Zimbabwe's Best-Kept Secret Has a Passport

On independence, identity, and the diaspora dividend

My granddaughter Camilla Makanaka will not remember her first Independence Day. She

is too young for memory, too new to the world to understand that on the 18th of April

each year, a country she has never visited pauses to honour what it cost to be free.

But she carries the name. Makanaka- it means “it is good” in Shona. Her parents gave her

that name deliberately. Not as sentiment. As a thread. A quiet insistence that whatever

distance lies between a child born into oneworld and the country living in her blood,

the connection would not be cut by geography or time.

“Distance does not dilute identity. It distils it.”

I know this because I have lived it. I call Pretoria home, and Kigali, and Cambridge where

my family is. I am Zimbabwean in every room I walk into - in rooms where nobody has

heard of Mhondoro, I describe it with a specificity that surprises even me. You leave a place

and discover, only from the outside, how much of it you actually contain.

THE WOMAN WHO IS ZIMBABWE

I want to tell you about my muzukuru, Grace “Mamoyo” Mpingidza. Mamoyo is her totem - the name we call her with affection, the name that carries who she is. If you have ever eaten food that made you close your eyes involuntarily - not because you were being polite, but because your body simply needed a moment to process what just happened - then you understand what her cooking does to people. Her gwatakwataalone is a religious experience. Her highfieldsdishes are the kind that make KwaGavaand kwaMereki- Harare’s most celebrated eating spots - look like they are still serving an apprenticeship.

She is legendary in the way that only people who cook with genuine love can be legendary. Not trained. Not performing. Just gifted, in the way Zimbabwe gifts so many of its people with something extraordinary and then asks them to survive on it quietly.

Grace is Zimbabwe. Not a symbol of it. Not a metaphor. She is it - the warmth, the resilience, the grace that refuses to become bitterness even when bitterness would be entirely understandable.

She is also a widow.

Her husband, Ignatius Mpingidza, spent his entire working life in Zimbabwe’s national parks. Not in an office. In the bush. Watching over wildlife that gives this country its character and its place in the imagination of the world. He was one of the quiet guardians of a heritage that attracts tourists who pay thousands of dollars to stand in a landscape he protected for a salary that never came close to reflecting what he gave. He died in a car accident. Gone.

What was left? A widow. Children. And the particular cruelty of a system that consumed a man’s best years and had very little to offer the people he loved most. His sacrifice - real, sustained, dignified - did not translate into security for his family. And we have, as a society, normalised that.

“A man can give his life to protecting a national treasure. His family will not be protected in return.”

Zimbabwe is not a poor country in raw endowment. But for too many Zimbabweans, the economy still does not pay them what they are worth. This is a country of extraordinary wealth and extraordinary inequality - where world-class assets coexist with lives held together by improvisation.

THE WEAPON WE ARE NOT USING

Today, Zimbabwe turns 46. Forty-six years since a people told they did not qualify for self-determination stood up and said: we do. That moment deserves to be honoured. Fully. Without asterisks. Zimbabwe is not a story of failure. It is a story of underused brilliance. And nowhere is that brilliance more concentrated - or more underused - than in its diaspora. There are Zimbabweans in Johannesburg, Cambridge, Toronto, Sydney, Dubai, New York, and virtually every city on earth that has a hospital, a school, or a functioning finance sector. We are everywhere. And last year, we sent home roughly US$3.6 billion in remittances, that's US $216 Per Person and 8.4% of GDP.

By any fair measure, that is not a footnote. It is economic architecture.

But remittances are still the least interesting part of this story. If oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, then Zimbabwe’s equivalent is its people - moving across borders, carrying capital, skills, networks, ideas, and culture. Not as charity. As capability.

What should Zimbabwe actually do with it? A single digital diaspora platform where Zimbabweans abroad can register skills and connect to verified projects. Properly structured diaspora bonds with ring-fenced projects in energy, water, and housing. Expert panels embedded in actual ministries - not symbolic consultations that go nowhere. Simplified business registration for non-residents.

“We do not need everyone to come back. We need everyone to plug in.”

INSIDE THE GLOBAL BLOODSTREAM

There is one more thing that deserves to be said on a day like today. This is not a marginal country. Zimbabwe sits inside the global bloodstream: the fourth largest producer of lithium in the world - the mineral powering every electric vehicle battery; a top-three platinum producer whose metals go into catalytic converters and medical instruments; and historically, the site of the world’s largest known caesium deposits, used in atomic clocks, precision drilling, and high-tech electronics. Add tobacco, chrome, and gold, and you have a country embedded in the daily life of billions of people who have never heard of Harare.

And the people match the land. Strive Masiyiwa built a global telecommunications empire from nothing. James Manyika shaped AI governance at the highest levels of the technology world. William Sachiti built Europe’s first street-legal autonomous delivery vehicle in the UK - and trained its AI on the roads of Harare. Dr Sikhulile Moyo, working out of a modest lab in Botswana, was the first scientist in the world to identify the Omicron variant of COVID-19. The world rewarded Africa with travel bans. He made the TIME 100 list. He kept going.

That is the Zimbabwean way. We do not collapse under pressure. We perform under it.

And then there is Learnmore Jonasi- comedian, America’s Got Talent golden buzzer recipient, currently facing a $27 million lawsuit over a Lion King joke, served the papers on stage mid-performance. Only a Zimbabwean would find a way to turn being sued into a content moment.

THE MAP WE INHERITED

There is one uncomfortable truth that sits beneath all of this. It is more conceivable - in the mind of a Zimbabwean, in the mind of most Africans - that a Zimbabwean might one day become British than that they might one day become Tanzanian. Sit with that.

We have internalised a geography of belonging that was drawn for us by someone else. Colonialism did not just redraw our borders. It rewired our aspirations. That will not be solved by policy alone - but naming it is where we begin.

I want to end where I began. With Mamoyo. She will cook today. That is her language, her love, her defiance. She will feed people who need feeding with a generosity the system around her has never matched. And somewhere in that kitchen, Zimbabwe will be exactly itself - extraordinary, uncelebrated, and completely undaunted.

The diaspora is not gone. We are distributed. And distribution, in the right hands, is not a weakness.

It is reach.

Happy Independence Day, Zimbabwe. Makorokoto. You are still home.