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Obituary: Tonderai Nyahunzvi
Tapera Kapuya
May 26, 2010

The Ukrainian writer Taras Shevshenko put it in one of his short stories, 'A Soldier's Path', 'there is nothing more selfish than to die young, and more stupid than to die old'. He had seen in his time many young lives as conflicted as the ones that became ours.

I am no more sad than I am nervous about Nyahunzvi's passing. I carry a mix of hope and frustration, but more nervous. On such a person's grave should be a bold epitaph inscribed: 'Here lies a man who loved his country'. On his, it is perhaps another number. He lies buried on a pauper ground. I hear he passed a two months back, in March. He was buried a month back. Some of us learnt it now.

A day before his passing a colleague and friend, Rashweat Mukundu, had responded to a distress call. Nyahunzvi was lying in agony and helpless outside Karigamombe Building. A spectacle for onlookers, perhaps too unconcerned or shaking heads in common fashion at this symbol of pity which he had become.

On arriving at the scene, Rashweat called the Harare Municipal ambulance services. They had no ambulance. This is a council whose Mayor, one of ours, recently bought himself a US$150 000 car. His wife is reported to have hers as well of a comparable value, from the same coffers that fail to buy residents an ambulance. His excuse: 'municipal regulations say so-. The regulations say nothing about ambulances or other services.

We must not risk blaming the Mayor and our council, our very own, for this tragedy. And many others. A look at the alternatives should not do this either: regulations are regulations. And so are laws. They are made by men to 'befit the offices of the leaders- and make them distinct from the led, and indeed extinct from the led. The combis we ride each day to and from work and the many dealing we have to do to raise money for the rates to buy the Mayor such luxury cost no more than US$5000 in Japan. I would assume, his car is perhaps worth 30 possible ambulances for our sunshine city. And 30 jobs for the ambulance drivers. And a happy, smiling resident.

Well, Rashweat ended up calling AMRAS, a cash ambulance service, which took Nyahunzvi to Parirenyatwa. We hear he passed the next day. The hospital did not concern itself calling Rashweat to inform him of the passing despite the fact that they had his number. The many who knew Nyahunzvi, who had known him for years, and his best friend Mbisva, spend months not knowing the fate that had befallen him.

Not that we could have done anything more. We perhaps could have been mildly depressed for a few minutes and gone back to the ordinary day. We would not allow ourselves to be beholden by some sense of responsibility. There would be no conversation on the meaning of such losses on the character of the struggle we fight nor on the ethic that underlie the relations we develop as a people with a shared struggle.

I knew Nyahunzvi from my early days at UZ. I can not recall how exactly we first met. It does not matter. But he was amongst the more vocal of the regiment of 'cadres' who formed the militant crust of the UZ student union then. He was not a student. But you would never pick this. He was amongst the most articulate, amongst the confident and certainly amongst the few who had a convincing idea of struggle. UZ and its students union was a home and space for struggle.

I could say I became friends with him in my second year. Two things shaped the closeness. I had been suspended from college. Coming from a deprived family for whom university education's illusion of a shared opportunity for upward class mobility seemed real, I found myself in a fix: no board, no means of sustenance. I found myself being housed (and supported) by Maxwell Saungweme, who himself had just spend a year away from college serving a suspension.

Max was then the youth chair of the NCA. His room, my room too, was a meeting ground of every shape of activists. It was a commune of sorts. This is the room to which Nyahunzvi, as many others, frequented: for short naps or for food. Most times for busfare if not money for a 'drink'. In all this, we always had opportunities for debate and deep conversations about the trajectory of struggle and the obvious associated gossip of personalities and the schemings that go with them.

In the same year, I was to stand for SRC elections. Nyahunzvi became naturally one of my campaign drivers. We won the elections by margins. He formed part of a convincing machinery that would push student activism at UZ.

Once we were arrested at a student protest on campus together with a group other students. Those early days in 2001, there was nothing such as legal defense funds and very few people strong enough to do a follow-up on arrested persons. We languished in cells for five days with the only thing that kept us going being his humor. We survived on 'jail food'. (I was to be arrested again with him and others during an NCA protest in 2004 and he was quick to point to me how things had changed: there was now a choice of KFC and other fast foods and lawyers were quick to act. We stayed in for four days - arrested on a Thursday and released on Monday after a court appearance).

I have not forgiven him for taking my collection of Taras Shevshenko. He did not borrow it. He never had that sense of borrowing. For him, there must be a space were 'comrades' share, where 'comrades' are entitled. He to my books and infrequent dollars for 'combi'. I to nothing really - perhaps only now with hindsight: to an experience with an organic intellectual and 'an in your face book' about how a revolution, a struggle consumes its children.

Nyahunzvi provided a serious face to those who looked for it, a comical face to those who sort it and, a cynicism to those who thought themselves smarter. That was him. We all have our stories - mostly about how a nuisance he was: disrupting meetings, making sure that those whom he supported and believed in (his friends) would never be undermined in his presence. And an impatience with order: meetings no matter how private, he would storm in and sit in! This is all him. A begrudging commitment to two organisations: his NCA and his MDC.

There are sure parts of his life which are painful in the context of our struggle. How do we allow such talent as his to fall in the gaps? And why? Nyahunzvi sure had a drinking problem, which we all knew. He faced throughout the last five years of his life (in the least) a crisis of uncertain future prospects amidst a deminishing social security in his then circumstances : the struggle did not prepare him for its aftermath nor did it provide any measure of support for his present circumstances. It has not prepared many. We have many young folks who have sacrificed their limp whose psycho-social welfare is on the hang. But even without thinking of this: does our struggle reflect on the effects it has on the agent? If not to address the anomalies, then to remind all of us that what we lost can not be a fair price for a compromised solution.

Even so, if we stop or dilute the core values and dreams we had at the start of it all, are we certain to emerge with political, economic and social systems that will turn the battlefields into homes for the many who are giving all for country and nation.

Comrade Nyahunzvi is gone. I pray that his life, concluded in youth, will perhaps trigger even a mild thought about the very character of our struggle. Unfair it is that should his death have had another explanation, circumstances and conversations would be different: a hero memorial it would have been, a celebration of life it would have been. 'The road was a long one', ends A Soldier's Path!

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