We Have a Beautiful Ambassador Down Under.
She speaks four languages, has two law degrees, a face that will make you look twice and a body that will make you look again (Admission: We looked four times and are looking again right now).
Teurai Chanakira is making waves in the Australian modelling industry and has the people Down Under looking up to see what her next curvaceous move will be.
It’s difficult to find a place to begin when talking about Teurai (and we’re not talking about looking at her body anymore). Her recent accomplishments tell the story of a fired up young woman with great ambition and drive. She recently made it to the top 100 of the Naomi Campbell international model search. In March she was selected to be the Australian face of the Zimbabwe Music Awards. She recently made the front page of The Sun newspaper in Cairns, Australia and out of all the amazing models we have covered, we picked her to be the inaugural featured model in the relaunch of The Zimbo Jam Fashion Section.
She is also the Australian Face of Authentic Fashion Renaissance (AFR), a company that was started by a group of people from all over Africa and donates 20% of all proceeds from their sales to African orphanages. They intend to donate from ‘Cape to Cairo’ and started in South Africa with NOAH orphanage last year. Teurai is their first and only Zim model so far.
When she appeared on the cover of The Sun it was a victory not just because the front page of any publication is highly coveted, but mainly because the journey that brought her from her first photo shoot to that sort of recognition was long and hard, and for a long time led in a totally different direction. Read on…
The Australia-based 29-year-old Teurai was born in Gweru and raised mainly in Harare where she attended Dominican Convent School (Guess which other model we featured recently is actually still at the same school?).
She revealed to The Zimbo Jam some of the fond memories of her youth. “I enjoyed growing up in Zimbabwe,” she says. “Life was so uncomplicated and much happier back then in the 1980’s and early 1990’s when the economy was stable.”
Teurai left Zimbabwe in 1993 at the age of 13 when her father was offered a job in Germany.
While living in Bonn, Germany she attended Bonn International School and got the opportunity to travel to various countries in and outside of Europe. She recalls how despite living so far away from Zimbabwea, her father taught her to appreciate and learn about different people and cultures, whilst holding firm to one’s own culture and language.
At home, she and her siblings were not allowed to speak any other language besides Shona, so that they wouldn’t forget their mother tongue. In the mean time she also learnt German and French.
She did the last two years of her high school education at Marymount International School, a boarding school in London, and when her parents moved back to Zimbabwe in 1999 she decided to stay on in the UK.
Teurai went on to do a law degree at the University of Birmingham and subsequently, a Master of Laws at the University of Wolverhampton.
She says that she decided to emigrate to Cairns, Australia after growing weary of the cold weather in the UK and because she sought employment opportunities that were better suited to her.
In order for her to practise law in Australia, she went back to school. She completed 12 subjects for a Graduate Bachelor of Laws (with Honours) for which obtained a Distinction average and received a Letter of Commendation from the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Law for academic excellence.
Despite doing so well on the academic side her mind- and yes, her body- had other plans. Teurai says that she has always dreamed of modelling from the time that she lived in Zimbabwe as a fledgling teen. She is passionate about fashion and describes it as exciting, ever-changing , subjective and the thing that defines her character.
It was only in Cairns that she made moves in that direction. She was approached one day by a popular fashion store, Tuba Rose, to be in one of their fashion parades and she eagerly agreed. Julie Vold Photography subsequently offered her her first photo shoot. When she saw the pictures afterwards she was impressed by the results. STORY CONTINUES HERE…
