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Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa
Conway Tutani was my dear friend from our University of Rhodesia days in 1975.

I had come from the ‘Skuru’ (school), St Augustines Penhalonga (Tsambe) and he was from the Government’s  Fletcher High School.

Our academic prowess was to be rewarded with a secondary school teaching job at best. Nothing more to fancy as African super brains.

Being from a deprived African racial background, our pleasure seeking endeavours subsisted on the menial vote given to the Shona society.

This gave us a much treasured chance to occasionally tour Zimbabwe in chicken buses. Short of funds, we drank traditional or opaque beer in township bars.

For weekend nights, we quartered in rustic African hotels like Mangondoza in Nyanga.

This was an era when swinging London plagiarised the music of Black America to turn it to all sorts of genres that would turn the entertainment world forever.

Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix were all thrown into a music cauldron with Stevie Wonder, Berry Goddy’s Tamla Motown, Chuck Berry and the lot.

Then there was jazz and blues as the foundation.

It would all resonate with African drums  of Osibisa, the Chacha from Congo, Mahlatini and his dancing Mahotela Queens, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

Zimbabwe offered its own polyglot of evolved or imitating musicians; Eye of Liberty, Lovemore Majaivana in Bulawayo, Manu Kambani, Jethro Shasha, Dorothy Masuka and Faith Dhauti.

Then there was the enduring Oliver Mtukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo.

All said, Tutani exuded the cultural mix of his era.

Tutani was born into and grew up in the generation that would prize freedom and democracy above own life and limb.

When the moment called for wholesale and collective self-sacrifice, many volunteered to join the national liberation war effort.

Much as he did not cross into Mozambique, Zambia or Botswana in the 1970s, he remained hewed to the values and ethos of that chosen Samora Machel/Soweto 1976 uprising generation of the sub-region.

No transgression so offended Tutani than an attempt to pour scorn or sloth on the valiant guerrilla war efforts of his classmates and contemporaries who fought in the heroic war, dead or living.

It did not matter that he worked for the private media which tended to have an inveterate penchant to denigrate hallowed national values.

Candid and objective, self introspection never brooked what he viewed as treasonable.

Recourse to irreverence on national glory and its tenets unfailingly provoked trenchant reproach from Tutani.

Perhaps being a Zimbabwean of Xhosa extraction in the early colonial epoch may have shaped his collectivist, pan-African outlook.

He also grew up in an urban milieu in National, Mbare, that crucible of nascent African nationalist resurgence.

The cosmopolitan outlook to life gave him remarkable tolerance which tended to avoid the excoriating polemic in his literary discourse.

Unless one was Hopewell Chin’ono, who really got into his cross hairs because of a perceived charlatan and cavalier approach to current issues.

He was a rare type of patriotic Zimbabwe journalist.

He would never soil time-proven attributes of the venerated profession by regressing to ideological fads or descent to the pits of geopolitical score-mongering.

He loved Africa with all passion and employed his sharp intellect and mighty pen to its defence and extol.

I managed to come back alive from the human sausage machine of the war.

Conway was so relieved and glad at my sight.

He started asking for other shared friends who had also absconded and after about a dozen names drew blanks, he slumped to the silence of the distraught.

It dawned on him that the war had neither been a walk in the park nor a dinner party. Definitely not a football encounter between Highlanders and Dynamos after which all players come back alive save for same muscle aches.

For the rest of our 40 years of post-war acquaintance, we never broached that subject again. Instead, we preferred to reminisce about the trendsetting music of our generation.

Our death and pain etched memories tried to avoid the agonies of the era wilfully and enthusiastically embraced by the Generation of Sacrifice.

Yesterday I  continued to dispatch messages to my favourite Facebook blogger.

I had given his name to a civil engineer leading the design of the new town being created by the Mvuma-Chivhu-Manhize Steel plant.

Covid-19 was not helping us to meet.

Yesterday morning I received a message of condolence from the civil engineer. Yes, yet another page of my chequered life had been plucked out to eternity.

Tutani wrote copiously about even the varied topics of his time on earth. His mind is all there to read and savour.

Tutani was, appalled by the ignorance, sloth and sloveliness that underlied Mugabeist rule.

He passionately believed he was not serving the cause of the youthful sacrifice of his generation of the 1970s.

Those who hated Africa piled themselves onto a gloating bandwagon of Afro-pessimists.

Tutani lived for hope eternal about his country, its African mother continent, its Diaspora and all positive humankind.

He firmly believed that having survived slavery, having fought colonial domination, history was still going to restore Africa’s due.

Above all, to glean on and learn so we can strive to be dutiful residents and nation loving  citizens. How do you bury a friend and seek closure in these pandemic harrowing times