On the 27th of January this year, Takura dropped the music video for his song Haroore. Despite it doing incredibly well, attracting 295k views on Youtube, the video has also been met with some controversy. At first glance without knowing the background of the actor and actress, one may view the storyline as a forbidden love situation, however, after looking at context it really does put things in a different perspective what are we as a community meant to take from it.
The release of the Haroore video has sparked a conversation surrounding mainly the fetishization of young girls in Zimbabwe. Child marriage in Zimbabwe is common especially now with the COVID-19 pandemic neglecting how it is a bigger issue that will require a lot of effort to eliminate. Almost one in three women in Zimbabwe are married by the time they turn 18. The practice most often occurs in the poorer regions of West and Central Mashonaland, where 50% and 42% of girls respectively marry as children according to a 2014 UNICEF report. With that in mind at first glance when watching the Haarore video one does not pay too much attention to the video in that scene. However, on the 25th of January 2022 in a tweet, Tanyadiaris highlighted how the age of the actor and actress causes the video to be problematic.
“No shade at all to all the beautiful girls involved but why does Takura frequently have really young girls in his music video?”
Nothing necessarily inappropriately happens in the video, but just the fact that they play the loving incest of a 30-year-old man that is not right. Her main contribution to the whole thing was to shedding light on how the media can promote predatory behavior all in the name of producing art. With this relation, one can note that the media does help us to explain how the media defines; defends. without knowing the background of the actress. One, at first glance, may not find an issue with the idea but after finding out her age due to the tweet and that he’s in his 30s it conjures at thoughts.
In a country whereby it is greatly affected by issues such as child marriage applying age as part of the context in which to view the video one may see how problematic the video may be. Hence, one mentioned that “a music video from a new point of view of a new mirror it will be interesting to know what people think about. One even went on to say that an 18-year-old incorporate is deemed in-experienced, an 18-year-old is deemed to be too young to have access to a well or free reign over a bank account however why is it when they are said to be underage? If anything Tanyadiaries’ tweet has been able to dialogue on a topic which as much as it is controversial is perceived as just a normal thing.
