Beth Ditto, living life large and proud. This feature from the Guardian is well worth a read.

Clearly, the public fascination with her went way beyond her music, homing in on her evident ease with her body size and shape and her willingness to sound off at the drop of a hat on the issues she felt strongly about, whether it be the iniquities of the fashion industry or the urgency of furthering civil rights legislation. Most simply, she clearly didn’t care. The Daily Mail, for example, once pictured her getting out of a car in slightly inelegant fashion, noting censoriously that “Someone needs to remind Beth Ditto about the rules of stepping out of a car when there are teams of photographers on hand to capture the moment.” It rather fantastically missed the point, which is that she’d have most likely done exactly the same if the entire world’s photographers were there – or not.

Acoustic Night debuted at HIFA this year on the Coca Cola Green, how did that go?
It was amazing! We had such a good time and the response was overwhelming! The artists really enjoyed it. It was also their first time at HIFA as well. For a virgin experience it was amazing!

How are you finding HIFA so far?
I’m enjoying it; I just haven’t had time to see all the shows. But I think there are a lot of new people, a lot of new faces. It’s very different from the past years where you had the same faces. We’re enjoying the new talent.

Of the shows that you’ve seen which one is your favourite so far?
Jamaram, not just because its ZGS, but because they’ve got such a lively reggae act. They’re very energetic on stage.

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.