https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnSmNYy5-80
This Mother’s day I remember my mum. She has been gone now
for 16 years but she is not forgotten and she was one of a kind. With apologies
to Khaya Dlanga (https://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-09-00-khaya-dlanga-my-mother-a-woman-who-never-knew-her-place/)
my mum also did not know her place and it was thanks to her attitude in
overcoming cultural barriers littered in her path that I turned out the way I
am. My first clearest memories of my mother are from around 1982 when we were
still staying at Belingwe police station with my father and my two sisters. In
December 1982 my youngest sister Phillipa had been left with my partenal
grandmother in our village in Murehwa about 600km away. My mother and father
came from the same village although technically where my paternal grandmother’s
homestead is where the other village starts before we cross the small stream
that normally only have water mostly in the rain season. Some villagers call the stream
“karukova kekwa Dhabisoni (the stream by Dabson’s place). My grandfather’s name
was Dabson and as the eldest grandson I was named after him. I am told my
grandfather had married a second wife a few years before I was born and he
moved away with his new wife to Chikore in Manicaland Province after I was born.
I only saw him around 1989 when my father was seriously ill and around end of
1990 after my father’s death.
The Shona are known for butchering English names when they
pronounce the name. In the Shona alphabet there is no L, Q and X letters. My
father’s name was Phillip and villagers would call me mwana waFiripi (Phillip’s
child). I remember a girl with the name
Sylvia, she would be called Sirivhiya. Some would call me mwana WA Ranga (after
my mother) my mother’s English name was Charity, or muzukuru wa Ndaiziveyi
(grandson of Ndaiziveyi after my paternal grandmother) my grandmother’s Christian
name is Ruth or Ruse in Shona pronunciation. Villagers would also call me
muzukuru wa Tapson after my maternal grandfather.
One late afternoon in
December 1982, my mother received a telegram to say my sister was seriously ill
and she was suffering from Kwashiorkor. By that time all the buses to Harare
had already left. That evening my mum took I and my sister Rosemary named after
my paternal grandfather’s sister her Shona name is Shupikai. I would call her
Shupi and I would call out her full Shona name only if I was cross with
her. That evening we started hiking mostly trucks, the next morning we were in
Harare. We arrived at our village and my sister was already at the government
hospital in Mutoko about 35km away. Our village was the last before you enter
the commercial farming areas. To the East and North it was the Mutoko white
commercial farming areas and to the South it was Virginia Commercial farming
areas of Macheke. I still remember the journey by bus from our village to
Mutoko. Along the way there were many burnt building such as farm houses and
farm stores. I was told this had happened during the war of liberation and the
war was so bad that the white farmers had abandoned their farms. Even after the
war ended and the country gained independence in 1980, the farmers never came
back to the farms. In the early to mid- 80s many of my relatives both on my
father’s and my mother’s side left the village and were allocated land in this
area of Hoyuyu Resettlement area of Mutoko.
In December 1982 my father was transferred from Belingwe to
Amaveni Police Station in Kwekwe whilst we were still at the village. My sister
was discharged from hospital and we were on our way to our new home in Kwekwe.
From that episode of my sister’s illness my mother vowed never to leave any her
kids with relatives. In January 1983 my mother enrolled me at Amaveni Primary
school to start grade 1. My first teacher for the first two years was Mrs
Chizano. I am from the generation that never went to pre-school. So from Mrs
Chizano I learnt my first English words, how to read and write. I also learnt about
Christianity and the concept of Gehenna. Mrs Chizano also taught me an
important life lesson, ‘doing the right thing can be tough but it pays off in
the end”. What I feared the most then in the order was my mother as she was
very strict, my teacher as she did not hesitate to use the rope and god. Some boys who were now in high
school told us about the imminent war between Soviet Union and the Americans as
it was at the height of the cold war. They told us how destructive the nuclear
bomb was and once it was detonated it would be the end of the world. I now had
one more thing to add on my list of things I feared- the nuclear bomb.
One evening in 1983 I was playing hide and seek with other
kids. I was hiding by the lawn outside one of the houses in the police camp and
I saw a spear and I started playing with it on the lawn next to my feet. The
next moment I saw a lot of blood coming from my foot and I did not feel any
pain at that time. I ran to my mother and she saw that I hap partially severed
two of my toes and she then carried me on her back for 1.5km to Amaveni Clinic. I
remember the pain when the nurse applied an ointment on the wound and started
sewing stiches. We would go together to have the bandages changed. There was
one unwritten rule from my mother, you could only bunk school if you were
admitted in hospital. Almost every of my primary schooling years, I would be
very sick either from tonsillitis or from Malaria.
By the time I was doing grade 4 or 5 as we were not on
medical aid, whenever I was seriously ill my mum would instruct me to go to
charge office and get a blue form from the officer on duty. All the officers
knew me and they would give me the form which acted like an official order to
the hospital (I have forgotten the name of the form). At that time the
Zimbabwean government was still credit worthy. In the 80s the government health
facilities where still of a very high quality in Zimbabwe. It is said at Independence
in 1980 the Zimbabwean dollar was stronger than the American dollar. The 80s
were a bliss as everything worked, we did not have water cuts or power cuts
then. The road did not have potholes then. I remember then at school we would
be able to buy buns and a 200ml fresh milk sachet for less than 30cents and we
would buy sweets for a cent. With that form I would go to the government Kwekwe
General Hospital with my mother on the first visit. With tonsillitis the doctor
would prescribe me to get injections that would last almost a week. The
following visits I would come on my own to have the injections and my mother
would check the hospital card to make sure I was not skipping the treatment.
She would give me the bus fare to the hospital and most days I would walk the
5kms to the hospital and use the money for pocket money.
One day a lady also staying in the police camp asked me to
go and buy something for her from the shop and I refused. When my mum learnt
about my refusal, she was not impressed at all. She then told me that the lady
had been struggling to bear her own children and every night she prayed to god
crying why she did not have her own babies and here I was adding to her misery
by refusing to do errands for her. I really felt bad after that I started
helping whenever I could. My mother was very strict. She loved farming as she
would keep a huge garden everywhere we stayed until her death, I think these
straits came directly from her father and mother. From what I gathered from my
mother both my grandfathers originally only had Shona names but when they went to work
mainly at the commercial farms also known as mapurazi in Shona (plaas in
Afrikaans). The white farmers would not be bothered to pronounce difficult Shona
names and they would be given English names. My grandfather did not know his
date or year of birth and from our estimation he was born around 1910.
During some of the school holidays, we would go to the
village and I would spend most of holiday at my maternal grandparents’ home as
I got to play with my cousins. My mother would stay with my paternal
grandmother and I learnt earlier on that these two ladies did not see eye to
eye. My maternal grandfather was a very strict disciplinarian and he was a very
wealthy man by village standards. He had over 50 herds of cattle, a house with
zinc (iron) roof, a blair toilet, many bicycles, scotch carts etc. Every morning, he would wake up very early and go at the outside fire place and my maternal grandmother Vasoko (from the monkey clan) would prepare tea for him. I would join him every morning for tea as I was also an early riser. At that time
many villagers only had thatched huts and they were using the bush as their
toilet. Not many people liked him in the village although they would not tell
him straight to his face. Some kids would whisper to me that my grandfather was
a wizard. With my western education I was not superstitious as most villagers
who would be scared of walking at night lest they met goblins. I was scared of
real things like village dogs, snakes, stones and obstacles on the road. Our
village was next to a range of hills so the hyenas would laugh during the night
but it was unheard of for a hyena to attack a human being.
Generally many people in the village did not believe that if
you worked hard you would prosper, the thinking was anyone who was prospering
was using muti. If a person was struggling, the thinking was that someone was
bewitching you. Around 2005, I was running up to 10 general dealer shops around
Mutoko and Macheke Resettlement areas and I also bought a 7 tonne lorry. I then
heard from my nephews and nieces that my uncle’s Zambian wife had told all the
kids to run away every time they saw me. Her logic was that there was no way at
my age I was able to have run such modest businesses without have killed
small children and having their body parts mixed with muti.
My grandfather was also street smart on top of being very strict;
I can write a whole book about his antics. He once told me a story of what he
did when he was working for the farmer feeding pigs. One day he strangled a pig
and showed it to the farmer, the farmer said, “Puza Tapson” and my grandfather
went on to eat the carcass and he continued doing this for some time. The
farmer must have suspected that something was amiss and when my grandfather
showed the farmer another dead pig, the farmer said, “tshisa Tapson, henaro
disease”. After that the pigs stopped dying. In the village every house had
this bathroom made from tall dried grass. These bathrooms were mainly for
bathing and since there was no piped water in the village we would use
buckets and dishes. One morning my grandfather wanted to take an early bath and
he noticed that someone had defecated in the bathroom. There were only two
small children staying with him being my cousin brother and my cousin sister.
He called the two kids and asked who had done this despicable deed and no one
owned up. The blair toilet was about 75 metres away from the homestead and one
of the kids must have been scared to walk alone in the darkness to the toilet.
My grandfather then took a stick and started to beat the two kids and in a
spare of the moment the two kids simultaneously picked the faeces with their
bare hands from the ground.
From an early age my mother would insist that I and my
sister wake up at dawn everyday even on weekends or school holidays. My mother would only tell you to do something
twice and on the third time even if she was holding a knife she would throw it
at you. Every morning my mother would tell us the same story when working us up,
“Dabbie, Shupi wake-up, my father taught me that a person must be awake by the
time the sun come out”, we would complain that our circumstances were different
than when she was growing up in the village as she had to go and fetch water
and work on the crops but us we were in the town. Whilst arguing with her I
would be working up because I knew by the time she came to where I was sleeping
she would either come with a bucket full of cold water to throw on my blankets
or a stick to beat me up. Up to now, I don’t need an alarm to wake me-up; I
always wake up before dawn.
My mother also believed that every child including boys must
be taught to do house chores. Her logic was that if I was not taught to clean
the house, wash and iron my cloths, cook for my self etc. by the time I left
her house to go and work I would be desperate to find someone to do the chores
for me that I would end up marrying an old woman just to get someone to take
care of me. My sister Shupi could cook pap by the time she was 7. One day when
I was in grade 3, I came home from playing and my mum said she not going to
cook that night, my sister Shupi also said she was full and was not going to
cook. That night I went to bed hungry and I quickly learnt to cook pap. In the police force they did not recognise
customary marriages so my father was considered a bachelor and our family would
share the 4 roomed police house with another family. My mother had a dilemma in
that my grandfather would not give his hand to have her wed until all the
lobola money had been paid. Fortunately marriage laws had evolved and now for one to
get married a couple needed two witnesses to accompany them to the magistrate’s
offices. My grandfather would call this type of marriage muchato wekwamudzviti
(marriage presided by the Native Commissioner). It appears no one sent my
grandfather a memo to say that with the new laws he was no longer required to
come in front of the Native Commissioner to give his blessing as the father of
the bride. After my parents got formally married, we started staying at the
married quarter’s section and we now had the full house to ourselves. This
marriage certificate would come in very hand in 1990 when my father died.
My father would battle with alcoholism and this probably had
such an effect on me when it comes to alcohol and smoking and those memories
discouraged me from drinking alcohol or smoking. My parents had an arrangement
that after my father got paid my mother would then manage finances. Our
standard of living started to improve. Towards the end of 1987 my mother left
me and my sister in the company of my father as we were going to school and she took my younger sister and my two brothers to the
village as she was going to start farming at my father’s plot. In November
1987, government workers got their bonus. My father drank himself until he was
sick. When my mother came back my father was broke. My mother does not know what
my grandmother did with the produce that was harvested from her plot and also
what happened to the goats that she had bought and left at the plot. My mother
never went back to farm at the village again.
My mother was also a member of the Kuyedza Women’s club which catered for spouses of police officers and
she learnt many practical lessons such as sewing, cooking, baking etc. This
would come in handy for us after my father’s death. In early November 1990 my
father died after a long illness and that marked the beginning of hardships in
our family. Three weeks after my father’s death, the family gathered at my
grandmother’s homestead where they had to distribute my father’s clothing which
was mostly given to me. My father’s will was read and I remember this sentence
from the will, “my wife should stay wherever she wants to stay”. The
expectation from both sides of the family was that once the pension money came
out my mother would come back to the village and build a homestead and buy some
cows and probably get married to my uncle as a second wife. A ceremony was held where my mother had to choose if she wanted kugarwa
nhaka (wife inheritance) either by my father’s only brother or his half-
brother. What happened is that my two
uncles would sit next to each other and as the eldest child and son I would
also sit with them. My mother would come with a stick and if she gave it to
either of my uncles it would signify that she wanted to be inherited by that
uncle. My mother came and gave the stick to me to signify that she no longer
wanted to be married within the family and she only wanted to take care of her
children.
At the end of August 1991 we left the accommodation in the
police camp and my mother started renting a few rooms in Dombotombo Township
and at that time I was at my aunt’s house in Murewa for the school holidays.
When I came back beginning of September for the start of the school third term
my mother told me the pension money had come out and she had bought a house
from the municipality in the new housing development in an area called Yellow
City. I went with my cousin and we slept at the new house on the day we arrived
I never slept at the rented house, that night mosquito feasted on us. The following days we moved our furniture to the new place.
The houses were four roomed houses. The municipality had only put outside
doors, no window frames, no electricity, no plastering to the walls. For the
first few months we had to put zinc iron sheets to cover the gaping holes where
the window frames were supposed to be. My father’s life insurance pay-out came
out. My mother and I were named as co-beneficiaries. My mother got her portion
as a cash pay-out and mine as a minor went to the Master of High Court. With
her pay-out I went with her to buy window frames, window panes, door frames, internal
doors, cement to plaster the house as well as electrical wiring. By the time I
was 15, I was already helping my mother with budgeting whenever she got the merger
widow’s and minors’ government pension we would draw out a grocery list and I
would go with her to do the shopping. Our house had about 450 square metres of
land so my mother had a big garden and we would get extra income from the produce coming from her garden, she
would also knit jerseys from the machine she had been given by her youngest
sister.
When I was in secondary school, I started going on my own to
the village and I discovered that the relatives were furious that my mother had
decided to stay in the town and not to come back to the village and farm like
everyone else. I told my mother about this and she did not care. The education
standards in the rural areas where not as high as in the townships. Most of my
cousins dropped out after grade 7. Kids were expected to help in providing
farming labour and they would walk long distances to school, they did not have
the qualified teachers like we had in townships, during the rainy season when
rivers were full kids would miss school for days until the rivers receded. In the rural areas they did not have well stocked libraries like us and also they did not have electricity to enable them to study at night. Another advantage was that during school holidays we would meet with students going to some of the top schools in Zimbabwe such as Kutama college, Goromonzi High School, St Augustine High School e.t.c and exchange notes. The
pass rates in national exams were very low in rural areas.
Some months when things were very tight we would put lodgers
on the other two rooms and we would only use two rooms. My mother would rear
broiler chicken for sale and we would also run a tuck-shop from our kitchen
window and I was in charge of managing the tuck-shop and I would go to the
wholesalers and bakeries to buy stock. It was always tough to study with a
paraffin lamp since it was expensive to study with a candle. Fortunately when I
was in the middle of form 3 (grade 10) my mother managed to pay to connect
electricity to our house. Those days my mother struggled to provide enough food
for the five children at times we would run out of mealie-meal, I would only
eat in the morning and walk a long distance of up to 7km to school, spend the
whole day without eating anything and only eat at night. Sometimes during
school holidays, I could come home in the afternoon from the library and there
would be nothing to eat, I would go and get sticks in the nearby bush set up a fire and roast
some dried maize kennels drink water and go back to the library to study. I could see that my future was very bleak and
my mum never got tired to encourage me to study harder. Somehow she always gave
me hope that if I pass my exams my life would improve. My mother would vet the
friends that we could hang out with.
Around 1991 the police had sent out a cheque to the school
nearest to our village for my father’s last salary for November 1990.
Fortunately my mother’s sister was teaching pre-school at the school and she
received the cheque. When my uncle (my father’s only brother) came to the
village and heard about the cheque. He asked my aunt for the cheque and he
promised to take it to my mother. My aunt did not suspect anything and gave him
the cheque. My uncle went on to fraudulently cash the cheque and used up the
money. My uncle had not finished school, I remember around 1984 when he was in
form 3 (grade 10) he had impregnated a girl who was the headmaster’s sister. In
Zimbabwe the policy was if a school boy impregnates a school girl that would be
the end of both their education. The remaining few cattle that my grandmother still
had were all taken to pay Lobola for my uncle’s new wife. Within the following
two years, he would divorce her. Luckily he had passed his Zimbabwe Junior
Certificate National Exams very well and due to the civil war in Mozambique
around that time many qualified teachers where shunning to go and teach in
Mudzi next to the Mozambique border as the war in would spill into Zimbabwe. My uncle got a place there as a temporary
primary school teacher there and taught for about 6 years until the end of the Mozambique
civil war. Somehow he did not improve his education during those years. After
my father’s death, he came to our house and he demanded to be given part of his
brother’s pension money when it came out as he now wanted to finance his
O’Level studies. My mother just ignored him.
In 1994 I was now in A’ Level and my two sisters were also
in high school and my mother was failing to cope with the school fees so she
went to confront my uncle to recover the money that he had fraudulently took.
My uncle was now working with his two cousins who were now running their
security company in Harare. When my mother got there the three of them wanted
to assault her for demanding the money. According to my mother my uncle said he
had every right to take the money as it belonged to his brother. He went on to
say that my mother was trying to show off by sending me to A’ Level, instead
she should have let me look for a job. As for my sisters, he said it was
pointless to send girls to high school because once girls have finished grade 7
they can now write letters they should get married. Words have power. All my
cousin brothers went as far as O’Level and all my cousin sisters once they
finish grade 7 they got married. Whereas my mother a simple widow managed to
send all her five kids up to A’ Level.
Towards mid 90s, my mother teamed up with other former
members of the Kuyedza Women’s club and she recruited and started working for the NGO, she
would go to the commercial farming areas to teach life skills to women working
on the farms. My mother would always come to my school events, from grade 3 to
grade 7, I was always in the top 3 of my class and every year, I would get a
book prize and my mother would be there and every term my mother would buy me a
watch for excelling. In 1994 when I started A’ Level, I had failed to get into
Fletcher High School which was my first choice on the sixth form selection
form. I had only managed 4 Distinctions and my classmate Simon who got 5
distinctions managed to get in. I was selected by Mutambara High School in
Chimanimani and when the acceptance letter came, I boarded the overnight train
to Mutare and then took the B&C Bus to Chimanimani arriving at the school
just after lunch. I started inspecting the school facilities and when I got to
the boys dormitories, the environment reminded me of Nhowe Mission that was
closer to our village, I decided there and then that I would not come to this school.
I then took a lift back to Wengezi on the Birchenough Bridge –Mutare road. I
arrived in Mutare in time to catch the train back to Marondera. I told my
mother that I would not go to Mutambara and she did not argue with me.
I started looking for a place at other schools including
Marondera High School and they told me they were full. I was already street
smart back then, I went to the police camp to see baba Challe who had previously worked
with my father in Kwekwe during the 80s and asked him to go to Marondera High School and assist me get a place. He was
now riding those big police motor bikes similar to those on the presidential
motorcade. He was now working as part of the presidential motorcade. I also
went to see my father’s former classmate who was now a provincial educational
officer and he gave me a letter to take to Goromonzi High School. At Goromonzi
I could only get Arts subjects so it was a non-starter for me as I only wanted
to pursue Mathematics, Biology & Chemistry. The next morning, I waited
outside the headmaster’s office and baba Challe came wearing his police uniform
and riding his bike and asked to see the headmaster and within a few minutes I was
called in and I was offered the place. I managed to enrol for Biology and
Chemistry but the 2 mathematics classes were already full and I was advised to
take Geography instead. At that time I still wanted to pursue medicine so
studying Mathematics was non-negotiable for me. I told the teachers that I
would do the two subjects full time and then pursue mathematics at night
school. The following day my mother visited the school and I do not know what
she told the teachers and I was finally enrolled for mathematics.
If my mother had gone to the village our lives could have
been different. We might not have got the education we got and especially for
my sisters their future would have been very bleak like those of my cousins who
left school early and married very early some even married before turning 14.
Five of my very close sisters died before they turned 30 or just after that. When
my younger sister got her bachelor’s degree and her masters’ degree, I told her
I wished our mum to share in all this success.
Now in the 21st century the path for black women
is not very clear as they do not belong within the two subsets of privilege
namely white privilege and male privilege. The reality for black women is the
following:-
-
Some families still believe in not giving the same
opportunity to a girl child as they give to a boy child. My uncle and her sons back
home belong to the apostolic sect that practices polygamy and they also don’t believe
in western medicine or traditional medicine. I have lost count, the last time I
checked my uncle had 8 wives and my other cousin had 12 wives and the other had
14 wives. My cousin sisters and my nieces only go to school up to grade 7 and
they are married off around their 13th birthday. No one is allowed
to seek medical assistance even for child birth, immunization, malaria, even
bone fractures. One of my cousins has teachers to thank after they involved the
police to go and fetch him from the house so that he would get medical assistance after his arm was fractured. At times three or more children would die at
the same time from diseases that can be prevented by immunisation. Even though
Zimbabwe has progressive laws against child marriage and immunisation, it appears
there is a gentlemen agreement between the ruling party and the apostolic
leaders in that hundred of thousands of their members vote for the ruling party and in
turn the government looks the other way.
-
Statistics show that in general it is very
difficult for women to get jobs and at times their spouses prevent them from
working. My mother went to school under the racist regime of Ian Smith when the
education of Africans was not a priority for the government during the early 70s. She went as far as
standard six, the same level as my father. Her father told her that she could
not continue paying for her education because as a girl she would get married
and he felt it was a waste of time. In the early years of her marriage to my father,
there was an opportunity for her to also join the police force and my father
refused. I imagine how different our lives would have been if my mother had
also been allowed to work.
-
When women get employed in general they get paid
less than their male counterparts and their work does not get acknowledged. Last
month there was a story that Bongani Bingwa shared on the 702 Break Fast Show
where two work colleagues one male and one female were doing the same kind of work
and they e-mail addresses got switched around in error. From that story the
male colleagues who everyone now thought was a female from the e-mail addresses
started getting fewer sales and more complaints and for the female colleague
whom everyone thought was a male started getting more sales and more
compliments.
-
Some statistics such as the percentage of black females
with driver’s licence would shock you.
-
In Pretoria and in Harare, I saw women who are
exactly in the situation that my mother was when she was raising me and my siblings. I see
women making fat cooks for sale from as early as 4am in Pretoria Central and
when I am in Harare, I see women waking up around that time going to Mbare
Musika to buy vegetables for resale. All these women are hardworking, they put
their family’s needs ahead of theirs and at the end of the day they get very
small amounts to get by but they don’t complain.
-
Women also suffer from patriarchy and the sad
part is that fellow women are at the fore front of propping up patriarchy. Just
look at elections in both Zimbabwe and South Africa where women are the
majority but they will never vote for other women. In Zimbabwe we are facing an
election in two months’ time and you can see from the candidate list being put
forward by both Zanu-PF and MDC parties women will be lucky to get even a third
of the seats. I grew up in police camps where women would look down at second
wives and I would hear words like, “she took someone’s husband”. However in the
African culture it is man who normally approaches women but the women gets the
brunt from fellow women. It was Steve Biko who said, “The most potent weapon in
the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. Its time women woke-up
and prop one another to also advance their best interests.
-
Also not forgetting the shocking violence
perpetrated against women. As a runner, I know that female runners do not
have the same priviledge like us male runners to run wherever we want and whenever
we want lest they become victims of crime.
I look back at my life so far and realise that I was lucky
to have the mother that I had. She guided me at the most time of need and she
taught me the values of the hard work and also the power of believing. My
mother still lives in my memory and when I dream of her I talk to her as if she
is around. I have also had amazing assistance from many outstanding ladies both
when I was growing up and now at this stage. I want to say happy mother’s day
to Manyoni my beautiful wife the mother of our three boys. Also to my two
sisters or more like my two daughters Rosemary and Phillipa, all my cousin
sisters, my grandmother, my mother's sisters especially Mrs Nkonde who taught me in my teens the concept of Karma,my mother in law, my aunt Mrs Maposa. I also had other mother figures growing up in police camps and in the townships. I remember Mrs Chapuma my best friend's mother. Also our neighbours, Mrs Chekera, Mrs Wakatama, Mrs Maida, Mrs Chihwai. Also my mother's friends, Mrs Mugandani, Mai Kuda (Mrs Mugariri). Other amazing
ladies that helped me were my grade 1 and grade 2 teacher Mrs Chizano, my grade
3 and grade 4 teacher Mrs Chirimuta. Also my form 1 and 2 history teacher Mrs
Mufambisi, my O’Level English teacher
Mrs Gwanzura who spoke English better than than the British as well as my A’
Level Biology teacher Mrs Rimbi.
During my over 21 years working life, I have had help from
amazing women such as Ms Tendai Chingovo my former boss at AIG Zimbabwe and as I
wrote in my blog last year in September when I celebrated 21 years of working (http://kanyokad.blogspot.co.za/2017/09/what-i-have-learnt-in-my-21-years-of.html)
she was a transformational figure in my career. Also my first secretary at ZIB
Mrs Loice Shangwa, Sandra Chipunza my secretary at Zimnat Harare and Alice my
secretary in Bulawayo. Also my peer Ms Emilia Hatendi who was our human
resources Manager and she never tired of telling me, “Kanyoka show emotional
intelligence’’ as well as my last boss in Zimbabwe Mrs Precious Chasara who was
both firm and fair to all of us. In South Africa, I have had amazing bosses
from Michelle De Winnaar, Maureen Siobo, Lerato Rasontsoere, Isabel Erasmus my
previous boss as well as my current boss Abigail. A lot of the people
have moulded me, I mentioned them in my blog of September 2017.
Happy Mothers’ day to all the ladies. As they say in Shona,
Musha Mukadzi (The woman is the anchor of the house), we must improve
opportunities for women as that has a direct bearing on the welfare of their
children. I am what I am mostly because of the values that my mother installed
in me when I was growing up under challenging circumstances. I can’t wait to go
to sleep and talk to my mother as we have a lot to talk about this day.
http://kanyokad.blogspot.co.za/2017/08/dear-mama-my-hero.html
