Did somebody say Cont Mhlanga?

When great heroes die people decide to celebrate their great lives rather than mourn their untimely death. People elect to salute than to be sorry. Celebrating rather than mourning the lives of the greats comes in two ways. The first way is that we philosophically make a solid decision, from deep within our souls to celebrate than to mourn because the dead hero is not totally dead but will live on in our hearts and minds.

We pledge, from deep within ourselves, to continue walking and living the lives of our departed hero. The second way, of course, is that we are fragile souls, and we seek to follow the less painful way of celebrating than the deep and painful path of being true to our bereavement and grieving. Grief can be taxing emotionally and spiritually and as human beings we elect to be happy and perform that happiness even when deep down we are pained, we are bleeding.

I am certain that these two ways of coming to terms with the death of a loved, admired, and treasured person have come to bear in the lives and ways of the many of us that were touched by the passing of Cont Mhlanga more than a year ago. The multitudes of the Cont Nation have chosen the rosy way of celebrating the iconic life of the arts and cultural idol than hang their hands on their heads and wail at the loss that came with the death of Cont.

With time passing, day by day, celebrating rather than mourning Cont becomes more and more easier and bearable. Time is a healer. But time can also be the great father of the truth. Those that lost Cont have, with each passing day, felt the loss and the gap that his great life left in their lives. That Cont is really gone should be sinking and cutting deep in many hearts and minds among the people of the Cont Nation. It is so true yet so unbelievable that Cont is really gone.
The many pieces of Cont

The Igbo people of Nigeria have a beautiful saying which asserts that: “When great people fall, they fall where their pieces can be picked up.” This beautiful and powerful aphorism means that great people leave pieces of legacies behind that work to comfort the bereaved. In other words, death does not exhaust greatness. Flesh, bones, and blood can evaporate but greatness lives behind the demise of the great and the bereaved, in their own ways, bask in the heritage of greatness.

In his life, Cont challenged the trusted belief that art is an imitation of life by living a life that proved that life, after all, is actually the imitation of art. In that way, Cont was an iconoclast and an inventor of new knowledges. Similarly, Cont’s death and the time that has passed after the event have proven that Cont challenged the notion that when great people die, they live a gap that can never be filled.

Cont was a great teacher and inspiration such that his gap has easily been filled by many artists, cultural activists, journalists, intellectuals, and community leaders that do Cont in what they do. Really great people live and die in such a way that the gap that they leave behind naturally and normally gets filled, not by one person, but by many people that pick up the pieces of the fallen giants.

Great personages do not only have their pieces picked up by those that come after them but also have their lives and acts multiplied and amplified by those that remain behind. The greats create traditions and make histories.

Celebrities can become celebrities, and some kind of heroes because they are inimitable. Truly great people become great by actually being imitable. Original greatness, true greatness, is that which can be copied, duplicated, and multiplied for the better.  Cont performed his Contness so publicly and so powerfully that it became easy for anyone that was interested to pick up the pieces of Cont, one or two of them, while Cont still walked around in Bulawayo.

That is how far Cont was inspirational and Messianic in the way in which he distributed Contness freely around to the many takers that hung around him and his scene.  In that cultural and social Messianism, the departed Cont might actually, with time, become greater and more popular than the Cont that lived. Death, especially of the great, has a way of purifying and perfecting the personhood and effect of the departed.

Beyond the grave, people’s gifts to the world tend to shine more than before the grave. That is why some political cynics have concluded that the only true heroes are those that are dead. Death seals heroism with a timeless stamp of the grave itself.
Cont the teacher
Cont was multiple. He was many things in one body and one life. There was Cont the storyteller, the griot. And Cont the Karate coach, the Sensei, Master Cont who trained his charges in Shokukai, the way for all. Cont also wrote and directed stage plays and television dramas. The historian and cultural custodian in Cont was another resource person.

In everything he did Cont was a teacher. That is why his life alone was a story and a long one for that matter. He was at his best questioning established norms than he was endorsing dogmas and other rites of the social and the political status quo. I was particularly enchanted by Cont the poet and the philosopher that was absorbed in seeking new truths and excavating time to unearth forgotten wisdoms.

As a teacher of many things, Cont was infectious and productive in the sense that he produced other teachers. Many of us today circulate many insights and ideas that are based on Cont’s furnitures of the mind.  Cont was a knowledgeable person who taught others not only knowledge but also the art of knowing itself. Cont was a teacher par excellence. As such, he was a great student of life and work because every great teacher is actually a good student to start and to end with.

The Cont walk
About Cont, I suffer two guilts. The first guilt comes from that I was supposed to write the life story of Cont and the history of Amakhosi Cultural Centre. I had planned with Cont to write his biography and the legacy of his work, not an obituary. I was supposed to be the author of a life and work story and not a death story. My story was supposed to be a story that Cont would also read not that one which would be read about him.

The second guilt is born out of that I did not walk the distance to bury Cont in Lupane. I was present by being absent at Cont’s funeral. In those two ways Cont haunts me, and I keep writing about and walking the Cont walk. The Cont walk being the walk of the body and the mind in search of the known and the unknown.

To exhume the idea of Cont and live the Cont life is the metaphysics of the Cont walk. The Cont walk is the activism of picking up the many pieces of Cont and scattering them around more to spread Cont beyond the horizons. It is my denialism that Cont ever left. So, the Cont walk is also a search for Cont wherever he is. Because I did not write his life story while he was living, and I did not bury him I can disbelieve that he ever left.

To celebrate Cont is not an option for me and many other Cont nationals. Cont is to be lived, talked, walked, thought, written and not buried just like that.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]