Act I: The Setup
Growing up, I loved Woody Allen.
That is probably the worst opening sentence anyone could write in the year of our Lord 2026, so if you have already closed this tab in disgust, I completely understand. But growing up in Chitungwiza offered very few recreational outlets for someone of my peculiar disposition, so I developed the habit—perhaps even the affliction—of reading anything that happened to fall into my hands. Comic books, manga, discarded magazines, the daily press, old family letters written in a cursive I couldn't decipher, and, most importantly, a battered copy of The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, half-destroyed by booklice and neglect.
To this day, I do not know how the book entered our household. For as long as I have been alive, it was simply there—sitting somewhere between the television stand and the general chaos of a Zimbabwean family home—its pages freckled with the deep scars of paraphyletic lice that had apparently developed a taste for Jewish neuroticism. The insects partially edited parts of the book by eating some of the crucial paragraphs, so the stories were occasionally confusing. But I kept returning to the book, again and again. As my vocabulary improved and I developed a marginally less stupid understanding of the world, the book became funnier.
Eventually, my devotion escalated into mild financial irresponsibility. Whenever I managed to accumulate a few dollars, I would spend them hunting down whatever Woody Allen material I could find—usually bootleg VHS tapes or DVDs of his films sold by a man who operated out of a cardboard box somewhere in town. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, I grew to love his films even more than the essays. My favourite was Annie Hall, which opens with what remains, to this day, my favourite joke of all time:
Two elderly women are sitting at a Catskills resort. One says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other replies, “Yeah, I know — and such small portions.”
I realise this joke will not be funny to most people who grew up in Chitungwiza. In fact, I suspect most normal children would hear it and stare blankly for a few seconds with the same confusion usually reserved for algebra before returning to something funnier, like Yahya Goodvibes. But for reasons I still don't understand, the joke perfectly aligns with my sense of humour. It still makes me laugh today.
Annie Hall went on to win four of the five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress for Diane Keaton (RIP). For most filmmakers, this would represent the single greatest night of their lives, but Woody Allen did not attend the ceremony. Instead, he was somewhere in New York playing clarinet and only learned the next morning — through the newspaper — that his film had swept the Oscars. According to the story, he more or less shrugged and went about his day.
Allen would later explain that the win meant very little to him because he fundamentally rejected the entire premise of award ceremonies. His logic was uncomplicated: if you allow other people to tell you that your work is good, you must also accept when they tell you that it is bad. The easiest solution is to avoid the trap by opting out of the entire arrangement. For reasons that probably say something worrying about my personality, I adopted this philosophy very early in life.
On the 8th of January 2010, the District Education Officer called our house to inform my parents that I had achieved the highest Grade Seven exam result in the entire Harare Province in the 2009 ZIMSEC examinations. I had therefore been invited to attend an awards ceremony celebrating the top students. My parents were thrilled. I, on the other hand, was mildly annoyed. I cannot explain why. Perhaps it was pubescent arrogance, perhaps it was Woody Allen’s philosophy taking root, or perhaps I was simply an annoying child. Whatever the case, I did not attend the ceremony. My former primary school ended up collecting the award on my behalf at what I vaguely remember being a ceremony held at the Aquatic Complex in Chitungwiza.
Years later, during my brief and largely unsuccessful rap career, I won the biggest award of the night at the 2023 Zim Hip Hop Awards. True to form, I did not attend the ceremony. Like Woody Allen before me, I found out about the award the next morning. I acknowledged it with a sweet tweet — mostly to avoid looking like a complete sociopath — and then went back to reading my comic books.
Now, I realize you did not click this article expecting to read my autobiography. But all of this context is necessary to establish a single fact: I do not care about the NAMAs. From a very early age, I was trained — perhaps irresponsibly — to believe that awards are not particularly meaningful indicators of artistic merit. This belief may be wrong. It may be arrogant. It may even be completely delusional. But it is my belief, which is why it is deeply embarrassing for me to be writing an article about the NAMAs today.
To preserve what little dignity remains in my ego, I will attempt to make this the shortest article I have ever written. There are many other things I could be doing with my time — reading old family letters, for example — but instead I find myself here, typing furiously about an awards ceremony. In fact, I am so determined to protect my pride that I am not even going to edit this article. If you happen to find any typos, please report them to your nearest District Education Officer.
Act II: The Confrontation
I have absolutely no idea what actually transpired at the NAMAs this year. However, the organisers uploaded a four-hour livestream of the ceremony onto YouTube, which means that if you are curious enough, patient enough, or masochistic enough, you can watch the entire ordeal online. Personally, I have chosen not to subject my mental health to that kind of test. Life is already short enough.
Despite my efforts, one controversy managed to slip through the algorithmic cracks and sneak its way into my social media feed. Winky D’s Fake Love — an AI-generated music video — won the award for Outstanding Music Video. Now I understand that the internet has trained us to assume everything outrageous is satire, so let me clarify: this is not a joke. I am not trying to be funny. This actually happened. I called roughly ten people who attended the ceremony just to make sure I had not misunderstood something fundamental about reality.
Over the years, I have tried to become a more charitable person. I have learnt that it is entirely possible that I am not the smartest individual alive. It’s one of the things maturity teaches you. So I tried to interpret the award title generously. Perhaps the judges meant “outstanding” in the literal sense — something that stands out. In that sense, the award is perfectly justified, because Fake Love certainly stands out. It stands out the way cow dung stands out in the middle of a freshly paved highway.
What made the experience even more tragic was the context in which I encountered it. Earlier that morning, I had attended a double-feature screening at a Cineworld multiplex here in Manchester: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice followed immediately by Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. Two magnificent contributions to cinema that remind you why the medium exists in the first place. I left the theatre floating on that particular emotional high that only great art can produce, and drove home feeling grateful for the existence of artists.
And then my gorgeous wife, in a completely innocent act of domestic routine, allowed the YouTube algorithm to play whatever it wanted next. Without warning, the television filled with grotesquely rendered images of Winky D wandering through a digital desert that looked like it had been stolen from a PlayStation 2. Within seconds, I had forgotten the entire concept of cinematic beauty. I returned to my natural emotional baseline, which is disappointment in the human species, immediately erasing whatever optimism I had gathered from watching Sentimental Value. Such is the destructive power of this abomination.
Further investigation revealed that the hallucination was “directed” — or perhaps more accurately, prompted — by Jusa Dementor. It reminded me of Kanye West’s legendary rant when he discovered that Lady Gaga had been appointed Creative Director of Polaroid:
“I like some of the Gaga songs, but what the fuck does she know about cameras?”
That is exactly the question one feels compelled to ask here. Because Fake Love is not merely bad. It is bad even by AI standards. Cinema existed for more than a century before AI entered the conversation, and during that time, humanity managed to establish a few basic principles about how moving images are supposed to work. Fake Love breaks all of them. Before we even begin discussing artificial intelligence as a philosophical problem, let us simply evaluate the video based on what appears on the screen.
As I mentioned earlier, I grew up reading a lot of newspapers. My father bought The Sunday Mail every Sunday with the consistency he perhaps should have redirected to church attendance. As a young film lover, my favourite section of the paper was always the movie column written by Tinashe Kusema. His reviews were sharp, funny, brutally honest, and more importantly, educational. I do not know where Tinashe Kusema is today. The last time I saw him, he was reviewing some terrible film live on ZTN and dismantling it with such ruthless precision that I laughed for several minutes straight. The experience transported me directly back to my childhood. Wherever you are now, Tinashe, I want you to know that your writing made my childhood significantly less miserable than it might otherwise have been. At one point, I even wrote a letter thanking you for postponing my suicide and sent it to The Sunday Mail Bridge email address. They never published it, which in retrospect was probably the correct editorial decision. Still, Mr. Kusema, wherever you are today, thank you. I owe you my life.
But before you go, sir, I would genuinely love to know what you think of this video. Is it horrible, or does it achieve the even more impressive distinction of being pathetic? Is it cringeworthy, or does it descend further still into the abyss of embarrassment? Because to my eyes it appears to be all of these things simultaneously. It is bad, worse, horrible, pathetic, cringeworthy, and embarrassing all at once. If you are reading this somewhere, Mr. Kusema, please return and explain to these people the elementary principles of filmmaking — shot composition, blocking, pacing, storytelling, basic visual coherence — because there is not a single film school on earth that would classify this video as competent filmmaking. Except, apparently, the NAMAs.
Now, I have been informed that several other controversies occurred during the ceremony, including the alleged snubbing of Comic Elder. Statistically speaking, Comic Elder appears to be the funniest man in Zimbabwe, which suggests an injustice may have occurred. However, speaking as Malcom Mufunde, none of these comics personally amuse me, so I cannot pretend to be emotionally invested in that debate. As I have mentioned before, my sense of humour is deeply questionable. But unfortunately for the NAMAs, there is one subject about which I do possess a modest amount of knowledge, and that subject is film.
So let’s go back to that.
Winky D’s AI video opens with an AI-generated desert landscape where the title of the song is carved into digital sand dunes in what appears to be an attempted homage to the Hollywood sign. Then we see AI Winky D wandering through an AI oasis with his AI lover. Then he fights an AI lion. Then there is an AI banquet. Then there is a battle sequence in which AI Winky D defeats an army of AI Philistines using the jawbone of an AI donkey. Then he rides an AI horse. Then he is suddenly injured. Then he is suddenly healed. Then the AI wounds mysteriously return. Eventually, we discover that the woman accompanying him is Delilah, and the entire narrative is simply a loose retelling of the Samson story from the Book of Judges. And that’s the entire video.
If you found any of this impressive, I would politely encourage you to stop reading this article now. I have a terrible habit of insulting people’s intelligence, and I would hate for you to be on the receiving end. For the rest of us, the fundamental issue with AI as it relates to art is quite simple. Artificial intelligence does not make untalented people talented. If you are a bad writer, AI will not transform you into a good one. Your writing will still be dull; it will simply contain fewer spelling mistakes. The same rule applies to filmmaking. If you do not understand storytelling, pacing, framing, acting, or emotional rhythm, AI will simply expose your lack of talent faster than a camera ever could. And that is exactly what happened here.
One argument I saw online suggested that human creators cannot compete with AI. Of course they can. Outside of cost, I do not see the competitive advantage. Take Josh Mtima’s Zvichaita Chete, which is currently popular on TikTok and Apple Music. The engineering is competent, albeit overproduced, but the lyrics remain catastrophically bad. AI cannot fix that. Do you honestly believe Takesure Zamar Ncube — the man who wrote Chinyarara Nyika, which deserves to be Zimbabwe’s national anthem — is sitting somewhere feeling creatively threatened by lyrics like this?
“Zvinogona kunge zvakaramba last year
Asi this year, zvichaita chete
I’m a go-getter, I’m an overcomer, yeah
NaMwari, sure this year, zvichaita chete”
Some people may genuinely find this writing profound. But I remain extremely grateful that my parents locked me inside a small cottage in Chitungwiza with enough books to help me understand the difference between great literature and a wet fart. This song is a wet fart. The same applies to Fake Love. People who think this AI video represents artistic genius genuinely deserve a seat next to my niece at Hartmann House Preparatory School, because clearly, the education system has failed them.
Another argument circulating online is that we should accept AI because it is inevitable. That part is correct. AI will improve. The visual artifacts will become harder to detect. Soon, it will be extremely difficult to distinguish between synthetic imagery and real cinematography. When I was growing up in the early 2000s, math teachers constantly warned us that we would not always have calculators in our pockets. Today, I carry a supercomputer everywhere I go. Technology evolves. But one thing will remain true: it cannot manufacture taste.
Which brings us back to the NAMAs. Their reaction to this video reminded me of the first time I owned an iPhone in 2009. Girls literally ran across the room to see it. Their minds were blown. It did almost nothing. It was simply a touchscreen. But some people were very impressed by that at the time.
After doing some lazy research into the other NAMA nominees this year, I noticed something else: AI appears to have infiltrated several categories, particularly those involving writing. Some of those individuals are people I know personally, so I will address that matter privately. But shame on you.
I do not know who sits on the NAMA judging panel, but if any of you consider yourselves artists, then I am deeply disappointed. How exactly does copyright theft qualify as artistic achievement? It’s like awarding a dildo the prize for Most Affectionate Man. Shame on you, too.
Act III: The Resolution
This final section is for the Winky D stans. If you are one of them, I must first congratulate you on exercising remarkable restraint so far. The internet has trained fandoms to respond to even the mildest criticism with immediate nuclear retaliation, so the fact that you have read this far without assembling a firing squad is genuinely admirable.
As I mentioned in the very first sentence of this article, I am a Woody Allen fan. I should also probably mention something else that people who listened to my music already know: I have attempted suicide several times. Yes, I used to make music. Not because I had a burning passion for music itself, but because it was the cheapest way to distribute my thoughts to a wide audience. Making films costs money. Publishing novels requires publishers. Recording songs, however, only required a microphone and the kind of delusional confidence that young men tend to possess in surplus.
Writing has always been the only thing I am even remotely good at, so I do think I wrote some excellent songs. Unfortunately, the sonic aspect of the music was less impressive. I was never going to compete with people who were actually gifted musicians like, say, Steve Makoni, Chiwoniso Maraire, Hope Masike, Leah Kasinamunda, or even Winky D himself. Whatever talent I possessed lived in the words rather than the sound.
But despite all the suicidal thoughts that haunted those years, it was art — human art — that repeatedly convinced me to keep going. The reason it worked was simple: it was real. It was messy, emotional, vulnerable, and unmistakably human. It spoke to me. Woody Allen’s comedies did that for me in ways that are difficult to explain to anyone who has never needed laughter to survive a bad day. I remember watching Love and Death in 2010, during one of the darkest periods of my life, and laughing so uncontrollably that the world suddenly seemed less unbearable. For a few hours, the weight was lifted. I do not know what your personal lives look like, but I can confidently say that Woody Allen’s work means more to me than Winky D’s will ever mean to you.
This is precisely why learning about Allen’s personal scandals later on was so devastating. Distancing myself from his work was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make. Films like Manhattan, which I once adored without hesitation, suddenly became complicated to watch. The laughter was still there, but it was accompanied by a quiet discomfort that had not existed before.
Now, let me be very clear about this: I am not asking anyone to cancel Winky D. Even if I did, I doubt I have enough influence to persuade anyone. What I am suggesting is something far simpler and far healthier. Loving an artist does not mean believing that artist is perfect. Every creative person, no matter how brilliant, will eventually make a questionable decision. Some of those decisions will be far worse than releasing an AI music video. Acknowledging that reality does not diminish your admiration. In fact, it can make the relationship between artist and audience more honest. When fans speak openly about what works and what does not, it can even help guide artists toward better choices in the future. But that process requires something AI can never supply: human judgment. It requires people — both the artist and the audience — to think.
For the record, I am not personally a Winky D fan. Perhaps if my father had purchased a CD of Igofigo instead of a dusty Woody Allen book when I was growing up, things might have turned out differently. But life rarely arranges our influences according to neat symmetry. The artists who resonate with me most deeply tend to be people like Audius Mtawarira, Sylent Nqo, Nyasha Murada, and Mwendamberi. I will not mention Jah Prayzah because I have been reliably informed that doing so has mysterious effects on the cardiovascular conditioning of Winky D's fans. But the larger point remains: if I can eventually distance myself from Woody Allen — a man whose work quite literally helped keep me alive — then acknowledging a creative misstep by your favourite musician should not be the emotional catastrophe some of you are treating this as.
My best friend in college was a woman named Natsai. We became friends because we shared an overlapping obsession with literature and cinema, and I remember once arguing with her so intensely about Woody Allen’s innocence that the conversation nearly ended in tears. At the time, I was absolutely convinced that the allegations against him were a conspiracy designed to destroy a great artist. I was embarrassingly delusional. So please understand that I am not speaking from some imaginary position of moral superiority. Fans defend their heroes instinctively. It is part of the emotional contract we sign when we invest ourselves in someone’s work. Sometimes that loyalty even blinds us to obvious problems. And sometimes we need a Natsai to gently remind us that admiration does not require intellectual surrender. Today, unfortunately for you, I am your Natsai.
To be fair, Winky D’s creative misstep is nowhere near the magnitude of Woody Allen’s personal scandals. But the principle still applies. It is perfectly possible to love an artist and still recognise when they have done something questionable. That is why I was genuinely encouraged to see several Winky D fans — vigilant ones, if you will excuse the pun — criticising the AI video online. A few months ago, I would not have expected such common sense from that particular corner of the internet, so this development gives me hope. After all, we already live in a world where Jah Prayzah’s fans routinely disagree with his politics. Runna Rulez’s fans do not support sleeping with underage girls, at least I sincerely hope they do not. Chillmaster’s fans presumably do not endorse driving vehicles into pedestrians. Surely Winky D’s fans can admire his music without endorsing AI slop. Especially since, comparatively speaking, this is a fairly minor offense.
Take Winky D's Vashakabvu, for example. That remains one of my favourite Zimbabwean music videos ever produced, and much of its brilliance comes from the imagination of its very human director, Nqobizitha “Enqore” Mlilo. Enqore also directed Synik’s Syn City, which I believe was the first 3-D music video produced in Africa. I am not personally the biggest fan of 3-D, but I appreciated how it was used there to recreate the aesthetic of Frank Miller’s Sin City. As someone who owned a copy of The Hard Goodbye growing up, I immediately recognised the visual language. It translated the comic book’s atmosphere into a Harare setting in a way that felt thoughtful and deliberate. The technology served the story. That is the difference. A new tool can expand artistic expression, but it should never replace the imagination that makes expression meaningful in the first place.
A recent example from the beautiful world of cinema illustrates this perfectly. Brady Corbet’s 2024 epic, The Brutalist, generated controversy because it used AI during post-production to refine actors’ Hungarian dialogue and enhance certain background elements. Critics questioned whether this crossed an ethical line, while supporters argued that it functioned as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement for human craftsmanship. And this was the Oscars — the most prestigious awards body in the world — grappling with the issue. Even they paused to investigate the matter, and the AI usage in that film amounted to mere seconds of enhancement. This makes the NAMAs’ enthusiasm for Fake Love even more baffling. At the end of the day, regardless of where one stands on the broader AI debate, I suspect most people can agree on one simple observation: these videos feel empty. They lack the warmth, humanity, and emotional texture that human creators naturally bring to their work.
One of my favourite trap songs of 2025 was Nyasha David’s Sleeping On Me, featuring Takura and Hillzy. Unfortunately, the song received an AI-generated video treatment, which immediately diminished my enjoyment of it. The video was also “imagined” by Jusa Dementor, which perhaps explains why it looks demented. I apologise for that joke, but I refuse to apologise very sincerely.
What makes the situation even more frustrating is that Hillzy is one of the wealthiest people I know. If Nyasha David had simply asked nicely, I am confident Hillzy could have financed a decent video. In fact, he has already done exactly that for other artists. The embarrassing truth is that even with all this technological assistance, these AI videos do not look better than Bag RaJahman by SaintFloew. They are not edited more impressively than Denimwoods’ Njuga. They are not visually more striking than Dikson’s Trajedy, which Enqore directed almost fifteen years ago. And they certainly do not feel more inspired than ScripMula’s recent video, Yowerere, despite AI theoretically having no creative limitations at all.
So I ask this sincerely: would you not rather have more videos like Vashakabvu, magafa? Is that not better art? To Nyasha David’s fans specifically, can we all agree that Charlene Furusa’s decision to include Kim and Tanaka in the narrative made the Ta Ta Ta video sweeter? Those small human decisions give art its emotional weight.
So demand better from your favourite artists! They may not listen to me, but they will absolutely listen to you. Be honest with them. Tell them when something feels lazy or hollow. Because if fans pretend to enjoy something they secretly dislike, then artists have no reason to improve. That is real love. And pretending to enjoy Fake Love is, well, fake love.
I apologise for that pun.
Denouement
My gorgeous wife insisted that I add this small post-credits scene because, in her opinion, the article up to this point had become slightly too cynical. Her counterargument was that many artists turn to AI visuals simply because they are trying to cut costs. Music videos are expensive, she reminded me, and sometimes creators are forced to work with whatever tools they can afford.
My response was that far better videos have been made with far less.
A good example would be Kae Chaps’s Juzi, which launched him into immediate stardom and proved that a compelling idea can travel much further than an expensive one. Although, if I am being intellectually honest, the longer I think about that example, the more complicated it becomes, because I am still not entirely convinced that Juzi did not borrow a suspicious amount of its concept and execution from Olefied Khetha’s Ijezi Lami, which had been released only a few months earlier. But that is a different investigation for a different day.
For the record, I remain a huge Kae Chaps fan. I still think he is one of the strongest mainstream artists Zimbabwe currently has to offer. See how easy that was, magafa?
In any case, in order to appease my gorgeous wife — and to avoid sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud — I thought it might be useful to highlight a few Zimbabwean music videos from recent years that demonstrate what can be accomplished with imagination. All of them were made with extremely modest budgets, some bordering on nonexistent, and yet the directors behind them managed to do what artists have always done: they looked around at what they had available and trusted their own creativity to carry the idea the rest of the way.
The result is that these videos feel alive. They make me laugh. They make me smile. A few of them even make me cry. And they work because the people behind them understood that storytelling is not just about the technology. When a human being is guiding the creative process, even the smallest production can carry warmth, personality, and meaning. If you still find that AI desert more compelling than these videos, then the desert isn’t the only empty thing involved here.
· Damien Marcus – Mudzimu Mukuru
· Dingo Duke – Kumaraini Kwedu (Visualizer)
· DKR (Munyaradzi) – Mugarandoga / Loneliness
· Garry Mapanzure – Where Our Hearts Belong
· Poptain & Anita Jackson – More
· SaintFloew & Jah Prayzah – Karikoga
· Ti Gonzi & Cindy Munyavi – Hurombo
To all the artists who still believe in art, I salute you.
Till next time.
