“Jab! Jab! Jab!” The shout comes from a wiry man in flip-flops and low-slung tracksuit bottoms, watching a group of boys fire punches into the air on a smooth concrete floor beneath a corrugated iron roof in Mbare, a suburb of Harare. The man is Arifonso Zvenyika, and The Guardian profiled him in October 2021.
In January 1998, Zvenyika beat Scotland’s Paul Weir in Glasgow to win the Commonwealth flyweight title for Zimbabwe. Boxing circles call him “Mosquito”, a nod to his 50kg fighting weight and his deadly skills. He turned professional at 17, and his career took him to Zambia and Australia as well as Scotland.
By the time The Guardian found him he was 45 and had little to show for it. He lived hand to mouth in a country where up to 90% of working-age adults are not formally employed. “I’m shy to say it, but I can’t afford to feed my family properly,” he told the paper. “We eat bread without butter, we drink tea without milk.”
A fall and a gym
The slide began in 2000. A neighbour accused Zvenyika of stealing a radio, and he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. He insists he was framed. A stroke in jail effectively ended his professional career.
“I’ve been in prison, in hospital, in a hooligan’s cell. I don’t want others to fall into that pit,” he said.
So he opened the Mosquito Boxing School of Excellence and charges nothing. Three times a week, up to 20 young people, aged from eight to their early 20s, turn up for fitness work and technique. He leans toward boys and young men who cannot stay in school and drift onto the streets. Some skip training because they own no shoes. The school is short of gloves, pads, punchbags and headgear, and he relies on others for training space. A chalkboard on the wall reads “Go hard or go home” and lists 10 rules. Eating, smoking, even joking during sessions is banned.
Noel Sunday, 16, is one of the boys. “Both my parents are unemployed. I only did four years of school,” he said.
What Zvenyika wants from the sport
A month later, Xinhua visited the same neighbourhood. Zvenyika told the agency he hopes to produce another world champion from a poor background. Boxing, he said, teaches discipline and dignity: “it’s not about violence”. With little else on offer in Mbare, he said, children end up on roadsides and in bad company.
Antony Mapako, 24, one of his students, told Xinhua he could see himself raising Zimbabwe’s flag within five years, as Mosquito once did. Tinotenda Mazuru, 15, said she boxes to show that women can do better than people expect. Xinhua added that funding for the sport remains a problem, so even professionals need side jobs to eat.
Lockdowns had shut the gym for much of the previous 18 months, and Zvenyika reopened it to students in September 2021. “I was born a fighter and I’ll die a fighter,” he said. “Boxing might leave me, but I’ll never leave boxing.”
Sources
- 'I was born a fighter': the champion boxer changing young lives in Zimbabwe | Global development | The Guardian
- Zimbabwe's former boxing champion nurtures next generation of fighters (Xinhua, by Tafara Mugwara, via Big News Network)
Sources
- ‘I was born a fighter’: the champion boxer changing… | The Guardian
- ‘I was born a fighter’: the champion boxer changing young… – IWMF
