Sing for Us, but Won’t Speak for Us? Econet, Mafikizolo, and the Price of a Star’s Silence
A Zimbabwean company books a beloved South African act to headline a concert at Victoria Falls — days after South Africa set a deadline for migrants to leave, while Zimbabweans across the border live in fear. The internet erupts. And underneath the noise sits a question this continent has dodged for too long: can our artists, our sportspeople, our celebrities take Africa’s money and Africa’s love, while saying nothing when Africans are being hunted? Let’s talk about it — kindly, but honestly.
What Actually Happened
Pull up a chair, because this one needs an honest conversation rather than a shouting match. Econet, through its Buddie brand, announced that the South African Afro-pop royalty Mafikizolo — Theo Kgosinkwe and Nhlanhla Nciza, the voices behind songs we have all danced to, “Khona,” “Ndihamba Nawe,” “Love Potion” — would headline the Buddie Beatz concert at Victoria Falls on 5 July, sharing the stage with our own Winky D and Killer T.
On any ordinary day, beautiful news. But this is no ordinary day. The booking landed just as South Africa’s 30 June “deadline” for undocumented migrants arrived — the climax of a season of anti-migrant marches that has left Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians and others across the Limpopo frightened in their homes. And so Zimbabweans did what Zimbabweans do: they spoke up. Calls grew to boycott or postpone the show. Some asked, reasonably, why a Zimbabwean company was flying in a foreign headliner while local artists struggle to fill a single date. Others put it more sharply: how do we cheer a South African star on our stage while our cousins are being chased through Johannesburg streets?
Defenders pushed back, and their argument deserves respect: music is a bridge, they said, and artists should not be punished for policies they did not write. Fair. We will come back to that — properly, not dismissively. But first, let me say plainly why I think Econet’s first instinct here was a mistake far bigger than bad timing.
A Blunder, Yes — but Also a Systemic Failure
Here is the line I keep returning to, and I will own it: Econet’s initial decision was not just a public relations blunder, but a systemic failure to align corporate strategy with the economic realities of the continent. Let me translate that out of boardroom language, because it matters to ordinary people.
A pan-African brand does not sell only airtime and data. It sells belonging. Its entire business rests on millions of Africans feeling that this company is ours — that it understands us, stands where we stand. The moment such a brand throws a glittering party featuring guests from a country that is, at that very hour, making our relatives feel hunted — and does so without a single word of acknowledgement — it has misread its own market at the deepest level. It has treated a moment of collective African pain as if it were just another Friday on the events calendar.
To Econet’s credit, a brand that listens can correct course — and the cost of reading the room after the storm is always higher than reading it before. But the company is not really my main concern today. The company merely held up a mirror to a much larger silence. Let us talk about the stars themselves.
You Cannot Take Our Love and Withhold Your Voice
Here is the conversation Africa keeps avoiding, so let me start it gently but clearly. Our artists, our footballers, our actors, our influencers — especially the biggest South African ones — have been made by a pan-African audience. It is Lagos and Lusaka and Harare and Nairobi that stream the songs, fill the stadiums, buy the tickets, wear the merchandise, turn a local act into a continental icon. The whole continent is their market, their fanbase, their fortune.
And yet, when xenophobia and Afrophobia flare — when fellow Africans are beaten, burned, blocked from clinics, marched against in the streets — too many of these same stars go utterly, deafeningly silent. No statement. No post. No word from the platform that the continent itself built for them. They will tour our countries, take our currency and our adoration, and then, when we are bleeding, find that they suddenly have nothing to say. And then expect us to keep buying the tickets.
My friends, I have to be honest: no. Not because we hate them — precisely because we have loved them. The platform a continent gives you is not free, and it is not neutral. Silence, when your countrymen are hunting your audience’s relatives, is not the absence of a position. It is a position. It says: my comfort, my bookings, my brand are worth more to me than your safety. And a people who hear that message clearly are entitled to answer it — not with violence, never with violence, but with the one power an audience always holds: the choice of whether to show up.
Here’s the Thing — Mafikizolo Did Speak, in 2019
And this is why I refuse to accept the “artists can’t get involved” excuse, at least about this particular duo. Because they already disproved it themselves. In 2019, when xenophobic violence last convulsed South Africa, Mafikizolo were booked for a concert at the Harare International Conference Centre. As the boycott calls grew, they did something genuinely admirable: they recorded a video, postponed the show, and openly condemned the killings of fellow Africans, calling on their own government to punish those responsible. Their fellow artist Mlindo the Vocalist spoke too, agonising publicly about what his country was doing to the continent’s children.
In other words, the ask on the table today is not impossible, not unreasonable, and not unprecedented. It is simply what these very artists already chose to do once, when their conscience was loud enough. So the question for 2026 is not “can artists speak?” — we know they can. The question is gentler and harder: why the silence this time? Has the violence become so normal that it no longer moves them? Have the bookings become more precious than the brothers? I do not know the answer. But I know the people of this continent are right to ask the question out loud.
The Counter-Arguments — Taken Seriously
A real conversation answers the other side honestly, so let me put the strongest objections on the table and respond to each without dodging.
“Artists didn’t make the laws — don’t blame them for politics.”Answer
True, and important. No artist wrote the immigration policy, and it would be unjust to hold a singer responsible for a government’s cruelty. But that is not the ask. Nobody is demanding they draft legislation. We are asking them not to perform a celebration in the middle of a funeral without so much as a word of acknowledgement. Condemning the killing of innocents is not “politics” — it is the moral minimum of being a public human being.
“Music is a bridge between people.”Answer
Beautifully true. Music has carried African solidarity for a century. But a bridge carries traffic in both directions. If the music flows north to take our money and our love, then a word of comfort must be able to flow back south when we are in pain. A bridge that only carries one way is not a bridge — it is a drainpipe. The artists who truly believe music unites us should be the very first to speak, not the last.
“Boycotting artists sets a dangerous precedent.”Answer
A fair worry. We must never let this curdle into threats, harassment or humiliation of any performer — that would make us the very thing we oppose. But a boycott is not censorship or violence. It is simply an audience deciding, freely, where to spend its money and its attention. Nobody is owed a sold-out crowd. The relationship between a star and a continent is a two-way street, and audiences are allowed to ask for respect as the price of their patronage.
“Why single out South African artists?”Answer
A reasonable question. The answer is proximity and platform. The harm is happening in their country, in their name, to the very African fans who travel to see them. They have the loudest microphones in the affected nation. With a big platform comes a small duty: to use it when it counts. This is not about nationality — a Zimbabwean star silent on our own injustices would deserve the same challenge.
The Bill Is Small. The Refusal Is What Stings
So that no one can say this conversation was only complaint, let me be precise about what solidarity would actually look like — for artists, promoters and brands alike. None of it is heavy. That is rather the point.
We Built These Stages. We Get to Set the Terms
Let me land this where it began — with love, because that is the only honest place to speak from. I adore Mafikizolo. Half of us got married to their songs; “Ndihamba Nawe” has soundtracked more African weddings than any pastor. That is exactly why this hurts. You do not feel betrayed by strangers; you feel it by the ones you let into your heart. The hurt is the measure of the love.
And so I am not writing to cancel anyone. I am writing to remind us of something we keep forgetting: the African audience is not a passive purse to be emptied. It is a force. We made these stars — our streams, our tickets, our adoration turned local talents into continental royalty. A throne the people built, the people may also ask to answer to them. That is not bitterness. That is the most basic reciprocity, the thing our grandmothers called kupanana — the giving and giving-back that holds a community together. You may not eat at the family table all year and then refuse to carry the coffin when the family buries its dead.
So here is my charge, and it is the same one I would give a brand, a footballer, an actor, an influencer, anyone who lives off our love. Speak. One sentence. Stand with the hunted before you dance for the comfortable. And to Econet and every promoter: align your strategy with the soul of your market, not just its spending power, because on this continent the two were never separate. Do that, and we will fill your stadium and sing every word. Refuse it, and discover that the people who made the throne can also, quietly, simply stay home. We are not asking you to be heroes. We are asking you to be family. Pamberi nehumwe — forward with our oneness, and with the courage to speak it out loud.
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