Online Reporter
Nhlanhla Bahlangene Dube
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more… Out, out, brief candle!”
Shakespeare wrote those words centuries ago, but I don’t think he ever met a man like Colonel Kenneth Mhlophe (pictured). Because if life is a stage, then Col Mhlophe did not simply strut and fret his hour upon it. He built things on that stage. He left the set standing long after his own scene had ended.
His candle may have gone out too soon, too suddenly, 60km from the home he was fighting to reach, but the light it cast will not be so easily extinguished.
I stand here today not just as a former colleague, but as someone he pulled into his life and never let go of. I was his CEO at Highlanders Football Club.
But long before that title meant anything, and long after it stopped being the point, I was something closer to family, a younger brother, almost a son, cherished and loved in a way I did not expect and will never forget.
We drove many roads together, to Highlanders matches, to business meetings, to his farm, into the middle of family projects that had nothing to do with football at all. Somewhere along those roads, I stopped being just his CEO and became his extension. Almost his confidante. I saw the version of him that boardrooms and press conferences never got to see, a patient, thoughtful man, endlessly turning problems over until he found the angle nobody else had considered.
Col Mhlophe was, at his core, a man in pursuit of growth. Football was his passion, Highlanders his calling, but he was never satisfied with the club simply surviving. He wanted it thriving on the field and off it.
He believed, without wavering, that a man only fails the moment he stops trying. That belief was not a slogan for him. It was how he approached every single problem the club faced.
It is that belief that took us to the Minister of Devolution and Provincial Affairs in Bulawayo, seeking a way to reach President Emmerson Mnangagwa on the club’s behalf.
It is that belief that turned an introduction into a mining claim, and that mining claim into the promise of sponsorship.
Most people would have given up long before that chain of effort produced anything. Col Mhlophe simply kept trying, one door at a time, until one opened.
He feared no challenge, yet he carried himself with a stillness that could easily be mistaken for something else.
Many who did not know him sometimes read his calm as passivity, his quiet as a lack of edge. They were wrong, and they were wrong every time.
You had to sit with him, work beside him, watch him build, to understand how much intention lived inside that stillness. The results spoke plainly enough for those willing to look.
The soldier in him never left. Stern when it mattered, determined always, principled without exception. But it was that same soldier’s discipline that made him a friend of rare loyalty.
Fierce, faithful and true. He did not know how to be halfway present in someone’s life. You had all of him, or you had none of him, and I was fortunate enough to have all of him.
He wanted Highlanders to succeed more than he wanted to be seen as the man who made it succeed. He absorbed criticism that would have broken lesser men, and he forgave the narratives that painted him unfairly, because he always said the bigger picture mattered more than his own name in it.
The year we won the Chibuku Trophy was supposed to be the beginning, not the peak. It was meant to be the platform for something larger.
Then Covid arrived, and with it, an election loss, and momentum that took years to rebuild elsewhere.
He returned to club leadership eventually, but the world had shifted underneath him in ways none of us could have controlled. He never quite recaptured the pace of his earlier years at the helm. Yet through every trial, he remained exactly who he had always been, honest, diligent, positive, unwilling to let disappointment curdle into bitterness.
Let it be said plainly, because everyone at that club knows it to be true: Col Mhlophe did not take from Highlanders.
He gave to it far more than he ever received in return.
Whatever anyone assumed about his motives, the accounts, the years, and the people who worked alongside him tell a different story, of a man who poured more into that badge than it could ever repay him.
I will miss you, mdala. I will miss the calm assurance you brought into every difficult room. I will miss your refusal to meet aggression with aggression, your insistence on rising above it instead. I will miss the way you encouraged, even when you had every reason not to.
As you would firmly state when barbs and spears flew: It’s ok!
Lala ngokuthula, Sotsha.
Hamba kahle, Col.
You will forever be my family’s most respected and cherished friend.
Nhlanhla Bahlangene Dube is Colonel Kenneth Mhlophe’s former CEO, friend and adopted family
