University of Zimbabwe

So I became the chairperson of that, uh, of that particular group.

Now after my high school, I, I went to the University of Zimbabwe where I also got involved quite actively in Christian Union.

We would go places preaching the gospel, uh, go to high schools, you know, and preaching to high, you know, high school students.

Uh, so it was a very, very revolutionary experience indeed.

What is standing in the way of doing it? We are looking at the laws governing our water and environment, how those laws work in practice, where accountability breaks down and what happens when institutions, communities and the environment are caught between competing interests we're also quite grateful to acknowledge the support from birdlife zimbabwe towards the conservation conversation zimbabwe water dialogue series their contribution has helped strengthen this important national platform and its mission to advance meaningful conversation around zimbabwe's water wetlands biodiversity and environmental future we sincerely appreciate birdlife zimbabwe for standing with us in this conversation This is the fourth episode of the Zimbabwe Water Dialogue, where we examine critical issues shaping water policy and governance in the country.

In this episode, recorded at the University of Zimbabwe, I was joined by a distinguished panel, Doug Coulthart.

He's a legal practitioner and partner at Mtetwai Nyambirai, specializing in constitutional and human rights law.

And also, lastly, I have Muriel Hondonga, who's a legal expert with Mangachena Attorneys, with a strong interest in environmental law.

And at the heart of that was rural development studies.

And some of the most amazing and some of the most creative ways of working with adults were the people that were in the faculty with us in Zimbabwe, University of Zimbabwe at the time.

And I was so fortunate to have done that because that molded me and made me understand the cultural basis of much of what we were doing.

But if I may step back very slightly, whilst I was at high school in Cape Town, one day my father, because I grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe, he came home and most surprisingly, he He flipped a book onto the desk in front of me where I was doing my homework.

Uh, scholars have, uh, written many books, but they've not drawn these multiple threads, uh, in their, uh, longitude, if you want, uh, from this, this deep past to the present.

Uh, but also it's really part of what I've been interested in, uh, since my years as an undergraduate student at University of Zimbabwe.

Um, as a student of economic history, uh, I was interested in the economics of entertainment.

Uh, so really like the industry stuff, uh, the, how the industry works, how music makes money, uh, the welfare of musicians and other creative, um, uh, workers, uh, in the Zimbabwean context.

So for over a century, the working assumption was that the birds were carved in the city's peak period, around the 13th to 15th centuries.

But the 2023 study, led by a team from the University of Zimbabwe and Oxford, tested a few fragments that had been carefully curated in the National Museum's vault, and they came back with dates in the 10th century.

That's a couple hundred years earlier than anyone expected.

Wait, the 10th century? That would mean the birds predate the big stone walls by centuries.