BY AGATHA CHUMA ORGANISERS of Pride of Africa Asia Awards will this month host the awards ceremony in-person after running them virtually for two years due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The awards to be held on July 29 in Guangzhou, China recognise African talents based in China in different categories such as fashion, music, culture and business.

China-based Zimbabwean and awards organiser Samantha Sibanda said the awards are designed to create awareness about Africa, African people, their culture and talent.

“I came up with the idea to host these awards after realising that people around here (China) had a delusion about Africa,” she said, adding that they viewed Africa as a jungle where there are diseases, poverty and uneducated struggling people without talent.

“Stories that I found circulating on different platforms was of Africans getting arrested for crime or for not having legal papers and through this, people peddle falsehoods to cement their fallacious views towards Africans.

“So, in trying to change and show them that there is the other side of Africans that they do not know, I decided to come up with these awards to show the talent that people here possess. For the awards, people get nominated from communities they are based in on what they do. We then do background research to check if they are genuinely doing something. We then group them according to their category.”

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Over the past years the awards have been faced a series of COVID-19 restrictions which have been a major drawback.

“We are ready to meet in Guangzhou for the awards ceremony for the first time because over the years we used to meet in Beijing. Guangzhou is a place where most Africans stay and some of them have gone through a lot in order to succeed, so in honouring them, we are going to host the awards there,” she said.

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