Tag: Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe learns to laugh at itself – but just how much?

Zimbabwe’s largest arts event, the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Hifa), came to a controversial end last night when popular South African Afro-fusion band, Freshlyground, was prevented from performing its closing show. With the highest priced ticket – US$25 – of all the performances at this year’s Hifa, the band was set to bring to an end the 15th edition of the festival, held under the theme ‘Switch On’.

Fielding questions from Zimbabweans via Twitter late last night, the band stated that upon arrival at Harare International Airport yesterday, they were immediately ordered to leave the country with no explanation offered.

The only plausible reason for this, and their inability to gain accreditation to perform, is the 2010 release of their song Chicken To Change. The music video features President Robert Mugabe as a latex puppet in a re-enactment of his 1980 Independence speech. The video incorporates political characters derived from the satirical South African show, ZA News, including Jacob Zuma, Helen Zille, Zwelinzima Vavi, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Towards the end of the video, Mugabe’s caricature turns into a chicken, underscoring the song’s message that the leader has lost his standing and respectability due to an inability to change with the times.

In the same year as the song’s release, Freshlyground had their working visas to Zimbabwe revoked just before a scheduled performance in Harare. Before the release of Radio Africa, the album which features Chicken To Change, the band had previously played in Zimbabwe at the 2009 National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) ceremony and at Hifa in 2004.

Mixed emotions have been expressed by Zimbabweans via social media about the cancellation with some feeling that state censors have acted irrationally to curtail freedom of artistic expression, while others feel that the festival organisers should not have publicised the band’s appearance if accreditation for the performance was not guaranteed. Some feel that the group should not have expected entry into the country again after releasing their controversial 2010 song.

Not the only controversy at this year’s festival, the play Lovers in Time came under intense scrutiny – from both the state and the public –  for its reworking of the historical narrative of the 1800s anti-colonial figures, Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi, who are transported into contemporary post-colonial Zimbabwe wherein they switch sex and race and experience Zimbabwe in different bodies.  Its last showing yesterday was delayed by almost 30 minutes and featured police presence and audience protest.

Stand-up comedy
Amid the web of controversy, stand-up comedians seems to somehow have managed to get away with it at this year’s festival.

Two of the comedy shows on offer, 75% (comprising three local comedians, Comrade Fatso, Michael Kudakwashe and Clive Chigubu) and Carl Joshua Ncube’s one-man act held audiences in braces of laughter with jokes about the adventures and misadventures of Zimbabwean life.

Attracting a racially mixed audience at the Reps Theatre auditorium – a venue of historical privilege which is still patronised by a largely white audience in between Hifa performances – the performers showed a consciousness and ease about discussing race. In one of his skits, Kudakwashe joked that while the black people in the audience may have had reservations about coming to the show, they couldn’t resist it when they heard it was comedy (as opposed to high art). Also, Comrade Fatso took to unpacking the different colloquialisms used among Zimbabweans – black, white, Indian and coloured – to show their concurrent hilarity and inaccessibility to those outside each racial grouping.

While it might seem risqué for a white performer in Comrade Fatso (real name Samm Monro) to make fun of race, he is of the long tradition of satire and political commentary in Zimbabwe. Starting out about a decade ago as a dreadlocked spoken word artist, his moniker is a deliberate play on the socialist tradition of comradeship among Zanu-PF’s leadership, while Fatso is a common corruption of the Shona name, Farai, which Monro has adopted. Monro is also co-anchor of Zimbabwe’s satirical comedic news show, Zambezi News, which provides commentary on politics and the state in Zimbabwe.

Nevertheless, it was Carl Joshua Ncube who raised the stakes higher in his one-man act. Everything came under humorous attack including the weakened MDC party, the state broadcaster’s idolisation of Mugabe and tribal differences among Zimbabweans, which all elicited howling laughter.

Carl Joshua Ncube. (Pic: Fungai Machirori)
Carl Joshua Ncube. (Pic: Fungai Machirori)

“Initially, political comedy had to be ambiguous because people always felt that if you made fun of Mugabe you were MDC, and if you made fun of Tsvangirai, you were Zanu-PF,” he states.

Joking about religion
When Ncube turns his humour to religion, however, the contrast is striking. Stifled audience response is offered as he makes a sexual joke veiled as a prayer and when he references the popular Pentecostal prophet, Emmanuel Makandiwa, who has promised to walk on water.

“My biggest challenge right now is religious leaders,” says Ncube adding that he has received death threats from church leaders and congregants of different churches and denominations he makes jokes about.

Ncube identifies as a Christian.

“Right now, I am deliberately holding back a lot of content because I need to get to a point where I am not seen as the anti-Christ,” he adds.

Ncube, who has steadily become a household name in Zimbabwean comedy, sees increasing acceptance of his more political content as a natural progression of political discourse in Zimbabwe; something which is not apparent in religious discussions.

Zimbabwe-born Takunda Bimha, founding director of the South-Africa based comedy agency, Podium The Comedy Merchants, concurs.

“Compared to South Africa, it’s been a lot more difficult to get a comedy industry going in Zimbabwe given the many issues the country is going through and the obvious sensitivities around politics and religion,” he observes.

Bimha’s agency has managed big South African names in comedy including Trevor Noah and currently boasts names like Kagiso Lediga and Loyiso Gola.

“Comedy comes from pain and a place where you need to say something,” Bimha adds. “And given Zimbabwe’s circumstance, this makes for great content.”

While this year’s local Hifa comedy performances have shown an increasing ease among Zimbabweans to laugh at themselves, they also underscore that with the return to one-party rule and the seeming demise of the MDC, religion is increasingly gaining purchase as the new and untouchable political paradigm in Zimbabwe.

At the same time, it is also clear that Zimbabwe’s political history remains off limits to humorous representation and artistic re-interpretation.

Zimbabwe can laugh … just not at everything.

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for women, Her Zimbabwe, and is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter. 

Free at last: The day Zimbabwe became independent

Methodist church reverend Canaan Banana (left) and his wife Janet share a moment with then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe (centre) and his wife Sally five days before independence celebrations. (Pic: STF)
Methodist church reverend Canaan Banana (left) and his wife Janet share a moment with then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe (centre) and his wife Sally five days before independence celebrations. (Pic: STF)

I wake up on election day in April 1980. Black Zimbabweans are learning to vote for the first time. It’s early in the morning. With no experience of voting, I reflect on the risk of spoiling the ballot paper. I feel like a child going to school for the first time. No one I know can give me an idea of what a ballot paper will look like.

Triangle Sugar Estate in south-eastern Zimbabwe can be a lonely place. It is just you and a few familiar faces, fellow teachers and cane cutters who are usually covered in black soot from the burning sugar cane.

When they cut cane, they don’t talk. Layers of black ash cover their faces. Perhaps they feel humiliated by their appearance. It is better to meet them in their clean states, not in sugar cane cutting gear. You just wave at them and leave them to meet their daily tonnage of harvested sugar cane. The stacks of cane they cut decide their earnings. There is no monthly salary. It is hard labour.

My friends and I have asked the company for permission to campaign for the Patriotic Front. It is granted, but on one condition: if the party of “terrorists” loses, we will all lose our jobs. We take the risk, print party T-shirts with party slogans for sale, and raise enough money for our fragile campaign.

In our small cars, we go from section to section, campaigning, making house visits and small speeches. No rallies. We walk and whisper the new political wind of change into all ears.

Then the day of the rally comes, and the big men arrive: Dzingai Mutumbuka, Dzikamai Mavhaire, Nolan Makombe, Basopo-Moyo, Nelson Mawema and other previously banned politicians.

A new destiny
There are speeches, and more speeches, and promises. Then there is spontaneous dancing and singing, men and women in a frenzy at the possibility of freedom, a new destiny.

With our poverty haunting us, hiring buses is a luxury out of our reach. People walk long distances to Gibo Stadium. That is the first rally of the “terrorists”, as the sugar company calls them. Thousands pack the stadium, singing and dancing. It is a joyous occasion.

It is the arrival of our dignity, freedom, a new self, a new nation, a fresh map of our destiny written in our own ink, even if that ink might be our blood.

Soon after that, on a Tuesday morning, I am at the garage to get my car fixed. The young white lady serving me has a small radio on her desk. She is slow to serve me. It is news time.

She fiddles frantically with the radio knob to get the best reception to listen to the election results before attending to me. She tells me that “Bishop” Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa is going to win. “Such a holy and gentle man,” she says.

But, in a few minutes, the British election official belts out the results.

The woman breaks down, crying. I try to help her up, to console her, as she shouts: “Terrorists! Terrorists! The British have let us down! Terrorists! I am leaving! Terrorists!” As I try to calm her down, her boss enters and takes her away. He thinks I have offended her. I tell him it was the election results. He nods and makes out my receipt. I pay and get my car keys.

A few days later, on April 18, the party does not seem to have come to an end. Far off, in Harare, Bob Marley graces the independence celebrations overseen by Robert Mugabe and Prince Charles. It’s an event of two Bobs and the Wailers.

My friends and I are no longer enemies of the sugar company. We are the new heroes. The threats of ­dismissal are rescinded.

We are invited to all the formerly prohibited venues for celebration. The sugar company buys all the chickens available from local butcheries. Cows and bulls are donated to the festivities. And the party goes on for what seems like eternity.

The dancing! Oh, the dancing! The eating. The music! The orderly chaos! One man, a Mr Chikanga, challenges anyone to a chicken-eating contest. He devours five large roasted birds in a few minutes.

Another man, primary school teacher Mr Chidhumo, the father of infamous convicted murderer and robber Stephen Chidhumo, dances until he breaks his leg. He ignores the pain until we call an ambulance and he is forced to abandon the party for the hospital.

He insists on taking his whisky glass with him to the hospital, but the ambulance driver will have none of it. The driver grabs the glass and drinks it himself. It is celebration time, and no one wants to be left out. All is forgiven.

April 18, the day a new national flower was born, still lingers in my imagination.

It was a day of hope and pride, the arrival of a new self, a new being, a fresh flower of our human dignity. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s “swords-to-ploughshares” speech enkindles our hope further.

Like the Bulawayo statue, we “look to the future” with an incisive sense of aspiration in our hearts.

The birds of hope have deposited new eggs in our hearts of hope, a new destiny is possible, we say to our silent but smiling hearts.

I wake up on election day in April 1980. Black Zimbabweans are learning to vote for the first time. It’s early in the morning. With no experience of voting, I reflect on the risk of spoiling the ballot paper. I feel like a child going to school for the first time. No one I know can give me an idea of what a ballot paper will look like.

Triangle Sugar Estate in south-eastern Zimbabwe can be a lonely place. It is just you and a few familiar faces, fellow teachers and cane cutters who are usually covered in black soot from the burning sugar cane.

When they cut cane, they don’t talk. Layers of black ash cover their faces. Perhaps they feel humiliated by their appearance. It is better to meet them in their clean states, not in sugar cane cutting gear. You just wave at them and leave them to meet their daily tonnage of harvested sugar cane. The stacks of cane they cut decide their earnings. There is no monthly salary. It is hard labour.

My friends and I have asked the company for permission to campaign for the Patriotic Front. It is granted, but on one condition: if the party of “terrorists” loses, we will all lose our jobs. We take the risk, print party T-shirts with party slogans for sale, and raise enough money for our fragile campaign.

In our small cars, we go from section to section, campaigning, making house visits and small speeches. No rallies. We walk and whisper the new political wind of change into all ears.

Then the day of the rally comes, and the big men arrive: Dzingai Mutumbuka, Dzikamai Mavhaire, Nolan Makombe, Basopo-Moyo, Nelson Mawema and other previously banned politicians.

A new destiny
There are speeches, and more speeches, and promises. Then there is spontaneous dancing and singing, men and women in a frenzy at the possibility of freedom, a new destiny.

With our poverty haunting us, hiring buses is a luxury out of our reach. People walk long distances to Gibo Stadium. That is the first rally of the “terrorists”, as the sugar company calls them. Thousands pack the stadium, singing and dancing. It is a joyous occasion.

It is the arrival of our dignity, freedom, a new self, a new nation, a fresh map of our destiny written in our own ink, even if that ink might be our blood.

Soon after that, on a Tuesday morning, I am at the garage to get my car fixed. The young white lady serving me has a small radio on her desk. She is slow to serve me. It is news time.

She fiddles frantically with the radio knob to get the best reception to listen to the election results before attending to me. She tells me that “Bishop” Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa is going to win. “Such a holy and gentle man,” she says.

But, in a few minutes, the British election official belts out the results.

The woman breaks down, crying. I try to help her up, to console her, as she shouts: “Terrorists! Terrorists! The British have let us down! Terrorists! I am leaving! Terrorists!” As I try to calm her down, her boss enters and takes her away. He thinks I have offended her. I tell him it was the election results. He nods and makes out my receipt. I pay and get my car keys.

A few days later, on April 18, the party does not seem to have come to an end. Far off, in Harare, Bob Marley graces the independence celebrations overseen by Robert Mugabe and Prince Charles. It’s an event of two Bobs and the Wailers.

My friends and I are no longer enemies of the sugar company. We are the new heroes. The threats of ­dismissal are rescinded.

We are invited to all the formerly prohibited venues for celebration. The sugar company buys all the chickens available from local butcheries. Cows and bulls are donated to the festivities. And the party goes on for what seems like eternity.

The dancing! Oh, the dancing! The eating. The music! The orderly chaos! One man, a Mr Chikanga, challenges anyone to a chicken-eating contest. He devours five large roasted birds in a few minutes.

Another man, primary school teacher Mr Chidhumo, the father of infamous convicted murderer and robber Stephen Chidhumo, dances until he breaks his leg. He ignores the pain until we call an ambulance and he is forced to abandon the party for the hospital.

He insists on taking his whisky glass with him to the hospital, but the ambulance driver will have none of it. The driver grabs the glass and drinks it himself. It is celebration time, and no one wants to be left out. All is forgiven.

April 18, the day a new national flower was born, still lingers in my imagination.

It was a day of hope and pride, the arrival of a new self, a new being, a fresh flower of our human dignity. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s “swords-to-ploughshares” speech enkindles our hope further.

Like the Bulawayo statue, we “look to the future” with an incisive sense of aspiration in our hearts.

The birds of hope have deposited new eggs in our hearts of hope, a new destiny is possible, we say to our silent but smiling hearts.

Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean writer living in exile in Europe. This piece was first published in the Mail & Guardian’s Zimbabwe edition.

Zimbabwe’s crocs go veggie for high fashion

Crocodiles are some of the most feared predators in Africa, ruthless reptiles renowned for tearing their prey to pieces before swallowing hunks of meat raw.

But in the baking sun at Nyanyana crocodile farm on the shores of Zimbabwe’s Lake Kariba, feeding time has a surreal edge as the beasts nibble lazily at bowls of vegetarian pellets.

Besides being cheaper than meat, the diet of protein concentrate, minerals, vitamins, maize meal and water is said to enhance crocodile skin destined to become handbags or shoes on the catwalks of New York, Paris, London or Milan.

“We don’t feed them meat any more,” said Oliver Kamundimu, financial director of farm owner Padenga Holdings.

“It actually improves the quality because we now measure all the nutrients that we are putting in there, which the crocodile may not get from meat only,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Crocodiles feed on vegetarian pellets inside a pen at Nyanyana Crocodile Farm in Kariba. (Pic: Reuters)
Crocodiles feed on vegetarian pellets inside a pen at Nyanyana Crocodile Farm in Kariba. (Pic: Reuters)

Four hundred kilometres northwest of Harare, Nyanyana is home to 50 000 Nile crocodiles and is one of three Padenga farms around Kariba, Africa’s largest man-made lake.

The company has 164 000 crocodiles in all and started feeding pellets in 2006 at the height of an economic crisis in Zimbabwe that made meat scarce and very expensive.

Initially, the pellets contained 50% meat but that has gradually been phased out to an entirely vegetarian diet.

“We have moved gradually to a point where we reduced the meat to about 15% then to 7% and where we are now there is zero meat, zero fish,” he said.

“It’s a much cleaner operation and the crocs are getting all the nutrients they want from that pellet.”

Fed every second day, the crocodiles are largely docile and lie asleep in their enclosures as workers walk around casually cleaning up leftovers.

Hermes, Gucci
The crocodiles are slaughtered at 30 months, when they are about 1.5 metres long and their skin is soft and supple.

Last year Harare-listed Padenga sold 42 000 skins to tanneries in Europe, especially France, where the average skin fetches $550.

Ninety percent of the leather becomes high-end handbags, Kamundimu said, while the remainder makes belts, shoes and watch straps for some of the biggest names in world fashion.

“When you hear names like Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Gucci – those are the brand names we are talking about,” he said with a satisfied smile.

Having survived economic collapse and hyperinflation of 500 billion percent in Zimbabwe, Padenga then had to deal with fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, and economic contraction in the euro zone, its main market.

However, while appetite for crocodile meat cooled in Europe and Asia, super-wealthy European shoppers shrugged off recession and continued to snap up crocodile-skin items, Kamundimu said.

“When you look at people who buy handbags for their wives or daughters that cost $40 000 a piece, even when the euro zone problems came, they could still afford to buy,” he said. We didn’t feel a decline.”

MacDonald Dzirutwe for Reuters

Zimbabwe: State paternalism and the policing of women’s bodies

Recently, a Kenyan friend and I had a long conversation about the objectification of women’s bodies in our respective countries, and the role of popular culture therein. As with all cultural industries, there are many avenues for such sexist expressions. But we eventually got stuck on the music sector, and two offerings in particular.

Hers was a song, Fundamentals, by a Kenyan musician known as Ken wa Maria. In the song, he points at the woman he is cuddling up to – even pointing to her nether regions at some point – and states quite authoritatively:

“These are the things,

These are my things,

These are your things,

These are the fundamentals.”

Apparently her body and its composite elements are “the things”, and these things are his before they are hers, or anyone else’s. These are the fundamentals!

In turn, I shared a Zimbabwean song from the late 90s. Called Special Meat (need I really say more?!), the singer engages in Job-like wailing as he exhorts the listener to help him with locating some ‘special meat’. Yes, special meat, like the kind you go into a butchery to buy.

There is a hilarity about these songs. As we watched and shared them online, we couldn’t help but laugh; the sort of laugh that finds these artefacts ridiculous and incomprehensible, and yet pervasively and dangerously catchy.

I am thinking of this interaction for a few reasons. Chief among them being an equally ridiculous and incomprehensible public notice featured in one of Zimbabwe’s main newspapers last week.

Nestled on the last page of the business section of The Herald of Wednesday March 26  is a notice – from the Registrar General  – which advises that there are “… some foreigners particularly Asians who masquerade as Zimbabweans whilst holding fraudulently acquired Zimbabwean documents…” and that “Some of them contract marriages with our local women.” Members of the public are therefore duly advised to “thoroughly scrutinize documents of all foreigners who are intending to marry Zimbabwean women”. Chiefs and village heads are also called upon to be “extremely vigilant”.

(Pic: Fungai Machirori)
(Pic: Fungai Machirori)

The xenophobic sentiment is enough to rile one up. But the authority of possession in referring to Zimbabwe’s women as a commodity of the state is disparaging and infuriating, to say the least.

The same Registrar General’s office, with Tobaiwa Mudede at its helm, has been the cause of much consternation to Zimbabwean mothers. The Guardianship of Minors Act, a piece of legislation granting guardianship rights and decision-making authority to a child’s father, has seen many mothers struggle to get basic documentation, such as passports, for their children owing to the fact that the Registrar General and his office have been known to make demands that the child’s father be physically present to sign accompanying forms on behalf of the child. A mother’s authority has not been deemed adequate.

The adoption of Zimbabwe’s new Constitution, however, now prohibits discrimination between men and women in terms of guardianship of children. Ironically, voting in this constitutional process took place a year ago in March. And yet a year later, we have notices from the same Registrar’s office reminding us that women are incapable of decision-making of any sort and are in desperate need of monitoring and surveillance; for our own good, of course.

This is not new, however. Zimbabwe’s Legal Age of Majority Act, passed into law in 1982, meant that for two years after Zimbabwe’s independence, women over the age of 18 were regarded as minors in issues such voting and ownership of property. In the same era, an operation to clear the streets of the capital city, Harare, of sex workers and vagrants was brought into force by the state. During this period, the government invoked emergency powers to detain women deemed to be ‘suspicious’’  At that time, over 6 000 women, many of whom were not part of the target group (for example, teachers, nurses and domestic workers), are thought to have been detained and/or arrested.

Walking in the suburb of the Avenues, sometimes nicknamed the red light district of Harare, after dark often still earns a woman an encounter with the police. And walking through town in a mini skirt – or any other form of clothing deemed inappropriate – still leads to women being publicly undressed and heckled.

State control is still set to full volume regardless of the raft of laws that seem to suggest otherwise.

Landmark ruling
The second reason I think of my interaction with my Kenyan friend is Mildred Mapingure who, in a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe last week, has had her appeal for compensation for a 2006 rape – that resulted in the birth of a child – partially allowed.

Mapingure is said to have sought emergency contraception within 72 hours of the rape to prevent pregnancy. The police, however, delayed her application.  Furthermore, the doctor overseeing the rape case is reported to have been unclear about the difference between a termination of pregnancy and emergency contraception.

While Mapingure’s pregnancy could have been avoided altogether, continual mishandling of her case meant that she was unable to have a medical abortion which is supposed to be provided for victims of rape as per the nation’s Termination of Pregnancy Act.

Indeed, Mapingure’s case is a watershed in the fight for justice, but it is also a chilling reminder of how the state continues to fail women. Whatever peace Mapingure may have made with the ordeal she has had to endure, the fact remains that the state’s lack of urgency and professionalism deprived this women governance over her body, and her future.

With international women’s month coming to an end yesterday, I am angered by the state’s continuing inability to handle women’s issues with the respect and fairness that they deserve.

These instances show a lack of confidence in women’s abilities to make reasoned decisions about their lives and aspirations, orienting our role in society to that of children. From the state and its paternalism to the sexist but body-jolting music we listen to, women are continually relegated to being viewed as objects and subjects.

April dawns today. On April 18, Zimbabwe clocks another year of independence.

Whose independence it is not, though, remains quite clear.

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for women, Her Zimbabwe, and is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter. 

I am an African first

(Pic: Flickr)
(Pic: Flickr / Pali_Nalu)

“Hi my name is Keith and I am African.”

This is how I choose to identify myself. Although I am Zimbabwean, Shona, black and Christian, I am an African first. I see myself as an intersecting set inside a Venn diagram.  I am too diverse to be an isolated set.

As people, we have an innate desire to belong. First we belong to our families, then our friends, our religion for some, our tribes, and our countries. When Africa was first colonised it was divided and land was shared like pieces of cake. A people who had been living together without any borders were now separated. They were separated in an attempt to keep them from communicating and standing together against the coloniser. Today, after decades of claiming our independence, we still cling on to the physical and superficial boundaries that were meant to divide and conquer our ancestors.

The colonisers did not only divide us by physical boundaries, they separated us with anything that made us different. The Rwandese were separated by skin complexion, the Zimbabweans by language, the Kenyans by tribe, and the Nigerians by religion. Our differences were used against us as a method of oppressing us.  We focused on identifying with our tribes and took pride in our own language. Because of that we did not have time to stand as one and say, “Hey brother, let’s kick out the oppressor!”

I fear is that my generation has not broken free of the chains of the oppressor. If a Nigerian and Kenyan are having a conversation in which the Kenyan says he likes to swim and the Nigerian asks if the Kenyan likes to run as well, the conversation tends to end with an air of animosity. People take offence or suddenly feel the urge to stand up and be patriotic when another African comments about stereotypes related to their country. We feel we have to represent our people.

I recently asked one of my Kenyan friends: “Would you be offended if I commented about the tribal violence that occurred during the post-election period?” He said yes – without even hearing my comment. However, if a non-Zimbabwean had asked me about Robert Mugabe and the situation in Zimbabwe, I would have reacted with equal hostility. But why? Are we all not Africans? Do we not all go through difficulties? Why would I feel a sense of hostility towards someone who wanted to share their opinion with a fellow African? I smiled and realised that our underlying problem as a community and as a people in society is that we want to hang on to the very things that hold us captive.

When I meet someone from Africa, they must tell me what country they come from. I would rather meet you and know your name and that you are African. The rest is irrelevant because by being African I know you understand how our parents will not hesitate to scold us, I know you understand the value of storytelling and vibrant African music. I know you understand the rot of corruption. Because you are African we become one. We are like puzzle pieces – different yet complementary.

I really hope people let go of mental barriers and borders because we will honestly never reach where we aspire to be if we keep reciting our passport nationalities. Tribes, languages and religions should not separate us. Instead, as Africans we should unite behind our diversity.

The more we keep fighting among ourselves the more easily those from outside can come and loot.

After reading Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa Must Unite, I believe his message showed true Pan-Africanism. Although his plan could have been improved, his fundamental aim of unity was nothing short of visionary. I was surprised when I heard my peers say how they hated the idea of a borderless Africa. The very people who wanted to change Africa and make a positive impact did not want free travel and trade in Africa. If we think as Tunisians, South Africans and Ivoirians then we will never be completely free. The day the white man convinced us that him being of a fairer skin meant that he was superior is the day black people became slaves.

We need to realise that by virtue of us being African, we ride in the same boat. GDPs may be different but as far as I know all countries on the African continent are developing countries. If we worked and traded more among ourselves maybe we would stop being beggars of aid, maybe we could actually put together our resources and pay our debts. The issue is that we have fallen into the trap of a ‘crab bucket mentality’.

Crabs are caught from the sea alive and put into buckets by fishermen. The fishermen do not bother closing the buckets or killing the crabs because if one crab tries to climb to the top and escape, the other crabs will pull it back in. Africans are like crabs in a bucket. We will forever be in a perpetual cycle of poverty if we keep pulling each other back instead of lifting each other up.

The economists and the realists will then step in and say that if we focus on improving ourselves we will inevitably improve the continent as a whole. Improving ourselves does not mean keeping what is ours tightly clenched in our fists, because ultimately we complement each other. I am proud of being a Zimbabwean, but I am African first. My roots stretch from Cape to Cairo.

Keith Tinotenda Simbarashe Mundangepfupfu is a student at the African Leadership Academy. He blogs at theblogwithnopurpose.wordpress.com. Connect with him on Twitter: @whiplash16