Sometimes when people grow up finding it difficult to find their place/space in the world, they develop a holistic contempt and abhorrence of everything that makes up this “wretched world”.
How they will act in their endeavours to mend the “fractured” world may vary from one person to another, as history has done us a great deal of showtelling this, from Qin Shi Huang, to Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, to Maximilien Robespierre, to Benito Mussolini and to Adolf Hitler.
While it is usually the extreme examples that come to mind, there have also been lesser harmful approaches that many other people who don’t belong have employed in trying to understand their space.
Alexandra Shungudzo Govere, popularly known by her stage Shungudzo, is a Zimbabwean-American all-around creative who is using two of the world’s biggest and oldest forms of expression, art and media to delineate her not-so-comfortable experience across all the sides of the hemisphere.
For one’s take, it appears her background set a precedent for her fate. She was born on May 12 in 1990 in the US and identified as of Zimbabwean, French, and Amerindian descent. She spent most of her childhood in Zimbabwe, where she says a lot of black and white Zimbabweans, and descendants of British colonialists did not fully accept her.
“I was in this sort of in-between, not really knowing where I fit in,” she said.
Eventually, she developed a love for gymnastics, and her mother helped her train at home using tree branches as bars and tape on the ground as a balance beam because she “wasn’t allowed to go to gyms” because of the colour of her skin.
A star destined to shine despite all the heckling, she never gave up on the training and ultimately she was the first woman of colour to compete on the national artistic gymnastics team.
“…being on the national team was a great accomplishment. And I’m grateful to have done my small part to open doors for other athletes of colour in my country,” she said of the experience.
Her family’s stay in Zimbabwe was howbeit short-lived as they left the Southern African country when Shun (short for Shungudzo) was ten to settle in California, USA.
Although chauvinistically glorified as the land of opportunity, Shungudzo has opened up so many times the transition was odd because the impression of perfection and freedom she had of the US did not match with the reality she experienced.
“It was like waking up to a slap in the face to realize that the ‘American Dream’ doesn’t come true for everyone. To watch my mother work so hard and still be on food stamps, wearing donated clothing. […] America showed me that the system is broken everywhere and, as a result, so are we,” she said.
While most of her work streams of activism where she intends to fix the corrupted world, one such song that fully demonstrates that is “Big Man”, that materialised after she looked around and see so “many other people in worse situations, failed by both their government and human decency.”
Anchored by that balafon and a 6/8 time signature that swaggers even more than it sways, the song builds a world where Shungudzo is in charge, where she’s arrested the crooked police officers and there’s money in the cereal with a spoonful of diamond. It is a piece of music that pregnant with the desire for competent leadership more potent than usual.
Overtly, Shungudzo’s work seeks to enlighten others on the need to reflect on both the world and the way they work within it.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter mass protests aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, the singer who is just a few weeks shy away from her thirties, dropped “It’s A Good Day (To Fight The System),” a song in which she celebrated the erupting chaos as the only way that the oppressed can have “peace”.
“What I do feel is an urgency and a desire to use my words, to say things that make some sort of difference, even if it’s a small one,” she said. “Even as a kid, throughout everything that I was experiencing, I always found words as a great way of describing what I had been going through and healing from it.”
In a follow-up single, “To Be Me,” Shungudzo created an anthem of empowerment for those who’ve been victims of sexual or racial violence as well as those who live in fear of it.
In March, racism yet again became a most-talked-about subject matter after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey on CBS. On it, the Dutch and Duchess of Sussex said there was concern within the royal family about their baby Archie’s skin tone, and condemned their relatives for failing to criticize colonial undertones in media coverage, in a series of damning and disturbing claims.
A global activist who breaks all frontiers to get her message wherever it is supposed to be known, it wasn’t long until Shun seized the scene again with a timely message, “White Parents”.
The video, which has Shungudzo bellicosely painting herself white to present herself to her partner’s who expected their son to bring home a rich, white girl, was shot and directed by Mark Nesbitt.
Consequence.net quoted Shun saying:
“I’ve been told that a relationship I was in wouldn’t work out because of my race — by the person I was in a relationship with. I’ve received the coldest shoulders from an ex’s parents over not being the rich, white girl they expected their son to show up with.”
While it is a piece of work that’s likely to louse up white fragility, White Parents is not an angry song. It is ultimately a call for people to see beyond colour when thinking of love and lovemaking. The song is about what it feels like to be unsafe in your body. Although it’s also personal for Shungudzo, its message is universal and mirrors the ideals of BLM and ALM.
The song comes off Shungudzo’s forthcoming debut album, I’m Not A Mother But I Have Children”.
