Growing up in Harare, Zimbabwe as the granddaughter of entrepreneur George Chirume Tawengwa – founder of the Mushandirapamwe Hotel, the first Black-owned hotel in Highfield, Harare (formerly Salisbury) – Tanyaradzwa was inspired by a spirit of entrepreneurship and collaboration from a young age. In a way, she is picking up right where she left off – she was a boon to the Music Department during her undergraduate tenure nearly a decade ago, and today she continues to enrich our community through her myriad talents, her passion for teaching, and her remarkable generosity. Both have brought her back not only to Old Nassau, but to the Music Department, where she maintains an office alongside former professors she now calls colleagues and friends and passes the days refining her practice as a Cultural Protector of Zimbabwean ChiVanhu culture. In the last year and a half alone, she has completed a year-long tenure as a Hodder Fellow and embarked on the three-year START Entrepreneurs program. If you can’t tell from her title – scholar, healer, composer, singer, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player) – Tanyaradzwa is not one to sit idly by. Yet it is her way of walking in abundance that is perhaps her most striking and admirable quality. Tanyaradzwa is like so many Princetonians – ambitious, fiercely intelligent, a true multi-hyphenate. Ask Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa (’14) to name a role she’d like to serve and the response comes easily: “I want to be president of the University.”
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