After fleeing her native Zimbabwe, arriving in Toronto alone, living in a Salvation Army shelter, getting first an undergraduate degree in Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and then a master’s degree in history and ethnic and pluralism studies and founding the Humane Migration Institute, Andriata Chironda decided it was time for a little fun.

So she entered the Miss Afri-Canada pageant. And won it.

But even with the crown and the flowers and the title, Chironda still sees the pageant, just like everything else, in terms of politics and social justice.

“Zimbabwe gets a lot of negative press,” she says, then pauses. “For very good reason. The cholera, the HIV, the politics.

“But we’re pretty nice people, except for Robert.”

That would be Robert Mugabe, president for life and the man whose despotic rule inspired her as a teenager to join the fledgling opposition movement. It was the first time since 1980 that Mugabe’s repressive regime could no longer smother dissent.

“It was unheard of. Civil society had burst and now a generation was saying no.”

A word not without risks. In 2001, at the age of 20, Chironda found herself on a plane to Toronto on orders from her mother. Canada had a reputation for being “more humanitarian than most,” she said. Zimbabwe‘s intelligence agents were believed to operate in Britain, so she would not be safe there.

Her father, who had fought against white rule when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, had died just a year earlier after many years in detention. She recalls him as a “difficult man to live with” but now, a little older, she understands better the sacrifices he made for his country.

“We didn’t have much time to mourn him as a family before things went to s—.”

Her mother wasn’t going to let anything like that happen to her eldest.

And so Chironda landed at Pearson airport with not much money and no connections, a little surprised “to see so many white people.”

Growing up in Zimbabwe, “I had never really thought of myself as a black woman. You’re not conscious of yourself as a black woman. It’s an experience you get here when you’re exposed to explicit and implicit forms of racism.”

Every single piece of her experience of the past eight years has fed into what she has carved out for herself. The loneliness of a newcomer, the experience of justifying her claim before the Immigration and Refugee Board so she could stay, the diaspora that is her family – mother and youngest sister now in Europe, two sisters in South Africa, her brother finally with her in Toronto – the realization of what other immigrants, not from Zimbabwe, have gone through to get here.

That last came with the Miss Afri-Canada pageant, in which she competed in October against 11 other young women in Toronto representing other African countries. It taught her, she says, how diverse Africa is as a continent and how “Mugabe is not the only evil on the face of the planet.”

Plus, it was “the best fun I’ve had in years. It’s not your typical pageant. It’s not a crass lining up of women.”

When she won the event, sponsored by the African Heritage Association since 1999, this self-proclaimed scrawny tomboy with a master’s degree in history “was laughing inside to myself. It all seemed quite ridiculous, surreal.”

The competitors showcase their culture. Chironda played the mbira, a thumb piano used to accompany traditional oral history melodies. Oral histories are what she wants to use the Humane Migration Institute to showcase as well, through stories, music and arts. “So much of it can be lost in translation.”

She talks eloquently of what transnationals, the people who straddle two cultures, lose and gain. She lost her family and country but gained what she calls a “more multi-dimensional” personality, able to put her activism in a world context and expand her definition of family to include the people at the Maytree Foundation, which gave her the scholarship that gave her an education.

Maytree also sponsored her internship at Amnesty International, putting more flesh on the bones of her knowledge about refugees and diasporas.

Before she goes back to academia for her doctorate, Chironda is putting that knowledge to use on a government-sponsored project through the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, which will examine just what immigrants and refugees are and aren’t receiving to help them adjust.

Her time at Evangel Hall, the Salvation Army shelter, taught her that a credo of her student activist days – that religion was merely a means of controlling people – didn’t fit all the time.

A chance encounter near her then-home on Wellesley St., with a man on inline skates, gave her a metaphor for “becoming Canadian.

“He looked really majestic, like he was gliding. I stared at him. A friend told me I was too old for that, so I was determined to do it. God bless Canadian Tire. I got a nice pair of Rollerblades there and I taught myself.”

Then she overcame being petrified of the cold to learn how to skate.

“There is something beautiful about learning `what’s done in Rome.’ Do you know what I mean? Now I can participate. I am at ease on the streets of Toronto. I can skate faster than most Canadians.”

A tiny bit competitive, Andriata? “Oh yes,” she says with a rolling laugh. “You have to learn to define yourself.”

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