zimbabwe

"You will get produce and not sell it and it goes bad pretty fast. That was my problem in the beginning. You need to have a strong presence online. Most of our sales come from the online store. You need to slay your brand. You need to breath, sleep and eat your brand. You need to know what to do when things go to the left…this industry needs 100 percent from the owner. You need to be the one leading from the front. A lot of work goes into the business. It is draining and that is something that I won’t lie about"

"In 2016 I had applied to every company that you can think of and I did not get any job. So, that is when I decided that let me be my own boss and do the employing. Everyone was expecting to go into the beauty industry but I met this lady who used to deliver vegetables to my house and so I asked her how she did it. She told me that the first thing that I needed to separate me from the rest of the field was to get a car so I could do deliveries"

"Fast forward to two weeks later and her husband came to deliver vegetables to me and I asked him where she was and he just started crying. He told me that she had passed away and that is when I decided that let me get into this business, if not for myself but for her because she believed in her business so much. It’s sad that I can’t share what’s happened since then with her but that’s how Zwide Veggies was born"

"I’m not going to lie and say Covid-19 has had a bad impact on the business. We have been the busiest during the lockdown. I think it is what has made me open a physical shop. The orders were now overwhelming and I needed a place where I could store the vegetables, a place where people can come and order without doing so online. At some point our site crushed. God would have to punish me if I said that Covid-19 affected me badly because it is what led to the opening of the physical shop"

"My advice to people to come into the same line of business as myself is that there is no off day. Vegetables and fruits are perishables and you need to have a plan on how to push your sales. If you don’t, you will end up running a loss"

"I wanted to start off with makeup, but it was going to be a long process to get the stuff ready on time hence why I opted for fragrances. In the long run, we want to build an empire with my husband and family so this is one of the ways in which we’re doing so."

"I have this passion of following my joy and it is my absolute joy to make people look beautiful, and that has also contributed to my inspiration in starting this journey"

"My husband is Nxumalo and his clan names are Mkhatshwa, Zwide and Ndwandwe, I’m a Khumalo and one of the clan names is Mangethe. Our clan names inspired the scents and their identity."

"Ever since I became a mother, children have become so dear to me. My heart breaks at the thought of how many children go to bed on empty stomachs. So, since every child is my baby too, that is why I have pursued this idea"

"We are not choosing any particular child to benefit from our food distribution scheme. We are going to feed every child who needs food as long as they are between the ages five and 18 years old"

"Charity begins at home. That is the reason why I chose to start with Pumula East before going to other townships. I want to give back to my home first before I expand to other suburbs"

"I was heart-broken when one of the grannies cried saying some of the food items (that were donated) were now like luxury. We as a community should try as much as we can to help our fellow brothers and sisters"

"The Covid-19 pandemic has made the lives of the less privileged children hard because most of them are supported by their grannies who used to sell tomatoes in the streets and now, they are locked down and have lost their source of income"

"We have fought for our land, we have fought for our sovereignty, small as we are we have won our independence and we are prepared to shed our blood…. So, Blair keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe."

"When Cecil Rhodes sent in his agents to rob and steal in Zimbabwe, they and other Europeans marveled at the surviving ruins of the Zimbabwe culture, and automatically assumed that it had been built by white people. Even today there is still a tendency to consider the achievements with a sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa, as part of the universal process by which man’s labor opened up new horizons. The sense of reality can only be restored by making it clear that the architecture rested on a foundation of advanced agriculture and mining, which had come into existence over centuries of evolution."

"Nationalism, as a political movement, has taken a variety of forms. In some cases a preexisting social unit defines itself as a nation and then endeavors to secure its own state. It also commonly happens in colonial situations, however, that a small local vanguard — typically a "middle group" between the colonial elite and the masses — is faced with the twin tasks of creating a nation out of formerly distinct social groups in order to underpin their legitimacy for taking the state. A third basic type of nationalism occurs when a small leading group secures the state and then engages a posteriori in processes of nation-building. Actually, the Zimbabwean case combines the latter two types of nationalism at different historical stages, and nationalism typically requires ongoing processes of nation-building or maintenance."

"People who will happily campaign for human rights in East Timor or the Middle East start to behave like the most rabid social Darwinists when you mention Zimbabwe’s whites. "Africa is a tough place and they were on top for a long time. It’s their turn to be dominated now," a friend I'd previously regarded as a liberal told me."