Imagine a warm summer evening. Two voices gather around fire, maybe share a meal or drink, and engage in a moment of dreaming. Listen to this ‘fireside chat’, a conversation between Baobab Community Engagement Associate Tanatsei Gambura and Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu. In it, they share, memories of home and childhood, offer a reading from “Imagination Library” and discuss the real meaning of building community and infrastructure. This is an invitation to be present and to allow ourselves to be surprised by the poetry of life surrounding us.
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Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a writer, editor and scholar from Zimbabwe working at the intersection of art, design and technology. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent. He has co-edited three books: Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (2019); Visa Stories: Experiences Between Law and Migration (2013) and State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry (2013). He is co-creator and lead researcher on readingzimbabwe.com a digital archive collecting, cataloguing, digitizing information on books about Zimbabwe from the 1950s to the present. He is also co-founder of a boutique creative agency, Black Chalk & Co, which brings together writers, artists, designers, academics, and technologists, engendering a new culture and new forms of publishing and creative production.
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Imagine a warm summer evening. Two voices gather around fire, maybe share a meal or drink, and engage in a moment of dreaming. Listen to this ‘fireside chat’, a conversation between Baobab Community Engagement Associate Tanatsei Gambura and Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu. In it, they share, memories of home and childhood, offer a reading from “Imagination Library” and discuss the real meaning of building community and infrastructure. This is an invitation to be present and to allow ourselves to be surprised by the poetry of life surrounding us.
*****
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a writer, editor and scholar from Zimbabwe working at the intersection of art, design and technology. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent. He has co-edited three books: Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (2019); Visa Stories: Experiences Between Law and Migration (2013) and State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry (2013). He is co-creator and lead researcher on readingzimbabwe.com a digital archive collecting, cataloguing, digitizing information on books about Zimbabwe from the 1950s to the present. He is also co-founder of a boutique creative agency, Black Chalk & Co, which brings together writers, artists, designers, academics, and technologists, engendering a new culture and new forms of publishing and creative production.
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Join the Baobab Platform today.
Tanatsei Gamburatsei Gambura:
My name is Tanatsei Gambura. I'm a Community Engagement Associate for the Baobab platform. And I'm excited to share with you today, a scintillating fireside chat that I'll be sharing with my friend, Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu. Tinashe is a writer, editor and scholar from Zimbabwe, working at the intersections of art, design and technology. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent and has co-edited three books: Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats, 2019, Visa Stories: Experiences Between Law and Migration, 2013. And in the same year, State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry.
Tanatsei Gambura:
He's a co-creator and lead researcher on readingzimbabwe.com, a digital archive collecting, cataloging, digitizing and making available information on books about Zimbabwe from the 1950s to the present. He is also a co-founder of a boutique creative agency, Black Chalk & Co, which brings together writers, artists, designers, academics and technologists, engendering a new culture and new forms of publishing and creative production. Tinashe is a WISER Institute fellow researching themes of knowledge features, and locations of African critical theory.
Tanatsei Gambura:
So, imagine us on a warm summer evening gathered around either a real or metaphorical fire, sharing a meal, a drink, and the connection. We're chatting about creativity, community and conceptualizing an Afrocentric utopia. Enjoy.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I have memories of sitting at the back of removal trucks. My family moved a lot. My parents only owned the house when I was a teenager, So we were always looking for better accommodation or the family was growing. So I've vivid memories of staying in a neighborhood for a little bit and we move to the next. And I had to change schools a few times. Sometimes when I look back, I think my love for travel or my itinerant existence almost comes from my childhood experiences.
Tanatsei Gambura:
For me, it's about belonging to a family that's in whatever is an emerging middle class in Zimbabwe in the late '90s. My parents worked just as hard as any other parents, but it was always difficult finding yourselves in situations where you're situationally poor as they describe it. And you have to move houses and you don't really have a place to call home and you take on this kind of nomadic identity of a traveler and of a mover. And in some ways have brought a lot of difficulties and grief, but at the same time, I can see how it made me personally and I suppose for my siblings as well, someone who's very sensitive to different cultural and social contexts and how life works across demographics, across social class, across race and that kind of thing.
Tanatsei Gambura:
And for me, that's definitely been central to my creative pursuits and my creative interests. So I definitely share in that. I did ask if you would prepare a short reading of a text, perhaps your favorite texts from any, I don't know what you've chosen, it can be anything at all, but I'm really excited to hear what you've prepared for us if you don't mind sharing.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I will read to you from my pamphlet, which I've recently published called Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive. So it's a small booklet based on some aspects of Dambudzo Marechera's life and I'm particularly interested in his final years, he tried to start what I call a writing clinic in Harare, but it only went for four days. So there's also a mythical story behind it, but this is what he says in his own words. And in my pamphlets, it's in part two that I have called Imagination Library.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So Dambudzo Marechera writes, "I was a literary agent for four and a half days. On the first day, I received 300 telephone calls from people all over the country who wanted advice on writing and publishing or who just wanted to know what kind of things I would be advising people on. At least 150, actually come to see me in the office on that first day. The next day, with it spread and even more people and calls were coming in. I scrapped my lunch hours and would sometimes work in the office until over nine o'clock. I enjoyed my work. I put all my heart and mind into it. It was a pitiful saga that unfolded before me the more I listened to the hopes and trials of those who came to the office.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Each night after witnessing such a horror show mascaraed, I'd pub crawl and get as drunk as I could and let the darkest minutes of the night crawl into my slimy alley and try to snow the world out of my mind. When drunk, I sleep the sleep of the just. What happened to them touched me."
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
And then this is my brief commentary about the parts which I've just read. More often than not, Dambudzo Marechera was the resident philosopher in Harare's nightclubs and bars. Random young people, the Dream Children, as Yvonne Vera called them, would gather around him to listen to his views and feel the sensation of overcoming the impossible. The majority of them were ex-combatants. They swarmed around for his opinion on all kinds of matters, such as politics, religion, and sex.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
They were getting bored with the corrupted legacies of the nationalist heroes rebellious against tradition, suspicious of the promises of the new black rulers. And so they eagerly identified with [inaudible 00:06:49] iconoclasm. To them, his was a fearless voice that undermined every kind of complacency and hypocrisy. Marechera released his role as a public intellectual. But from time to time, he'd tend against his audiences when he was drunk or paranoid. Harare had not underground publishing scene, and Marechera individually facilitated an alternative model. He was frequently approached with manuscripts by aspiring writers. At the times, it was Central Intelligence Office Operatives who approached him pretending to be writers in a beat to spy on him.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
"There were among them a few whom I recognize as male intelligence agents out to find out what exactly I was doing." He writes. If there's anything Marechera contributed, he introduced a new form of writing that is more improvisational. This marked the generational shift from his contemporaries, who were then gate keepers and presiding over publishing houses and teaching literature, the country's own investor at the time.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Marechera always carried copies of his own books in a rack set, which is so directly to readers in order to get money for booze. Once purchased, the books would circulate among readers until the copies fell apart.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Yeah, so this is from my pamphlets which came out in July, 2020.
Tanatsei Gambura:
Firstly, congratulations on having your publication out available to the rest of us to enjoy. I'm always so enthralled by your ability to capture and analyze Marechera's life and his significance, not only to Zimbabweans, but I think to a whole generation of African thought leaders and writers alike. So thank you for choosing that text. I guess that just moves me right next into my next provocation for you. I'm really interested. And then thinking about this text that you shared, why is story telling important to you as a writer?
Tanatsei Gambura:
And I really liked something that you mentioned about Marechera, the description you gave of him as kind of a pub philosopher whose ideas about life and our existence was very much, yes, in many ways he was an academic, but in many other ways, he rejected that colonial institution or the coloniality of academia and of education. And I suppose a philosophy within the confines of an ivory tower such as a Western education system. And so his storytelling was very different and very much about resistance and telling a new narrative and giving voice to a way with minds, like many of us I think identify with. And so when thinking about these ideas, why would you say storytelling is important to you specifically as a writer?
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I mean, look, that's a very important question. And I think for me, my first sort of experience of stories was through books; the book as an archive and the book as an experience. That's what I grew up with. But as I grew older, I started thinking about the archive behind the book, so the archive in its material form, but also the archive through people, through individuals who were sort of community repositories people are widely identified as sources of community knowledge. And Marechera, for me, has been one such individual to the point that I have had to go to school to study his methods, to study his impact on the Zimbabwean society.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
And that's in a way what I'm interested in when I think about reincarnating Marechera. The basis of the pamphlet, for example, is a series of letters. So after he died in 1987, young people across the country started writing to him or at least writing to the Trust that was established after he died. And the idea for a lot of these young people was that they were writing to him and the trustees were proxies to Marechera. So they shared their own frustrations, the fact that they were unemployed, they'd returned from war and suffering from PTSD and all kinds of things, but the government was not concerned.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So I think now I'm interested in sort of the stories that make our nation being preoccupied with sort of digging into the Zimbabwean National Archive, through my digital projects, through my book projects, through my exhibitions that I have been doing. Yeah, I think storytelling is very important. I mean, even if we go back to the '60s, there's a long history. Writers played a big role in the decolonial project, for example. So in the '60s, it was not just either the liberation movements that were fighting for the overturning of the colonial system. Writers were also playing the part. They were recording our histories. They were projecting our future aspirations as a black people, as an African people, as a Zimbabwean people. And so, I'm very interested in storytelling as an archival experience. And that is being part of my, especially my academic work to this point.
Tanatsei Gambura:
I really liked this idea of storytelling as both history making, but also very much a counter history to perhaps the dominant narratives that perhaps don't reflect the aspirations or the grievances of young people and also of the majority population of this thing that is called a state or a nation. And you've touched very intuitively on the difficulties, not only of writers, but I think that young African people historically and presently face in pursuing life or the specific creative pursuits. And I think the examples you cited where, for example, post-war PTSD following Zimbabwe's independence and unemployment, and those kinds of struggles.
Tanatsei Gambura:
And so I'd like to turn this question on to you and ask if you're comfortable sharing, perhaps what some of the challenges that you've come across as a writer or as an African or a Zimbabwean person who has an aspiration for themselves and for their country. But just like anyone else, I suppose, has challenges to face. What would you say, perhaps two or three of those major challenges have been?
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Yeah, I mean, thank you so much. The first one, I feel like there has been a generational disconnect. For example, in Zimbabwe, I'm part of what is loosely called the bond free generation, so the children who were after independence. And there has been a big generational disconnect between my needs, our needs as a generation, from our parents' generation or from the generation that brought independence. And that thing, that is something that is still ongoing, something that is unraveling in a place like Zimbabwe to the extent that we do not have a voice or at least we have to seek permission. We have to participate in this sort of patriotic history what Terence Ranger called patriotic history.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So if you deviate from that, or if you question that, you're deemed to be an enemy, or a puppet, or a traitor, or a sellout. So this is a language that has been used to define those among us who are either experimental or radical, who are just independent-minded. And I think another challenge is just operating in this very authoritarian societies. So even if we're to adopt technology as a medium, we find ourselves being censored. So there have been internet shut downs in places like Zimbabwe, in places like Uganda, like Burundi, many other African countries. So it has just been difficult to be expressive and we can not articulate ourselves fully because we're being watched, because we have to say and say things that do not conflict with the status quo.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I mean, maybe the final challenge has just been something beyond everyone's control. Our economies are not generous to creatives, especially writers. So if you are thinking about the hierarchy of needs for creatives, I think writers are at the very bottom of the chain, and that's been a challenge in itself, how do you make a living? How do you sustain yourself if you are invested in storytelling, if you're invested in writing books? Unless your book is adopted for the curriculum, you cannot make a living. So there are these kinds of interconnected challenges. Some of them are very political, some are economic. But at the same time, I think we are also finding ways of subverting those limitations and just, I think elevating our practice, elevating our methods, elevating our language, because I think at least for me all these things have liberated me to find a more defined language.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
It just means I have to confront head on, these challenges, in a way that maybe doesn't necessarily endanger myself or that doesn't end up in death, because these are real practical things. I think I've also tried to separate my love for storytelling, my love for archiving with activism. Not that activism is bad, but I think that it just means I failed to think deep about how I communicate and what methods, what formats, what mediums I adopt for pursuing my love for storytelling. So these are some of the challenges, but also the very challenges, I think they've been allowing us as a generation, as a younger generation, to find new ways of articulating ourselves and our aspirations and dreams.
Tanatsei Gambura:
I think difficult and heart rendering in many ways as these challenges are, I think they've also... I mean, not to romanticize them at all, but I think they can offer an opportunity to stretch the imagination and to challenge our imaginative capacities and to expand them into very subversive and powerful ways. And so that's really inspiring to hear, that you are being very intentional about how you communicate and who you communicate to. What I'm receiving from that is kind of the colonial logics, that pervades how our lives are constructed.
Tanatsei Gambura:
When you say something like when you look at the hierarchy of needs of an artist and a writer is at the very bottom, I am compelled to ask why and to think about a system that privileges infrastructure development and whatever is described as economic growth, privileges that over ideas of really growing a nation and the people's culture and the sense of south. Also, it's very clear that writing and any creative output, I suppose, it's so political. And I can't help, but see a link between storytelling and movements for change on the African continent and kind of the dialectic between those two. And I'm wondering if you can share, about what your thoughts are about the role of the writer or the creative in fostering real, authentic change on the African continent or fostering real or authentic leadership from young people on the African continent?
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Yeah. I mean, look, the role of the African writer specifically has, I think, has changed over time, I think in the early days of African literature. The publication of things fell apart in 1958. The African writer was seen as a teacher. Their duty was to educates, was to quench entice their community. And I think over time, the needs of our communities have gradually changed. The writer is no longer writing back to the Imperial powers. I think now we are also writing for ourselves. Writing has mutated into a form of self-expression, but at the same time there are also forces that dictates how we as young black, African writers can and should write. And that remains a challenge.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
If you want to be seen globally, you either have to play into the market forces. And that is dictated by forces beyond yourself. And I mean, that's obviously a very contentious subject that is no easy answer. But I think that we are also increasingly becoming experimental. I mean, because this is a very interesting question for many reasons. It's not a question that easily or summarily arises when people are speaking to European or American writers. But I think that for us, from the African continent, we almost always have to explain our politics, our contributions to the discourse that explains maybe the states of our nations and those kinds of things.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So I think what is also always missing is an appreciation of what actually happens on the ground in cities like Johannesburg, in cities like Nairobi, in cities like Harare. There are many interesting things that are happening, that are ignored by the mainstream, because they are not sponsored by global multinationals. And these are initiatives that are almost happening underground; self-initiated, self sponsored. So there are so many young people who are doing things for themselves. But because they are not part of the larger global program, they are completely ignored. And I mean, I'm increasingly interested in that. I'm interested in sort of that dialectic, that privileges, the African diaspora over the African on the continent. So there's a way in which, I guess, we are pitted against each other.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
One has validation, one doesn't. One is authentic, one isn't. And the funny thing, is that the one on the ground, the one living these everyday realities is not authentic. But the one who sees from a distance is authentic. So they're all these really interesting things that have been happening. I mean, I guess, I respond to this questions, not just as another creative, but I'm also responding as an academic or as a scholar, as someone who spends a lot of time reflecting on the retentions of being a creative in Africa or its diasporas, because I am privileged to move between the spaces. And for me, these sort of movements and dialogues increasingly inform my practice.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So in terms of how I think about my books or how I write them or how I want them to circulate, I think about these different spaces. I think we have to be intentional about building community. I think that is key to navigating a lot of these issues and tensions and problems. I think that we have to build communities within the places that we live, the places that we inhabit. And I think if we were to look back at the beginnings of African literature, our elders were very intentional about community. So you will find that Nairobi, Kampala, Johannesburg, they were all these places that writers tended to convene and congregate and share ideas and cross pollinate ideas.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
And I think that is one thing that is lacking because a lot of us right now are preached to run away from our sources, to run away from our homes in pursuance of international residences, international opportunities. And I think there's a way in which this very opportunities that give us visibility and money and awards also remove us from our experiences, remove us from ourselves. And I think that we should be intentional about building ourselves from within our communities. And I see that. When I first lived Zimbabwe, I was in my early 20s, to study abroad. And the writer I was before I left Harare, and the writer I became after my graduate studies in the UK for almost six years, it was completely different.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I couldn't recover the writer I was before. And every time I think about that, I always feel like I left too early before I had fully embraced or I had fully grown in my own home, in my own community. And so there are things that you can't recover once you've been displaced from the place that is also the source of your materials as a creative, as a writer. I think we also need to build infrastructure. Infrastructure is key. We need to build. We need to build our own bookshelves. We need to figure out how to teach ourselves this creative... Yeah, we need infrastructure. And I think I can't overemphasize this point. We are lacking infrastructure. I think that we need to find ways to crowdfund our interests.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I think we're still waiting for NGOs and foreign embassies and all these institutions to fund our art. And as they say, "He who pays the piper decides the tune." Or I'm butchering this saying, but the point is we need to start investing in our own creativity, and that is still not happening. And part of it is because we are lacking infrastructure. We're not building schools, we're not building residencies, we're not building all those things. We still assume that going to North America, going to Europe is what completes us as artists. Whereas those things should be happening within our backyards.
Tanatsei Gambura:
And I think they already are. I think in many ways, I mean, I'm back in Zimbabwe at the moment and having left and come back after just over a year, it's been so interesting to see how my perspective has changed about what art is and what does it mean to create. And these things that, for me, for a very long time had very Western attributes to them have metamorphosized in my mind into something completely different and authentic and indigenous. And I'm very excited to see how I'm connecting all these dots and just having a more, I think a bigger perspective about the world and what our identities as Africans and as transnational people mean.
Tanatsei Gambura:
I would like to go back to your point about community. I think that's the very first thing that you mentioned when I posed the question to you. And I share in that sentiment about community being central to the success of any pursuit we might engage in. What I'm wondering is what to you are the tenets of community. If you were to describe what community very practically needs to look like amongst African people, not only within the creative industry, but I think across sectors, we're working towards the same thing, working towards building infrastructure, working towards building authentic wealth and also decolonized wealth in our home countries. And in our context, what does a community that works together and is United look like in the sense that is meaningful to you?
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I mean, we just have to look into our traditional practices. Community, I think what you're already doing, these fireside chats, if we are to take them back into their original traditional context, there's a fire, there's a group of people around the fire, there is a drink, there is food that is shared. I mean, I think that we just have to tap into our traditional practices, things like [Bira 00:33:06]. A Bira is a platform for singing, for connecting with the other worlds. It brings storytellers, it brings poets, it brings different generations together.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So I think that we can identify forms and methods of building community from our traditional practices. And a lot of that was just sort of networking, identifying within our community people and their different skills. I think that when we look back into history, communities always identified who were the blacksmiths, who were the people can brew beer, who can make furniture, who can do all these things. And I guess the point is that community is already there, we just need to harness it. The problem is just that we are fracturing it, we are breaking it because we are trying to pursue the promises that these worlds far away from us promise. And almost always, they detach us from that community.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So everything. I mean, we have everything. We have everything that we need to make our creative community stronger. But I think we also need to reconnect with our elders, because this generational disconnect is a real thing. There's a breakdown. Knowledge is not a passing through as it should, because we are either fighting with our elders for the same resources. So there's kind of a log jam that has happened where our elders are also refusing to grow up and allow us as younger people to take charge, because they still see us as babies. So I mean, I think community already exists. We just need to find ways of harnessing it and building it to our advantage. And we should stop seeking that community outside, because I think that is where the breakdown is really happening.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
But I think community and infrastructure are pretty much connected, because once we have that infrastructure, where are we meeting? How are we convening these get togethers? And that way, institutions like book fairs, like festivals, like musical galas coming to play. It's platforms that allow us to come together to share our creative experiences, to build together, to collaborate. But unfortunately, we're always waiting for the big money, and that big money is not from within. And that just corrupts the whole system.
Tanatsei Gambura:
I really, really like this idea of infrastructure, not as a tool for mass economic pursuits or mass economic growth, of course, at the detriment of the rest of human life. But rather infrastructure as a tool or a site in which communities can meet. And I think it's important that we were intentional about countering these systems of knowledge production, which knowledges are validated, and which knowledges are allowed to influence culture and influence generations.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I mean, I think the other thing to think about is also kind of this inter-regional networks. So I'm very excited with platforms such as Aké Book Festival in Nigeria, Ubuntu in South Africa, Storymoja in Kenya. I think increasingly we're also seeing value in sort of crossing borders, if you like. We are sharing notes and experiences beyond our specific cultures and traditions. And I think that is also enriching sort of the new arts that is emerging out of Africa. We are increasingly interested in collaborating with each other, or at least being in dialogue with each other beyond our specific experiences. And I think that too has been important because it's also helping us bypass the limitations within our own spaces.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
So if a place like Harare or Zimbabwe is tightly controlled, it just means that our writing can be published outside in Kenya or in South Africa or in Nigeria. So there's ways in which this sort of inter-regional networks and connections are also triggering a new way of bypassing censorship and the other sort of material limitations and all that our specific conditions dictate on our practices.
Tanatsei Gambura:
You know, this into regional Pan-Africanism, if I can describe it in that way, has historically worked, has historically proved very successful. If we just look at, for example, liberation movements, which, I mean, that's a whole different conversation altogether, but just the idea of if your immediate geographic location has confined or limitations preventing you from doing said work. I think there are many examples of regional solidarity that has proved successful or has opened windows for this work to continue and to expand and to transcend borders. I think for me, that's very key, transcending the border, transcending the nation state, and the idea that imaginary lines of belonging and citizenship have such a weighty presence in our life. And so I really appreciate that you've brought that into this conversation.
Tanatsei Gambura:
I suppose, that brings me onto, I think my last question for you, Tinashe, which is really about... We've talked about the history, we've talked about the present, and I want to take a moment to really dive into the future or what it might be and what the possibilities, what the future for creating and for writing and for just pursuing meaningful work on the African continent looks like. And so for you personally, if you can imagine your Pan-African community centered creatively bolstered utopia on the African continent, what does that look like?
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
And African utopia is already being imagined. I've been excited with sort of the development of African science fiction, for example. I think we are beginning to think beyond the grime and grief that has always been associated with our existence. And I think I can see the future is within our streets, it's within our every resourcefulness. And I think that we just need to be present and conscious of noticing the ways that we have always survived. I think I am increasingly drawing lessons outside sort of the creative or artistic practices.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I'm very much interested in the creativity that I see in sort of the backyard industrial sites in places like Mbare in Harare or Glen View in Harare, where your dreams are made to come true. These are people that you can tell your vision of your aspiring middle-class life, and they can turn it into reality. They can make any type of furniture. I don't know, I think I'm always trying to look at the future in the present material conditions that we live in. And there's so many remarkable things that have made our societies very resilient, that are ignored because they're not fashionable or because they've not been validated by sort of Western eyes. And I think that is where the future lies.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
The future lies in our industry, in our innovativeness. And that also just means doing things for ourselves, and I think some of that is starting to happen, taking charge of publishing, taking charge of institutions of higher learning, because these are spaces and places of dreaming. And if our dreaming is conditioned by foreign interests, it is always going to be difficult to see our future or to see ourselves in the ways that we imagine. So I think it is important to pay attention to the material conditions that have allowed us to be resilient, even when people think that we there's no hope in our lives, in our existence, in all the things that we do.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I think that's how I imagine the future. The future is in the small joys that are always around us, that are never fully remarked because they have not been validated by foreign eyes.
Tanatsei Gambura:
What a brilliant point to just end off on and tie this conversation together with, about paying attention and being sensitive and awake to the present as a means of accessing what the future might look like. I think that's a principle that we can all learn from, and we can all apply to our daily lives. One thing that continues to inspire me is how you use your Instagram account as a means of documenting these moments of creativity or a fascination, or of curiosity that around all of us and that belong to and exists with the people in the streets that we walk in and in our communities, and in our homes. And yeah, the central idea of the present giving access to their future is so important. Thank you for sharing that utopia.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Yeah. No, I mean, thank you for bringing up my Instagram. I think what fascinates me is it's... I think the analogy for me is that it's almost like walking through the streets, looking down. And every time I lift my eyes, I'm always surprised by the things that surround me, by the poetry of life that surrounds me, like just the level of innovation and the level of entrepreneurship, the creativity the play with language. Those are the kinds of things that excite me, that these people are thinking. And a lot of times, like when I photograph names of small enterprises in our streets, I love just how aspirational some of those names are. They are transcending the sort of poverty or political limitations.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
These are people who can already see themselves as billionaires, as just significant as any other person. Being present is very, very important. And I mean, I love one team that you used or the team that you brought up earlier about colonial logics. I think some of the colonial logics were also just denying us our humanity. So everything that we think and dream about is not important, is not significant. And I think that we've carried that with us, we still believe that, we still behave as if everything that we do is substandard, is not important, is not significant, when it is. And when it also just shapes our own resilience.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
I mean, I think we are having this conversation during a pandemic, the COVID 19 pandemic. But what has been particularly remarkable is how much Africa as a continent has been resilient to something that the world imagined it was going to devastate us or decimate us completely. But there's a way in which our own organizational structures, they've also kept us safe. And that for me has just been some of the most important, I think the important realization just experiencing this pandemic while living in an African city.
Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu.:
Yeah, I guess I'm privileged to be alive this moment and seeing how much Africa has all this really amazing resilient attributes.
Tanatsei Gambura:
I think it's just about, again, remembering that we are our own center, and any prospect of a solution to any challenge you might have is already in and amongst us. All we have to do is pay attention to it and be awake to it. And remember that any ideas that do not come from within us, from our immediacy cannot bring any authentic or sustainable change or prosperity in our individual lives, but also in terms of the greater fulfillment of our communities and of our people.