Growing Out of Poverty
By Simplisius Chihambakwe
Published by Heritage Publishing House: Harare (2019)
ISBN 978-1-77906-842-2
“Without commitment, everything you do will be a waste of time, money and labour. If there is anything which I have in abundance, it is commitment.” – Simplisius Chihambakwe.
GROWING OUT OF POVERTY is Heritage Publishing House’s new offering on the Zimbabwe literary scene.
Published in the last quarter of 2019 and edited by Mashingaidze Gomo, it is Simplisius Chihambakwe’s autobiography – “…a rendering of my life-long experiences in the two worlds of law and business.”
Chihambakwe is a big household name in the legal fraternity and Growing Out of Poverty is the story of the giant whom colonial Rhodesia attempted to dwarf.
It is a story of hope – a story of a village boy who emerges from a simple village life in Zaka, in colonial Rhodesia, to be counted among the ‘who-is-who’ of independent Zimbabwe.
Writes Chihambakwe: “Growing up in a rural environment had its own pleasures and challenges.
Like other boys of my time, I herded my father’s cattle, goats and sheep.
When it was not my turn to herd cattle, goats and sheep, I slaved in the fields.
This work in the fields was very important to my father.
It meant that before taking the animals to pasture and, or before going to school, I often had to first work in the fields for about two-or-three hours.”
Cataloguing personal achievements that are, in essence, milestones on Zimbabwe’s educational, legal, political and business landscape, the biography takes the reader on a journey whose destination is a specific worldview; a progressive mindset founded on honesty.
And, in so doing, the often-understated value of biographies is confirmed.
The human side of history is detailed and many cold statements of history books come alive in a lived experience village boys, schoolchildren, college students, workers and struggling entrepreneurs can identify with.
Chihambakwe was among the first black legal practitioners in colonial Rhodesia.
In 1976, he was part of the ZANU delegation’s three-member legal team at the Geneva Conference.
His law firm was the first all-black law practice in colonial Rhodesia.
ZANU PF’s 1980 election campaign was launched from his boardroom and he was the first black president of the Law Society of Zimbabwe.
In fact, the accolades go on and on, and all of them not handed out to him but arising from a purposeful upbringing.
Revisiting his past, Chihambakwe writes: “In his last days, when I asked him (the father) why he had been so cruel to me when I was a boy, he explained, without the slightest show of remorse, and said: ‘It was not at all out of cruelty or malice that I brought you up the way I did. I did not want my son to grow up to be like your idle and good-for-nothing youth counterparts who ended up achieving absolutely nothing in life’.
We would laugh about it because, although as a young village boy I surely resented what I viewed as unjustified scourges, upon rational reflection in my adult years, I came to agree that his medicine of the whip and all the slaving in the fields made me the real man that I grew up to become.
Indeed, it was in my adult life that I appreciated the fact that my father’s energy which he exerted on me and the concern he showed for my moral welfare were because he wanted to bring out the best in me as his first male child.”
In the current polarised Zimbabwe, characterised by mudslinging contests driven by obdurate political partisanship, Chihambakwe intertwines his own life story with the checkered story of Zimbabwe.
He ‘amazingly’ does so with a disarming and emotionless simplicity, mounting no offensives and building no defences.
At the end of the read, one does not foresee Chihambakwe taking any prisoners, but rather a following of converts to the suggestion of the existence of alternative forms of nationalism: ‘legislative nationalism, economic nationalism, educational nationalism’.
One foresees readers wanting to be initiated into his brand of financial literacy; readers captivated by his keen business acumen:
Chihambakwe notes that: “I have observed that while people think that having money, hardworking, being educated and/or being employed are the gateways to financial success, street financial success says otherwise. It says:
Money alone does not solve financial problems. This is why giving poor people money does not solve their problems. The answer is found in the common adage: ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for life’.
Working hard does not solve financial problems; the world is full of hard-working people, who have no finance to show for it.
Education does not solve financial problems; the world is filled with highly educated poor people.
A job does not solve financial problems, many people with jobs earn just enough to survive, but cannot afford to buy their own homes, pay for children’s good education, let alone set aside enough money for their retirement.
What then does a person need in order to enter the Kingdom of Financial Freedom?”
Chihambakwe’s answers to the question are honest – an honesty that is not self-proclaimed but self-evident in the natural style, the language and the simple but insistent facts of one who is also the indisputable substance of the story he is telling.
Chihambakwe’s life story effortlessly defines the liberation struggle and the post-independence consolidation of some (not all) of its objectives in wider scope and, it turns out to be a more inclusive narrative that inexorably foregrounds and vindicates alternative perspectives as ‘indispensably’ valid to the integrity of the revolution.
While the very intense nature of Zimbabwe’s liberation war has had a way of ‘inadvertently’ stereotyping the gun-toting party cadre as the exclusive hero of that struggle, one will find, in the biography, a not-altogether subtle insistence that perspectives of liberation struggle, or any struggle for that matter, are, very often, ‘essentially’ multiple and as varied as the imperatives or backgrounds that inform the diverse fighters.
The suggestion (not in as many words) is also unmistakable that it may actually be alternative perspectives that rendered potency to the ideological superstructure without which our armed liberation struggle could have been successfully prosecuted as well as justified in the post-independence era.
The scope of the war slogan, ‘Iwe neni tine basa’, that has (to date) been literally confined to the martial theatre of war because the heroes of alternative or complimentary struggles have chosen to remain unsung is widened into numerous walks of life not as a nihilist mantra agitating for ‘change without purpose’ but as a proposition for each to contribute to the development of Zimbabwe according to their capacity and placement.
The village-boy success story casually pulls the rug from under the feet of the ‘born-frees and millennials’ who have demanded that those who fought for Zimbabwe according to their ‘political placement and military capacity’ should return it to the place of bondage for them to re-liberate it.
And, it is an indictment that insists that the African’s responsibility for self-development cannot be delegated to others.
The informed reader will not miss the silent foregrounding of the Diaspora community of the war-time for comparison with the Diaspora community of the current context.
The biography includes stories of the likes of Simbi Mubako and the late national heroes Edson Zvobgo and Stan Mudenge leaving relative comfort zones of profitable occupations in the Diaspora to contest the colonial oppressor on the international arena.
The inclusion echoes similar experiences of the late national heroes Felix Muchemwa and Herbert Chitepo, among others. The informed reader will find all this in stark contrast with the current Diaspora community of ‘born-frees and millennials’ agitating not for self-development but rather the fall of Zimbabwe.
Chihambakwe’s Growing out of Poverty is a must-read masterpiece!