s famous portrait! But unlike Vermeer's passive subject, this girl chose to empower herself by reading What happened to you?: conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing, co-authored by Bruce D Perry and Oprah Winfrey.
A fan of English Premier League team Manchester City Football Club came wearing a branded black and red jersey accessorised with pink frames, reading Nyasha Madzingira’s The Third Leg Age.
An FC Barcelona fan showed up wearing her team's 2025-26 season orange jersey.
One young man with a skateboard proved that there's more to a skateboarder than meets the eye.
No one rings a bell when the time is up. New members lost in the worlds created by their author will notice an increase in chatter and discover that sixty minutes have elapsed.
The SBC meet-up may be a crowd of strangers, but everyone is easily approachable. They acknowledge and greet one another with a smile that recognises a kindred spirit. A common ice breaker is asking the other person what they were reading.
It comes off as both invasive and flirtatious where sapiosexuals are gathered.
It's never shameful to admit a lack of knowledge about Héctor García and Francesc Miralles's Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life, when the owner is reading it for the first time.
It may also be a smart way to avoid long conversations for the introvert. But Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo can be a great conversation starter!
The idea of hosting the event at eateries like Mara Mara restaurant provides a stimulating environment, but comes with a challenge when the proprietor expects to convert the crowd into direct sales.
It’s not many book lovers who prefer Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO, with a side of Executive Chef Mac’s Parmesan Polenta Fries.
And although one may choke with emotion while reading a poem from Batsirai Chigama’s Gather The Children, it’s not the norm to chase it down with a swig of Bacardi.
In any case, if the chef at Mara Mara were to be given credit, simultaneously partaking in one of his dishes while going through Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door or Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, others would be a serious distraction.
The Mara Mara restaurant BYOB meet-up was an avant-garde cross-demographic social
gathering.
Far from the dry and sterile environment of the library, it exuded an atmosphere of opulent decadence.
Undoubtedly, the SBC movement is a powerful catalysing force with wider implications for progressive social transformation.
