Itai Mushekwe: Tribute to a dear friend who lived a life of loyalty and dedication to family and his trade

BY ENOCK MUCHINJO

HARARE – When Zimbabwean journalist John Mokwetsi last week broke the very sad news of the death of colleague Itai Mushekwe at the age of 42 in Germany, apparently months after his passing, I immediately shared it with childhood friends on our WhatsApp group.

Just like everybody else, all of them were in the dark about this tragic demise of a fine young man who still had so much to offer in life and in his chosen profession that he so passionately loved and served.

Hard to take as his passing was, especially in those circumstances of ambiguous grief – as his body lied lifeless in distant Cologne where he now lies interred – we took a trip down memory lane as we fondly remembered our friend.

We reminisced about the good boyhood days when life was carefree: when all the good things that have happened to us in adulthood were romantic dreams to surely come true one day, when the vicious punches that life has thrown at us over the years were nothing but nightmares never to see the light of day.

A lot of these things, laced with naivety and innocence, were discussed avidly on the long walks to and from Ellis Robins Boys High School.

No cellphones, no appointments. Somehow nearly every day the boys grouped around Strathaven Shopping Centre, then walk down Suffolk Road, and up Sherwood Drive, into the school gates, and then regroup later for the journey back home.

We all were somewhat different, there were the quiet ones, then those that loved to clown around, you name it.

Mushekwe – as we commonly called him even at the playground – was the intellectual, the guy that read the newspapers, followed local and international affairs keenly, and liked to delve into the serious stuff. As a student he was hardly in trouble with authorities, a focused man whose future was unquestionably bright in the eyes of everyone who encountered him, staff and fellow students alike.

His love for books saw him being appointed as one of the school’s junior librarians, a role for form ones to four, with the ‘A’ Level boys having their own.

Together we contributed to the school magazine, the Robins Monitor, at one time edited by 1999 headboy Tawanda Gughlanga, the late ZBC broadcaster.

But as much as Itai was this model pupil everybody knew and liked, he also had an extroverted personality.

He was lively, he loved a good laugh, and liked to pull quite a few pranks on those he knew well and to everyone’s amusement. His nickname, Sox, or Soxeflo, also reflected some kind of a vibe about him.

Mushekwe wasn’t also just a bookworm. He was an all-rounded individual, a very good sportsman.

He made it into the first team in his favourite sport, hockey, barely in form three. Given his diminutive physique back then, although he’d later grow quite tall, hockey suited him perfectly at the time and he was one of the team’s star players, earning half-colours in that sport.

For a man of his size back then, he was impressively fit, so he also excelled in cross-country due to his endurance.

Another keen sportsman in the family was Itai’s cousin, Nyasha Mushekwi (family name spelt differently), later to become a famous Zimbabwean footballer and one of the best players of his generation.

The boys lived together with their lovely old grandparents in the Monavale area, showered with love and affection. Their home was very close to Italian Sports Club, a hub of sporting activity those days. Itai and Nyasha – alongside other local boys – spent a lot of their free time there running, throwing and kicking balls of different shapes and sizes.

That exposure to a multi-purpose facility just around the corner hugely shaped a lot of the guys’ all-round abilities and improved such desired components as hand-eye coordination. It didn’t surprise any of us also that Nyasha could suddenly swiftly switch sporting codes from basketball to football, becoming an instant hit and so successful.

Itai was very fond of his younger relative, Nyasha, and took him under his wing. Nyasha on the other hand looked up to Itai in many ways, and the two were often seen together in the neighbourhood, whiling away the time.

My early memory of Nyasha was passing each other frequently, him off to Blakiston Primary School and me going in the opposite direction to join his cousin and others on our way to Ellis Robins.

Itai Mushekwe.

When Itai and I later became young reporters on the Zimbabwe Independent and Nyasha was chasing his sporting dream, he gave me a friendly command to write something about his schoolboy relative, who was now playing basketball in the Mashonaland Basketball Association League.

Basketball not being my forte, a rather peripheral sport those days for a renowned national business weekly like ZimInd, the consistent pleas by Itai were initially resisted by me.

But Itai – an arts reporter then – insisted that I should feature his cousin, or else he would write the story himself and submit the copy to the editor!

A perfect opportunity would present itself early 2005 after Nyasha put together a stellar run of form for the Cameo club in the MBA.

He came to the newsroom at 1 Union Avenue in his purple and grey Churchill Boys High uniform, a wide-eyed schoolboy starting to view the world with the lens of a young adult.

The quick interview was done on my desk, with Itai in attendance and helping me quiz his own cousin. The sub-editors placed the resultant story on a corner of the back page and when the paper came out on Friday, guess who was at the newsroom after school to happily collect a copy from his journalist cousin who had facilitated the coverage.

Nyasha went on to be voted the MBA’s Most Valuable Player for the 2006 season and had started to look well on course for a career in basketball. But the rest is history, he instead became a footballer, a top-class one for that.

I sometimes imagine the kind of influence that a journalist like Itai Mushekwe – who later became a hard-nosed political reporter – would have had on his cousin’s sporting career.

This is because to quite a few of the older lads from back in the days, Itai was the first Mushekwe (i) family sports guy that came to mind.

When big and powerful Nyasha was on a scoring spree for CAPS United in the 2009 Premier Soccer League (PSL) season, on his way to win the Golden Boot award with 21 goals, one of the childhood crew who had since moved abroad called me after reading of the exploits of this certain Nyasha Mushekwi.

Suffice it to say this particular curious childhood friend had been one of the recognised football stars at the Italian club back then but had later chosen a different professional route, making a name for himself in the creative industry.

And because the Nyasha Mushekwi he knew used to excel elsewhere on the sporting fields and courts of Italian Sports Club, hardly on the football pitch, he had assumed that the one making the headlines was in fact a namesake.

“Ndeupi Nyasha Mushekwi uyu, mupfanha wa Itai uya uya here (which Nyasha Mushekwi is this one, Itai’s young brother?).”

For me, that is the small but important impact that Itai had on his cousin, to the extent that people who saw the formative days could actually remember Nyasha through him.

Family and loyalty were at the centre of everything for Itai. In a family of bags of talent across different fields, there was another cousin of Itai, the musician Tendekai Mushekwi, the older brother of Nyasha, who goes by the stage name TK Hollun.

Itai had a more mature relationship with the singer, being of about nearly the same age, so they supported each other’s careers at the same level as young men trying to get strong foothold in their chosen paths.

I do also recall TK’s visits to 1 Union Avenue, sometimes in the company of other Urban Groove artistes, and Itai would have succeeded in getting his cousin good press from fellow showbiz reporters.

Itai Gwatidzo Mushekwe travelled to Germany slightly over 15 years ago on a journalism training programme and never returned home as Zimbabwe underwent serious hardships and economic collapse. He preferred to communicate via e-mail, but over the past few years, he lost touch with friends, and some family, for very personal reasons that a lot of us may also be prone to.

Itai had been dead for a few months when the horrible news was finally relayed to Mokwetsi last week through his global network of media connections, the announcement only coming in two days before the burial in Germany’s fourth largest city.

For me, while all this is inevitable as life is but a walking shadow, the saddest thing is the lone death and lone interment of somebody who from a young age became family not by blood, but by heart and same modest upbringing.

We take comfort in the wonderful memories that we will hold on to until we meet again.