HARARE - Zimbabwes famous dub poet, Albert Nyathi, has been named by the British Council as one of the climate change icon who will be working with schools to bring to the fore the challenges facing the country as a result of climate change. In an interview with The Zimbabwean, Nyathi said he was now taking poetry to schools, having done the same to schools in the UK for more than 10 years.
“On this programme, I go to schools where I take the children out and ask each child to write not more than three lines about climate change. Since climate change is a collective responsibility, we will then sit down together and piece together all the lines to make a poem. I have been working with school children on poetry in the UK for more than 10 years, but this is the first time I am doing this in Zimbabwe, said the popular musician cum-dub poet.
“I am enjoying working with children and we hope to create a website where we will post these poems,” he said.
Nyathi said he had been working with Gateway Senior School, Peterhouse Girls’ Senior School and Watershed Senior School among others.
Albert Nyathi is Zimbabwe’s premier performance dub-poet. His performances are often backed by powerful music. At school, he used to perform traditional praise poetry, but was inspired by the freedom struggle in Zimbabwe.
He started to write plays and poems at secondary school. At university in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, he was so influential within the students’ representative body, that he was invited for each rally or each meeting.
He gave up his rapidly advancing career in the government service as a very well informed senior member of the Zimbabwe’s National Arts Council to concentrate on performance and the development of youth training programmes in the arts in Harare’s townships.
Nyathi said he started fusing his written poetry with music so as to blow life into them, to blow life into a dead word. In 1989, while at university studying Arts, Nyathi was invited to play the leading role of form South African President Nelson Mandela in a play called “The Spirit of No Surrender” produced by the community theatre company Zambuko/Izibuko and the ANC as a co-producer. The production was about a family’s struggle in the townships through the period of Mandela’s incarceration.
Nyathi now performs with Imbongi, fusing words, music, dance and song into an exciting blend of traditional blues, jazz and contemporary Zimbabwean and South African rhythms.
The group was chosen by the United Nations to represent African Music at the youth congress in Hawaii in 1999. Imbongi were in Britain for the first time in 2000, and were an enormous hit.
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