There is something unusual about Zimbabweans. Something the world may never fully understand.
Whether Black, white, Indian or mixed race, once you are Zimbabwean, you learn how to survive almost anything.
Zimbabweans survive inflation that wipes out salaries before month-end. They survive endless power cuts, collapsing public services, pothole-ridden roads, company closures and economic uncertainty that has lasted for decades.
Then came COVID-19.
The world stopped. Powerful economies panicked. Cities shut down. Many feared Africa would collapse under the weight of the pandemic.
But Zimbabweans survived that too.
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Families shared food with neighbours. Informal traders found ways to keep feeding households. Nurses and doctors continued working under impossible conditions. Communities buried loved ones, comforted each other and somehow carried on.
In many homes there were no savings, no stable income and little medical support. Yet people adapted the only way they knew how — through improvisation and endurance.
That is what Zimbabweans do.
No country should normalise hardship the way Zimbabwe has. Yet few people have mastered survival like Zimbabweans.
In Harare, a graduate engineer may drive a taxi during the day and repair computers at night. In Bulawayo, a retired teacher sells vegetables to support grandchildren. In rural communities, families survive through farming, remittances and sheer determination.
Zimbabweans have built an entire informal economy around improvisation.
When banks fail, people trade in cash.
When cash disappears, they use mobile money.
When electricity goes out, generators appear.
When fuel becomes scarce, someone always knows where to find it.
This is no longer ordinary resilience. It is survival science.
A Zimbabwean can lose money, get robbed, miss transport, receive bad news from home and still send a WhatsApp message saying: “Life goes on wangu.”
That is not normal strength.
It is advanced survival technology.
But beneath the humour, jokes and famous Zimbabwean resilience lies exhaustion.
Many people are no longer truly living. They are surviving from one crisis to the next. An entire generation grew up hearing promises:
“Zvinhu zvichanaka.”
“Tichiri kusimukira.”
“One day zvinhu zvichachinja.”
For many families, that “one day” never arrives.
The tragedy is that Zimbabwe is not poor in resources. It is rich in minerals, agricultural potential, talent and educated people. What has often been missing is stability, trust and institutions that function consistently.
Zimbabweans in the diaspora survive too.
In the United Kingdom, many work double shifts in hospitals, care homes and warehouses while sending money home every month. In South Africa, thousands hustle daily under difficult conditions to support relatives back home.
Zimbabwe’s greatest export is no longer gold or tobacco.
It is its people.
Yet despite everything, Zimbabweans still carry hope. That may be the most extraordinary thing of all.
A people who continue smiling after decades of disappointment are either incredibly strong or incredibly tired.
Maybe both.
Perhaps one day historians will study Zimbabweans not for how much they suffered, but for how they kept going when everything around them suggested they should have collapsed.
Makaoma maZimbabweans. Somehow, you always make it happen.