Organisers of the annual urban culture fiesta, Shoko Festival, will this year make Peace in the Hood their main event following a slump in attendance at most of last year’s scheduled events at the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences grounds.
Kennedy Nyavaya
This will be the first time in the festival’s existence to take the main event, which usual features a foreign hip-hop star, to Chitungwiza, where thousands of young people have consistently showed up every year on the last day.
In a statement on Thursday, the festival director Samm “Cde Fatso” Monro, said they had decided to “flip the script” after feedback from last year so as to “surprise our audience” over the three days from September 28 to 30.
“We have heard constructive criticism from our long-time fans from day one (and) 2017 was definitely a tough year to operate in and we are going to be playing to our strengths this year,” said Cde Fatso.
Peace in the hood has been an epic closing event for the fete attracting thousands of people in the past seven editions and the satirist believes that calls for celebration.
“Peace in the Hood has organically grown over the years to become the biggest day of the festival so we want to celebrate that,” he said
“It’s unique in that in Harare most international acts play gigs in the city centre whereas we take international acts and Zimbabwe’s most cutting edge artistes out to the hood.”
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Meanwhile, the new development could also dispel the perception of elitism that has been tagged to the three-day event for a long time.
Other events to look out for are a re-imagined comedy night programme at a venue to be announced, the ever-popular Hub Unconference and the Zim Hip-Hop Summit which attracted a range of hip-hop heads from across the country last year.
Shoko Festival — among the country’s longest-running urban culture festivals — is a product of Magamba Network.
