Transcript for 1.1 Prince and Kezia

Amalie: You're listening to Sharing things, a new University of Edinburgh podcast from the Alumni Relations team about the University community, which we want to get to know a little better. 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: Hi, I'm Amalie, I'm a fourth-year student and I'm the host of this podcast. In Sharing things I talk to alumni, staff and students about their stories. Guests have all been asked to bring an object as a starting point for discussion and the object can be anything important or significant. It can represent an event, person, decision, experience or it can just remind them of something. Let's see where this takes us. 

Amalie: In this episode you will meet Kezia Dugdale and Prince Chakanyuka. Kezia is the Director of the John Smith Centre for Public Service at the University of Glasgow and works to promote trust in politics and public service. She led the Scottish Labour Party from 2015 to 2017 and has a masters degree in Policy Studies from the University of Edinburgh. 

Prince is a fourth-year student of Medicinal and Biological Chemistry and a Mastercard Foundation Scholar. He has particular interests and social enterprise and education policy, and co-founded Up’a’Step, a platform that encourages students going up a step in their communities.  

We talk about stable diets, bringing diversity to politics, Gordon Aikman, childhood and more. 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: So welcome to Sharing things, Prince and Kezia. How are you today? 

Kezia: Good. 

Prince: Good, thank you. 

Amalie: Nice, I'm good too. I'm going to start with the question: What have you brought to the studio today and why? 

Kezia: So I have brought an award. It's a Scottish Politician of the Year Award. It's not mine. So I do have two of these, like smug face, but this one in particular is... 

Amalie: [Laughs] Just got to put that in there. 

Kezia: But this one isn't mine. So this was given to my dear friend Gordon Aikman, which he won for Public Campaign of the Year Award and the reason he won it was he had raised over £600,000 for motor neurone disease research and he had also changed the law in Scotland to make life better for people with motor neurone disease, which is a really horrible, debilitating disease that basically eats away at your nerves, starts at your fingertips and eventually affects your respiratory system. 

And the reason I brought it is because Gordon and I met here at Edinburgh University when I was working at the Students' Association as a welfare adviser back in 2003 and he was one of the student presidents and Gordon was 29 when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. We don't know why people get it. We're still researching why and we're still trying to find a cure and a lot of the money that Gordon raised was about researching for that cure and he died after 24 and a bit months of living with motor neurone disease in his early 30s, which is utterly tragic and he was so successful at campaigning around motor neurone disease that the University here named a lecture theatre after him. So the George Square Lecture Theatre, as it used to be called, is now called the Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre and I think that's awesome. So that's why I brought my award today. I should add that the reason I have it is because it's the one thing he left me in as will. So I was kind of hoping for the CD collection [laughs] 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: And I got his award, but it's lovely because it sits next to my desk at my new job and that's rather special. 

Amalie: Why do you think he left it for you? 

Kezia: I think he knows how super proud I was of him for what he had achieved because, you know, everybody that gets a debilitating disease or illness is fighting and using every kind of ounce of their mental and physical power to take on what they're living with, but somehow he managed to find additional inner resource to campaign, not for himself, because this is a killer disease, nobody survives it, you can't treat it, he spent all of the time that he was dying trying to find a cure for other people and I find that utterly inspirational and lots of other people found that really inspirational, which is why he was recognised as a brilliant campaigner and got this award and I think he would just have left it to me knowing that I was always going to talk about it and showcase it with people like you. 

Amalie: Do you guys keep any other, like, keepsakes? 

Kezia: Oh loads. 

Amalie: Yeah? 

Kezia: Yeah, I try to travel quite a bit and I'm fortunate that I'm able to do that now at my stage in life, I'm very grand and very old in my late 30s. 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: So I always like to bring something back so if you, if we were doing this in my house right now I would be trying to talk about all the different trinkets and things around the room that I had smuggled back in a suitcase on a Ryanair flight from somewhere in Europe. 

Amalie: Can you think of like any trinket right now? 

Kezia: Yeah, well I just cleaned it this morning 'cause I was tidying my flat - oh the glamour. I was in Pisa last year and I bought a little red Vespa, 'cause in Italy everybody's buzzing around on little Vespa bikes so it's a little toy Vespa bike and it sits in my kitchen, so that's one example of the stuff I fill my house with. 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: Do you want to tell us about your object? 

Prince: Yes, so today I brought- it's called mugoti- so it's basically a cook stick that we use to make sadza in Zimbabwe and sadza is our staple diet. A lot of African countries can kind of identify with sadza, so in Kenya it's called ugali, so in Tanzania as well, and the reason I brought it is because not only do a lot of Zimbabweans identify with it, because we use it to cook our staple diet, but also here in the UK they'll be controversial but back in Zimbabwe it's not. 

Almost every Zimbabwean has either witnessed or been a victim of being beaten by this. With their mother or their grandmother and is a very common thing that happens so just every time we see it, it's a reminder of like our favourite food, like everything we want to eat, but it's also a reminder of all the bad times you've been naughty when you were a kid, so it's an interesting mix of what this one object can kind of like, the things you can identify with it. 

At one moment it's making you dinner, and another moment you're literally being slapped with it. 

Amalie: Do you remember like a specific moment where you were slapped or what did you do? 

Prince: [Sigh] I can remember the time when I felt it wasn't - I was not meant to be beaten with it, whether people believe this or not, so my mum thought I had stolen sugar and peanut butter- it was a very common thing there for a lot of kids to do- but I knew it was my brother, I knew it was my older brother that had done that but because I was the youngest and I just happened to have been the last person who was holding the peanut butter bottle, she thought it was me and I was like, "No, I just had my share of peanut butter today." But she thought I just had a lot, a little too much, and I was just like kind of wasting food, so yeah I got a beating with it and I thought that wasn't fair but obviously I couldn't tell anyway because, you know, like I said, it's a very common thing, like it happens to a lot of people. 

It's not very tragic, I hope it doesn't sound tragic. 

Amalie: No. 

Prince: So yeah. 

Kezia: What's in sadza then? If you were to make it here, what would you go and buy from the shop to make it? 

Prince: Maize meal and water. So it's just those two things, so you can, we can think of as like a dough made of maize meal instead of wheat flour. Think of it as mashed potato but using maize meal. 

Kezia: What about, like, porridge? 

Prince: Yes, we do have porridge as well, so we can make porridge and we put peanut butter in it and that's like every child's favourite meal as well, so yeah this thing actually can be used for a lot of things, I should have actually added the porridge as well. 

Kezia: A muguti, have I said that right? 

Prince: Mugoti. 

Kezia and Amalie: Mugoti. 

Prince: Yes. 

Kezia: Can I hold it? 

Prince: Yeah. 

Kezia: Just for the benefit of people listening to this at home, it is a wooden spoon with a large head that's quite flat and it reminds me of my childhood as well because I guess the Scottish equivalent of this would be called a spurtle, which is again a wooden instrument that you'd use to make porridge. 

It should be like the staple part of lots of - maybe not today - not every Scottish child is brought up on porridge today but I mean I certainly had a lot of it as a kid in the northeast of Scotland, it was quite a common dish, isn't that funny? 

All around the world there's like a cultural process around food, you know they have a big pot and a matriarch figure stirring it and naughty kids at their ankles. 

Amalie: You say that this reminds you of home, what else do you, like, miss about Zimbabwe when you're here in Edinburgh? 

Prince: I think the biggest one would be, I miss vendors.  

So in Zimbabwe we have a lot of people kind of on the street selling different vegetables, like I'm not used to buying fresh vegetables in a shop because that's kind of a thing that you just walk out of your door and you walk to the market and you can kind of buy directly from people and you know the profits from the vegetables are going directly to the person who either grew them or to someone who's like paying school fees for their families, so you can kind of like connect with people as you buy things that you need on a daily basis. 

But I find here, every time I need to buy something I have to walk into a literal store and I've never done that with vegetables that I effectively started buying vegetables in stores when I came to the UK. 

So that's a big thing I miss about Zimbabwe, just kind of connecting with the community, especially buying fresh vegetables. 

Amalie: I wouldn't say Tesco is a very social place necessarily, you know. 

Prince: Especially when everything is like self-checkout as well, like you walk in and you walk out and haven't spoken to anyone effectively. 

Kezia: I think there's lots of people here who would like to buy their food like that. 

Like that sounds like the dream and the only examples of maybe where you can do that in this city is like at a farmer's market at the weekend and then you're paying a premium price... 

Prince: Exactly. 

Kezia: ...for a premium product but it excludes a lot of people who maybe can't afford to buy organic potatoes from a farmer at the weekend and that whole market economy around supermarkets is eating us all up in a way that's not very good. 

I feel like you might have a long-term interest in this as a topic though. 

Prince: Potentially, potentially because when I came here and when I noticed it, I was kind of like, the way I notice that I kept going to buy vegetables and I kept asking myself how come I just feel like there's something missing, until I started discussing with a lot of my friends when we bought I think it was onions from Lidl and that's when we were like, oh yeah we just remember the last time, every time we used to buy onions you have to hold them and ask how big is this one and sometimes you have to negotiate and say actually you know the price they charge you for this is a little too much, is a little too, like it's not fair and you just kind of have that interaction, kind of trying to debate how much you should pay for an onion and I was like, "Oh I haven't done that here in a long time." But yeah I think that the way to connect with people and just to understand why people are doing certain things and just to know someone is selling vegetables because they can send someone to school, I think that puts meaning to things that you could otherwise take for granted. 

Kezia: I still think you should go into Tesco tonight and take a bag of onions to the checkouts and say, "I think these are a little overpriced." 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: And just see how you get on. 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: So Prince mentioned, you know, staple diets, do you have a staple diet? 

Kezia: Not a very good one, so I spent most of the last 10 years working in politics- quite long days- it's a very privileged existence but it's hard work too in the sense of long days, lots of pressure and you often forget to eat and you kind of live off of coffee, I guess like a lot of students do, and then when you get home you realise how hungry you are and you make really bad choices, so you really carby, cheesy, lovely things at night that then just sit in your tummy and make you fat. 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: It's as simple as that, so there's ways round it, so when I became leader of the political party and the Labour Party in Scotland I had to become much more aware of how I presented myself and how I looked because people expect their politicians to always be smart and always have makeup and women should always be high heels and there's a lot of gender stereotypes and stuff and that. 

And so I had to care a bit more about, you know, how I looked after myself so I set some new rules like I wouldn't eat carbohydrates after 6 o'clock at night so I would have to try and aim instead to have a really good lunch and then eat really lightly in the evening that was the only way I could sort of maintain my diet. 

Prince: So it's very interesting to say like there were all these, I guess we could call them constructs, that you had to live with... 

Kezia: Yeah 

Prince: If you had a choice to change them, would you change them? Were they important? Was it important for you to kind of change your routine just so you could fit into this lifestyle? 

Kezia: Such a good question. I toil with this a lot because, you know, a great example would be high heeled shoes. I never wear high heels but when I became leader I wore high heels and I started to wear dresses in a way that I wouldn't normally do. Now I never wore anything that I felt uncomfortable in, because that's too far... 

Prince: Okay 

Kezia: 'cause I can't do my job properly if I don't feel good in my own skin... 

Prince: Right. 

Kezia: but there was a construct which was, "Politicians look like this." And I think that should be challenged because I think people want their elected representatives to be diverse and to look more like they do. 

Prince: Exactly. 

Kezia: But at the same time, you can't on your own be the person that changes all of the single-handedly. You can try and it will be a valiant effort but you can't expect a sort of cultural mass to gather behind you and deliver the same thing especially when the media are going to be the first to turn and go, "She's turned up today in her jeans." 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: And that takes you to negative place. 

I was in Quebec recently, I was visiting the National Assembly of Quebec and I met the leader of a new party in Quebec called Québec solidaire and it has two leaders, a man and woman leader, like joint leadership, but the female leader of this party was a woman called Manon Massé and she was like the most amazing feminist. 

She had grey hair and she didn't care what she wore and she was in her 60s and she wore flat shoes but the force of her personality meant it didn't matter and there's something beautiful about that that I think we should have more of, but I don't know how you get everyone to that place. 

This is not the biggest problem in politics, but a lot of my new job is about trying to break down the barriers that people face entering politics and I think, for a lot of people, they look at the people that represent them and they see an elite that they can't identify with. 

Prince: Right. 

Kezia: I don't know how you would describe the kind of politicians in Zimbabwe but I'm guessing they're not hugely reflective of the diverse country that Zimbabwe is. 

Prince: Um, it's interesting that you say that because I think, especially in Zimbabwe, a lot of the politicians are much older and culturally we are brought up to, like any culture, are brought up to respect people who are older than us, but I think in the Zimbabwean context that respect, it gets to the point of, you sometimes feel like you're not being listened to based off of your age, so kind of, age equal maturity equal wisdom, so a lot of young people don't quite- at least for me- we don't quite feel connected and that someone who was the Minister of Youth could potentially be the person who probably won't listen to you because they feel they know everything, they know everything that needs to be done for you. 

So at that point it's kind of like, oh politicians, it's just these people who represent you but you don't necessarily identify with them. 

Amalie: You mentioned barriers that a lot of people face when entering politics. What were some barriers that you faced? 

Kezia: I was really lucky because I was quite late I guess in my life to identify what my politics were, so in the party that I was elected representative for, the Labour Party, it's quite traditional for young people to support it and to get involved at a very young age, so a lot of my peers had been political since they were like 15 or 16. I wasn't, I didn't even really, I didn't vote at all until I was 23. 

Prince: Wow 

Kezia: Yeah, which is, which I feel very guilty about now, but I honestly at the time I didn't understand how politics related to my life. There wasn't a connection there for me. 

I just, I didn't think it mattered, to be honest, who was in charge and I still think a lot of people who are under the age of 25 feel that way. Maybe, maybe less so now because certainly in UK politics there are polar choices to be made now in a way that maybe 15 years ago, the political parties were much closer together, but it took me a long time to kind of identify my politics, then when I did, I met a lot of really interesting people really quickly because I joined the party here in Edinburgh so my Member of Parliament the time was Alistair Darling. He was the Trade Minister, he went on to be the Chancellor, so I had a really, like, lucky experience of meeting interesting people early on who were keen to help me and believed in me and saw, I guess, some sort of talent that they wanted to support. 

So I had quite a fast rise in politics and when I became leader, I was 33 years old and I was telling a lot of older people what to do. 

Prince: Wow 

Kezia: So I was young and female. 

Prince: Oh wow. 

Amalie: Oh that's fun. 

Kezia: Yeah and that, that came with its difficulties sometimes but more often than not I was respected because of the authority of the position that I held. 

But I definitely saw some barriers creeping in at that point there, some people- largely white middle class men- who didn't quite like being told what to do by me, can you, can you imagine? 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: Gasp. 

Amalie: Unimaginable. 

Kezia: But just to quickly answer your question in the round, if you look at politics today, we have a shocking record around black and minority ethnic representation in Scotland. 

We've only ever had four politicians in our elected parliament that aren't white and they have all come from- they're all men- and they all come from the same Pakistani lineage. 

So for example we've never had an African woman, or we've never had a Chinese man in our parliament. Everybody else in the history of 20 years of devolution have been white. That's the big problem that we need to understand as a country. We're not very good at having people with physical disabilities access in politics. 

LGBTI's quite well represented but I can't really explain why, so there's a lot of work to do there, and that's before you get to socio-economic factors like class. How easy it is for somebody who's working on the factory floor to have a brilliant idea about how their country can be fairer and better and see politics as a means by which they do that? 

Prince: I think actually like in Zimbabwe, a reflection of that would be, for as long as I've grown up and understood politics, I've seen the same people every single time, like, we had the same president for like 36 years. 

And even though people talk about how long the present person Robert Mugabe served as president, people kind of forget that even the Member of Parliaments and some of the ministers were also in time with him for 10, 15 years. 

God knows how many years, so we always know that it's going to be this person every single time, so that means there's not much change, so if the person still wanted to build a bridge in the place that didn't have a river, they'll still spread the same message every single time, and they'll still win. 

I used to joke with a lot of my classmates who, like, wanted, will say, "Oh, when I grow up I want to be president." And I'll be like you do realise people who are in your father's class when he was in school wanted to be president and it'll still be the same person since then. 

[Background laughter] 

Prince: So, for you to become president but we need to remove this one and people in your father's generation and your grandfather's generation, the people in our generation have to campaign with you before you become president. I wish I didn't say that because I probably discouraged them [laughs]  

Prince: But it was reality. 

Kezia: They can dream right? 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: I just want to bring it back to the objects, because your object has a lot to do with home and I just wanted to ask the question: What does home mean to you? 

Kezia: Hmm, that's deep, isn't it? 

Prince: I know, I know. 

Kezia: For me definitely it's a happy place, so I'm going home after we finish recording this. That involves a two-hour commute because Edinburgh in the midst of the festival is a nightmare and I'm going to Fife across the new bridge, which is another nightmare, but I'll get there eventually. When I get there, my partner will be there and our golden cocker spaniel dog called Brodie. Home is Brodie and my girlfriend. Happy days. 

Amalie: That is happy, what about you? 

Prince: I could consider home going to a place that my friends are there and as long as I feel comfortable there and the reason why I said that is because for 18 years I never travelled outside of Zimbabwe so I was always kind of within the same bracket, but even within that, my family, we lived in different places, like I went to like seven schools in total, so because of that I never been in like one solid environment. 

So while I never like travelled outside of my country, the idea of not being in the same place was always constant so by the time when I left Zimbabwe, I just find if I get to a place and I feel comfortable, I just want to call it home. 

Like I was in Uganda for five weeks and I was telling people, "Oh yeah, see later, I'm going home." So if I can find people that I can kind of connect with and identify with, that place just becomes home and right now, home is Edinburgh. 

I don't know where home is going to be the next two years but... 

Kezia: I'm delighted you call it is home though. 

Prince: It is home, it does feel like home. 

Kezia: Will you stay? Please stay. 

Prince: If I find ways to make me stay, I will stay. 

Amalie: You're both very passionate about doing the most for other people, what motivates this, would you say? 

Kezia: It's instinctive, do you not think it's instinctive? 

Prince: I, yeah, yeah, for me I think I've never been in a time where, like, there was a change or like- I didn't- there was a time when I didn't have the passion and then it grew and then I can kind of see the difference but I would say, what keeps it going and I can see burning is the fact that a lot of, for me to get to where I am now, is because a lot of people have helped me. 

So when I was 16 I spent a phase where the option of going continue with my education had kind of gone to non-existent and then I got a scholarship from a charity called Macomber Zimbabwe and I went to a private school called St Georges, so it was at that point that when I saw people believe in me and kind of invest in me, that that fire kind of keeps pushing me and for me to be in Edinburgh right now, I'm on a full scholarship as well, if not for that scholarship I wouldn't be in Edinburgh. 

I probably wouldn't be in university so it's kind of just witnessing other people kind of do things for me that is now the default that even people who have never seen you, people who don't know much about you can still kind of stand in a position to just make the world a better place, and if I can do that by making someone smile or if I can do that by either finding opportunities for other people, then I would, it's kind of like a give back and kind of way to appreciate what a lot of people have invested in me, so that's what keeps the fire burning for me. 

I don't know about you. 

Kezia: Both of my parents were teachers when I was very young, so I was brought up with a value set, which was about the importance of education, not just in of itself but as something which liberates people from like a pre-determined destiny. So you can overcome almost any barrier through access to education. 

I think I grew up looking at both of them as very clear examples of public service and they kind of brought me up to realise that we're all intrinsically linked, so my ability to succeed kind of requires you to be doing well as well, like, so, you know, that's society that's the culture that we collectively built together so that's why I think it's really important to do everything you can to focus on the people who face the greatest disadvantages. 

That's what shoots my politics, so my, my politics are by the using the power of government to break down institutional barriers. 

Prince: Right. 

Kezia: I think that's the role of the state, is to make things more equal, so that people have an equality of opportunity to be the very best that they can be and I guess some of that came from my parents' values set and some of it has just been shaped over my lived experience, like what I've seen, things that made me angry, things that made me happy. 

Prince: Right, right. In my experience, a lot of my friends or rather, in, when we grow up, especially in Zimbabwe, the ideal kind of careers to go into would be, oh go into medicine, engineering and a lot of the times, it's like so many other careers are kind of shutdown, especially public service. 

Public service, at least in Zimbabwe, a lot of people kind of see it as an option after all the other options are out, so I was just curious as someone who was raised by teachers, what did you see from your parents that you think could be a message to help other people who, even though teaching is not necessarily being encouraged to a lot of people, it could make people see value and make people realise that you could actually grow up and just want to be a teacher and that's also good enough and not let people kind of shut down on certain things and make things second best all the time. 

Kezia: So my dad is retired now but he taught in the same school from the day that opened in 1979 to the day that he retired a few years ago. 

So let's say that was, I don't know, 38 or 39 years, and think how many students know my dad, or were taught by my dad, you're talking tens of thousands of people over that period of time. 

I think that's incredible, like the number of lives that he touched, so when I kind of grew up without the background, I was like, I want to be a teacher, like, that's amazing. 

And both my parents were like, "Oh no no, don't go into teaching, there are no career prospects, the pay isn't great, blah blah blah." And they wanted more for me than that, which is really sad if you think about it, given the pride I have for what they had to achieve with their lives and what they were actually contributing to the world they lived in, but they didn't want me to do that and so I think it's really sad and then you look at other countries in the world, you know I was my party's education spokesperson for a while, so I studied what other countries' education systems looked like. 

I went to Finland and in Finland I was told the greatest aspiration a young person can have in Finland is to be a teacher, it's incredibly difficult to get into university to study. 

You have to have the best grades, it's rewarded with really good pay, like comparatively to other European countries and it's like well maybe if that was the kind of system we had in Scotland, then you would have a greater number of people going into public service. 

I got really good school grades, I was a proper geek at school, I went downhill when I got to university but I was a really good school student. 

Prince: That's probably always the case. 

[Background laughter] 

Kezia: And my grades were so good that thing happened it was like, "Oh with grades like that you have to either do law or medicine," and I was like, "Oh, I don't want to be a doctor, so I better do law." And it wasn't for me. 

So I got to do, I went and started law, and I was like, "I don't really like this a whole heap." So there's something in that about, I don't think we give young people enough time to really think about who they are and what it is that they want to be, certainly here there's a lot of pressure on you at 17 to know what university you're going to go to, what you're going to study, with a grand plan about where you're going to be at the end of it and it's really okay to not have those answers. 

It doesn't make you a bad person, it doesn't mean that you're a layabout, it doesn't mean, you know, a gap year is pointless or whatever. 

We should just sometimes slow down a little bit, not put so much pressure on young people. 

Prince: I wish we could hear that every single day [laughs] 

Prince: It would make such a difference. 

Amalie: Have you ever had that feeling, Prince? 

Prince: Um, so ever since the age of five, because I was very more academic than a lot of my peers, medicine was just kind of like, Prince is going to become a doctor, and it was such a strong passion because I was going to be the first doctor in my family as well, and I got up to 18, I applied to med school in Zimbabwe, I got in, but I still felt like, I was very scared and then when I started applying I knew to come to Edinburgh I couldn't apply to med school because that was very competitive, so I applied to medicinal and biological chemistry thinking, you know what, I can like, kind of go and become a pharmacist and go into the drugs side of it, I mean like that's close to medicine. 

Got here first year, joined so many societies and also took elective courses and actually by like end of first year, I was like, I don't want to be a chemist, I don't want to be a doctor and that's when I was like, it's probably too late because I don't want to change my degree because I can still enjoy chemistry, I can write exams and still get good grades, but it's still not what I want to do, so at that point, that's when I decided to change. 

I was like you know I don't really know what I'm going to become. I don't really want to know what I'm going to do after I graduate. For now it's going to be me finishing chemistry. I wish I had heard so many conversations when I was young that I could just make a random choice and it's still okay, um but yeah. How about you? 

Amalie: I mean, who knows what they want to do when they're 17? No one, so I knew that I was interested in the world and that for me just became a degree in politics, which is what I'm studying now, but I think I want to go into media, hence. 

Prince: [inaudible] 

Prince: I see what you did there. 

Amalie: Um, I just pointed at myself, is what I did. 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: I'm going to ask the last question right now and that is: if you could associate your object with one word, what would it be? 

Prince: Pride. 

Amalie: Pride. Yeah, why? 

Prince: Because I think the word 'pride' kind of associates with a lot of different things and I think it's got a good meaning to it. 

So I use pride for now because this object reminds me of home and I'm so proud of being Zimbabwean, and I'm so proud of the things that I've learned by being Zimbabwean, by living in Zimbabwe, and so yeah, the word is pride. 

Kezia: Do you know, I was thinking pride as well and then I, I sometimes I've got this thing that I think pride is, it sometimes has negative connotations, pride. You know, especially, and I'm not suggesting for a second that this is in your case, but sometimes it can be ill-founded. You know, it's not always a positive attribute, pride. So and of course my object makes me very proud because I'm immensely proud of my, of my friend so I can't use that word because you stole it... 

Prince: No, you can use it [laughs] 

Prince: We can share it. 

Kezia: I'm going to go for...yeah we could share it, that way, that's a really nice way to close it. 

I'm going to, maybe we can share my word too, and I would go for positivity 'cause for me the word represents finding some good and some purpose in a really adverse set of circumstances. 

Amalie: What a great way to end this conversation. 

Kezia: Drops the mic. 

Amalie: Yeah. Mic drop [laughs] 

Thank you, Prince and Kezia, for being on Sharing things, I had a great time I hope you guys did too. 

Prince: Thank you for having us. 

Amalie: Yeah, that's it. 

[Sharing things theme music] 

Amalie: Thank you for listening to Sharing things. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play to catch our next episode. 

Be sure to visit our website to read more about our guests and other episodes at www.ed.ac.uk/sharing-things-podcast. 

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