About
Romeo Zulu
Romeo Zulu is a Zimbabwean poet from Gwanda, a Social Innovation and Community Development graduate of the University of Zimbabwe, now in Harare, and the author of The Watchman of Africa, poems on Africa’s politics and people.
[An isiNdebele line to come.]
Gwanda
Romeo Zulu was born on 2 January 2002 in Manama, in the Gwanda district of Matabeleland South, and grew up there, doing his O and A Levels at Manama High. He is Ndebele and speaks isiNdebele; he writes in English. He started writing at 13, as songs. At 16 he accepted that he could not sing and that a songwriter who cannot sing lives in the shadows, and decided to be a poet instead. At 17 he got serious, and the poems that became his first book began.
The Watchman of Africa
The collection was published in 2021 by Ubuntu Afro-Publishers in Bulawayo, when he was 19, and printed in a small run that he sold himself. Its subject is Africa: the leaders who will not leave, the colonisation that continues through loans and trade, the history Africans were not taught, women’s lives, faith and the prosperity gospel, and what Africans must do for themselves. He has said he sees himself as the watchman who has to alert Africa to what is coming. The influences he names are Pan-Africanists: PLO Lumumba, Arikana Chihombori-Quao, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and Marcus Garvey, and the Zimbabwean poet Methulisi Ndlovu.
In 2022 the book won the poetry category of the Phoenix Publishing Book Awards, and his poem Poisoned by Mary Jane’s Relatives took third place in the Gourd of Consciousness National Poetry Writing Competition. The Standard and NewsDay profiled him that year, he appeared on HStv’s Book Club Sessions, and in January 2023 Three Men On a Boat published his poem Heritage. A Kindle edition followed in April 2023. A second edition, in paperback for the first time, is in preparation, and a second collection, Ill Mind and All, is written.
The University of Zimbabwe
He studied at the University of Zimbabwe from 2021 to 2025 and graduated with a BSc (Honours) in Social Innovation and Community Development. During his internship with Hand in Hand Zimbabwe he visited rural project sites to monitor irrigation, bakery and poultry initiatives, ran workshops for self-help groups on business management and financial literacy, worked with ARDA to help farmers improve their yields, and created market links for community producers. He co-founded Amahle Marula Oil, helping to solve production problems and set up its governance. He lives in Harare and is open to work in development, communications, research and writing.
Photographs
Contact
WhatsApp · zuluromeo58@gmail.com · Instagram @mfokazulu · Facebook · LinkedIn