The cross-cultural love story that forms the heart of the Africa Centre
A Zimbabwean and Japanese love story lies behind the forces empowering minorities in Hong Kong
Growing up in Zimbabwe, Innocent Mutanga harboured a childhood love for Hong Kong films starring the likes of Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow Sing-chi. They painted a picture of a city buzzing with energy – “the place to be” for anyone wanting to make it big – but little did he expect that he would call this city home one day.
Today, he is fully embedded in the fabric of Hong Kong, juggling a career in investment banking, founding and running the Africa Centre, an NGO that fosters cross-cultural interaction between the African and wider communities in Hong Kong, and raising two children with his Japanese wife, Chihiro Mutanga (née Shimizu).
His journey to Hong Kong, like so many before him, came from a place of survival. As a young adult campaigning against the regime of the late despot Robert Mugabe, Mutanga became the target of the Central Intelligence Organisation, Zimbabwe’s notorious secret police, who sent masked kidnappers to capture and silence him. Mutanga narrowly escaped the country, deciding on Hong Kong for its visa-free entry requirements.
Arriving in 2013, the 21-year-old heard of Chungking Mansions for the first time at the customs inspection. “They asked me where I was staying, and I honestly wasn’t prepared,” he recalls. “They asked if I was going to stay at Chungking Mansions. I thought to myself: King? Mansions? Yes, that sounds like the place for me! They must think I’m loaded.”
While he soon discovered it was far from his idea of luxury, Mutanga found Chungking Mansions was, in his words, the best place to start. “Chinese people can take a while to warm up to new people, but the community there was immediately welcoming. You can build a tight-knit base in the city so quickly.”
Although he was pursuing political asylum, Mutanga quickly calculated the near-impossible odds. “I’m a math guy: I figured it was probably 500 times harder to get refugee status in Hong Kong than getting into Harvard,” he says with a chuckle. “And I wasn’t going to get into Harvard, so I had to pivot.”