I’ve seen you guys at HIFA for a few years now…
This is our fourth year.

What does your stand sell?
Peanuts, peanut butter and roasted corn.

What is the idea behind your stand?
We want to promote our traditions beginning with food. Some people think that tradition is not good. As you can see I’m a youth, so we want young people to be able to appreciate our traditions.

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.

“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.

Saw Eclipsed – was wonderful, simple, complex, moving and a sad, refreshing yet engaging experience.
- Gavin Peter