The University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Theatre Arts and the Faculty of Arts, in partnership and collaboration with Student Solidarity Trust (SST) and the Disability Resource Centre (DRC) this week hosted the Disability Arts Festival. Under the theme: Navigating and Re-negotiating Marginality: Cultural and Artistic Dimensions. Academic presentations, poems and plays were presented during the week. Of essential mention is the presentation by Mr Masimba Kuchera from SST.

Mr Kuchera is visually impaired and his presentation investigated ways that impaired people can navigate the marginalities they encounter in their daily lives. The action plan is not one which requires one to be educated or academically advantaged but rather it draws itself from the natural attributes of any human being whether disabled or not. He presented a 5-point plan way of navigating and re-negotiating marginality from both cultural and artistic perspectives. A plan is vital in a negotiation process, as it serves as a yardstick. Negotiators are therefore desired to:

1. Refuse to be a hostage of the situation
Our society tends to model the way in which disabled people grow. For example some are denied their right to access education. It has become “normal” to see a disabled person not go to school. Thus there is need for disabled people to decline to be held into that ‘model’ and choose a different path.

2. Know their weaknesses and understand their strengths
It is important that disabled persons know their weaknesses and understand their strengths. In so doing, they are able to accept their disability and concentrate more on what they can do best.

3. Be patient
Patience is a virtue. This applies to anyone in general. When one is negotiating there is need for them to understand how the system works so you can be able to manipulate it for it to work to your advantage. And this can only be done when one is patient and takes time to learn.

4.  Be confident and assertive
From a cultural perspective, elders are the ones who sit at negotiating tables ‘matare’ and make the final decisions or have the final say over a matter.  In a scenario like this, the ideas and opinions of young people tend to be ignored. Likening it to disability issues, there are some people who negotiate for the disabled and at times they are the able bodied ones. It therefore takes confidence from disabled persons to not look down upon themselves and know that ‘disability does not mean inability’, for them to negotiate for themselves. After gaining the courage to have said something, one should be assertive and stick to what they said until it has been achieved. However, this confidence should not grow into arrogance, as a thin line exists between the two.

5. Ignore artificial ceilings
Break new ground, do the impossible! Pearson Nherera was the first Advocate who was visually impaired. Herry Gwala, became the first MP in Uganda who had disability.  Paul Matavire and Stevie Wonder entered the music industry. Disabled people need to identify the artificial ceilings (which are usually set by the society) and choose to ignore them.

Disabled persons should work closely with partners. First, the State is obliged to work with them. Members of Parliament and policy makers and advocates should be able to put systems in place to assist this group of people. Second, the media should accommodate them, rather than to choose to ignore them. Through the media, arts and cultural activists raising awareness of the situation of disabled people will be given a platform to fill the gap of their non-existence.

For a long time have we seen blind beggars sitting at street corners. Everyday we see them begging at controlled intersections. Jairos Jiri, had a dream, and created a home for disabled persons. But over the years, we wonder and ponder what our government and the non-profit making sector have done to assist disabled people. But the fact that their numbers are increasing in the streets shows that more work has to be done.

Corn Husk Maidens on sale at the Avondale Flea Market.

What will you be wearing the day your lover leaves you?
I will be wearing my mothers disappointed smile.

- The Door by Warsan Shire

Having spent a couple of days looking at Zimbabwe through a camera lens I’ve noticed that there are more people living in poverty than I originally thought, or perhaps it’s that I’ve been forced to take more notice. It’s easy to be distracted while a woman, or a child, weaves through waiting cars begging for some change, or to walk hurriedly past as an old grime-covered woman sits at a street corner rattling a metal bowl with coins. I’ve seen it so often it doesn’t even register anymore.

When I look through the lens, I am not distracted; I see them and feel the guilt of privilege and not knowing the appropriate action to take. I want to help, I just don’t know how. Should I write a strongly worded letter to my MP, whose name or address I don’t know? Should I take it up with Harare City Council and demand that they remove the homeless and beggars from the streets? Where would they go? After Operation Murambatsvina where the people became the ‘tsvina’, is that a humane plan of action?

I’ve had wild fantasies about opening a soup kitchen or a shelter. It would be a modest sort of dormitory large enough to sleep every homeless person I’ve seen, and more that I haven’t. It would be a safe, warm place with food to fill every hungry stomach. It would be so many things to so many people. .. my fantasies have remained just that.

They tell you not to give homeless people money, they don’t tell you what the alternative is. Young and seemingly unoccupied men have asked to be paid for their picture. They need money to buy ZED to dull their existence. I suppose they have a right to demand money, don’t celebrities demand payment for their pictures too? And in a way it does seem as though I’m taking advantage of their situations, their poverty to add to my portfolio of pictures. And again, I am wracked with guilt, how can I accuse others of profiting from suffering when I am doing the very same thing? I am paid to do what I do.

Often when I am allowed to take the photo I see the pain in someone who is barely holding on, and trying to make it through just one more day. But I also see quiet resolve, that resilience that Zimbabweans are so famous for. And I feel shame for all the times I was undignified in moments of what is comparatively mild discomfort.

www.ishr.org

Pictured above is a Lyons Maid ice-cream vendor plying the suburb of Avondale in Harare. This red and white livery is ubiquitous in Harare. The ice cream man with his bicycle cart has come to be quintessentially Zimbabwean.

The Harare International Festival of the Arts takes place every year in the last week of April. Come visit Zimbabwe. Check out www.hifa.co.zw