The immigration official at Harare’s Robert Mugabe International Airport looked up after examining my passport, his face expressionless. “Why have you come to Zimbabwe?” “To celebrate,” I replied. “What will you be celebrating?” “Zimbabwe’s liberation,” I said, holding my breath. Journalists without visas have not been welcome in Zimbabwe for most of Robert Mugabe’s autocratic reign. […]
In my lifetime I have so far missed two critical turning points in the country of my birth, Zimbabwe. The first event was Independence Day on 18 April 1980 which marked the beginning of our freedom from colonialism. Legend and a few grainy video clips and images show that the day was full of ecstatic […]
18 November 2017. A day that polarised Zimbabweans. The majority of Harareans heeded the call to march for Robert Gabriel Mugabe to resign after 37 years in power. People who had never attended a single political gathering came out from the suburbs, the ghettos, everywhere. “I had to play my part in putting paid to […]
On 10 November, I flew into a country whose citizens were doing the best they could to survive in the economically and emotionally bankrupt nation that Zimbabwe had become during the last half of President Robert Mugabe’s 37 years of governing. It was no secret that the First Lady, the so-called Doctor Amai Grace Mugabe, […]
As a former student of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, I have had the opportunity to ask the former president and patron of the institution, Thabo Mbeki, questions on the ‘Zimbabwean Issue’ at a Q&A session. It is a topic in which he was lambasted for what was termed as ‘quiet diplomacy’ during his […]
My identity straddles African borders. I was born in Zambia to a Zimbabwean mother and a South Africa father. Of the three countries, I carry South African citizenship. On social occasions I have often been at loggerheads with my compatriots who self-identify as pan-African. There are, you see, African politicians they will not brook criticism […]
Zimbabwe has a new president thanks to what its military chiefs called an “intervention” to “weed out criminals” that were negatively affecting the work of the President. The actions of the army generals ended up leading to a popularly, if not emotionally, supported removal of President Mugabe, the man they had initially pledged to be […]
I was born in 1988, eight years after Zimbabwe’s independence from British colonial rule. I am thus considered a “Born Free” — meaning one born after the liberation war. For a long time, particularly over the last two decades and the fraught turmoil we have endured as Zimbabweans, the term has been used to denigrate […]
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe I’n’I a-liberate Zimbabwe. So sang the late, great, Jamaican reggae star, Bob Marley in 1979, just a year before the country was finally won its independence from white rule. Today, with Robert Mugabe forced to resign as President after being fired by his party and with Zimbabwe about to inaugurate a new […]
