EVAN MAWARIRE – BIOGRAPHY
Growing up during the infancy of Zimbabwe’s independence, activist Evan Mawarire lived under a constant state of fear– a fear that was ubiquitous and generational. Robert Mugabe had taken power in 1980, following the country’s independence from Great Britain. Leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF party), he moved swiftly to establish a regime predicated on persecution and corruption. Under Mugabe’s direction, the state’s military forces carried out Gukurahundi, a violent campaign against the Southern region of Zimbabwe. This genocide killed over 10,000 civilians, many of which were political dissidents who had expressed loyalty to his rival, Joshua Nkomo. Mugabe cemented a culture of silencing and censorship, most infamously demonstrated in the disappearance of journalist and outspoken critic Itai Dzamara, who has been missing since 2015. In the 2008 presidential election, Mugabe lost the first round of voting to the Movement for Democratic Change candidate. In the face of being displaced from office, he refused to relinquish the reins of power, rejecting anything less than a power sharing agreement, despite losing the people’s mandate to govern. In 2016, a turning point occurred for the populace when Evan Mawarire found that he was unable to put food on the table for his wife and children. A little-known pastor of a small church, Mawarire channeled this frustration into recording and posting an emotional video to social media. Mawarire deplored the current state of Zimbabwe– suffocated by widespread inflation and an unresponsive government. Using the colors of the national flag as an icon of what the country no longer represented, Pastor Mawarire ignited a social movement that captured global attention. From this moment on, Pastor Mawarire became a “thorn in the government’s side,” by challenging ZANU-PF’s one-party state. Mawarire’s four-minute lament inspired many civilians to reclaim their country– in the following week, anti-government protests emerged, a rare crack in Mugabe’s ironclad monopoly on power. Using platforms such as Twitter, Mawarire continued to organize the opposition and was repeatedly arrested and tortured on charges of subversion and inciting violence. As his movement grew, it culminated in a grand demonstration of the people’s repudiation of Mugabe: Mawarire organized a nationwide shut-down, asking everyone to stay inside their homes on July 6, 2016. An estimated 9-12 million of the country’s population of 14 million participated. Throughout this process, one catchphrase held constant: “If we cannot cause the politician to change, then we must inspire the citizen to be bold.” Out of concern for his family’s safety, Mawarire eventually fled to the United States and lived in exile. Six months later, he realized that he could not abandon the vision he had for Zimbabwe and soon returned to see it come to fruition. In November 2017, the country’s military carried out a “bloodless correction,” and ousted Mugabe from power. Soon after, Mawarire helped mobilize thousands of people to flood the streets of Harare, the country’s capital, to demand his official resignation. Immediately taken into custody for “urging a violent overthrow of the government,” Mawarire’s acquittal just a few days later came to symbolize the courts’ departure from its history of compromised judicial independence. Though Mugabe is out of the picture today, Mawarire’s work is not over. Seeing repressive continuities within the regime of succeeding “crocodile” President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mawarire unrelentingly persists in pressuring the government for reform. As a Christian pastor, Mawarire found that religion was inextricable from his mission; it informed his non-violent approach and grounded him to the values of justice and freedom. In his darkest hours of physical abuse at the hands of state actors, Mawarire credits his faith for seeing him through: “The ability to weather those storms comes from my faith...it has played a large role in keeping me focused [and] keeping me alive.” Through The Nehemiah Project, Mawarire hopes to inspire the next generation of global leaders to similarly utilize their Christian values as instruments to stand up against injustice. Pastor Mawarire has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy, was selected as a Yale World Fellow, and named African Person of the Year by South Africa’s Daily Maverick Newspaper. Listen to Evan Mawarire speak at the 2017 Oslo Freedom Forum here.
