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Lenox Lizwi Mhlanga
Zimbabweans are among the most creative people I know. It’s not just because I am one, it’s a fact. But that statement should come with the proviso that most of us do not realise it and as such we struggle to make money out of it.
I will not go into an academic argument on those claims. Save to say that my more than half a century’s existence on this planet should make me an authority of sorts.
Talent is God-given. It is the raw material with which one’s purpose on earth is achieved. For as long as you do not know your purpose, then you are doomed to a miserable existence. You will be frustrated at every turn and angry at everyone, unless you are going to be paid for it.
Let me share with you something that is profound. I believe my late parents (may the Almighty bless their souls) could have achieved much more than they did if only the environment allowed them to. They really tried their best under the circumstances and achieved a lot by the standard of the days.
But they could only rise as far as the barriers that they encountered. Most of which they had little control over. But since those barriers had a lot to do with segregation and a block to self-determination, they took the route of resistance to force change.
In other words when the situation unfairly prevented them from reaching their goals, they sought to fix the source of the problem. If it was the system, then they sought ways to influence reform to provide the environment that allowed them to soar.
It was not by choice that my father eventually found himself in business. It was a means to an end. I know he was a great sportsman in his youth, and if he were white, he would surely have represented his country. Yet apartheid had grown horns to the extent of eating anyone who resisted.
In South Africa where he spent his youth, his contemporaries found the arts to be an outlet of sorts, both as a coping mechanism and a different form of free expression.
The architects effectively shut out anyone of colour from representative sports, but as for the arts, especially music, it was a difficult proposition. Maybe they were too dull to see, though of course they surely had flashes of morbid genius.
The destruction of the iconic Sophia town and District Six, in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively was more of removing any vestiges of racial mixing in a country where it was a crime to be seen dating a white woman or man, let alone sleep with them.
But these were the places where the seeds of rebellion were planted and germinated in the jazz culture and speakeasy shebeens on the time. A police raid would possibly be fended off by a cursory excuse that, ‘we are just listening and enjoying music, baas!’ Nothing can be as harmless as that!
Yet it was the inordinate number of ‘liberal’ whites who drifted to these locations, in search of a good time, that had the authorities’ underwear in knots.
Yah, those Boers had a sadistic way of snuffing out the fun! Raze the whole township to the ground they did.
But like any kind of seed, once planted, no one except the Almighty had the power to stop it from germinating. Even when that seed was carried to another location.
My father found himself back in this country, at a time when most young men of his age were going in the opposite direction — migrating to a miserable life in the mine compound and underground in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. It surely qualified to be a black man’s longest and most cynical death sentence.
Because most of those who left never came back and were practically dead, even if they made new lives for themselves over there. Those that came back were celebrities. Revelling in their short-lived fame, they only became caricatures and everything that was wrong with the exploitative labour system of the time.
My father was not among these. He had gone to South Africa as a child following his entrepreneurial father, a rarity in those days. You see, my grandfather, Robson “Fifteen” Mhlanga was a craftsman by training.
A highly skilled carpenter trained at the iconic Mount Selinda (Chirinda) mission, in Chipinge, and the first African (read black man) to open a factory in Gweru in the 1930s.
As fate would have it, which had to do with the controversial birth of my father in that Midlands town, he found himself in Cape Town. UKhulu Robson set up another carpentry factory over there, made a name and money for himself, and soon sought his son (my father) to follow him eKapa.
So, my father had a good upbringing and education to boot. He also played rugby and cricket, sports encouraged by the white men, even though they set conditions as to how far they would go. The alternative was to excel in academics with most of my father’s contemporaries, including the late Dr Sikhanyiso Ndlovu and Advocate Kennedy Sibanda attaining degrees.
My father had to cut his studies short to come and support my ailing grandfather, who had moved back to this country in the late 1950s, in preference to the smouldering cauldron of eGoli. Khulu was diagnosed with acute glaucoma and was advised to leave for a climate more tropical than the Cape.
So back home it was for Khulu, his son Jonathan Themba cutting his studies short, embarking on a shorter yet practical course in salesmanship, to follow him. A decision was taken out of expediency but was to shape his destiny in a future Zimbabwe.
To be continued.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter