Whose winter is it, anyway?

Mai Chenesai is at her stall by five in the morning, before the frost has lifted off the roofs of Mbare. Her hands are cracked from the cold and from washing vegetables in water she carries from a communal tap. She wears two jerseys, a doek, and a blanket knotted at her waist like an apron.

By the time the sun is high enough to warm the tarmac, she has already spent three hours in a temperature her body was never built to withstand without proper shelter, proper clothing, proper anything. Ten kilometres away, in a Borrowdale home with underfloor heating and a gas geyser, winter is a mood. Candles are lit. Soup is served. Someone remarks, over a glass of red wine, that Harare's winter light is "really quite beautiful this year."

Zimbabwe does not experience one winter. It experiences several, stacked on top of each other according to income, geography, and proximity to power, both electrical and political.

The Cold as Class Marker

We tend to speak of winter as a shared national experience, a season that arrives for everyone in June and leaves everyone in August. This is a comforting fiction. In reality, winter in Zimbabwe is a magnifying glass held up to inequality that exists all year round but becomes lethal, or at least visibly cruel, only when temperatures drop.

Consider what it costs to be warm. A household with reliable ZESA and a functioning circuit can flick a switch. A household without, which, depending on the suburb and the week, may be most of them, must buy firewood, paraffin, or gas, all of which have become luxury goods dressed up as necessities. Firewood prices spike every June with the predictability of a tax. In rural Nzvimbo, in Chiweshe, in Chivi, in Binga, families burn through savings meant for school fees just to keep a fire going through the night, because the alternative is a child coughing through winter with no clinic within reach and no blanket thick enough.

This is not weather. This is policy, expressed through temperature.

The Body Keeps the Score

Zimbabwe's health system, already stretched thin, absorbs a seasonal spike in respiratory illness that falls disproportionately on the poor. Pneumonia in infants. Bronchitis in the elderly. Asthma attacks in overcrowded, poorly ventilated high-density housing where five people sleep in a room built for two, sharing whatever warmth their bodies can generate because the walls offer none. Meanwhile, the well-insulated suburbs experience winter as an aesthetic: a reason to wear a nice coat, not a reason to fear for a grandmother's life.

Our public discourse rarely names this directly. We talk about load shedding as an inconvenience: missed Zoom calls, spoiled meat in the fridge, without reckoning with what it means for a family with no backup, no generator, no solar, no choice. Winter does not create this vulnerability. It exposes it, the way a receding tide exposes what was always beneath the surface.

A Season That Should Embarrass Us

There is a version of Zimbabwe that could exist, one where winter is genuinely a shared, manageable season rather than a stratified ordeal. It would require treating energy access, housing quality, and rural health infrastructure not as separate policy silos but as a single, urgent question of dignity. It would require our institutions, public and private, to stop treating the poor's suffering as seasonal noise and start treating it as an annual, entirely predictable failure of planning.

Shakespeare's "winter of discontent" was made glorious summer by the sun of York, a change in fortune, a change in power. Zimbabwe's winter of discontent will not be resolved by better weather. It will be resolved, if it ever is, by a redistribution of warmth: literal and structural. Until then, Mai Chenesai will keep arriving before the frost lifts, wrapped in whatever she has, while the rest of the country debates whether winter this year is "quite beautiful."

It is. For some.

Simbarashe Namusi is a strategic communications consultant and columnist writing on governance, accountability, and civic identity in Zimbabwe.

inequality in Zimbabwe