Put Zim First: Why Our Festivals Are Dropping South African Artists as Xenophobia Burns Across the Border

A festival that was supposed to run on the last day of July has quietly pushed itself to the first of August, and somewhere in that reshuffle every South African name fell off the bill. No press conference. No long statement. Just a new date and a shorter poster. If you did not know what was happening across the border, you would think it was a scheduling clash. It is not a scheduling clash. It is a choice, and it is the same choice a lot of Zimbabwean promoters have been making all winter.

I want to talk about it plainly, because it deserves better than a hashtag.

First, The Part That Is Not Up For Debate

Let me put the real thing on the table before we discuss music, because the music is downstream of it. Since late May, a fresh wave of xenophobic violence in South Africa has driven Zimbabweans out in numbers that are hard to hold in your head. By early July our own government said more than 78,000 nationals had come back, most of them on their own, some through state-assisted returns. Human Rights Watch has documented mobs targeting African and Asian foreigners while the police stood by. In Alexandra, protesters kicked in doors looking for people they had decided did not belong, and one of the men they dragged out, Total Mhlanga, was holding a valid Zimbabwean Exemption Permit. He had the paper. It did not matter.

Sit with that. A man does everything the system asked of him and still gets hunted in his own home. That is the ground truth under every cancelled booking, and I am not going to pretend the two are separate.

The Industry Went To War Quietly

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Mafikizolo, one of the most beloved groups on the continent, was axed from a Victoria Falls show. Musa Keys got pulled from a major bill. Y2K Entertainment Promotions announced it was withdrawing support from South African musicians altogether and disassociating from the Mzansi industry. The National Arts Council of Zimbabwe stepped in and asked promoters to postpone South African performances outright, citing public tension and safety. And on social media a whole movement crystallised into three words that are now doing the work of an entire argument: put Zim first.

So this festival moving its date and quietly deleting its South African headliners is not a rogue act. It is one more brick in a wall the whole industry has been building since June. The question worth asking is not whether it is happening. It is happening. The question is whether it is right, and what it actually achieves.

Why I Understand It Completely

Here is the honest emotional truth. You cannot ask a Zimbabwean crowd to put their hands up for a Mzansi hit in the same week their cousin is sleeping at Beitbridge with everything they own in two bags. Music is not neutral. A stage is a statement about who you are willing to celebrate, and there is something obscene about throwing a party for the culture of a place where your own people are being chased through the streets. A boycott is one of the few weapons ordinary people actually hold. You cannot stop a mob in Alexandra from Harare. But you can refuse to hand over your money, your dancefloor and your applause. Solidarity that costs you nothing is not solidarity. This one costs bookings, costs money, costs a great lineup. That is what makes it mean something.

So no, I will not stand here and scold Zimbabweans for choosing their own. I would be lying about how I feel.

And Here Is Where I Have To Be Honest About The Other Edge

But I have never been the kind to stop where it feels good. So let me say the harder part.

A cultural boycott is a blunt instrument, and blunt instruments hit people who did not do the crime. Mafikizolo did not kick in a door in Alexandra. Many South African artists have publicly condemned the xenophobia, some of them louder than their own government. When we cancel every Mzansi name on principle, we are punishing musicians for the sins of politicians and mobs, and we are using the exact logic we claim to hate, judging a person by the flag on their passport instead of what they have actually done. That should at least make us uncomfortable.

And there is a strategic question too. Does an empty South African tour date change one thing for the family at Beitbridge? Or does it just let us feel like we did something while the actual violence carries on untouched? A boycott can be a moral stand and a substitute for harder action at the same time. I do not have a clean answer. I am suspicious of anyone who says they do.

The Real Story Is The One Nobody Wants To Name

Here is what I keep landing on. The tragedy is not that a Zimbabwean festival dropped its South African acts. The tragedy is that it came to this. For twenty years amapiano and afrobeats and sungura and kwaito taught us that this region is one sound wearing different accents. Our biggest records are collaborations. Our sound crosses that border more freely than our people ever have. Music was the one thing that was already united while the politicians kept drawing lines.

And now the lines have reached the music. When a festival has to choose between its lineup and its conscience, the border has finally won a battle it was never supposed to be allowed to fight. That is the loss. Not a poster. A principle.

So put Zim first, yes. Stand with the 78,000 and the man with the permit that did not save him, absolutely. But do not mistake a cancelled booking for justice, and do not let the anger curdle into the very thing we are grieving. The goal was never to hate South Africans. The goal was for a Zimbabwean to be able to sleep safely in Johannesburg and a South African to be welcomed on a stage in Harare on the same weekend. We are further from that today than we have been in years, and no rescheduled festival is going to close that distance.

The music will forgive us. The question is whether we will deserve it.

About Taona Oswald Chipunza

Taona Oswald Chipunza, known as Teemak, is a Zimbabwean singer, songwriter, and producer. He is the founder of Lord Empire Music and creates music that fuses Afrobeat, Amapiano, and traditional Sungura sounds.

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