The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
ON Monday morning, more than a handful of twitter users, including a few prominent ones, were clamouring for Munya Chawawa.
At that time, the world was still in shock, after American superstar Will Smith had walked on the haloed Oscars stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock after he made a few unsavoury comments about his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith.
Across the globe, people were reacting to the infamous slap, tweets were being typed out at breakneck speed, memes were being manufactured in record and eye-catching headlines were being composed. It was a slap that stopped the world.
And yet, Munya Chawawa was the name on some people’s lips.
What did a Zimbabwean, resident in Britain, have to do with a violent altercation between two Hollywood stars halfway across the world in Los Angeles?
The frantic calls for people to “wake up” Chawawa, who was holidaying in Spain at the time of the incident at the Dolby Theatre, brought into sharp focus the fact that for many people across the globe, his satiric videos have become the go-to source for those looking for comedic interpretation of major global events or occurrences.
Since the start of the Covid-19 induced lockdowns around the world two years ago, Chawawa stocks have risen remarkably, with his videos making it somewhat easier to digest events that, viewed without the biting humour he sprinkles on them, would be too hard to swallow for some.
He has become a handy filter of weighty issues, distilling news that would otherwise leave people despondent into bite-sized chucks of incisive, topical humour.
“I make content because I need to express how I’m feeling about the world,” he said of his comedy in an interview.
“You have to have some form of catharsis when the world throws stuff at you, otherwise you’ll just go crazy.”
While he deals in humour, peddling clever comedy that elicits easy laughs, Chiwawa has also had the bravery some comedians do not possess, tackling topics some would fear to touch.
For example, in one of his latest skits, he went after the British crown, making a mockery of the recent royal visit to Jamaica.
While royal visits, with their over-the-top pomp, make for good comedy fodder, there was no denying that this particular visit was sensitive.
During the visit, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness told Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate that his country wanted to be “independent” and address “unresolved” issues, a day after protesters called on the United Kingdom to pay reparations for slavery.
In a minute-long video that has since been viewed 2,4 million times on Instagram alone, Chawawa makes a very effective parody of the whole trip and somehow manages to dissect British imperialism and colonial abuse without belittling the centuries-old pain of the Jamaican people.
Chawawa would go to jokingly remark that, as he was outside the UK at the time, he did know if they would let him back in the country.
But this would not be the first time that Chawawa, a Zimbabwean immigrant, has made viral fun of his hosts.
When the UK’s adulterous health secretary Matt Hancock was caught red-handed in June 2021 enthusiastically breaking social distancing rules with a married aide, Chawawa’s video, a playful parody of reggae artiste Shaggy’s It wasn’t me, introduced a whole new perspective on an incident of how the elite had disregarded their own rules when the world was struggling under the strain of Covid-19. The 62-second It Was Me video has been viewed 2.5-million times on Twitter alone.
However, despite the liberties that he takes as he clowns the elite, Chawawa has never lost sight of his status as a Zimbabwe. On his Instagram bio, the comedian proclaims that he has “A Zimbabwean passport or British…depends on who’s asking”.
In that sense, he joins thousands of other Zimbabweans with that dual identity.
Born in Derby in the UK, Chawawa spent his childhood in Harare before his family once again moved to Framingham Pigot, a village in Norfolk.
Given all this, he has never discarded his Zimbabwean roots and believes it had a bearing on his craft.
“My dad always used to say to me, ‘When you were in Zimbabwe you were so bold,” he told the New York Times in an interview last year.
“Being a satirist now,” he added, is “a resurgence of the guy I used to be.”
Of his native country, he said: “People are very warm… “everyone wants you to do well”.
In contrast, life was often lonely in Norfolk.
“A lot of time in your own head, thinking to yourself, ‘Am I ever going to have friends who are like me?
What’s the world like out there? There must be more to life than this.”
As his stocks have risen over the last two years, so has Chawawa’s fame and success.
Last month, Chawawa was voted Best Breakthrough Performer at the first British National Comedy Awards for Stand Up to Cancer while only this week the Royal Television Society Programme Awards gave a thumbs up to his show, Race Around Britain, giving him an award in the presenter category.
While for the public Chawawa’s success might seem sudden, coinciding with the start of the lockdowns, the 29-year-old University of Sheffield alumni insists that the success has been a long time coming.
“Anyone who says to me.
Oh, you really blew up during lockdown,’ I think to myself, I’ve been doing this for years,” he told The Guardian in an interview.
Besides his razor-sharp humour, Chawawa has earned a reputation for being one of the hardest and fastest working comedians, barely letting events simmer for a day before he unpacks and dishes them out to the world.
All that hard work however, has come at a cost, as there is barely any balance between business and pleasure for him anymore.
“I’ve discovered being a workaholic isn’t the greatest thing in the world.
In terms of prioritising the people who matter.
Last year, I was in Norwich, seeing my niece for the first time, and then my phone goes and I see they’ve announced tier three and I got a train back to London and stayed up all night, writing a satirical song about the (Covid-19) restrictions.
You think I can just let this slide, people will forget after a few days, but then I think, this video can change my life, and that’s how I approach it.”
As he searches for the next joke, the next jab to throw at the high and mighty, Chawawa believes that his destiny is to leave a legacy in the world.
With each skit, each viral video or TV programme he gets to presents, it seems like the sky is indeed the limit for a man who proudly counts both Zimbabwean and British passports as some of his proudest possessions.
“I love the idea of being indelible, of leaving a mark on the world.
I can’t process the idea of leaving it without having left something, you know?”,” he said.
