By Farayi Mungoshi
MEMORIES of moments with my father Dr Charles Muzuva Lovemore Mungoshi flooded my thoughts as I drove along the sandy paths of Chivhu.
Dr Mungoshi, also known as Carlos Manhize (his pen name before he broke out as Charles Mungoshi the writer), was no more.
He had passed on at Parirenyatwa Hospital in the early hours of February 16 2019.
I didn’t know how to react when I heard the news, neither did I know what feelings I was supposed to have.
One part of me wanted to hold onto him and another felt this was the best thing; the pain he’d gone through over the past 10 years was unbearable, luckily my mother had been there by his side throughout.
I feared we would end up losing both parents because his illness had also taken its toll on my mother.
I could see her deteriorating by the day, her career having been literally put on hold to tend to my father.
It was as if she’d forgotten about herself, she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything and the few times we’d force her to go out she would bombard us with phone calls asking if he was okay.
It was with these many thoughts swirling in my head that I drove.
Night fell and darkness enveloped the terrain such that we could not see further into the beauty of the landscape lying on either side of the road, I could not show my companions my favourite spots along the road as we headed home to Chivhu; the road I had travelled many times with this man we were going to inter.
My thoughts drifted away from the group of people I was travelling with as I recalled my early childhood.
My father would travel the world presenting his work to different nations with David Martin and Phylis Johnson.
These were the days in the early 1980s, around the time they formed (Zimbabwe Publishing House) ZPH and founded the Harare International Book Fair.
I didn’t care much about his work then or that he was building a legacy, as I was still young.
Neither did I care about the kind of education system he was helping Government build or set up through his books that were made set books and read by the majority of Zimbabweans.
I didn’t care what it all meant or that it contributed to Zimbabwe’s becoming one of the world’s most literate countries.
Nor did it matter that one day he would appear in the New York Times or the BBC, or have pictures taken with former President Robert Mugabe or that the Queen of England would later invite him to Buckingham Palace.
I didn’t care about all of that.
It was the toys and the new clothes I looked forward to, the times we would take turns with my brother Graham to sit on his shoulders during walks around the neighbourhood of Zengeza.
And times he would take us to Chikwanha Shops so he could buy and have a bite of trotters (pig’s feet he fondly called them).
In between bites of pork and sips of his favourite brandy, he would tell us not to tell mother because she didn’t want us eating pork (for religious reasons, being the daughter of a ZCC preacher Joram Jaboon), it was our little secret; my father, Graham and I.
This was some years before Nyasha, Charles Jr and Tsitsi were born.
Surprisingly, and funny enough, upon reaching home, he would be the one to break our pact and tell mother that we had gone for a pork treat.
Our father had a soft spot for his children. Naughty as we were, we could get away with almost anything — it was only at the request of our mother, Jesesi Mungoshi, that he would punish us for misbehaving.
He hardly belted us. He didn’t like it; but if you are going to raise a young man in the ghetto of Chitungwiza, a parent, once in a while, had to use the belt.
Now that I am grown up, I now understand why he was reluctant to use the belt on us as a form of punishment.
It wasn’t long that we; Graham and I, were both sent to boarding school, Godfrey Huggins Primary School in Marondera.
Nearly everybody who turned out at the funeral had a personal account to share about Dr Mungoshi.
A lot of people came, including Government officials, writers, film-makers, students and many others too numerous to mention in this article.
I even had phone calls from the international community and media organisations such as BBC.
One question I have always been asked after people know who I am is: “How does it feel to have such an icon as Charles Mungoshi for a father?”
I have always responded by saying: “It’s a normal father-son relationship. He encourages me, shouts at me just like any father who wants his son to succeed.”
But as I ask myself that question again today, I realise I was wrong. There is nothing normal about having the likes of Shimmer Chinodya, Yvone Vera, Aaron Chiunduramoyo, Musaemura Zimunya, Chenjerai Hove and Albert Nyathi, among may other notables, visit your house regularly or waking up to find Dambudzo Marechera sitting on your porch.
These were, and are, great writers I grew up surrounded by. When I was made president of the Literary Society at Prince Edward High School, it wasn’t difficult for me to get any of them to come over to my school to talk to my fellow students and read poems or extracts from their works.
In our culture, we believe that great men do not die alone. And so it was that my grandmother (Dr Mungoshi’s mother) passed on just days after her son.
She had already declared that she would only die when Charles died and so it was.
But nothing had prepared us for the others who also died within that one week of his passing on and were not chronicled like my grandmother.
My mother’s sister-in-law passed away some five days after my father. And then my father’s brother-in-law passed on four days after my father; a dark and gloomy week indeed for the family.
For the legacy you built and left us, I salute you Dr Charles Muzuva Lovemore (Carlos Manhize) Mungoshi. As my young brother Charles Jr always says: “Your name is the legacy you left us and we will build on that.”
And according to your words: “Be careful of being proud of not being proud.”
I say and promise Zimbabwe and the world that we will continue to humble ourselves in the face of the work you did, the work we are now faced with.