I ATTENDED an emotions and mood training session this week, a quiet room in a bustling city far from home, where the facilitator urged us to “sit with discomfort.” As I closed my eyes, I didn’t find the stillness she described. Instead, I felt the restless hum of Zimbabwean life, the laughter tangled with longing, the resilience carved from ruin.
To be Zimbabwean is to hold a universe of contradictions: a heart that beats to the rhythm of mbira melodies and the cacophony of protests, a soul nourished by soil that has both blessed and betrayed us. This tension came alive for me days later, when journalist Blessed Mhlanga, arrested months ago on charges of “publishing falsehoods,” was finally granted bail. His release, a small victory in a system designed to suffocate dissent, reminded me that even in darkness, we are never without sparks of light.
Zimbabweans wear survival like a second skin. We are the children of a land that has survived colonial plunder, economic freefall, and the quiet violence of broken promises.
At the training session, a woman beside me whispered: “Back home, we don’t have the luxury of ‘processing’, we just march.” Her words echoed the unspoken truth: Zimbabwe’s mental health crisis is a silent epidemic. The World Health Organisation estimates one in four of us grapple with depression or anxiety, yet clinics lack basic antidepressants, and stigma clings to vulnerability like dust to a Harare highway.
My grandmother’s generation buried their trauma in hymns and humble chores; mine scrolls through Instagram reels of diaspora glamour to numb the ache of unemployment. The facilitator’s breathing exercises felt absurd when I thought of my cousin in Chitungwiza, who queues for water at 3am to avoid the shame of daylight desperation. Yet, I lingered on her question: “What happens to a people who never grieve?”
When Blessed Mhlanga was arrested, accused of transmitting material with the intent to incite public violence, it felt familiar.
Another chapter in Zimbabwe’s long war on truth. His initial bail denial, a tactic to intimidate, drew outrage from activists and ordinary citizens alike. Crowds gathered outside the courthouse, not with placards, but with songs.
They sang old Chimurenga anthems, their voices weaving a shield of solidarity. This week, he was finally granted bail, a rare concession in a judiciary often bent to power.
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Mhlanga’s case is a mirror: it reflects a regime terrified of scrutiny, but also the tenacity of those who refuse to be erased. His voice, like the tongues of our grandmothers who passed down histories colonial textbooks erased, is a weapon of memory.
Yet his temporary freedom changes little. The Patriotic Act still looms, a legal guillotine for dissent. Over 60 journalists have been arrested since 2018, their “crimes” as arbitrary as a president’s whims. What shifts, though, is the collective resolve.
When Mhlanga walked out of prison, it was not a closure but a kindling, a reminder that even fractured systems can be forced to bend.
The aunt who once taught biology in Harare now nurses in a country where her accent bends to foreign tongues. The brother who aced constitutional law drives a taxi, his degree folded into a drawer like a relic from another lifetime.
We orbit each other in fragments, WhatsApp voice notes crackling through Zesa blackouts, video calls abandoned mid-sentence when the grid collapses.
Another brother wires US$50 for groceries, but by the time it reaches Harare, inflation gnaws it to scraps. “They have cut the water again,” my mother writes, as casually as one might note a passing breeze. Her suburb has not seen a tap flow in 19 days. She joins the 2am pilgrimage to the borehole, clutching a bucket dented by decades of drought.
Last week, cholera slithered into the queue, hospitalised a man who sold tomatoes beside her at Mbare Market. She doesn’t tell me this; I stitch the truth from cousins’ cryptic texts and aunts’ hushed prayers. Our love is hyphenated by survival math: How many Zesa tokens will US$10 buy? Can the neighbour’s solar panel charge a phone? The guilt of leaving is a shadow that lengthens with every power cut. Remittances, once lifelines, now mock us, exchange rates shifting like quicksand, turning sacrifice into satire.
When my partner Farai snapped at me last week: “You don’t know what it’s like here!”, his anger wasn’t just exhaustion. It was the residue of a man raised in a land where patience is devoured by 18-hour blackouts, where pharmacies stock hope but no painkillers, where the national anthem plays over radio static as the water tanker arrives three days late.
His voice, like Zesa’s pylons, is overburdened and sparking. “Your words hurt,” I told him later, “but I see your heart.” It’s a Zimbabwean love language: forgiving the fractures because we know the calculus of endurance.
To survive here is to measure time in candles burned, buckets hauled, and the silent tally of those who have left. The training session ended with a challenge: “What sustains you when the world is on fire?” I thought of the vendor in Mbare who shares her last loaf of bread, the activists turned organic farmers reviving dead soil, the poets who turn coup speeches into satire.
Healing, for Zimbabweans, is not a destination but a daily rebellion. It is in the way we still gather for mahumbwe, christening babies with names such as Tatenda (thank you) and Nokutenda (with gratitude).
It is in the laughter of comedians such as Gonyeti, who turns despair into comedy so biting it becomes a kind of therapy. Blessed Mhlanga’s bail is not justice, but it is a testament to the power of collective voice, a modern-day nhimbe where lawyers, journalists, and street vendors alike contributed to his defence fund — not necessarily financial. It reminds me that our greatest alchemy is turning grief into grit.
To be Zimbabwean is to be fluent in the grammar of resistance. We are the daughters of Nehanda, who met the noose with a prophecy, and the sons of Joshua Nkomo, who carried a flywhisk as a scepter of dignity.
We are Blessed Mhlanga’s ink-stained fingers, the auntie selling tomatoes in a market with no electricity, the lover whispering “ndinokuda” (I love you) in a country that rarely says it back.
As I left the training session, the facilitator handed me a stone. “Anchors are lifelines,” she said. Mine is the Zimbabwean pulse, the one that quickens when the rains finally fall on parched earth, when the crowd at a protest breaks into song, when a journalist walks free, if only for now. Nyika yedu inovakwa nevene vayo (Our country is built by its own people). Brick by brick, story by story, we are still building. Until then, let us keep spreading positivity (#spreadpositivity). We were here, becoming better, making our mark, and leaving our footprint as we make the world a better place!
- Chirenje writes in her capacity as a citizen of Zimbabwe. Follow her on social media for more Lifezone with Grace conversations on Twitter: @graceruvimbo; Facebook: Grace Ruvimbo Chirenje; Instagram: @graceruvimbo
