Imbizo: Gather Around Zimbabwe’s Indigenous Cultures

By Gregory Pings, July 20, 2022

A Projects For Peace grant will support an IC grad’s online archive for Zimbabwe’s cultures.

Khangelani Mhlanga ’22 was awarded a Projects for Peace grant for her project.

(Photo Submitted)

Khangelani Mhlanga ’22 wants young people to be involved in their culture, to be proud of their traditions and participate in them. That’s how she feels about the traditions in her home country of Zimbabwe.

“People should find joy in in their cultures, instead of shame. Our traditions exist for a reason, and they have great power in our communities,” she said. “Many of Zimbabwe’s traditions are centered around community -- helping each other, supporting each other, and celebrating each other.”

Mhlanga, who grew up with limited access to traditional Zimbabwean arts, had a desire to tap her culture’s deep reserves. However, even in Zimbabwe, it was difficult to find places that taught indigenous dance or music because of where she grew up.

Even with the Internet, she noticed that important pieces of information are often wrong or missing.

“If I’m watching a dance on YouTube, I don’t always know its purpose,” Khangelani pointed out. “Is it a celebration? Are they mourning?”

To help combat this problem, she has launched a project, titled “Imbizo”, to preserve and promote Zimbabwe’s indigenous cultures. The initiative was awarded a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant, which Khangelani will use to create a digital archive over the summer.

“People should find joy in in their cultures, instead of shame. Our traditions exist for a reason, and they have great power in our communities. Many of Zimbabwe’s traditions are centered around community -- helping each other, supporting each other, and celebrating each other.”

Khangelani Mhlanga ’22

Projects for Peace is a global program that encourages young adults to develop innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues. Along the way, these student leaders increase their knowledge, improve skills, and establish identities as peacebuilders and changemakers. Projects for Peace headquarters is hosted by Middlebury College’s Center for Community Engagement.

The grant money is provided by the Davis United World College (UWC) Scholars Program, the world’s largest privately funded international scholarship program. Ithaca College was named a UWC partner institution in 2021.

Imbizo is a Ndebele (n-deh-beh-lEH) word that describes a meeting or a gathering. An Imbizo is typically called by a chief or community leader to share news or knowledge. Khangelani chose the name because “… Imbizo is the best description of what I’m trying to build.”

More than just a collection of videos and images, each submission will be accompanied by a narrative so that everyone knows who created it, which community they represent, how the work connects to that community’s culture and more. As such, the Imbizo website will inclu place the dances, music, and art into their proper context.

Khangelani’s ultimate vision is a website that covers all elements from each of Zimbabwe’s indigenous ethnic groups. Imbizo will provide open access to a digital archive where members submit work – dances, sculptures, poetry, drawings, descriptions of traditional agricultural practices, medicines and more.

“I want the idea of the community sharing its knowledge. It’s not just me or someone from the outside going in, collecting stuff and publishing information,” Khangelani explained. “Imbizo is something that people make for their communities.”

This is a summer project and by the fall, she hopes the site will host at least 10 different types of dances, and represent eight languages. It’s a good start.

The lessons Khangelani is using to build this project apply to indigenous cultures around the world. “People are dying with this knowledge, and when the last person dies, it is lost forever.

“It’s such a privilege to know where you come from; to actually go home and say, ‘this is the house I grew up in. And this is where my grandmother grew up,’” Khangelani said.

Whether you count yourself among an indigenous population or not, Khangelani asks you take one lesson with you: “Learn something from your grandparents, then pass it on to someone else.”