Silvanos Mudzvova is a Zimbabwean actor, playwright, and performance artist distinguished for numerous creative protests against the regime of Robert Mugabe. In 2002, Mudzvova co-founded the Vhitori Entertainment Trust to organize local theater shows addressing public corruption and repression. In 2007, police arrested Mudzvova’s group and stopped their performance of the satirical play “The Final Push.” They were accused of subversion, briefly detained, and later fined and barred from state media. He subsequently suffered numerous arrests and persecution under Zimbabwe’s draconian censorship laws for daring plays such as “Missing Diamonds, I Need My Share” — a one-man act based on Mugabe’s public statement about the theft of billions in diamond revenue — or “Protest Revolutionaries,” which encouraged Zimbabweans to plan their own Arab Spring. The 2017 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent celebrated Mudzvova’s resilence and ingenuity in devising what he called “hit-and-run” performances in public spaces to avoid arrest.