Letter to Alexander Kanengoni Alexander Kanengoni
Cde Kanengoni

Cde Kanengoni

The Other Side Nathaniel Manheru—-
“My Mother (all black mothers whose children have left) you taught me to wait and hope as you hoped in difficult hours
But life killed in me that mystic hope
I no longer wait
I am he who is awaited

It is I my Mother
hope is us
your children
gone for a faith that fuels life

Tomorrow we shall sing anthems to freedom when we commemorate the day of the abolition of this slavery
We are going in search of light your children Mother (all black mothers whose children have left)
They go in search of life”
Gone, no one yet knew how, why

I hope you travelled well, Alexander. Reached your destination and that you have had time to rest.
The rest of the new realm you now inhabit, which none living knows.

I did not attend your departure ceremony, and since I hear THAT where you are — up there — you see all, hear all, know all, happening here on earth, I am sure by now you know why. My body ached, still does. Suffers that prickling ache which leaves you prostrate to the bed.

I actually begrudged you, wondering why you would not pop in to see how I was faring.
Surely you knew muviri yangu were not well, I, your good friend and ally?
And as I mused on possible reasons, that fateful morning a call came in from Regis Chikowore, our mutual friend.

Alexander is no more, he said, voice hoarse, nearly broken.
“Alexander aita sei nhai Chikowore”, I asked, beating acute agony that afflicted my body to ask.
He did not know, was still awaiting details.

Gone, no one yet knew how, why? I felt a huge lump choke my throat.
A lapse on the part of Destiny, on the part of Providence never known to make amends on this planet.
Its pages, always scribbled, illegible, untidy, hard to fathom. Surely this could not be!
You, of all people? What had become of you? What took you, Shava? One felt gutted, but vainly hopeful this is human reporting error.

Alone at witching hour
Evening came. In between groans, I leered, peeped through crevices of my blanket, onto the box. ZBC confirmed. My goodness! Augustine Chihuri, the Police Commissioner General — imwe Mhofu— confirmed it. He was part of the unhappy retinue of mourners who had come to condole with your wife, expectedly disconsolate, there in Warren Park D.

I recalled the day we had returned from a Presidential trip, together.
It was an unscheduled return, at night. No one from your workplace had come to fetch you home.
I did, happily played chaffeur to you home. It meant more discussion time for you and me. The laughter, the analyses, the wartime stories, ahh.

We never seemed to have enough time, you and me.
Then the tussle with your black gate, fast fastened, locked, unbreakable.
How your knuckles rapped it, temperately initially, then hard, harder, my car purring beneath your worsening yell to those in the house, all dead asleep, all to dead silence.

You knew your wife was at the farm, she who sleeps lightly for the rest of the family in your absence.
The interim guardian between your rounds of journalistic duties.
At the farm, minding that tobacco crop which had to be carefully harvested, cured meticulously.

You told me as much, all to stead my heart. It was late, very late, the hour of witches. And with the thin durawall between Warren Park D and the main cemetery of this great city, this was no figure of speech.

God’s Summons
So I immediately recognised the same black gate as the Police Commissioner General walked in, sullen. So it’s true? Uuh! I groaned. The Nation had just sent INTO eternal rest two of its choicest daughters — Mai Chitepo, wife of the legendary Herbert, and Vivian Mwashita, the diminutive lady trainer of trainers.

I knew both quite well, and had missed their send-off, for my flesh ached sore. I just could not. Then you! Oh God, no respite to this Nation, is there? I felt it keenly, felt a pierce that reached the inner folds of my being, all in their aching frailty.

The one who makes or breaks us, had sent his summons, despatched his most efficient messenger of heavenly court to you.
You answered the fatal knock. The rest is now history. That was a quick service, unlike the messenger wielding mine.

Very desultory, a drunk who staggers, snores on the journey, but never losing the celestial message. Rest assured, he shall arrive, one day soon, what with this dry run, this mock battle that prostrated me for an unusual while, I, Mhofu yanga isingazive the inside of a hospital, not a single night under those drug-smelling blankets that I have come to regard as symbolising that wafer between life and death. Oh Tamburlaine, thou art but a man! Remember Christopher Marlowe?

The late Cde Chitepo

The late Cde Chitepo

When (I)felt most truant
I still had one more day to write my column before your burial, and would have loved to dedicate it to you, like I now do, write and dedicate it in the freshness of your demise, in the sharpness of my pain at your unheralded departure.

Part of the dirge. But no, that was not to be. I was in bodily pain. Besides, out of respect, I would not have written about you from a mind half to you, half to my aching body, its shell.
That amounted to an abomination, the ultimate form of disrespect to a figure so lofty.

And when Friday came and the Patriot was eventually served in my bedroom of ailment, I felt very bad. Horribly truant. Your workmates paid tributes, weeping tributes flavoured with intimate recollections, rending recalls of brisk conversations held with one of them as you sought to excuse yourself only for the morning. Morning? God and his angels seem never to tire of dramatic irony in the vast drama of puny man.

Unaware of his already abridged life, man still builds glassy castles, makes gratuitous promises for tomorrow!
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, said Macbeth.

And the Shona have it in hand: it is the graze in the bowels that belong to the buffalo, as for the grass on the mouth, it may die with it before a chew and a swallow. Your hope was to go to work, catch up. All IN vain buddy! And one such tribute in The Patriot identified me as one among your soulmates!

It hurt even more, hurt more than the bodily ache. Hurt even more when burial arrangements were announced, to be held there in faraway Centenary. I knew I could not be part of the procession, and would have to see the mound beneath which your remains lie, see it much later, no longer fresh as if to emphasize my truancy. The sorry story of the absent.

When you referred Cde Chemist to me
Another layer of memories got triggered. I had gone to Centenary, part of my pilgrimage to the district that houses most of the early heroes of our war of liberation. I had gone to say hello to Cde Vhuu and his family.

He is not very far from Centenary, off the road to Altena Farm. I had met him and many other comrades the year before, vana Comrade Esteria, Herbert, Chinodakufa kuMount Darwin, and many others I cannot mention, for a raft of interviews we needed to reawaken the spirit of the struggle.

You had been the first to notice when we published, the first to commend the team for a timely intervention.
Later, I was to ask you to chaperone the youngsters at Zimpapers and ZBC as more such interviews took place.

You sat in just once, then vanished, never to come again.
There, you met Cde Chemist, an old veteran of the Nhari and Cephas generation, maybe the only one alive from that episode.
His war experiences had been bitter, making him lose faith in the whole thing.
But somehow, the military and Cde Khumalo had drawn him out, reconnecting him yet again with his wartime comrades, and ready to share his slice of experience.

You had referred him to my office, where we spent a whole day literally, as he narrated his long story. To you, he had regretted turning his back on his comrades, vowing thence forward, to be part of the narrative. Before long, Cde Chemist’s story will be published for all to read.

But that afternoon, he confided that a little detail from the war had pricked your heart, pricked you so sharply that you could not stand more narratives. I understood. Even soldiers have soft hearts, soft spots. But all this is a digression.

When I could not find you at the farm
On my way back from Centenary, past Cde George Rutanhire’s farm — himself a Catholic like you, and more than you a catechist who left the pulpit to join the war, to become a guerrilla fighter — then round a bent and down a declension into the valley that feeds from a big water body upstream, to the West.

A workmate pointed to the hill up North, adding, “ukoo, ndiko kunorima Cde Kanengoni”.

Immediately, I checked for a signal on my phone. Luckily it was there. I rang your number, hoping to hear a voice choked with smoke from a dhirihora (tobacco curing barn). You answered: “Aaa Comrade . . . I am in Harare”.

Disappointed, I drove home.
I would have visited you at your farm, seen how your “lemon” tobacco was doing. Maybe put up there even, to great stories and thoughts from the war and contemporary matters respectively.

That lemon flavour, you had told me, had kept the white farmers stubbornly put on the land, even as guns of struggle boomed, even as the agitation of hondo yeminda rose to a crescendo. Centenary, you added, is well-known and unique for that much sought after flavour. Still, I will have to come to see you there, to greet you, Shava.

A page from Neto
I opened my piece with a poem from Agostino Neto, late like you.
A freedom fighter, again like you, from a sister liberation movement, MPLA of Angola.
He died in 1980, just after our Independence. It is one of the few books I would not give you. You know how difficult it is to get English translations of African anthologies from Portuguese Africa.
I chose it for two basic reasons: firstly, for the simplicity of style. But very poignant.

I don’t need to tell you that poetry is a genre associated with conceit and opaqueness. You belong to the sect. Neto’s simplicity of style reminds me of you, of your style which I for long I sought to copy, before giving up, soothing myself by saying Alexander’s style is “inimitable”. Simple yet penetrating, a rare gift for a writer. Look at Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate. What is he saying to mankind?

Bloody clashes an Nachingwea, Mgagao
Secondly, the extract got me to approximate what you might have wanted to tell your guardian/parents when you left for the war back in the 1970s.
A qualified teacher, you didn’t have to join the struggle.
There was so much going for you. Yet you did, quite early on. Like I do each time I interact with a war veteran, I always wonder what the parting words to the parents were.
And you met many moments of grief, both at the front and in the rear.

More in the rear where inexplicable contradictions often broke out. It is a feature of every revolution, but one keenly felt and suffered by those in the ranks with some modicum of enlightenment. More so then when the two liberation movements and their armies had not fully adjusted to the literati who were always viewed with hate and suspicion as zvigananda zvamangwana, independent tomorrow’s petit bourgeoisie.

And bristling, often bloody, contradictions between sister armies: Zanla to which you belonged, and Zipra, then your Other institutionally. Our discussion on your narrow escape at Nachingwea where trouble began, and where you were based, before it spread over to Mgagao, both in Tanzania. How a goodwill comrade from Zipra bent down to whisper: “Cde Gora, your war name, take leave immediately, the situation is set for the worst”. You said you melted, forever knowing the value of larger affinities in times of war. Your supposed enemy, in reality a companero and A brother in struggle, saved you.

—————-Criticizing Manheru’s extremities——–
Such was your amazing capacity to bestride deep chasms of the day, of a people and of history. But only at an individual level, as that was not always easy organizationally. Those who know our history will argue plausibly that after Nachingwea and Mgagao, Nyerere and the Frontline’s delicate experiment, ZIPA, went up in smoke, only to be rescucitated by new efforts much later. We light-heartedly reminisced on Cde Disaster, that truant fighter to emerge from his hideout in the fastness of the mountains in the East, a good four or five years after the end of the war, and how that character had leapt from the world of the living into the realm of fiction, your fiction, as one of the characters in your book. Such is the thin wall between history and creative writing. You wrote an obituary to this column when, at the start of compromise politics of GNU, I personally thought it prudent to set it aside for a while, but with a clear message I would come back once it became needful. Indeed it did when the need arose. But you thought this was a beaten columnist’s face saving exit. You celebrated the language which you said often made the British envious, criticized – gently – Manheru’s extremities. I vividly remember the sentence, even now as I say my requiem to you on these pages. You said, Cde Manheru did not know that all wars end up at the peace table! Aah, what a lifelong chastisement, one to guide a man in this life!

———————Seeking answers and clues———-
A few weeks back, you hadcome into my office, unheralded, but evidently much exercised. Of course my secretary knew where you stood in my estimate, and would never stop you, however busy I would be. You slouched into the easy chair and after greetings, sought to know what was happening, where we were going. Less where we were going, more to read my state of mind. You had turned me and this column into some oracle, a source from which to cull and extrapolate the wishes of divinity. All founded on proximity you imputed on me, unjustly, like I always protested. But I also knew of my responsibility to keep you hopeful, for alongside other children “gone for a faith that fuels life”, you were “he who is awaited”. After the mysterious departure, you had come back with the light, and those that tend the light for a still struggling people, dare not drop it, dare not lose hope. Such was, is, The Patriot you helped edit, which you, alongside Zhou and Pfukwa, had and have turned into an amazing hatchery for a nationally-conscious strand of journalism, all to complement Zimpapers, amidst all its ministerial vagaries and vicissitudes. You had picked unsavory murmurs, picked some rumblings in the Party – watched them even – and this had set your heart throbbing. Much worse and to your great fright, these politics had recalled politics you had met and seen in the days of struggle, politics powerful enough to get cadres to pull swords out of scabbards, to draw internecine blood. Wartime commanders like George Rutanhire you knew was related to me matrimonially, and Chinodakufa, had visited you also in absolute perplexity, for advice against the mindless turbulence that had gripped the Party, over soko risina musoro, as Herbert Chitepo, our late Chairman, would have said.

Herbert Chitepo

Herbert Chitepo

——————-A generation deracinated———-
Then my advice to you then to deepen society’s knowledge of its history, its actors in that historic episode, its past mistakes and dangers that had drawn so much bloody, the enemy forever stalking, hungry for an opportunity to smash the national project. My leaving the easy chair to pick up a few titles I had bought at Oliver Tambo Airport, written by the resurgent Rhodesian factor, all for your perusal, and how the burden to rebut all that rested on our little shoulders. We deigned not lose hope. How I had interpreted a recent rally by the leadership for you, and how I had intimated that the rally in Bindura would presage a turning point in the affairs of the Party and the country. Above all, how I had asked you kuti if anyone wanted us to throw away our wartime heroes, who would they give us in their place? From what cause, what struggle? Revolutions pass from generation to generation, harmoniously, I opined. The 2013 election had given ZANU-PF resounding history. But it had also revealed a new generation of young actors, all of them wheeled, well-heeled, gaudy and well connected to elite parentage in party and government, but without any organic connection with the struggle and with their predecessors and now elders: the war veterans whom they now sought to alienate from society. The group had mastered ZANU-PF slogans, learnt and mastered backstage intrigues of the elite vying to take over from President Mugabe. But it did not know a thing about the struggle, its aims and its ethos. That group and gap, apparent then, incipient then, visible and strong now, had come to dominate without the requisite consciousness, and had grown into the odd that faced the party. It had the much-needed energy; it lacked the knowledge, direction and connectivity. As planned by the leadership, the big indaba of fighters of the liberation struggle took place, with you in attendance. I was not there, already prostrated by this thing. I am not sure the connectivity has been restored, but I hear you left that meeting happy and satisfied. I am sure you carried that happiness and satisfaction with you, on your journey up.

 ————–Greater love hath no man…..———-
And my meeting with Cde Chemist? At your instance. You recall? This country carries folds and folds of meanings from the war. Who will narrate its epic? When? I thought you were the mind and hand to do it, maybe with me as your subaltern, but check where you are now, where? I hope there is a good library where you now live. That there is time for reading, between celestial duties. Of course I have no doubt as to where you are and stand in Godliness. Is it not the great book of life which says: “Greater love hath no man than this than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15vs13)? The Bible is replete with many wars fought with the Almighty’s blessings, fought by people we pay homage to this day. Moses, David, many such people’s war heroes. Did you and your ilk not fight, not lay down your life for the millions of this land? Was yours not a people’s struggle? Why would I doubt where you stand in God’s estimate? After all, He called you in because He needed a good editor, a good, clear writer for a message of freedom to the slave. Plead for a moment off please, into in the celestial library.

———————-Recycling old, select conflicts————–
The mischief you fought here on earth continues to brew in bigger pots, in greater quantities even. The Coltarts and their Cato publications, hoping to expunge the bloody history of their Rhodesia by inventing new controversies out of old mistakes committed at Independence, which this still tender Nation hopes to outgrow, and for which atonement has been tendered, albeit by one side. They want those conflicts recycled as an electoral issue because they have no message for contemporary man and woman. You recall Rhodesian atrocities – like you did – they are quick to wave writs and threats of writs as if they were born in Zimbabwe. Yet they wielded guns for Rhodesia, these faultless white men. And a whole group of their fake historians now reborn through society’s collective amnesia. Poor memory breeds old gorgons Cde Gora. We spoke about it.

——————-Children weep no more——-
Mischief from men of your color, little comprador bourgeoisie who think respecting their story and white-led interests they masked at Kondozi, would have spelt hope and prosperity for people you liberated. Was a slave in the field ever a free man, even if the supervisor was of his ilk? How do you site Kondozi in apposition to the recovery of a people’s heritage? Or failures of current inheritors as proof that that heritage should not have been redeemed? Should not have come? Or your little salary? Is that the politics of Zimbabwe People First to which such writers are fastened, have been historically? And the Catholics – our church together – and its stubborn right-wing, white German factor, still at it. Thank God the Comrades are united, and whatever these enemies yarn, we have that little shoot you tended – The Patriot – and its full set of cadres. I waited wistfully for its latest copy yesterday after your departure. I was quietened and reassured when I saw that Dr Pfukwa was out and about, in the countryside, reconstructing broken stories of our struggle. You used to do much of that, your last major trip having taken you to Dzapasi in Buhera, my home district. You brought back a message for me from Dzapasi Secondary School, a message from the headmaster of that needy school. I have not forgotten, and will fulfill it in your honor. The column will continue to run of course, the editor willing, and, together with The Patriot and Zimpapers, to help decolonize minds, clearly define issues of the day, and enlighten and mobilize the Nation. The youthful team you left behind continues to sob. They can’t grieve forever ka. Clean its tears so it sees better, meets the world with bravery of fighters for freedom. That is the best tribute to you. Till we meet Mhofu.

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