by chipawo.admin | Jul 5, 2017 | testimonies
Danai (Didi to her friends and family) Gurira is now pursuing an extremely successful career in show business in the United States. A reviewer described her as ‘the red-hot Zimbabwean actress…who stars as butt-kicking, katana sword-wielding zombie, apocalypse survivor in The Walking Dead’. She has scooped an Obie Award and other awards for writing and acting. Yet, Danai could very easily have been an academic like her father or a librarian like her mother or any one of the many careers that graduates of the Dominican Convent in Harare choose. Instead, surprisingly and rather unfashionably, she decided to take up drama, earning herself an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) at New York University. The performing arts was not a popular choice among young girls of her age when she was a Harare teenager. So why and how drama? The answer is simply ‘CHIPAWO’. Danai admitted this herself when she addressed a group of Swedish parliamentarians at the CHIPAWO Media Centre while on a visit to Zimbabwe from the States somewhere around 2003. Movingly, she acknowledged her debt to CHIPAWO, saying that it was CHIPAWO that had launched her on her theatre career and provided her with grounding in the performing arts. She explained that her membership of and experience in the CHIPAWO Youth Group made her and the others in the group believe that they could do anything they set their minds to. The sky was the limit. And it seems that this is exactly what is happening for Danai right now in the United States. The CHIPAWO youth group that Danai was referring to and of which she was...
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