Listen to Gavin Peter’s daily brief audio blog on happenings at HIFA. Click here!

The Harare International festival of the Arts (HIFA) is a six day annual festival and workshop programme that showcases the very best of local, regional and international arts and culture in a comprehensive festival programme of theatre, dance, music, circus, street performance, spoken word and visual arts.

During this year’s festival Kubatana have been inspiring people to get involved and support the arts in Zimbabwe by sharing information about the festival over mobile phone. Working with the actor Gavin Peters, Kubatana is running a daily information service . . .

Tune in Daily during HIFA to the FABULOUS Gavin Peters

It’s all about the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) at the moment folks so make sure to . . .

Listen to Gavin talk about what’s hot, what’s not. And, if you’re lucky you might get some saucy festival gossip as well.

Liberate your ears for a daily dose of fun.

Gavin would also like to hear your festival feedback, so Leave him a Message!

Phone 0914 186255 up to 8 NOW and during the run of the festival.

If you still doubt the power of people, ask the ZESA bosses who locked themselves in their offices when confronted by scores of women, not violent but demanding to express their grievances over the unfair charges by the main power service provider. Surely there is a powerful force in numbers and in unity of purpose. The number of those who participated in the demonstration clearly shows that the most affected people by power cuts are women who have the load of looking for firewood for preparing meals. They are the ones who feel the gap left by power cuts and the pain of looking for alternatives and preparing food in smoky fireplaces. People now resort to traditional meat preservation methods, because fridges are no longer reliable.

And all this is putting pressure on the sparsely distributed population of flora around the city.

If birds and rabbits had the capacity, they should have joined the streets in protest for their natural habitat is no more in and around Harare.  Even the fish of the Mukuvisi River should have joined in because deforestation coupled with poor practices of urban farming that have seen streams losing their depth.

Since 2008, when the Forestry Commission encouraged the urban authorities to consider tree planting as a means of curbing further deforestation, nothing has been seen on the positive front. Axes are at work on a daily basis, but no seeds are being planted to replace the trees.

Not only is this predominant in the cities; even the countryside has almost doubled, if not trebled, a tree devouring appetite. New farmers have for the past decade been clearing forests for farming, building homesteads as well as for firewood. The use of firewood for the preparation of the best paying farming crop, Virginia tobacco, is also a cause for concern.  Almost every new farmer appreciates tobacco as the best paying crop and wants to grow it. There is no electricity or coal for preparing this crop; only available is the natural tree that has taken thirty years or centuries to mature only to fall in less than a few minutes destined for preparing tobacco.

Agricultural extension officers are doing their work in teaching people how to grow tobacco, how to prepare it and how to sell it. But I wonder if there are any initiatives on how to plant new trees, how to preserve the existing ones and also on the use of alternative power sources.

Global warming is seeing a shift of seasons, and an unreliability of rainfall, a phenomena that should be of concern to farmers and yet, only the axe is at work. It is high time the authorities start giving value to the natural vegetation.

I want many people to wake up and do something for the sake of our environment, in unity so our voices can be heard.

Its amazing how much life can about one’s self. We can be so consumed on what we don’t have and what we would never have. But we never take stock of what we have. I fell in that category until a few days ago when I went to a presentation on Chiezda Child Care Centre. I tell you I was moved and challenged at that moment I realized that life sometimes has to cease to be about me and what I don’t have or what I wish I had. There are children in that center that have experienced life beyond their young ages. This is where the center comes in to try and help them realize that they can be more than just orphaned people. Though the center doesn’t have boarding facilities the children are offered food on a daily basis after school. They are also taught different life skills. For example the children are given the chance to play soccer while others are exposed to sewing and raising poultry. Unfortunately the current political and economic situation has taken its toll on the centre. The centre has not escaped the limited funding and scarce donations. Like I said before I was challenged and have stopped thinking of only myself. I am going to consider other people and be involved in making a difference in at least one person’s life. I would like to encourage you to take time go visit these child care facilities and you will be surprised at how much you could do in changing someone’s life. Your help doesn’t have to be monetary – your presence can inspire those children to hope and dream beyond being just a surviving orphan.

Mbizo Chirasha sent Kubatana some gut wrenching words to mark Zimbabwe’s independence. Have a read:

State of the Nation

dreams and thoughts floating in stinking
bubbling sewer streams
broken pipes
broken voters
broken ballots
broken roads

banks stink hunger
stomachs of dust laden kindas thunder war
poverty shriveled chests of mothers luggage sorrow baggage
sorrows blooming like flowers every season

mothers cutting the freedom cake
with aluminum tears foiled faces
children munching the FREEDOM
cream with poverty rugged
yellow maize teeth
fathers celebrating with election chopped arms

ministers mecerdes swimming in highway potholes
corruption, the vaseline that polishes the floor of the state
flowers of Justice died with last decade sinking sun
daughters eat political regalia like omelet for breakfast
sons eating torn diplomas and
soot laden certificates for supper

peasants eating the smell of the sun
voters enjoying the perfume of propaganda again
mentally sodomized
the scars of the last season
is the signature of the next election
wounds of last winter bloom another pain in this winter

diggers of the truth bring me jugs filled with lemon juice of justice
bring the ladder to the jewel laden bethel of freedom
i am drunk with barrels of orange bitterness

freedom is the placard on your chest?
democracy is how you shake your fist?

freedom sing me a song
erase these wounds from the charcoal of violence
machetes signatured leadership name tags on mother breasts
pink bras coughing blood beside dead ballot boxes
bullets wrote epitaphs for funerals of children unlimited
black cockerels drinking black eggs in dying winter nights
black nights
acid of politics bleaching the trust of the flag
colors melting in the vaseline of grief

bring me the sneeze of murenga
download the cough of nehanda from her chest
blow the wind into the ears of mutapa stone
silence went with them to sleep, away from today’s wind

wind of change changed its compass
barometers cant stand the pressure
godfathers breakfasted promises of change
bathing with some bath-soap in froth filled tubs of corruption

rise for me the sun, that i see the club mixed color of the east
sink the sun for me that i smell the smelling breath of the west.

paparazzi smiling to the bank after recycled headlines
i am tired of the rhetoric

sing me the song of self discovery
for my identity is beyond the lotion of my skin
my identity is beyond the paint of my eyeballs
and the vaseline on my tongue
it is beyond the state of the nation

the nation that i baptize in my poetic ritual cleansing

the moonrise with chopped breasts
the sun rise with scarred forehead
I am a poet born in grapevines of colonial bitterness
and groomed in apple groves of freedom hatred

liberation. what?

light me better candles for another poem
a poem with freedom rhythm
and liberation rhymes

that politicians will weep in the hovels of their slogan rituals
and voters hear the real jesuses of their stomachs
that fat cats decide to run or to dance
and big fish fried by the oil of metaphors

political ghosts turn in their graves
after a ritual of poetic grapes
the sweetness and bitterness of words
repent dictators into democrats

for the womb that carried this freedom griot
have eaten grains of sand for lunch in the villages of dust
that last smelt the state motorcade last ballot season

If you have spent any amount of time in Harare, you’ll know of a popular spot called Mai Faffy’s. Located in the heart of Avondale – at one of the city’s busiest shopping complexes – Mai Faffy’s serves some of the tastiest sadza and relish to be had in Harare.

And as with any place named in such affectionate terms, there is a story behind  Mai Faffy’s – a story  I recall Faffy herself telling me.

After a spell of giving birth to only baby boys, Faffy’s mother finally had a baby girl – a girl she named Tafadzwa.

Faffy was the term of endearment that the family used to call Tafadzwa and it stuck so hard that everyone called her Faffy from then onwards.

Even to the day she died.

Faffy died in a car accident last week Monday, on the 12th of April  – a needless loss at the young age of 24. She would have turned 25 in October.

I only learnt of her death last Thursday from her best friend who sent me an SMS to tell me the shocking news.

It’s still unbelievable.

You may not have known Faffy, but on behalf of all who did know her – and in particular her friends and family – there is need to remember this remarkable young woman who has left this earth too soon.

What do you say when someone so full of life and promise dies so prematurely? Where do you start?

I remember getting a call from Faffy the day before I left to relocate to South Africa in November last year.

Faffy called me early in the evening wanting to make a plan to go out as her farewell gift to me.

I told her that I had a heap of ironing to do and would have to think about it first. Her response was typical Faffy.

“Stuff the iron in your bag and get all that done when you get to SA!”

In her world, there was too much living to be done without having to worry about mundane chores. I obviously didn’t listen to her, but now I wish I had and had just seized the moment and added yet another memory to the collection of brief moments that I spent with her.

When I asked her best friend, who’s also called Tafadzwa, what she’d like me to share about Faffy, she gave me  a long list of things.

But perhaps the most striking thing she shared was the range of people who attended Faffy’s funeral this past Saturday to pay their final respects to her. The lady who sold tomatoes from the corner of the block where Faffy lived came. Her neighbour, who named her child in honour of Faffy for escorting her to hospital in the desperate final stages of labour, also came.

Her kindness and accommodation of all people was well known and celebrated by those who loved and appreciated her most as they bade her a fond farewell.

Tafadzwa and I wanted to let you know about our remarkable friend, about the girl who always made time to brighten someone’s day, about the girl behind Mai Faffy’s.

She will live on in the vibe and atmosphere of Mai Faffy’s, in the laughter and chatter of friends and strangers alike who gather there each and every day.

So long Faffy, and thank you for the memories of a life well lived.