17/05/2026
ZESA.
In Zimbabwe, ZESA — the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority — has become something bigger than an acronym. It has become a word. A feeling. When the lights go out, you don’t say there’s no electricity. You say ZESA haipo. ZESA is not here.
And for weeks, ZESA was not here ,not for downtown Harare, not for the vendors, the small businesses, the ordinary people who needed it to survive. But uptown? Uptown had light.
This series was my response to that divide. To the quiet violence of a city split in half by something as basic as power. To the reassurances offered by those who never once sat in the dark. To the way suffering becomes invisible when it only happens to certain people in certain parts of town.
Kudya Mari — Eating Money — is one image from this series. In Zimbabwe the phrase is not metaphor. It is diagnosis. When systems fail the people they are meant to serve, money stops being a tool and starts being something you consume just to stay alive.
I made this work because I believe photography has a responsibility to collapse the distance between those who are suffering and those who are comfortable enough not to notice.
ZESA haipo. But we were here.
jhxn
