Becoming The Muse

The Best Festival of the year …HIFA didn’t happen

HIFA

The Harare International Festival Of The Arts (HIFA) is one of the biggest events that happens in Zimbabwe if not Africa with a six day ensemble of local, regional and international acts coming together to perform, showcase and exhibit to an audience from far and wide.

Its all about the healing, unifying and creative power of art to bring hope where there’s darkness and a beacon to the world to come share our love for arts and experience our hospitality

This year citing socio-economic challenges the country is facing the organisers of the event decided to shelve it to my heart’s break… I mean wasn’t one their themes on the enduring nature of art through the darkness… anyway they say hold on for 28 April – May 2020

Despite the challenges these annual happenings still happened:

Shoko Festival

Shoko Festival is an urban culture festival embracing tech, new media, art with presentations and discussions centred around these and headline concerts, recitals and comedy nights.

I attended The Hub Unconference segment which is mostly about new media and the were talks and presentations such as The State Of The Internet Address and a panel discussion with 2 members of parliament Temba Mliswa (independent) and Vincent Tsvangirai (MDC)on how to use the internet to effectively engaging with elected officials and their constituencies

I also set through a session of Techzim a tech mag/blog a Pindula-Edit-A-Thon where they were showing and telling on Pindula (a local crowd-sourced content site similar to Wikipedia) and how one can contribute content on it.

Another interesting session was a panel discussion On WHOSE STORY ARE we telling between Robyn Kriel(Al Jazeera news correspondent formerly with CNN) Faten Jabai(freelance video & photojournalist) and Christian Epps(Lighting Specialist CEO lightsCamera and Diasopra) The conference also had room to further interact with these experts through masterclass sessions on Mobile Journalism and Lighting & Content Composition

During Christian’s masterclass he mentioned an interesting observation on how African videos seem to suffer from camera and lighting effects with people focussing more on the environment than having the actual person come out clearly and you can clearly see the eyes of the subject if one had to make a compromise between having a poor background and the person coming out badly shouldn’t one obviously first make sure the person is clearly visible first? Anyway practise makes perfect and he cited the strides Nigeria’s Nollywood industry has made in film people are shooting feature films using mobile phones and handheld lamps for lighting.

"if you have a story, a phone and the internet… nothing stops you from putting out content"@christianepps @TheFeedZW#thehubzw#shoko19

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) September 28, 2019

Facebook has a straight-up stalkerish algorithim….
Its now suggesting all the people I saw at the #Shoko19 Hub as people I may know… when I didnt post on FB anything about being there. pic.twitter.com/d6LRhwIKOX

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) October 2, 2019

Harare WordCamp

A WordCamp is a conference hosted by the local WordPress group with presentations and discussions on all things WordPress and other things by various everyday speakers on areas of their passion. I was one of the speakers at the 2019 Harare WordCamp and I presented on blogging you can check out the fun and learning we experienced as I have written extensively about on the images below:

What is WordCamp Harare?

Highlights from WordCamp Harare 2019

My Presentation at the WordCamp Harare 2019: To Blog Or Not To Blog

Day 19 of 25 days of blogging

~B