Munya Chawawa on moving to England from Zimbabwe, talking about race in comedy, and making films about dictators

Munya Chawawa has been talking about growing up in Zimbabwe – and the culture shock of coming to England.

The satirist said his childhood in Africa was ‘fantastic’ as it was ‘the total embodiment of what being a child should be. When you're a kid, you're adventurous… always falling and climbing and jumping’.

‘In England, it's hard to do that because school finishes it's dark. You have to go home, and you have to sit on an iPad,’ he told Jamie Laing  on his podcast Great Company. ‘In Zimbabwe, you can do whatever you want, climb trees, go on mad adventures.’

However that didn’t always end well, as he recalled: ‘I remember I saw bungee-jumping on TV once, and I said to my sister, "let's try bungee jumping". So, I climbed in a tree with a rope, just a normal rope, tied it around my waist, tied some around the tree, and then just jumped out the tree. My ribs were just hanging on this rope, and my sister has to lift me whilst we quickly asked my dad to come and untie the rope!’

There were tensions in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime, but Chawawa credits his parents of doing a good job from keeping much of it from him ‘although I'd hear stories of violence’.

But it was hyper-inflation which prompted his parents to put all they had into coming to the UK.  Zimbabwe’s inflation between November 2007 and November 2008 ran at 89,700,000,000,000,000,000 per cent.

He told Laing: ‘I had a big ice cream tub full of pocket money, which I'd collect. Let's say I had about Z$400 which is nothing. I remember my mum come into my room, and she went,  "it's totally pointless what you're doing, because tomorrow be worth nothing". That was the extent of inflation.

‘At one point you could go into say your Sainsbury’s equivalent, buy a loaf of bread for £2. And by the time you walk over to the till, it's £10…They had to change currency to the US dollar because they ran out of space on calculators.’

The family came to stay with his grandma in England ‘then my dad would hitchhike around to see where it would be safe for us to grow up’. He reflects: ‘Oftentimes, African fathers sacrifice so much for the preservation of their kids and for their kids to do well’ – at the expense of anything else.

‘Like, my dad doesn't even know who Beyonce is,’ he said. ‘Do you know how crazy that is? He just has no reference of popular culture. So I can't talk to him about anything other than stuff that's really deep. 

'I went to take him to Avatar [and] they constantly mention this place, Pandora. And we got to the end of the film, and  I said to him, "Dad, what did you think of Pandora?" And he went, "Who is she again?" I thought he’s a lost cause.’

He says his father’s influence also means he steers clear of reading reviews, saying: ‘Being a Zimbabwean and having had my dad's feedback, if I hear anything remotely bad about something, I'm like, "it's a total failure". If it's not five stars, it's a failure. That's not a good way to think. 

‘I remember at GCSE, I got six A*s, four As,  but you would have thought that I failed every subject the way I was in the shower, like a Usher music video, hammering the wall. It's crazy. 

‘That's just the way I'm built. Yeah, it creates my drive, but, you know, people around me, my friends, say, "Look, you can't go through life [like that], that’s just going to get in the way of you being a grateful person."’

However his drive to succeed did not always work out well in English schools.

‘It was a culture shock,’ he said of the move. In Zimbabwe when I told people I was moving to England everyone would say stuff like, "no, don't go to England. I've heard that they throw chairs at teachers." That was mythology. And literally two weeks into moving to England, in the music lesson, someone threw the chair at the teacher.

‘England can be a very cruel place in terms of even how kids are. My degree is in psychology. and we would describe England as an individualistic culture, which realistically, is a slightly scaled-down version of the American dream.

‘In America it’s amped up to the to the nth degree, which is, if you fail, it's your fault, right? In England, it's more shrouded, but it's certainly a case of: it's your job to be successful. And if someone falls over in front of you, not your problem. 

‘In Zimbabwe, it's a collectivist society, so its people are happy to see each other do well. When someone begins to climb the ranks of success people very excited for that. Even on an academic level in school. 

‘In Zimbabwe, being smart in school was the equivalent of being a jock. To the point where people would get detentions in class because the teacher would ask a question, everyone would shoot their hands up, and people would be clicking just to be able to answer the question, and the teacher would go, "don't click at me, you're in detention."  For wanting to answer a question!

‘So, when I moved to England and I put my hand up in lessons, I'm the only person putting my hand up, Then sure enough, people start calling me "boffin". I'm thinking, what's a boffin? Sounds like that thing freaking Harry Potter catches in Quidditch, right? 

‘So my first survival instinct as a teenager in England was to hide any and all talent I had for fear of being bullied or ridiculed. That was the biggest culture shock. It was like, you know, don't openly succeed.’ 

In the wide-ranging podcast, Chawawa also spoke about the reaction he gets when talking about race in his work.

He said: ‘If I come on a podcast, or do a stand-up show or go on a panel show and mention anything to do with race, people are very quick to suggest that we're mobilising the race card.

‘When I was practising for my stand-up, I watched Lenny Henry Live A The Apollo, and all of the comments were about how he was  making jokes about his race and they were really chastising him for it. 

‘What's really interesting to me is that  when you are a certain colour, all of your experience is dictated by that colour. Everything from  going to the shops and being followed around, or people asking where you're from, or touching your hair, or utilising certain words against you… So of course, it's something we mention more because it has such an influence.

‘I'm half-white,  I'm mixed. So part of what my exploration in my stand-up show was, was this ability to know how to do both. People will refer to it as "code switching". 

And it can happen in many ways. My black friends will talk about how they have to code switch on the phone. They talk about the phone voice… 

‘I actually used to read the dictionary in order to try to learn words and come across more intelligent in school.  I remember one teacher would always say to me, "whoa, like your vocabulary is crazy". And  in my kid brain, that's what I had to do to  blend in seamlessly.’

However he says he has not been traumatised by any everyday racism. He said: 'Maybe this is  just classic repression –  but those things, they don't make me sad, they don't make me feel as though I want any sympathy.

‘If anything, I like to dissect them and tackle them via my satire. That's my outlet. That's my expression. You know, also, these are all one-of-one experiences, by which I mean, another person, might have come from Ghana or Nigeria and been like, "no, no. I didn't feel the need to learn long words, because I was very happy to be unapologetically myself."

‘So, although they may have been hard at the time, I'm very oblivious to strong emotions. I try to take everything in my stride and  to observe a feeling from very far away, which is why I never cry’

‘There's been times that I've tried to cry my hardest and literally not a single tear will fall out. But when I'm going through tough times,  I'm always imagining fictional characters like Kratos from God of War, and they're these totally emotionless. Now, I know that isn't healthy, but I know how to be good, to help others with their emotions.’

‘That's why I say  if I when I have kids, I am totally conscious. I can't create another Munya. I am the way I am because of my dad, and he is the way he is because of his dad. But when I speak to my [mates], we always say we can't be our dads.’

However he did confess to occasional tears – at the Disney film Up, watching documentaries about ‘extreme achievement’, and while writing an article that reminded of his granddad, who died  in lockdown, ‘so I never really got say bye to him.’

Chawawa was talking to promote the second of his documentaries How To Survive a Dictator, which aired on Channel 4 last month and looked into life in North Korea.

He said: ‘One thing that’s become very apparent to me after doing both of these documentaries is that dictatorships are things that we wrongly and arrogantly assume happen in poor places and to "dumb people" right?

‘Because if I said to you, in England, do you think we'll ever have a dictator, you might be like, "what are you on about?"  What about America? "Nah, man, come on. We're America. We're England."

‘But Donald Trump is saying stuff that could very easily fall straight out of a dictator's handbook. The membrane between us and them – your Zimbabwes, your North Koreas  – is thinner than you think. And that's why it's really interesting for me, even personally, just to investigate that, to see how many parallels are there, and how close are we.’

He added that using humour to tackle such big topics was ‘like putting the medicine in the lasagne… a Trojan horse’. 

‘If you want people to understand something, humour is a language we all speak and enjoy speaking. That’s why, in something as intense as a documentary about North Korea and Kim Jong Un which are extremely ominous topics – you’re talking about people suppressed under a dictatorship, somebody who could literally end the world with the press of a button –  I have to put sketches and songs in there, because otherwise, why was a British person scrolling their TV guide going to go, "let me watch a documentary about a group of people who are having a much harder life than I am"?  How do you get them to care?   

‘So, it's cool if I can communicate through song and through satire and make you laugh, hopefully through that you will absorb some of the other messages So, in my own experience, comedy is a great communicator.’

Asked what he liked best about himself he replied: ‘I like my brain. I like my eyebrows. Yeah, they're good. And I like being able to jump so high. Imagine that I was once the second-best person in Norfolk at high jump. There was only one person better than me in the whole of Norfolk. That's crazy.’

And asked for his favourite swear word, he said: ‘I don't really swear that much. One that really baffles people, that’s so childish and a huge ick, is if something mad happens and you go, "Oh, Pants.’

•  Great Company with Jamie Laing is available on all podcast providers.

Published: 23 Oct 2024