One day last year, Evan Mawarire was feeling very low. He had just turned 39 — and he considered himself a failure. He had a wife and two children, which was great. And there was a third child on the way — also great. But Mawarire could barely make ends meet.
The family was living hand to mouth. Mawarire could not afford school fees for the children. He owned no home of his own. Prospects seemed negligible.
“I was dejected and frustrated,” Mawarire says, “but also, for the first time in a long time, I was angry.”
That was April 19. The 18th had been Zimbabwe’s independence day. And on the 19th, Mawarire sat down and made a four-minute video, with the Zimbabwean flag wrapped around his neck.
That flag is a colorful one. And all the colors have meanings. For example, red is supposed to stand for the blood that patriots shed in the liberation effort. But what would those patriots say about Zimbabwe now? What had they died for? That’s the kind of thing Mawarire asked in his video.
At the end of it, he asked Zimbabweans to stand up: for themselves, for their flag, and for their country.
He hesitated to post this video, naturally: He lives in a dictatorship. He knew the video could get him into big trouble. But post it he did, around midnight. After a hard, emotional day, he went to bed.
The next morning, he received a call from a friend, who had unexpected news: The video was going viral. It had struck a nerve among Zimbabweans. And it would lead to a democracy movement that travels under a hashtag, #ThisFlag.
Evan Mawarire does not see himself as a political leader. “I’m someone who has been able to express the views, the frustrations, and the hopes of an oppressed population.” But others see him as a political leader, including the regime. “I didn’t find it,” says Mawarire, of politics. “It found me.”
A word about pronunciation. That name is pronounced “Mah-wah-REER-ay.” And his first name, interestingly enough, is pronounced “Ee-VAHN” (though he also answers to the familiar “EH-vin”).
He was born in 1977, during the final days of Rhodesia. He spent his early childhood in a ghetto of Salisbury, the capital city (now Harare). In 1980, when independence came, Robert Mugabe took power. He still has it, 37 years later.
At 93, he is one of the oldest men ever to rule a country. Next year, there will be another of those sham elections that dictators sometimes feel the need of holding. Mugabe will run. If he dies, his wife has said, the ruling party will run his corpse.
Mawarire was brought up in a Christian home. His parents were civil servants. Evan worked in business for a while. But he also worked at church, teaching Sunday school and the like. And he found this much more fulfilling. “So I decided I would give my life to pastoring,” he says. He quit his job, went to Bible school, and indeed became a pastor. That was 15 years ago.
When he made his “flag” video, he did not stop there: He made 25 more videos, one a day from May 1 to May 25, which is Africa Day on the continent. Mawarire wanted Zimbabweans to think, “What kind of African nation do we wish to be?” In those videos, he discussed the various problems of Zimbabwe.
And he continued to strike nerves. The democracy movement grew. Mawarire’s repeated message was, It’s up to us to save ourselves. No one’s going to swoop in and help us. We have to claim our own country.
He tells me that, year after year, he watched rigged elections. “And I always yearned for someone to come to our rescue: regional powers, or the African Union, or the United Nations. But there is so much happening across the world, there is no one to listen to your own troubles. We have to rescue ourselves.”
Mawarire and his movement have a slogan: “If we cannot cause the politician to change, then we must inspire the citizen to be bold.”
Zimbabwe is in desperate shape — it is desperately poor. Unemployment is something like 95 percent. And more than half the population is under the age of 25. Silvanos Mudzvova has something funny to say, regarding this mass joblessness.
He is a Zimbabwean actor, playwright, and activist. He is also a guest of the Oslo Freedom Forum, as is Pastor Mawarire. (It is in Oslo that I talk with Mawarire.) In Zimbabwe, Mudzvova used theater as a form of protest. In a country where nobody’s working, he quips, “you are assured of an audience within minutes.”
They arrested him many, many times — so many times, he lost count. Finally, they tortured him almost to death, leaving him paralyzed on one side. Mudzvova now lives in exile, in Britain.
Last July 6, there was a mass protest in Zimbabwe. And, six days later, Evan Mawarire was arrested. The charge was incitement to violence. What happened next, as people have noted, is straight out of a movie.
The courthouse for Mawarire’s hearing was packed to the rafters. People were singing: worship songs, church songs. Outside, there were thousands of people, also singing. Mawarire could hear it from his prison cell. The young guards were amazed: They had never seen anything like it, and neither had anyone else.