Bulawayo does not merely exist it performs. It hums like a well-tuned mbira at dusk, its rhythms carried on the wind through avenues lined with memory and ambition. In this city of kings and queens, creativity is not an accessory; it is the bloodstream. Each street corner is a quiet stage, each artist a flame resisting the dark, each story a thread stitching past and present into something enduring.
By Trevor Mawaka
This week, the city’s cultural heartbeat quickens with a blend of restoration, celebration, triumph, and reflection a delicate dance between what has been, what is, and what dares to be.
At the National Gallery in Bulawayo, art prepares to inhale again. On the 31st of March, the gallery will host its first-ever Repair Café, an initiative that feels less like an event and more like a resurrection. Broken sculptures, fractured forms, and weary pieces will find new life under careful hands. It is a poetic contradiction that in a world so quick to discard, there remains a space devoted to mending. Here, art mirrors humanity: scarred, perhaps, but never beyond repair.
Beyond the city’s borders, Nkayi calls like a drumbeat in the distance. The iMiklomelo kaDakamela Cultural Festival rises on the horizon, promising not just performance, but pilgrimage. From the 3rd to the 6th of April, Dakamela Arena will transform into a living archive of African expression where voices do not merely speak, they echo. Praise poets will summon ancestral spirits with syllables that shimmer like heatwaves; performers will stand not just as individuals, but as vessels of memory.
In a striking juxtaposition, tradition will meet modern spectacle as the festival partners with Highlanders Football Club in its centenary year. Sport and culture often seen as parallel rivers will converge into one powerful current. And into this current steps South African actress Dawn Thandeka King, her presence a bridge between borders, her artistry a reminder that African stories, though rooted in place, are boundless in reach.
Meanwhile, somewhere along the long roads of the continent, Dr Gasolo walks quite literally between worlds. His 205-kilometre journey from Bulawayo to koDakamela is more than endurance; it is metaphor. Each step is a sentence in a larger narrative about commitment, about carrying culture not just in speech but in action. Where others organise from afar, he walks the story into existence.
Yet the creative journey is not always paved with applause. Zimbabwean performer Black Diva offers a sobering counterpoint a reminder that behind the spotlight lies shadow. Her experience in Filabusi, marked by frustration and uncertainty, could have ended in silence. Instead, it turned, unexpectedly, into opportunity through her association with Genesis Coaches. Her story reads like a proverb: sometimes the road breaks beneath you only to reveal a better path beneath the cracks.
In the realm of structure and legacy, the Centre for Talent Development signals a new chapter. With a refreshed leadership team drawn from diverse disciplines, it stands as a testament to the idea that art does not grow in isolation. It requires scaffolding visionaries, strategists, custodians those who build the stage as others perform upon it.
And as the global stage marked World Theatre Day, Bulawayo paused to reflect on the power of performance. Theatre, after all, is society holding up a mirror to itself sometimes flattering, often unforgiving, always necessary. It is where truth dresses in costume and still manages to be recognised.
Music, ever the city’s most restless voice, continues to ripple outward. “Abalele,” the long-awaited collaboration by Josh Major, Ril Ghostzwe, and MJ Sings, arrives like rain after a dry spell rhythmic, refreshing, and impossible to ignore. In another corner of the sonic landscape, Msizkay’s “Don’t Let Me Down” emerges after years of anticipation, proving that some songs, like fine wine, demand patience before they reveal their full body.
Elsewhere, Sylent Nqo and Mann Friday blend sound and language in “Sewe,” while Mzoe 7 looks beyond borders, his sights set on Zambia a reminder that art, like water, refuses confinement.
Then there are voices that travel even further. Edith Katiji’s recent recognition in the United Kingdom reads like a modern epic a tale of distance, doubt, and eventual triumph. Her words carry the quiet astonishment of someone who has outrun their own expectations. She stands as both individual and symbol: a daughter of the soil proving that roots do not restrict growth; they anchor it.
The hip-hop streets, meanwhile, buzz with anticipation as Asaph Afrika teases a collaboration. The question lingers like a drumroll: Kereng or Briza? Grit or melody? Fire or finesse? The answer, when it comes, will not merely be a song it will be a statement.
In visual art, Joseph Maramba turns intimacy into imagery, drawing inspiration from maternal strength. His work does not shout; it resonates. It reminds us that behind every artist is often an unseen figure a mother, a guardian, a quiet architect of resilience.
Literature, too, asserts its place in this cultural symphony. Arnold Nkala’s biography of Chief Dakamela stands as both documentation and tribute, capturing a life dedicated to community upliftment. It is more than a book; it is a bridge between generations, a way for young minds to meet the footsteps that shaped their present.
Yet even as new stories are written, others reach their final chapter.
The passing of Mihla Sitsha Tsheza leaves a silence that words struggle to fill. A prolific writer whose work moved from classrooms to airwaves, he was both storyteller and historian a keeper of language, a guardian of narrative. His legacy lingers not just in books, but in the minds he shaped.
Similarly, the curtain falls on veteran actor Aleck Zulu a man who did not merely play roles but inhabited them. As Snake, as Godogodo, as countless others, he blurred the line between fiction and reality with unsettling brilliance. To watch him was to forget performance and believe in presence. Offstage, he became a mentor, proving that the greatest artists do not just create they cultivate.
And in the vibrant world of fashion, EkasiKulture rises as both brand and philosophy. It wears its identity boldly, stitching township narratives into fabric, turning everyday language into statements of pride. It stands as a quiet rebellion against borrowed identity, declaring: we can be inspired by the world without losing ourselves within it.
In the end, Bulawayo’s arts scene is a study in contrasts fragility and strength, struggle and triumph, tradition and evolution. It is a place where broken sculptures are restored, where festivals resurrect heritage, where artists stumble and rise, where legends depart and legacies remain.
Like a song that refuses to end, the city continues verse after verse, story after story.
And if you listen closely, beneath the noise and motion, you will hear it: the steady, unyielding rhythm of a culture alive.
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