Transformative youth development through heritage projects: connecting political, creative, and cultural capabilities

ABSTRACT This article draws on our continuous artistic engagement with Tonga youth in Zimbabwe over the last four years and offers a critical analysis of their transformation. We use the intersecting concepts of political and cultural capabilities to argue how arts-based participation in civic spaces has enabled them to shift the power balances, fostering them as epistemic agents and change-makers. Their journey across three arts and heritage workshops showcases that the longitudinal collaborations and social networks developed and built on one another, creating a thick interrelational embodied process of initiating political advocacy and re-creating different and multiple reinterpretations of their cultural heritage. The paper demonstrates the possibilities of envisaging and realising alternative livelihoods amidst the struggles exacerbated by horizontal and vertical inequalities, precarity, political apathy and poverty and highlights the importance of identifying relevant, context-sensitive, and engaging approaches for transformative development and legacy.