Pastor Spearheads Zimbabwe Pro-Democracy Movement

An unlikely pastor has been thrust into the forefront as a key societal leader against President Robert Mugabe’s longtime authoritarian rule.

Evan Mawarire, 39, an evangelical priest, was arrested and detained in June after a video he had posted the year before sparked a social movement calling for an end to government corruption and Mugabe’s ironclad 28-year-long rule.

After posting the video in April 2015, which showed him wrapped in a Zimbabwean flag and arguing that the country needed change, it went viral online and sparked dozens of protests in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. The movement came to be known as #ThisFlag. 

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“If three months ago you had told me that I would have to speak on behalf of my country … I really would have asked that you have a medical checkup of some sort,” Evan Mawarire said at an event organized by the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C. on Aug. 17.

Mawarire said that the movement, which garnered support across Zimbabwe, started out as a mere “accident” or “fad.”

While Mawarire made the video to express his anger at the state of Zimbabwe’s economy and its social problems, he did not expect it to garner the reaction it has. Little did he know that his experiment would propel him to become a national and international figure in Zimbabwe’s dormant pro-democracy movement. 

Mawarire was released after international pressure following his arrest. He has since been in the United States, but intends to go back.

Zimbabwe has long been plagued by economic woes, including an 11 percent inflation according to the World Bank, a GDP annual growth rate of 1.5 percent, and persistently high unemployment, although the data on official unemployment numbers in Zimbabwe have been unreliable.

However, despite the dismal economic indicators and destitution experienced by the population, the people in Zimbabwe have yet to challenge Mugabe’s reign, which when adding his time as prime minister comes to 36 years.

The time of acquiescence and compliance seems to have reached a boiling point for Mawarire, who said that the people cannot be silenced any longer: “I’m here to tell the story of Zimbabwe and how we are turning it around. We want the world to know that we have discovered that we are the heroes that we have been waiting for.”  

An emotional Mawarire, who often paused to wipe tears from his eyes as he addressed the Atlantic Council, discussed the deprivation experienced by the citizens of Zimbabwe while also articulating a clear sense of optimism for the way forward: “It has felt like a crime to feel like Zimbabwe can be better than the one we have,” he said.

“I believe that we are standing at the cusp of the opportunity that allows us to see this beautiful nation become exactly what it is supposed to be.”

Officials in Zimbabwe are not as receptive to the social mobilization or the rhetoric espoused by Mawarire that has been so influential to those who have taken to the streets. Mawarire stated that the government has tried to discredit the oppositional movement by claiming that it is supported by the West.

“So #ThisFlag thing is a pastors fart,” Higher Education Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo, said on Twitter in May this year, in an attempt to mock the movement.

Oh. Very revealing. So #ThisFlag thing is a pastor’s fart. How stinking! https://t.co/dMmpRJoNk9

— Prof Jonathan Moyo (@ProfJNMoyo) May 9, 2016

President Mugabe has also come out against the protests, stating that uprisings challenging his rule “don’t pay” and compared the demonstrations to the Arab Spring movement that started in 2011 and spread in the Middle East North Africa resulting in the toppling of several leaders.

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Despite the growing backlash he has received from authorities, Mawarire is remaining steadfast in his pursuit against “corruption, injustice, and poverty.”

“I’m the one that’s responsible for helping Zimbabwe to regain an honorable place among the nations of the world,” Mawarire said.