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Thomas Deve

Nathaniel Manheru
THE Chinese are here. The Russians are coming. The Western world quakes, courts. But this is not a poem, can’t be. Reality is always deeper, more problematic than rhyme.  It needs reason. Then boldness. Much else follows.
But before that, Thomas Deve, the friend I have lost, the friend I always differed with.

The art of fire and iron
For me the saddest news of the week that has just gone by is the passing on of Thomas Deve.

He hailed from the Shava totem, something that welded him to me, premievally. He believed in history as the first, abiding DNA.

I agreed, which is why I accepted his boastful narrative about his forefathers as the clan that tamed fire and iron.

They were blacksmiths of a renown that beat distances, tribal boundaries. Affectively, he called himself Charikuzhindu, a long adjectival noun that had something to do with this lineage-domiciled art, but which his own generation, himself foremost, helped kill yet without abandoning the boast that celebrated it.

Again, I granted him that, including his propensity to arm the vaunt with a bit of a martial ring. In spite of his pacifist bend, his wiry physical makeup, he always imaged himself as some all-conquering warrior whose fearful stature I always humorously contrasted with him as its mock-heroic.

But he would never be restrained by my jibes of intended denouement. The one who bends iron, who creates arms, the spear specifically, hailed from a martial tradition, from a line of fighters.

The test of the she-leopard
Whether a spear-maker was the best spear-thrower, was the best hunter, the best fighter, papa Tom never allowed that conceptual inconvenience, never allowed that to whittle down his boast.

There is a day we slept at my farm. Very early morning we went out hunting, ‘303 rifle in arm, feeling impregnable.

Soon I picked sight of what looked like some feline creature, atop some tree easily within the range of the rifle. I fired a shot, into the air, hoping to scare it.

The cat swelled in anger, transfiguring into an aggressive, ready-to-charge she-leopard. It had a cub, one it was ready to defend with its full might, fangs, claws and all. The shot had threatened it, provoked it. It was ready to charge, in full rage. That day taught a key lesson: no one has a more acute sense of danger than the man who fears.

Thomas bolted, threading through thick bush with the deftness that only an ever mounting sense of danger could inspire. As always that is a non-repeatable act, less so in peacetimes.

Later, we rendezvoused at the homestead, each at his un-appointed time, each with ample bruises to parade, many self-laudatory stories to tell. I am sure he smiles at this escapade as I retell it. So much about this son born of a lineage that bends iron and, as I was soon to discover, bending courage in the process!

Two-techniques karateka
Did I say martial? Yes, I introduced Thomas to the “dojo”, the training space for karatekas.

As a martial artist, he was not that good. He had little time for the art, which is why he left the “dojo” without mastering a single “kata”, not even a beginner’s kata, the most elementary one. For him karate was about self-defence, and a bit of offensive, street defense.

As we all went through the motions of karate as a demonstrative art, he busied himself with perfecting one or two deadly kicks, in themselves a full kit for roguery.

A wiry man, he knew he stood little chance where muscle met muscle, all in equal, prolonged measure. So he built his defences around one knockout kick which, in the event of a miss, would be followed by a hard run, well away from danger.

How well he was with his legs, I never got to know. Thin, long, slightly rickety legs are hardly a good getaway facility, although they seemed to have served, saved, him well against the leopard. I suspect he used his prepossessing grin to get by, to charm a hostile world rather than confront it, used his fiery intellect to subdue it, often forever.

Except for that little incident where he defended Everjoice, I know of little else involving his physical side, something quite remarkable for a man who patronised musical shows and some such events.

The beauty that wouldn’t finish
After his undergraduate studies, he enrolled for an MPhil. Or pretended to have. Then, he stayed with me in Glen View 3, I already working. My simple, indicting judgment was he feared the world, preferred to be a student forever, which is why there was no closure to his MPhil.

He feared life, its travails, or so I thought. Until one day Bernadette came home swollen around her traditionally wasp-like waist-line. She was heavy with Thomas’ child, had been without my noticing it. You know how it is with first pregnancies.

Ahh, he had done it before me, this man I thought feared life. How does a life-fearing man create it, multiply it as the good Lord commanded? I ate back my word. Bernadette, Berna as we called her then and forever, is the daughter of the late Mari family, a family less known for its better known surname and lineage, the Muzendas.

She was a beautiful college girl. Very beautiful, as behoves all the issue from that handsome family. If Thomas thought siring many children with Berna would exhaust her beauty, he was wrong.

Today that beauty outlives its haver, both by way of Berna’s abiding girlish state, and by way of Berna’s child-bevvies, Tafadzwa, “Tit”, making the forehead of this troop of lovelies.

Girls, and you Takudzwa, Thomas’ son, these are my tears to your father, who was a bosom friend I have now lost. My own way of crying his departure.
The girls we bore

How Berna fell for Thomas, I have never sought to find out. Except to know circumstantially that she used to sport half-hearted dreadlocks, similar to Tom’s social statement.

And with those locks, the love of reggae music, again akin to Thomas’. Thomas grinned a lot. I am sure Berna saw it. Thomas loved to stand out, not by sartorial blandishments (The man dressed awfully), but by intellect, by activism. At university and beyond, Thomas was active, very active.

Berna, too, had this innate rebel element about her personality, albeit pursued in a quiet, charming way. Thomas’ melding of Marx and music made his scholarship and activism graspable, made him accessible, approachable. Berna fell when she was in her first year, a fatally impressionable time in the college life of a girl-child.

I never regarded Thomas as a fair hunter, one given to stalking game that matched his alleged muscle. A little fresher from Goromonzi, Berna had little chance, but lost to a good hunter.

Somewhere in the very distant past, Berna’s father and my uncle had worked together, at some place in Wedza called Makarara, just across the mighty Save, abutting Dorowa, but on the Wedza side of Mashonaland East. Like flew to like, via an unlike I played with, Thomas.

Later she bore Titi, Thomas’ first child who became my daughter as well, who grew alongside my own, playing with them to this day. I got to know about Thomas’ demise through their own communication, as they sought to comfort each other. It was devastating.

The friend I differed with
Then one day something happened that got Thomas right on the wrong side of the law. It was related to activism. He was taken in, and Samson-like, had his locks shaven clean!

He felt disarmed by the “shis-stem”, quite a profound personal tragedy I personally hoped would last. In my eyes, there was something about his locks that made him a perpetual teenager, long after he had brought children into this world. It often rubbed me the wrong side, as it did Berna too, and Chris Chinaka, our mutual friend.

By the way, Thomas and I loved Karl Marx, believed in his principles, seeking differently to apply them to change the world which philosophers had effetely analysed interminably. It was not about ideology, therefore.

I believed, still believe, that for all its warts, Zanu-PF remained the most credible vehicle for changing our world. He disagreed profoundly, stating militantly that Zanu-PF was part of the obstacles to the African revolution, an obstacle to be cleared, washed away. He was anti-establishment, vehemently so.

He worked with Zanu-PF’s breakaway sentiment called ZUM, followed its offshoots, to nowhere but without ever giving up. He worked with workers, pretended to believe in peasants he never reached!

His own father benefited from the land reform programme, and would watch with absolute fascination as I argued with Thomas on the virtues of Zanu-PF and its land reforms, whose beneficiaries included his own father.

Watch with fascination as he rubbished the whole thing as petit-bourgeois survival reformism, lacking in purity of intentions, reach and impact.

The old man who today mourns bitterly the passing on of his son, stood pitiably torn between the tag of filiality on the one hand, and the pull of peasant-based commitment to the land. I had him, Thomas had him too. That way we both shared him as our father.

Sorry baba, Tom waenda.

When I let go
He had his sympathies with the MDC, and the shards that followed its spectacular break-up. Whether he became a card-carrying member, I never quite knew. And cared less. But I knew he would never vote Zanu-PF, the same way he knew he would never shake me off Zanu-PF.

Strangely, he would find himself caught up in Zanu-PF initiatives, and even personages, something that got his paranoid peers in the political NGO sector to suspect he worked for the “shi-stem”. He was deeply hurt, and had to leave Misa for something else that took him far away from his country, but not his cause.

The only time I saw him as upset, was when another fellow friend succumbed, Tajudeen.

I was always cited as evidence of his alleged unhealthy distance with the system. Why were we friends, his detractors would ask and charge. Reluctantly, I let go for his sake.

The day Tendai called
Forever Siamese, I too, found myself caught up. He played with a pro-MDC activist, went the script. What do they discuss when together? But the most dramatic of that invidious-ness was when Thomas died, and when the family was struggling to retrieve his body for pre-burial handling.

I was away, too far away to be present, to help. Berna reached me for intervention.

As we spoke, one Tendai Biti grabbed the phone urging me to assist, assume leadership even. I recoiled, but quickly regained my composure after telling myself that as in real life, Thomas was wont to create these awkward moments for me. Tendai was a close friend of Thomas.

From very far back. Thomas had just brewed yet another moment, sealing his victory over me, all from the morgue. Tendai of MDC Renewal? But the years had given me good skills in handling such awkward moments.

This profound nationalist
In the run-up to Heroes Day, Thomas sent me an SMS message. What was the Party doing about preserving songs of the struggle? Could he help? Was there any appreciation in Zanu-PF of the deep emotive value of those songs? And their malleability