If you are a “neutral” observer you would agree that the past week has been equivalent to the World War Three of Words. The Elon Musk platform now called X was aflame in whatever country or region you looked at.
For the Zimbos, the constant word was “gaslighting” – arguments on political leadership (or absence of same) were at the heart of the twar. Accusations were made. Counterarguments were thrown. Receipts in the form of screenshots were resurrected. I know this involved real people, with real emotions, but it was more riveting than the El Classico. Emperors were found walking naked. Not very demure, you would agree.
Down south in Mandelaland, bigotry ended up entangling e-hailing service providers and even fast-food restaurants. The pathology of hate always exhausts itself because it is entirely driven by negative energy. When you are done with your primary target, you move to the next weaker group and hail hate speech on the basis of perceived difference.
Across the Atlantic, Michelle Obama decided to ditch the sophistication of “going higher, when they go low.” She went for Donald’s jugular: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?”
In all this noise, it is easy to lose focus on what’s important – keeping relationships that last! So, I really would like to park the weekly rants and write on this.
Enter Marvin Gaye
The other day, I wondered if Mr Musk could include a feature on X that allows us to play a song very much like a Space, when things get heated up. Could that cool down the tempers? Leading into the SADC Summit I would have played Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On:
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today
Yes, Brother Marvin. Twar is not the answer.
As Times Go By
As I grow older and the muscles get stiffer, with every little pain bringing horrors of mortality, I think a lot of the people I loved and cherished as friends who have transitioned into the other world. Much of the time a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) titled In Memory of Major Robert Gregory comes to mind:
Now that we’re almost settled in our house
I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stairs to bed:
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.
The poem then turns to focus on one of the friends who died in their youth during World War 1 and asks the rhetorical question: What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?
Naming my friends
Ben Bepete was a year older than me. We were very close from our days in high school to our working lives. He had a dry sense of humour and would deploy his invented analogies with humour and a guttural laugh – “Ko iwe seyi kushata kunge shizha remusango?” At Mutare Boys High School, he memorised Acts and Luke from his Bible Knowledge class, and would show off by rattling off a whole chapter. Having done his quantity surveying studies at Harare Polytechnic, he found jobs in Botswana and Namibia. Always good with his money, he bought land in Nyazura and elsewhere. The message of his demise whilst on duty in Namibia is one I only accepted some time later.
Fortune Muparutsa was my classmate and friend at Rujeko Primary School. By grade 6 he was the marimba leader, accompanied by Paddington Munongwa and Luke Mupunga. This was a big deal, as the marimba guys played at every morning assembly and, yeah, you know who loved these guys. In our class, compositions (as we called essays then) were a chance to be overly dramatic. One of Fortune’s compositions started with the line: About 30 millimetres from Dora, a man was found dead.
Getting into our high school years, we moved as Fortune, Lomas Gangata and me. What united us was a love for “funk” – Shalamar, Kool and the Gang, Evelyn Champagne King and Melba Moore. Fortune and Lomas would practice their dance moves ahead of a disco at the weekend. After one attempt to join them, I gave up. Colonialism did a number on my hips. Years later, Fortune would play at the Wine Barrel at Monos (Crowne Plaza Hotel) and we loved nothing but to hear him croon: Ndiri Samanyika/Ndinozvida. We had arrived. Or so we thought. May Fortune rest in eternal peace.
Lomas also left for that other world. He was a brother to me in every respect. We grew up together in both Zimunya and Dangamvura. In January 1982, he tried to push my old man so that I could join him at St Augustine’s. We drove kwaTsambe and I was shortlisted, but nothing came out of that. Years later, it was Lomas who oriented me to Johannesburg. He was good to me. He was great to my kids. I am grateful that I have photos with him ranging from us slaughtering a goat on Christmas day in 1985 in Dangamvura to 2001 in Joburg.
Reza the Chameleon
Some people seem to be born larger than life. Reza (not his real name) was such. I first bumped into him in a restaurant in Melville, Johannesburg in 2001. He had just skipped Zimbabwe, having been informed that a certain government minister allegedly wanted to eliminate him. I was never able to verify that story. However, Reza had been a student leader and later led demonstrations on behalf of junior doctors. As such, arrests and detentions were familiar territory. Now in South Africa, he was marooned. He could not practice as a medical doctor without clearance, a work permit or residence papers. How Reza kept a cheerful face with the odds against him remains a mystery to me. A decade after odd jobs here and there, he ended up as a pathologist in a certain South African province. He lasted some nine months. When we met in Johannesburg, he was accompanied by the daughter of a king. But they were on the run. The pathologists in the other province had allegedly given Reza an ultimatum – bullet or flee. Reason: you are eating into our police pathology cake. It was like a movie.
Our last evening together with Reza, the Princess and me was a riotous one in Rosebank. Two weeks later Reza was admitted into hospital with abdominal pains. He would not come out alive. What made me think he would live to comb grey hair?
