Fare thee well Comrade Zinjiva

A tribute to Zinjiva Nkondo, by Morakabe Raks Seakhoa

Chinua Achebe, on his triumphant pilgrimage to South Africa last year, told a beautiful story, tinged with sadness, about when he was informed of soldier poet Christopher Okigbo’s untimely death, way back in the sixties.

"Don’t let him die! Don’t let him die! Don’t let him die!", was a cry from Achebe’s then 3-year-old son, Ike, now Cambridge University’s Professor of African Civilisations.

I can’t find a better way of expressing our shock and utter incredulity at the death on 22nd June 2003, of Zinjiva Nkondo, a soldier poet of note, activist, philosopher, diplomat par excellence, father and husband all rolled into one.

It seems it’s not raining but pouring for artists’ rush for the hereafter: young poet and big concerts organiser Geoff Mokale died in a horrid car smash on Monday night 23rd June 2003. Veteran musician Teaspoon Ndelu was shot dead two weeks ago. Actor Ramolao Makhene and muso Luther Vandross are fighting for their lives against suspected liver cancer and cardiac problems, respectively, in hospitals here and in the USA.

When I visited Ramolao at the hospital, I left him with a very stern warning: don’t ever think of dying! For if you do, all the other artists and I will come moer (beat) you! He laughed that typical Rams laugh…

Though one heard so much of, and, about Zinjiva (nom de guerre Victor Matlou), from newly-captured combatants in apartheid jails, pilgrims to the ANC in a number of African countries, underground operatives etc, I first met Zinjiva through his poetry collection The Long Road The Tunnel, published by that daredevil of anti-apartheid era publisher, COSAW Publishing, the publishing wing of the Congress of South African Writers.

Through Walter Chakela, Windybrow Art Centre’s executive artistic director, who’d just appointed Zinjiva the centre’s general manager, I came to know Zinjiva very well: writers’ skills workshops; literary readings; one-on-one cross-night political and social topical debates and interrogations…

Always the sanest of minds, it was a sort of a let down when he resigned his deputy presidency of the Congress of South African Writers (Cosaw) during my tenure as general secretary. He had so much to offer but he felt he needed more time for his writing, his interventions as board member of the National Arts Council (NAC) and script-reader for SABC Education Channel. Above all, he always insisted on comrades spending quality time with their families and reading books with their children, helping them with doing their schoolwork.

On an international cultural exchange programme tour of Libya with South Africa’s wunderkind of poetry Don Mattera and writers from Zimbabwe and Swaziland, Zinjiva taught us protocols of international interaction, from our core mission being that of interfacing with Libyan writers and intellectuals, the ordinary folk, to having a pow wow with the Leader Muammar Qaddafi.

Zinjiva said of his time in hospital: "When the First Lady Comrade Zanele Mbeki went to the funeral of Julius Nyerere, she visited me at the hospital." One of the doctors there said, "Mrs Mbeki, in four days, after Nyerere’s funeral, please come and bury this man, he’s the next to follow!"

An avowed Marxist he was, Zinjiva said, he turned to prayer and told God, " I don’t want to die now, but if it’s your will, take me!"

Just before the prayer, Zinjiva said, he had told the nurses and other workers at the hospital that "I am going to walk out here and go to my house!" He did!

Many months thereafter, when on an odd visit to him at his Judith’s Paarl house, Johannesburg, Zinjiva regaled us with anecdotes of exile, pre-exile, home, political intrigues of times of war and our post-apartheid era. A sharp mind, incisive, scalpel-like, always.

A poet who swore by the works and books of other writers he always made sure to read, he was very unforgiving of writers who knew naught of other writers, home and abroad.

A critical thinker, Zinjiva suffered no fools and he would challenge everyone he found lacking in rectitude, from Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, our current socio-economic dispensation, fellow poets, artists and workers he was always mingling with.

I feel the poorest for not having visited him when I’d so promised during our last telephone discussion a month ago.

Most of all, his legacy, that of establishing sustainable schools/academies for writing and reading, must find a way of happening.

In that way, Achebe’s son’s mantra: "…don’t let him die!…" would sustain Zinjiva’s dream.

In his poem "This Is How The Centuries Went", Zinjiva cries

…We want freshness in the air
Of this world
We want knowledge and growth
Out of human hands and merit
We want singing babies
With rice in their mouths
And rest for aged workers.

Like in this title poem from his anthology The Long Road , The Tunnel, which he dedicated to the "entire Nkondo family" and "to the heroic Freedom Fighters fingering the Long Road", Zinjiva lamented:

…all my people are on this road
for this road is the road of life
of accommodation
running with and towards the light of life

…my past is on the pulse of this road
there is light down there at the end of the tunnel
to grope on to touch to carve hopes
breathe songs onto the hearts of martyrs
to dry tears to summon the dead
to life.

Zinjiva will be buried on Sunday 29th June 2003, Malamulele, Limpopo province, South Africa.

Rest in peace, Camarada!

Raks Morakabe Seakhoa is the co-editor of the African Review of Books. This tribute first appeared in the Sowetan Sunday World.