Since the introduction of the Internet in Zimbabwe a lot of people have started to embrace social media as a means to share information and to socialize. In countries in the Middle East social media was mainly used to cover the Arab spring protests where citizen journalists, only armed with a camera phone and Internet connection, managed to cover the events. Recently in Zimbabwe the press has been awash with stories of poor service delivery. The most recent and painful one being of a child who was seriously burnt by naked ZESA cables, the child eventually died. The good thing about citizen journalism is its done by citizens reporting on issues relating to their day to day lives and one can it do it without incurring any costs. Since an informed citizenry is a basic principal of self-governance, citizen journalists are the people who report from the ground and this makes their stories more credible than most of the profit driven articles we now read from the established media houses.

If you live in Greendale you might have seen fliers from the Greendale Seventh-Day Adventist Church littering the streets. On the one hand they want you to come and “be blessed”. And on the other they think nothing of chucking their literature on the streets leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. So spiritual …

“This had better have a good ending Jamie….”
- Val Maasdorp on The Cambria

Petina Gappah

Stunner

On my way out after a show last night a young man spotted the camera around my neck and demanded (in a nice way) that I take his picture, pretty soon a couple of his friends wanted their pictures too. Now, usually I’m wary of being alone with three young men in the dark, but HIFA has a way with people. We had a lot of laughs taking the photos and they even took down our web address to see them live on the internet.