In this episode i will tell you about Shona language and history of Zimbabwe from Rhodesia time untill now. I will also try to get a Zimbabwean passport for my son .We will go to in Harare, Emiigration Department. Check my new series from Africa. i visited Ethiopia, Zambia, South Africa but i stayed the longest in Zimbabwe. Check how i explore Shona and Ndebele culture, food, music, night life, wild life and many other topics in Norton, Katanga, Lake Chivero and Harare. I also talked to white Zimbabweans and find many interesting stories. I was shocked when i came to South Africa and saw an epidemy of white Afrikaners homeless on the streets of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Check the new series.
Hi people, this is your boy Robert Zupa. We are going to department of immigration which is this huge building here. Get the Zenos papers with the Zimbaban passport. Hey folks, this is the central district of uh economical district of Kerala. Then see yeah this is the offices. This was built in during the southern Rodasia. It's a beautiful col colonial building. You look 1902
from Zimbabwe. Interesting fact. Uh there's a fast food tax. Look, it's 43 cents for fast food tax. Kusai, which means hello in Shaa language. Sha language is an interesting language. It is a unified version of the languages that are spoken in the territory of Zimbabwe. There's five languages which belong to the family of the Bantto languages. When in 18th century British colonizers moved to this area and formed a country called Rhdesia, they had a problem with establishing a language that everybody could understand. There are five different dialects spoken in Zimbabwe. dialects of the banto language which are corore, zuru, manika, karanga and nadawo and they all belong to the family of the banto languages which originated in where now Nigeria is. The word bantto itself means one people. So the language spoken in pretty much the whole subsaharan Africa belongs to the banto family. Of course, it differs so much that a person from Nigeria would not understand a person from Zimbabwe, but the core is the same. Even language called Swahili, which a lot of people say, "Oh, it's a bit Arabic and it's not really African." It's got a bantoore. For example, in Swahili, you say a mongu for a foreigner, while in Zimbabwe, you say murongu. Pretty similar, in it. But you must understand that in Africa, the language will change very quickly. I would say that every 100 miles of distance there will be another dialect. I think in Nigeria there is 150 different languages, official languages. Now in Zimbabwe it's 16 but it's a much smaller country. So Shaa is a written standard language with the autograph and grammar that was codified during the early 20th century and fixed in the 1950s. In the 1920s, the Rodesian administration was faced with a challenge of preparing school books and other materials in the various languages and dialects and requested the recommendation of South African linguist Clement. Clement was a British linguist who spent a lot of time in South Africa. He got to know local tribes and actually got to know a local lingo as well. He knew that African languages cannot be translated into into European languages because I have a different different structure. But anyways, you will probably ask me, "What the hell are you doing in Zimbabwe? It's 15,000 kilometers from Europe. It's quite far. What are you doing there?" Well, my son was born in Zimbabwe. I'm trying to get him a Polish passport, take him back with me to the UK. It is a very complicated task. There's no Polish embassy in Zimbabwe. So I have to get a birth certificate. Then certify the birth certificate. Then me, the mother of the child will have to go to South Africa to Ptoria where the nearest Polish embassy is located. Everywhere I go, I have to wait for hours. If you have not seen my previous vlog where I show how I was getting the birth certificate, you must do so. There is no national database that is accessible online. So to get a certificate that you want, you have to go to an office that it was issued in. And then there are stamps, there are taxes, there are fees, there are zero copies, copies of a copy, etc., etc. Be prepared to have a lot of time if you want to get that paper. The African time, it is a very different concept to a European time. You become frustrated very quickly. Don't get me wrong, the staff working in those offices are very nice, but there's nothing they can do about the system. It is a lesson I'm learning. You just have to stay there, sit quietly, and wait until you are summoned upon. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. In meantime, I have plenty time to explore the area. There are plenty bars in Zimbabwe. Despite the poverty, the bars are always busy. A bottle of beer usually cost you around $1 US. I'm not a big fan of lagger beer, but I find the African beer very tasty. It's called shake shake and it's made of corn and it's got that sediment in it and they say it's food and drink all together. I really enjoy it. It's not very fizzy. Do try it if you can. I have not seen this kind of beer in Europe. If you are wondering what you could export from Africa is definitely that beer. I will be your first punter.
Okay, folks. Black level in the bar. 75 cents in the bottle. So maybe 50 cents uh maybe 40 p a pint in the in the bar. Not bad. Hanging around the immigration office in Harare waiting for my papers. I see a lot of white people around. In the 70s, there was 300,000 white people living in Rodesia, what it was called. Now, it's only about 24. And it seems like all of them are around that office trying to get a passport and leave. Inside the building, I'm meeting a white Zimbabwean of a Greek origin. He came with his parents in the 70s. His parents got a big farm with a swimming pool and become a tobacco farmers. Now when everything is gone, he's trying to get his Greek passport and go back to Greece. But not all the white Zimbabwans want to leave. Some of them love the country so much that despite the harsh times they are going through, they won't leave. Some simply cannot get a visa to another country and must stay. One of them is Kirst Coventry, the most decorated African athlete in the world. She won six medals in four Olympics in swimming. Now she's the minister of sport. Well done, Kirst. In Rodesia, which was the name of Zimbabwe before 1980, the whites introduced the system of segregation. It was a very similar system to the apartate in South Africa, but it wasn't as formal. Sha people are farmers and laidbacked friendly lot while the Zulus of South Africa are warriors and had to be enslaved in a different way. But overall the both systems discriminated locals. European settlers had a lot of colonies in Africa but not all the colonies were meant to be settled in. The climate along the equator was simply too hot for the white person to live. Don't get me wrong, the Europeans colonizers put their hands on everything they could, but for many of them the tropical climate was lethal. Zimbabwe has a subtropical climate and most of the country is located on a plateau. The temperatures in the daytime are around 20 to 25 Celsius just perfect. On top of that, you have constant eastern wind bringing nice cool breeze. Northern Zimbabwe is renown for its citrus plantations. For the northern Europeans, it was like getting piece of South Italy for themsel. In the beginning, the Sha people accepted the newcomers, but they had no idea what's coming. Soon they became secondass citizens in their own country. That's where Chimorena, which in Sha means the war of liberation started and they gave whites hard time. Politics of British Empire has also changed at that time. A lot of African colonies were granted independence, but the Rodies didn't want to follow the suit. On November 11th, 1965, Prime Minister Ian Smith issued a declaration of independence from the UK to prevent rapid transition to black majority rule that led to the second Chimoranga, which the Roies called the Bush War. 30,000 people died during this conflict. To find out more about it from the white perspective, watch the vlog with Gary Stafford who was a soldier during this conflict and took active part in the war. Gary has now a bird sanctuary on the lake Chero. Do watch my vlogs from Zimbabwe if you are interested about this matter. I conducted a lot of interviews with people from Zimbabwe, white people from Zimbabwe, black people from Zimbabwe. But when I was on the lake Cho, I was lucky to meet a lot of white Zimbabweans and they told me a lot of stories from their perspectives. I must say the history of that part of the world is incredible. The whites lost the war in 1980 and the country of Zimbabwe was established. Rhodesia, which was a parliamentary system that enforced minority rule, couldn't face the international sanctions and a guerilla war from Zanla and Zebra forces. During the interviews on Lake Chiver, I found out about Polish immigrants who settled down in Rhodesia during the Second World War. After the Polish soldiers were set free from the Russian camps, Golaks in Siberia, they went down through Iran to Africa where they settled. They were allowed to stay and had families and their children went to Polish schools. There are still Polish war cemeteries in Zimbabwe. Now, personally, I've met a few ancestors of the Polish settlers. They couldn't really speak any Polish, but they were still trying to claim the Polish citizenship. I've met them in Ptoria in Polish embassy. They were trying to get the Polish passports. At the moment, Polish passport is a thing to have. And in the town of Cheutu, Mr. Kojinski founded one of the biggest chicken farm in the country. After the war, Robert Mugab become the president of Zimbabwe. was ruling the country for over 30 years. He kept borrowing and printing money. The country went through so-called hyperinflation. At one point, there was a note of $100 trillion. Zimbabwe went through a humanitarian crisis. Folks weren't happy and he was overthrown in a coup. His former colleague Emerson Nanuaga took the presidential seat and is ruling the country. Till this very day, the country is still facing many issues. During the colonial times, 440 farmers had 51% of all the Zimbabwean soil. Robert Mugab has taken that land back and given to his fellows. Because of that deed, there was a lot of sanctions put on Zimbabwe. The new president Nuagua invited the white farmers back to the country, even promised them some money, but they never came. The compensation he promised to them were in national funds that really didn't have much value. To prevent any further hyperinflations, Languaga has changed the currency into US dollar that kept the economy fairly steady. The country has become one of the biggest producer of tobacco in Africa. The US dollar is the main currency. The smaller currency under $1 is a zig. You can see the zik as well. The nodes are very old uh and torn and used. You can see that new nodes are not coming to the country and the old nodes that were introduced are still in use. When it comes to transport, the best way is to use so-called combi, which is a mini van, usually exported from Japan. They are meant to take around 10 people on board, but the conductor will put in as many as possible.
Oh. Folks, thank you very much for watching this vlog. I hope you liked it, commented and did subscribe to my channel. There will be more coming. Zimbabwean history is so interesting. This was just an introduction to it. But let's find out if I managed to get that passport or not today. So, I haven't been able to get the papers. I need to go back tomorrow. Everything shuts at about lunchtime here. So, in a couple of hours, you have in the morning to get your things sorted, unfortunately.
Hello. Hello. This is your boy Vlogger Zupa. Welcome to the new series from Africa, Zimbabwe. I have 3 weeks to travel around this country. The size of Zimbabwe is about the size of the UK, but it's only inhabited by 14 million people. 80% of that population is Shauna tribe. And we will look closely at them. We will look at their oral traditions, music, food, and of course, night life. Snuff tobacco is a big part of Sha culture. I had the experience to use it myself. Find out if I've connected with my ancestors. Ancestors totems and spirituality is a big thing in Shona culture. So is the music. A traditional instrument called serves as the telephone to the spirits. Their has been estimated to exist in Shaa society for the past thousand years. It is a mystical instrument full of tradition and history. The revatory dates itself back many centuries and it's only passed down orally. I was very fortunate to meet the right people who explained to me complicated history of this region. Zimbabwe and street food is amazing. Watch the episode where I eat chicken and cow feet. At Lake Chiver, I've met Gary who showed me his birds and told me interesting history of his Dutch side of the family. I've also met Ian Darl and Alex whose stories were as incredible. Make sure you watch the interviews I've had with them. Also, definitely watch the episode about the Johan Masawa church, which is a phenomena of Zimbabwean church. It is a church without a church. Yes, they pray in nature. 30% of Zimbabwan territories covered with national parks or protected areas. Animals are protected by the common belief of totems. But it is the people of Zimbabwe that made the biggest impression on me. They were very kind and helpful. and I never felt unsafe. Subscribe to the channel and watch the series from Africa.
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