Online Reporter
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
AS it celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, the Intwasa Arts Festival koBulawayo, the country’s oldest surviving festival of its kind, appeared to have lost some of its vitality.
In the family of Zimbabwe’s arts and cultural festivals, Intwasa is the resilient sibling that has watched its counterparts disappear.
Over the years, it has seen the country’s largest festival, the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Hifa), falter and ultimately succumb to the financial struggles that plague most multi-disciplinary cultural events.
After being last held seven years ago, it is fair to say that Hifa is no longer just in a coma — it has been permanently silenced.
Similarly, it may be time to mourn the Amakhosi’s Inxusa Festival, which has not been held in over a decade. The Ibumba Festival also teeters between life and death, appearing sporadically every few years.
Throughout this period of decline, Intwasa has held firm.
However, last year, whispers of its demise grew louder when organisers announced the festival would be delayed from its traditional September slot to November.
A “spring” festival held in late autumn was an unusual move, and many critics were quick to write its obituary. Despite the doubts, the event went ahead, proving its resilience. Still, questions lingered about its future.
This year’s edition, themed “Imagine It, Experience It,” is set to take place from September 23 to 27, marking a hopeful return to its spring tradition. Despite ongoing financial difficulties that limit the organisers’ grand ideas, they are determined to once again revitalise Bulawayo.
Festival organiser Raisedon Baya acknowledged that this year’s event may not feature as many high-profile events as in the past.
“It is not as big as we would like it to be. We think it is modest but very impactful. That is what we are hoping for,” he said.
For festival organisers, the financial bottom line is important, but for Intwasa, its most crucial commitment is to the city of Bulawayo. Baya, emphasised that Intwasa is a community festival focused on giving as many people as possible access to the arts.
“We are a community festival. I have always emphasised that we are about giving access to the arts to many people. We are about grassroots arts and I suppose that makes it challenging in the times we are living in.
“We are a festival that wants to get the city engaged and we want to reach everyone, but that is difficult in this day and age, where everything costs a dollar. Without the dollar, it will always be difficult to put on the events that we want.”
Baya said that despite the continued challenges, the main motivation for organisers was to make sure that it ran every year, no matter the cost.
“That speaks to the funding challenges that we always speak of year in and year out, and that has never stopped us from doing stuff. We have always said that the festival has to happen every year, and we have now had 20 years of the festival.
“One of the reasons we have survived this long is that we continue to believe in the spirit of collaboration. We continue to believe in the spirit of partnership, and we continue to believe that we need to make do with whatever we have within our community to make the festival a reality,” he said.
Over the last few years, Intwasa has managed to capture the attention of the wider public in Bulawayo by taking events away from the city centre and bringing them to the townships, where most people in the city live.
This was a theme they were eager to continue with again this year, Baya said.
“We are bringing back our community engagements again this year. They might not be as many as 2025, but we want to make sure that the community is once again in tune with the events, so we will have one or two events out there.
We are collaborating with Winya Sounds to bring one to Makokoba and also another in Nkulumane,” he said.
Despite a compressed programme, Baya said this year’s programme will retain fan favourites.
“We will have several activities cutting across genres. Of course, we will have some theatre here and there, we will have poetry, literature, music and a few workshops. So, as we get into September, we are still running around to make sure that we have a memorable festival within the confines of the resources that we have.
“We have always said that for us, this is a community festival, and we are doing this for Bulawayo. With that in mind, we are grateful for the people who believe in what we do and continue to support us here and there.”
He added that the major highlights that people have become accustomed to about Intwasa are still going on.
“Women, Words and Wine has been our highlight for years, and this will be the case again this year. We are bringing in new acts, and in the next week or so, the line-up for that should be up.”
They have partnered with the Zimbabwe Music union and they will be doing a national gender at work conference.
Similarly, they have been working on a policy that looks at gender and they will use the festival to unpack it.
Book lovers also have reason to celebrate this year, with the long-awaited return of the Intwasa Book Day.
“We are bringing back something that we have not had for a while. The Intwasa Book Day will come back this year, and this is something for literary enthusiasts and writers. Perhaps through this, we can create or start to map out an ecosystem around the book industry,” he said.
