THE Bulawayo Wushu Association will on Saturday host the inaugural Martial Expo 2012 at Drill Hall.
REPORT BY THE SPORTS REPORTER
Four disciplines, taekwondo, boxing, dragon and goju ryu, will feature at the exhibition. Bulawayo Wushu Association has also invited members of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean communities in the country to attend.
Simbarashe Simango, co-ordinator of the association, said the whole idea of the expo was to create relationships within all martial arts disciplines and come up with a tournament to be held in the future.
The first edition of the Martial Expo is being held in honour of wushu coach Given Dube who passed away in Bulawayo last Tuesday and was laid to rest at West Park Cemetery on Friday.
“We have invited the Asian community in Zimbabwe — that is the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans — because they are the owners of the sport,” Simango said.
The Wushu Association would on Friday be at the Bulawayo Centre between 12pm and 2pm to publicise the Saturday event. They would perform drills and demonstrations about wushu.
“We have talked to the management at Bulawayo Centre and they have agreed that on Friday we publicise the Saturday event. We will be doing demonstrations and drills about wushu,” Simango said.
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He said he recently met an official from the Chinese Embassy’s Cultural Office in Harare, Cai Jian, who said they were in discussions with the government to either have wushu coaches come down to Zimbabwe or have students travel to China for training in the martial arts discipline.
“We discussed widely with Jian, but most importantly he indicated that they were discussing with the government to have wushu coaches come to Zimbabwe to train athletes in the country or have athletes from Zimbabwe travel to the Asian country for training,” Simango added.
Wushu to be held in Byo IT is the first of its kind in Bulawayo where we want to forge relationships within all the disciplines in martial arts and then establish tournaments for the future.
Moreso, it will be an awareness campaign for the Bulawayo community that martial arts are not all about violence, but self-discipline.
