Vusumuzi Dube
Bruce Ndlovu , Sunday Life Reporter
ALMOST everywhere one goes in Matabeleland, they are confronted by the effects of climate change.
Watering holes from where plenty water once flowed have dried up and green leaves are a sight now reserved for the rainy season. Even this season of plenty is not as reliable as it was in the past. These days, the rains awaken the dry grasses of Matabeleland late, arriving at a time when most of the livestock is now lean, starved of both water and food for long periods of the year.
In other parts of the region where there was once fish aplenty, stocks are dwindling, as the long periods of prolonged drought threatened to bring the proverbial fish out of the water.
Despite this, rarely will one come across art that depicts the changing times. To many artistes, like it is to many people in the country, climate change is still a distant monster that will one day be confronted when its effects are felt even more severely. For now, most are content to sing and write about the problems that seem most immediate to them. Never mind the fact that the problem is present in the here and now, affecting the lives of people across the length and breadth of Zimbabwe.
It is with this in mind that Kelna Climate Productions was established two years ago with the intention of giving artistes an opportunity to speak effectively about a problem whose effects are felt keenly every year. So far, the organisation has been hosting climate themed poetry competitions in Bulawayo, with the goal of expanding to other parts of Matabeleland where the effects of climate change are the most debilitating.
The project’s director Keith Ndlovu said: “I’ve been running the organisation for the past two years now and we’ve been doing climate change seminars and Climate change poetry competitions within Bulawayo. We’re planning to go to Matabeleland South rural communities because we realised that they suffer more from the rippling effects of Climate change.” Ndlovu said the expansion of the project would depend on the support they received financially, as they were still mostly self-funded. While initially the project addressed communities at large, it had started taking the climate change gospel to school-going children, after the realisation that they held the keys to any change that may come about in future.
“We are a youth-driven organisation, we just started by advocating for climate change through Poetry, which is why we also do climate change poetry programmes within schools, we then later developed to doing climate change seminars where we teach communities about the severity of Climate change within our community
“We have visited a total of 15 primary schools and two high schools. We started off in 2021 but we were mostly doing community outreach programmes during that time then later expanded to engaging school-going children. We are hoping for our programme to go beyond the vicinity of Matabeleland but
that will depend on our budget because we are a self-funded organisation, but we recently asked for potential sponsors for our next project if we fail to garner any, we will still continue .
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