If you’ve somehow stumbled onto my writing for the first time — hi, my name is Malcom Mufunde. In my ongoing attempts to make sense of Zimbabwean culture, music, and the mess in between, I tend to write like I talk: too much, too openly, and usually with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s nearby. Depending on how this piece goes, you might remember my name fondly, or not at all. Either way, welcome.
Before I decided to take my writing talents to the tabloid division of the creative industry, I was a rapper, or at least a man doing a remarkably unconvincing impression of one. I had everything a rapper needs: a hoodie, a snapback, misplaced confidence, and a cousin who owned a microphone — everything but the talent.
My rap name, if you can believe it, was Malcom Mufunde; the same name you’d find on my payslip, my birth certificate, and on the voters’ roll. That catastrophic lack of imagination was one of many reasons I never made it as an artist. There’s nothing marketable about a name that sounds like it files tax returns. Even now, if someone shouted “Make some noise for Malcom Mufunde!” you’d expect a PowerPoint presentation. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently if I’d gone into gospel, where you can show up on stage as Takesure Zamar Ncube or Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave and still go platinum.
There’s something fascinating about gospel artists and their refusal to rebrand. I don’t know whether it’s because of divine authenticity or something else, but they insist on using their ridiculous government names. No one mocks them though, perhaps because to mock them would feel like blasphemy, or perhaps because their audiences are a gentler species entirely. Gospel and Sungura audiences live at a slower pulse. They are kind, soft-hearted people who iron their Sunday shirts on Saturday night. That’s why Alick Macheso, Sulumani Chimbetu, and Leonard Zhakata fit perfectly. They don’t need mystery or make-believe. Their names are passports to that world, and they carry the dignity of their genre.
That same formula would never fly in, say, Zimdancehall. Imagine hopping onto a riddim and introducing yourself as Everton Mlalazi. You’ll get booed before the first snare hits. The problem isn’t Everton himself — he’s cool, bless him — it’s just the rules of phonetics. Some names sound better on a church poster than a dancehall flyer.
Beyond cultural pride, some artists lean into their real names out of nominative determinism; the poetic and pseudoscientific belief that your name dictates your destiny. For the unenlightened (and I include myself in that group until about three days ago), nominative determinism is the theory that your name subtly nudges you toward your life’s work. This same principle, I suppose, is what gives us wonderfully descriptive names like Hwindi President — names that double as résumés. Usain Bolt is the textbook case; a man literally named to become the fastest human alive. If the same logic held in Zimbabwe, Voltz JT would be CEO of ZESA, Tsitsi Dangarembga the Chairman of the SPCA, etcetera.
Coming up with a stage name is its own delicate art form. It’s myth-making mixed with marketing and a little bit of deception. It’s not unlike naming a child. Some artists go through several incarnations before they find the one that sticks. Consider Sean Combs, a man who’s changed names so often his Wikipedia page reads like a witness protection file. Sean spent three decades shapeshifting from Puff Daddy to Puffy to P. Diddy to Diddy; each iteration an improvement on the last. It took him thirty years and multiple rebrands to arrive at a mononym that still sounds like a text notification.
A mononym, in case the education system failed you, is a single name by which an artist is known. It’s a minimalist form of branding usually reserved for icons who’ve achieved first-name-only status. Think Madonna, Beyoncé, Adele, Rihanna, Shakira, Sia. They sound like luxury brands or hurricanes, depending on your relationship with the cultural climate. Even we, in our small corner of the world, have produced a few; Takura, for instance, though I’m fairly sure I’m deadnaming him now that he’s rebranded as Shona Prince.
But nowhere are names wilder and more flippant than in Zimdancehall. The genre has its own naming algorithm, and it usually follows one sacred formula: a questionably chosen and vaguely intimidating designation followed by a single, random letter. Killer T. Major E. Dhadza D. Nisha T. Master H. And yes, the H in Master H stands for Hillary, which is a fact that has improved my mental health on several occasions.
The lone outlier in this naming galaxy is Pastor G, a gospel artist who apparently missed the memo that in his genre, sticking with Stanley Gwanzura would’ve been perfectly fine. In gospel, authenticity is the brand. You can’t be a man of God and sound like you’ve got swag. The Bible is full of Isaiahs, Ezekiels, and Jeremiahs. None of the prophets went by “Jay Prophecy.”
The crown jewel of this naming formula, of course, is Winky D, the people’s prophet. And before anything else, let me be clear: I love Winky D. I would name a son after one of his songs. He’s a genius who’s done more for social consciousness than most NGOs. I have no quarrel with the Gafa himself. But I cannot, with clean conscience, say the same about his most devoted followers, who on Twitter often behave like they were raised by pitbulls.
I’ve seen them cyberbully academics, pastors, and innocent bystanders for merely suggesting that not every track on Eureka Eureka changed their lives. If you tweet anything less than glowing about the Gafa, they appear instantly like bats responding to sonar, fueled by Caps Lock and Smart4U bundles. Their level of devotion borders on religious extremism. Actually, you can critique the Pope and get less pushback. I’ve never seen that kind of loyalty outside of organized crime.
I do understand them, though, to an extent. Obsession is a kind of religion, and we all have our gods. I would probably fight for Feli Nandi or Plaxedes Wenyika if the situation ever escalated, and not all of my reasons would be musical. But what worries me is how parasocial devotion has replaced critical thought. There’s a line between admiration and cult membership, and Winky D’s stans blurred it sometime around Disappear.
My breaking point came with the release of the AI-generated music video for Drink Up, his recent collaboration with Busy Signal. The video caused more civil unrest online than the entire 2018 elections. The Gafa camp hailed it as visionary and defended AI as if it stands for Artistic Integrity, while everyone else saw it for what it is: creative heresy. Now, I’m not anti-AI. I love technology. I’ve spent most of my life admiring its miracles. I’ll celebrate and welcome any invention that reduces human suffering: vacuum cleaners, insulin pumps, electric kettles, robots that do dishes, spellcheck, algorithms that recommend good music. But I draw the line at robots making art. Because art, for me, is a deeply human exchange. Strip the humanity away, and all that’s left is machinery performing emotion.
I say this as someone who has sinned before. When I first launched this column, I used ChatGPT to design two promotional posters for social media; just silly, self-harmless fun. But a few moral crusaders, who, I suspect, just wanted to feel taller online, tried to shame me for it. I simply dismissed it as virtue signalling, until I started reading about actual visual artists and painters whose work had been scraped and repurposed by AI models without consent, credit or pay. Suddenly, it wasn’t so funny. That’s when I understood it. If someone took one of my essays, fed it into ChatGPT, and generated a knockoff piece, I’d be livid. So I stopped. That was the beginning and end of my AI experiment; two posters and a revelation.
But the Drink Up discourse was different. It spiralled into full-blown cyber warfare. People were insulted, doxed, and threatened. Friendships ended. I watched grown adults type paragraphs of violent Shona because they couldn’t fathom anyone disliking an artificial Busy Signal. By the end of it, I wasn’t sure whether we were arguing about art or auditioning for madness. It felt like witnessing the decline of human intelligence in real time.
Still, I hold on to some optimism, probably misplaced, that the readers of this column — this slightly dysfunctional family of failed rappers and overthinkers — are capable of nuance. We can love Winky D, worship him even, and still admit that not every idea that springs from his genius deserves to be treated like holy scripture. We can hold both reverence and reason in the same breath. Because while he remains one of the most important artists of our time, it’s also okay to admit, with all due respect, that “Winky D” is, by any standard, a flagrantly reckless name to give yourself.
So, with love, admiration, and mild fear, that’s where this list begins.
1) Winky D
Open a dictionary.
Go on, I’ll wait.
Now turn to the W section and look up the word winky. I’ve checked more dictionaries, databases, and online rabbit holes than I’d like to admit, and the definition is consistent across the English-speaking world: winky means penis. And, just in case you thought the D might redeem things, it doesn’t. For those of you fluent in modern degeneracy, you’ll also know that D is, conveniently, well-established slang for the same anatomical feature. Which means, in plain linguistic arithmetic, Winky D = Penis Penis.
Legend has it that a young Wallace Chirumiko earned the moniker “Wicked DJ” after a streak of impressive DJ battles, and somewhere along the way, Wicked DJ evolved — or perhaps devolved — into Winky D. The logic behind this metamorphosis remains one of life’s great unsolved mysteries, and I’ve spent the better part of my adult life trying to understand how. “DJ,” after all, is already a shortened form of “disc jockey.” What exactly was gained by shortening it further? And how did “wicked” morph into “winky” rather than “wicky”? I’m not saying “Wicky DJ” would have been perfect, but at least it’s not Penis Penis. Naming yourself Winky D is, linguistically speaking, equivalent to calling yourself Booty Bum or Coochie Vajayjay.
Growing up, I was a loyal disciple of the Gafa, though one forced to worship in silence. Because even back then, I knew I could never, under any circumstance, say the obscenity “Winky D” around my parents. My mother would have confiscated my Walkman, my cassettes, and probably my freedom. So I found refuge in his safer aliases: Gafa, ChiExtra, Di Bigman, anything that didn’t sound like genital slang.
I remember one bus ride home from school when I finally got aux privileges, a sacred honour in those days. The aux cord was basically the nuclear codes, and a trust fall between friends. My classmates — equally zealous Gafa disciples — began chanting “Biggie! Biggie!” and, eager to please, I queued up Life After Death by The Notorious B.I.G. The outrage was immediate. Within seconds, I was getting pelted with pencils and called every obscenity known to teenage kind, including a few new ones. Turns out they wanted Di Bigman, not Big Poppa. I lost aux privileges for the rest of high school.
Biggie, of course, is short for Di Bigman, one of Winky D’s better-known aliases, though even that name carries its own complications. In high school, our sex ed teacher — a repressed Adventist — refused to use the word penis during lessons. His chosen euphemism was, regrettably, big man. So you’d have this grown man standing in front of a class of fourteen-year-olds, saying things like, “You must always wash your big man every morning,” or, “Sometimes, before you pee, your big man might be longer.” From then on, every time someone said Di Bigman, my mind went straight back to that classroom; meaning that in my head, ‘Winky D Di Bigman’ basically translated to Penis Penis the Penis.
Whatever else can be said, the Gafa remains one of the wittiest, most inventive lyricists this country has ever birthed. I’ve listened to pretty much his entire catalogue and watched enough of his interviews to confidently attest to his genius. Take Onaiwo, for instance, where he drops one of the slickest lines in Zimdancehall history:
“Zvimoko zvogaya ndiri musalad
Hanzi gafa makapenga padressing semayonnaise.”
The first time I heard it, I paused the track, took off my Musungo headphones and sat in reverent silence processing. The only other Zimdancehall line that’s ever sent me into that kind of blissful delirium was Enzo Ishall’s ode to a woman in a G-string:
“Uri wetambo pakati sekenduru.”
I’m a sucker for wordplay like that. Even recently, Winky pulled off another miracle during the Mike Chimombe and Moses Mpofu trial, casually slipping in:
“Hamusi mapofu (Mpofu), maona mbudzi (GOAT) yadzoswa; buditsai Mike (mic).”
Come on! It’s almost unfair. I just stood up in my living room and clapped. That’s why it baffles me that this same man — this lyrical genius, this surgeon of syllables — still willingly walks around calling himself Winky D. I’ve stopped believing it was an accident. A wordsmith that sharp, that deliberate, had to know what he was doing. You don’t get to wield that kind of verbal brilliance and still call yourself Penis Penis. Was it a dare? Did he lose a bet? Someone in his camp, surely, should have pulled him aside, cleared their throat, and said, “Gafa, we love the music, but maybe, just maybe, let’s find a name that can be said on daytime radio.”
I’ll never forget the time Makhadzi — the unstoppable force behind Riya Venda (my favorite song of 2019) and Ghanama (my favorite of 2021) — complained about having her set cut short because, allegedly, Wanka Dee (her innocent mispronunciation) had overrun his slot. Twitter went to war. Makhadzi was dragged across social media like she’d insulted Mbuya Nehanda. And the whole time I was just thinking, “If we’re being candid, Wanka Dee is still a marginal improvement over Winky D.”
The only other name I’ve heard that rivals Winky D’s in sheer absurdity is Dr. Marijuana Pepsi, an American academic whose doctoral thesis, fittingly, explored African-American naming traditions. She’s the proud sponsor of the Marijuana Pepsi Scholarship for first-generation students, which is admirable and generous, but every time I hear it, I imagine how it must sound out of context: “Congratulations, you’ve just received the Marijuana Pepsi Scholarship!”
That’s kind of how I picture some unassuming middle-aged white woman when she sees a poster for a Winky D Live Show. She’d grab her friends, buy a ticket out of curiosity, dress a little scandalous, show up expecting some sort of risqué cabaret, only to find herself in a packed room of euphoric Zimbabweans pointing directly at her, screaming:
“Ndakaona maIndia, maChina nemaVhet vese vachiimba kuti Musarova Bigman”
2) Nitefreak
There are three reasons Nitefreak’s name is on this list.
Reason One: On the 22nd of March, 2025, I performed in front of twenty of my favorite people, one last time. It was my farewell to hip-hop; a genre I had decided, after years of emotional and financial strain, was best left to the young, the talented, and the mentally resilient. I called it The Malcom X-it Show, because I am clever.
The show was Eleni Athitaki’s idea. Eleni, who runs Katikitiki Space and has always had an unshakable faith in me, convinced me to do one final performance at her new venue, Nhaka Gallery. She genuinely believed people would show up. After all, I was one of her favorite rappers of all time — her words, not mine — so she assumed the public shared that opinion. We learned, very quickly, that they did not.
Tickets were five dollars, which is not expensive, but apparently still too steep for my fanbase. Eleni gave me three hundred tickets to sell. By the week of the show, I’d moved roughly five, two of which went to relatives. In a panic, we dropped the price to three dollars, then to one dollar, and finally to “just come.” I started giving tickets away to anyone who made eye contact. After all the promotional efforts, I managed to attract twenty people, and that’s counting the sound guy and the bar staff. It was humbling. It gave me a new respect for anyone who’s ever filled up HICC.
Later that night, I learned that my show coincided with ROOTS, an Afro-House festival at Emagumeni headlined by one Nitefreak. The tickets cost way more than mine but the event was sold out. Of my twenty attendees, maybe ten were actual friends; the rest were people who looked at their budgets and decided, “You know what? The failed rapper’s event is free.”
Dennis, my fellow Riddims & Raps contributor, was one of the selfless few who skipped Nitefreak’s show to attend my little concert. I hadn’t expected him to, but not only did he show up, he ended up helping me carry equipment, run cables, and keep the mood alive. He could have gone to Emagumeni to dance under cosmic lights but chose instead to watch me rap to chairs. The next day, the timeline was flooded with praise for Nitefreak’s masterclass (pun very much intended), while my show got the digital equivalent of a morgue.
So yes, part of why Nitefreak is on this list is my petty revenge.
Reason Two: By some real metrics, Nitefreak is the biggest artist in Zimbabwe right now. That statement tends to rattle the Gafa faithful, who treat Winky D’s status as untouchable. The moment someone new gets a bit of shine or you mention them in the same sentence as Di Bigman, the gafas unsheathe their favorite weapon: “Can he fill up HICC?”
As someone who failed to fill up Nhaka Gallery, I’m probably not qualified to weigh in. But I needed to balance the scales after putting Winky D on this list, otherwise his fans would’ve burnt my mentions down. So including Nitefreak here is purely political; a peace offering. It’s my way of saying, “Look, gafas, I’m fair. I make fun of everyone equally.” Think of it as a diplomatic gesture. I am, above all things, a peace-loving coward.
Reason Three: Nitefreak is, without question, a degenerate name. It’s the phishing ID you see on a pop-up ad promising there are hot single moms in your area who can’t wait to meet you. “Congratulations, you’ve won a freaky night with Nitefreak! Click here to claim your malware.” No one should call themselves Nitefreak unless they’re launching a career in adult entertainment. Seriously, suppose an alien crash-landed at Trabablas Interchange today and heard the name Nitefreak. Would it guess “music producer” or “OnlyFans top earner”?
Now, before anyone accuses me of shaming the adult industry, I’ll have you know that as a tech enthusiast, I have enormous respect for the freaky arts. If there’s one thing my many hours of research have revealed, it’s that if it weren’t for porn, most of our favorite technologies wouldn’t exist. Take the Internet itself. The very first image ever transmitted over the Internet was a photo from Playboy. The pioneers of connectivity, with an entire world of possibilities ahead of them, looked at this brand-new, world-changing technology, and their first thought was, “Can it send nudes?”
When the VHS versus Betamax format war broke out, the adult studios chose VHS because it could record for longer. Betamax was technically superior — cleaner video, better sound — but it had a fatal flaw: shorter runtime. That single decision turned VHS into the global standard. So every time you rewound a family wedding tape in the ’90s, it was the freaky people who made that possible.
Cable television’s rise followed the same pattern. Early cable subscriptions skyrocketed because people wanted private access to channels their mothers couldn’t accidentally flip to. The same technology that later brought households HBO and ESPN was bankrolled by an audience that simply wanted to keep their viewing habits between themselves and their remote control.
When credit-card payments emerged, the adult industry again led the way. Most companies and merchants were too nervous to go first until the adult industry normalized online payments. People who’d never dared buy anything online suddenly found courage when discretion was part of the checkout process.
Even video streaming, the great cornerstone of modern entertainment, was first tested and refined through the exchange of low-resolution clips passed between horny strangers in the dial-up era. Those stuttering, pixelated, naughty recordings trained servers, shaped bandwidth expectations, and forced the Internet to grow faster and more stable.
In short, freaks built the future. They gave us the tools, the speed, the privacy, and the infrastructure we still depend on today. But along with all that innovation came a digital wasteland of usernames that haunt cyberspace to this day. Names like SexyBabe69, HotBl4ckMom, CoochieVajayjay96, Hot4UForever, and Nitefreak.
3) Janet Manyowa
Another friend who skipped Nitefreak’s show to attend my farewell concert was my work husband, Desmond Tapfuma. If you’ve been here since my debut, you’ll remember him as the guy with the painfully corny puns from my first Riddims & Raps essay. He hates it when people call him Dez, which of course is why everyone calls him Dez.
Dez is from Bulawayo, just like Nitefreak, and like most Bulawayo men, he carries that calm, devastating Ndebele charm that can convince anyone — from an angry client to a raging boss — to forgive him mid-argument. It’s been his biggest professional asset. We both work in Corporate Communications, which is a fancy way of saying we get paid to use proper grammar. Don’t get me wrong, Dez is brilliant at this, but he also happens to work alongside me — a generational writing talent — which inevitably relegates him to second fiddle. He’s the Robin to my Batman, the Luis Suárez to my Lionel Messi.
When I was growing up, I was convinced I was a football prodigy. I was small but nimble, like Messi, so I got fouled by defenders constantly. But every time I went down, I’d get up, dust myself off, and humiliate the same defender who’d fouled me with a nutmeg. It was beautiful. I genuinely thought I was special, right up until I went to Churchill High School and discovered the painful truth: I wasn’t good. Everyone in my town just sucked. That’s pretty much how Dez felt about his writing when he left New Lobengula for Harare and found himself working in the same office as me.
People assume Dez and I work the same job, but that’s not quite true. My job is writing, while Dez is the performer. He’s the face of our operation; the man in the shiny suit. I write the stories; he gets on planes to tell them. That division of labor explains why when the company needs representation in the Bahamas to “strengthen international relations,” it’s Dez boarding the plane in business class while I’m left behind to hold the fort — and by “fort,” I mean the paperwork. His job is to travel, shake hands, and charm international partners over cocktails. My job, on the other hand, is to document those same interactions in twelve-point Times New Roman for the executive report.
The system is simple. Dez goes off on what we generously call a “business trip,” but is really just a vacation with a few meetings attached. Those who follow him on Instagram or TikTok already know the aesthetic: sunlight, linen shirts, poolside smiles. He flies back two weeks later, suntanned and smug, and we meet for drinks so he can narrate his adventures. I listen, nod, and take notes. Then, for three days, I set aside my MacBook — which I use to write essays like this one — and open my work-issued HP laptop, which smells faintly of spreadsheets, to craft a report that makes Dez sound like a visionary. I write about his “strategic insights” and “cross-cultural engagements,” and when I’m done, I hand it to him for review. He adds one polite sentence, usually something about “global synergy,” and we submit it as Written by Malcom Mufunde and Desmond Tapfuma. I hope our roles are clear now.
Anyway, Dez is an animated drunk. When he gets tipsy, his inner griot emerges. He tells stories about his love life, his family, his ancestors, all performed with such conviction that you forget you didn’t ask. It was during one of these monologues that I learned his family name isn’t actually Tapfuma. It’s Takundwa, which means “we have been defeated” in Shona. Because of nominative determinism, the theory we discussed earlier, Dez’s father decided to rewrite destiny. The entire family dropped “Takundwa” and rebranded to “Tapfuma,” which means “we are now wealthy.” If you only know Dez from social media, you’d swear the name worked: clean white shirts, tasteful wristwatches, and captions about “grind season.” But I know him too well to be fooled by the lighting. Still, I genuinely hope the prophecy fulfills itself someday. He’s worked too hard to be stuck at the “manifesting” stage.
Dez’s family anecdote reminded me of Zimbabwean gospel artist, Mudiwa, who legally upgraded from Mudiwa Mtandwa to Mudiwa Hood, a name-change that instantly raised his marketability. For those unfamiliar, legally changing your name is a simple procedure that costs less than therapy but achieves almost the same sense of renewal. It involves filing a petition, publishing a notice, and standing before a judge who hopefully has the patience for midlife rebrands. In Zimbabwe, you can do it through a notarial deed; you get a notary public to draft it, announce it to the world, and then file it so it becomes law. It’s a lot of paperwork, but entirely possible. So if you don’t like your surname — or maybe it doesn’t test well with audiences — you can absolutely fix that.
4) Bush Baby X-Rated
When we were planning the Malcom X-it Show, it became painfully clear to me that I did not have the talent, the looks, the voice, or any other marketable human quality to fill a room on my own. Eleni, my enabler, suggested a revolutionary idea: “Why not add more performers?” We could build a lineup of artists, each bringing their own little army of followers, and together, we might just fill a small fraction of the venue.
It made sense. So I reached out to my favourites: Supermuno, Kurry Suave, Paintafresco, Matipa the poet, and Farai Danda, the best rapper in Zimbabwe. Miraculously, everyone agreed; perhaps out of pity, perhaps out of guilt. Whatever the reason, they showed up, and they all performed better than me. My own set was half-music, half-eulogy; a trembling, emotional farewell to my late sister, made worse by the sudden realisation that I suffer from stage fright of biblical proportions.
But Farai — my God, Farai — performed twenty songs that night, one for every member of the audience, I suppose. I’ve seen men rap; I’ve seen men perform; I have never seen anyone command a stage like he did. He’s the only rapper I’ve seen live who made me forget to breathe, and he had us eating out of his hands before the first hook even dropped. If you have never listened to Farai, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Pause here and fix that. Start with his guest verse on Hombe by a tragically underrated failed rapper named Malcom Mufunde, then queue up Makunun’unu, the song that first made me a believer. There’s a live video of that one, too — you can see a visibly stunned Nutty O in the crowd, mouth wide open, looking like he’s just seen God. Farai’s music is so hypnotic that you forgive him for choosing a stage name as cursed as Bush Baby X-Rated.
The problem with that name is twofold. The first part, “Bush,” could have survived on its own. It’s vague, earthy, maybe even a bit poetic if you squint. But then he added “X-Rated,” which took it from mysterious to something you’d definitely expect on a midnight channel that asks if you’re over 18. Why anyone would voluntarily add an MPA rating to their stage name is beyond me. Is there a clean version of Bush Baby somewhere called Bush Baby PG-13? I could perhaps understand if his music were explicit — if he were out here dropping verses written by Malloti — but Bush is one of the few rappers whose lyrics could safely be played at an SDA youth retreat.
I don’t get star-struck easily; most people fail to impress me. I think admiration has a way of deflating when you’re close enough to see the pores. But Bush is one of only two stars who genuinely humbled me. The other is Nijo Tha Slick Pastor, and that encounter remains one of the most humiliating moments of my life.
Storytime.
I park at Julius Nyerere Parkade, where I’m a loyal patron. I pay $120 a month for the comfort of knowing my car will not be clamped by the fluorescent-vested warriors of City Parking, a species I simply do not have the emotional stamina to negotiate with. The system, again, is simple: you get a small tag with RFID tech (whatever that means), you scan it at the boom gate, and the barrier opens like the Red Sea for the chosen. When you exit, you scan again, the system logs you out, and life continues. I’m explaining this for the sake of my dear readers who don’t live in gated communities and therefore may not be familiar with this particular form of modern witchcraft.
One bright morning, my gorgeous wife and I parked our Benz at the Parkade and decided to use InDrive to get around the city. Because while I love Harare deeply, I also value my sanity, and nothing erodes the human spirit faster than fighting kombi drivers for lane dominance.
After a long, sweaty day of errands, we returned to the Parkade, tired, dusty, and ready to go home. We reached the exit boom gate around 4 p.m., perfectly timed to beat the 4:30 traffic. I reached into the glove compartment for the tag and realised it was gone. At first, we stayed calm; you always do at the beginning of a disaster. We checked the dashboard, the cup holders, the footwell. Nothing. Within minutes, the search escalated. We tore through the car like it was Pimp My Ride; cushions off, bags emptied, seats bent backward. Still nothing. We called every office we’d visited that day, asked receptionists to check under desks, behind chairs, in bins. Nothing.
Then came the epiphany: we’d been InDriving all day. The card must have fallen out in one of the rides. Relief washed over us briefly, right before despair took back its place. We began calling every driver from that day, one by one. The first said no. The second said no. The third said yes, thank God. He had the tag, lying peacefully on his back seat. The problem was that he was now deep in the Market Square area, the inner belly of chaos, at the exact hour Harare traffic transforms into a test of patience designed by Satan. It would take him two hours, minimum, to reach us. My wife — my gorgeous, beautiful wife — was visibly fraying. Her anxiety has a way of showing on her face, so the responsibility to fix it fell on me as the man, the husband, and the idiot who’d lost the tag in the first place. I told her I’d run there myself. And so I did.
I sprinted through the city in the fading light, clutching my phone, trying to call the driver again. Of course, his line went straight to voicemail. I opened the InDrive app, pulled up his details, and memorised the make and plate number: white Honda Fit, registration AFJ something. So there I was, in the middle of the city, muttering every curse word I knew, manually checking the plates of every white Honda Fit in sight. If you’ve ever been to Harare, you’ll know that’s like trying to find your hair in a barber’s bin. There are more white Honda Fits in Harare than there are people. Meanwhile, my gorgeous, exasperated wife kept calling from the Parkade, her voice growing more frantic as the sun disappeared. Every call made me run faster, as if her voice was chasing me through the city.
After what felt like an hour of purgatory, I finally spotted the driver, who looked annoyed to see me. I retrieved the tag, thanked him with the voice of a man on the verge of collapse, and began the long trek back to Julius Nyerere Parkade. By now, the air was cool, the city dim, my forehead gleaming with sweat, and the voices in my head mumbling insults at myself. Then a different voice snapped me out of it:
“Munenge muri munyika yenyu mega ka mumusoro menyu, Mdara Malcom?”
I turned, startled. No familiar faces. Then a hand reached out from a grey sedan beside me, and there he was: Nijo Tha Slick Pastor himself. For a moment I couldn’t move. My heart leapt; the country’s best comedian knew who I was. Maybe my rap career hadn’t been such a tragic waste after all. But the euphoria died as quickly as it came, replaced by sudden self-awareness. Nijo was sitting comfortably in his air-conditioned ride, calm and radiant, while I looked like I’d just escaped captivity. My shirt was soaked, my hair was ruined, and worst of all, I was on foot, walking through town. Nijo was going to think I didn’t own a car. I could not, under any circumstances, allow Baba Ropa to believe he was cooler than me. The thought gnawed at me.
And then I remembered: the Benz key fob was in my pocket. I reached in, pulled it out, and as I leaned in for a handshake, I let the fob dangle casually between my fingers, spinning just enough for the silver logo to catch the light. He saw it, I think. We smiled, exchanged a few pleasantries, and right on cue, my iPhone 16 Pro Max rang — my gorgeous wife again, confirming that I hadn’t been abducted by kombi drivers. When I finally got back to the car, she was waiting, calm but visibly drained. We scanned the tag, the boom gate lifted, and we drove home in silence.
Later that night, as the exhaustion settled, shame followed. I couldn’t stop replaying that moment with Nijo. I had been so desperate to appear successful that I reduced a genuine human encounter into a pissing contest. I hated myself for it. I still do. I’m truly sorry, Nigel; that wasn’t me. I’m not the kind of man who measures worth by engines or devices. But that day, I let my smallness take the wheel. And for what? To impress a man who’s already mastered the art of being himself. Nijo earns more in a day than I make in a month. The fact that he even took a second to acknowledge me was a gesture of humility, and I responded with the emotional maturity of a child flashing new sneakers.
So what if I was walking? So what if I looked exhausted and broke? None of that makes me any less. I have a gorgeous wife who calls me every few minutes to make sure I’m safe. I have readers who wade through six thousand words of my rambling every week. I have friends like Dennis and Dez who would skip better shows to support me. I have world-touring comedians who can spot me in traffic and know my name. I am Malcom Mufunde. And what will make that name worth remembering will never be Benz keys or the iPhone in my hand. It will be the laughter, the love, and the small kindnesses I scatter along the way. Because if you can move people, if you can make them feel something, you can call yourself anything — Marijuana Pepsi, Penis Penis, Freaky, Manure, X-Rated — and they will still love you. Just be yourself. You’re special enough.
Till next time.
