Pursuit of the Elusive Dream

Dedication

To my children: Gerald, Audrey, Lorraine and Valerie.

Know ye your roots, children, and
whence your power derives its force.
Be reminded that
it didn’t
come easy.


Introduction

Before writing this memoir, I often wondered how one takes the plunge and begins telling the story of a lifetime, especially one that includes grim childhood details of extreme poverty and a relentless search and waiting for a perceived life of comfort as I edged into adulthood. After mulling over the assignment before me and finally bringing together the bits and bobs of memories I have gathered about myself and the circumstances that have nurtured me, I am chuffed to bits to get started and commit these thoughts in the pages that follow. My wife, Margaret, son Gerald and daughters Audrey, Lorraine and Valerie have occasionally had the good fortune of listening to me telling them broken pieces of my life experiences during family mealtimes or while we relaxed in the lounge at home. With you, dear reader, my family can now sit back and watch me condense these reminiscences in a book they can read at leisure. The chapters in this book represent a selection from numerous recounts of events that I made to my family (including pieces that I may not have even told them) that, while nevertheless by no means exhaustive, constitute what will probably appear to some of you, my readers, as an unnecessarily obese volume. But I must remind you that this is the story of my life, so I feel there may be no apology that I can possibly offer for this hypertrophy of verbiage! For a long time, I kept promising my family I would start writing this memoir. Still, somehow for reasons to do with my inability to organise myself properly, I persisted in putting it off.
The title of this book, “Pursuit of the Elusive Dream”, is about Me. I talk extensively about myself in this book, and there are no holds barred. The memoir is published in my name ‘Lawrence D Moyo’ which name I have publicly been known as for the past sixty odd years. Otherwise, for all my years in middle primary school, part of my secondary school, the period of my training as a teacher and even a bit of my university education, I used a mixed bag of names which, from my unmerited position, I have the privilege to tell you that some of these names will have no bearing on your knowing anything about them, save to say most of them were completely at variance with my family names or the true names I have been known by. The multiplicity of these and often offending surnames, furtively stealing their way onto some of my school reports and other personal paraphernalia of the document type, arose principally from my quest in the 1960s to attend African government primary and secondary schools in Salisbury (now Harare).
For reasons associated with the political climate obtaining in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) at that time, these places of learning enrolled in them only those black children of parents who had been authorised to live in rented municipal houses in African townships. Schools would without exception demand production of relevant documents to confirm that a child seeking enrolment was a bona fide child of parents who had permission to live in the African locations which by then had mushroomed in towns and cities all over Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Towns and cities were essentially European areas by designation in terms of the Land Apportionment Act brought into law in the parliament of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1930. In terms of that law, Europeans alone were entitled to live in urban areas while all those of colour were relegated to live far away in rural areas. In terms of that discriminatory law, therefore, it was illegal for black parents to send their children to attend schools outside their assigned tribal trust lands.
As most of my readers will probably be total strangers to me, I will get to share with them episodes or experiences I have never shared with them before. To be honest, except for perhaps my wife, my children, immediate family members, students I once taught in schools and colleges in Zimbabwe and in the UK, collegemates and workmates and a handful of close friends and associates, the great majority of my readers will not immediately recognise me. It is true because we have never met anywhere for whatever reason. I am by no means a celebrity of any sort; it has never been my wish to be one. I am content and a freer man to be hidden in the inconspicuousness of my nonentity. Before we go too far, let me be categorical about one important matter: English is by no means my first language although, being colonial Rhodesia, it was the official medium of communication through which all teaching and learning in the school system were conducted. So, in my flat-footed, though not plodding prose style, I make a determined effort to express myself in writing intelligibly as I take you on a tour of a whole raft of my childhood and adult experiences in this book.
As you read through this book, it may seem that some of the anecdotes that I narrate will give you the sense of soliloquies or monologues. You may discover that at times, it appears as if I am having a conversation with myself. Now depending on your analytical ability and the level at which you reach your conclusions, you might be allowed through these seemly devices the rare opportunity to identify the invisible force, the inner workings of my psyche that sustained my spirit through the rigours and ravages of my childhood and adulthood when I was tossed about from pillar to post by circumstances beyond my control.
Some of the events I narrate were happy while others were probably sad. Within the sub-plots that surreptitiously emerge as the sequence of events in the book unfolds, I explore several themes, some of them probably controversial to my readers. In no order of priority or importance, therefore, some of the themes that I discuss are child and domestic abuse; racial discrimination and its effects on people’s attitudes and behaviours; identity; equal rights; racism per se; ‘hidden racism’; diversity; violence; deprivation and evils of individualism. By way of ventilating my thoughts on some of these themes, I have put myself in the centre as a by-product of the extent to which a stultifying environment, the negative outcomes of evil practices, attitudes and behaviours by other people can have the potential to frustrate or altogether kill off all hope and aspiration in budding youth. In my case and through hard work, sheer determination, and aspiration-flow, I adopt the ‘fight’ and not the ‘flight’ spirit. Indeed, like the proverbial phoenix, I rise from the ashes and face the challenges before me head-on to free myself from the evil clutches of deprivation and the malevolent attitudes of other forces. The forces I refer to symbolise human beings who do not believe that the things that are good for them must also correspond to the natural needs that are the same for everybody else. This book is an epic account of my heroic struggle to escape a life of grinding poverty and unhappiness.
My struggles as a school-going child to obtain a formal education in Enkeldoorn (Chivhu), Gwelo (Gweru), Selukwe (Shurugwi) and Salisbury (Harare) in pre-independence Zimbabwe are consistent with the Greek Philosopher Aristotle who says, ‘the means we use to finally grasp those goods that we seek so that in the end we live well is by developing in ourselves and acquiring good habits in the form of intellectual and moral virtues.’ Acquisition of those moral virtues will help us to choose our options correctly as we move through life. Possession of such virtues will also determine whether at the end of all our efforts, we will enjoy good living or not. Aristotle concludes his argument on possession of moral virtues by pointing out that if we do not choose our options correctly and therefore tend to make too many bad choices, we will be destined to live poorly. Then as the thread of my story unfolds and I become an adult, I am seized with the same mindset where, juxtaposed with the vexing issue of living the good life. Aristotle further emphasises that the goal of human life is to flourish, to live well and enjoy the comforts and conveniences that life has to offer.
Stretching his perspective further, Aristotle says some of the good things or the natural desires that we must accumulate, over the course of our lives, include health, pleasure, food, drink, shelter, clothing, knowledge, skills, love, self-esteem, aesthetic enjoyment, and honour. All our actions should aim at this goal.
With all these ideas at the back of my mind as I progress through my life of work and study in the Zimbabwean and UK corridors, I find myself ceaselessly on the move in search of better opportunities to obtain comfort and happiness, life chances, employment, and a better quality of life for myself and my family. In the full grasp of Aristotle’s philosophy on living the good life, it will be noted in ‘Pursuit of the Elusive Dream’ that my wife, Margaret, and I do not just concentrate on increasing our knowledge and skills about the nature of our occupations. I reserve a whole area of the book to talk about my work as a teacher and our children who I am proud to say were our biggest achievement and I single them out as ‘our bundles of joy’. As parents who recognise that educational achievement is a key determinant of financial success, we spare no effort and cost in cultivating in them an appreciation of the value of acquiring a strong educational base. To this end, my wife and I invested heavily in ensuring they each attended top performing primary and secondary schools in Zimbabwe at the time so that they would be ready to face the challenges of life ahead of them and engage in making choices unconstrained by the circumstances in which they would live and work.
Earlier in the book, I present a caricature of my father as the basis of my origin and how his personality shaped me into the person I am today. My biological father, Timothy Dzenga Mudyara, was driven by an ambition to achieve fame as a small-scale farmer. He calculates that achieving fame as an African farmer would be his escape route from the negative effects of racial discrimination in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in which many blacks suffered. He uprooted himself from his rural home in Nharira Tribal Trust Lands (Mashonaland East Province) where I was born. Then against all odds, he embarked on a hazardous expedition as a small-scale farmer on soils of doubtful fertility in an area of unreliable weather patterns. It is in these provincial, rough, and dreary conditions where my childhood and early adolescence were nurtured. I project my father as a ‘He-man’ in the farm compound who has a mercurial temper. He rarely spoke to or smiled at me and my brothers, ever.
In the winter months of May, June and July when work in the fields is considerably reduced in the Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) countryside, his idea of relaxation in the evening is to sit quietly but seriously on a stool or chair by a fire at the ‘dare’ scratching or strumming lightly on a ‘mbira’ instrument, humming an old hunting song in accompaniment. Hardly anybody, including his wives, will make him smile. Yet when the summer rains begin falling in earnest in November following a long dry spell, seeing him feign a smile is an absolute revelation. I make this submission here and now because I spend the whole of my childhood years being brutally disciplined by that man. When things went wrong between you and him, it was you who got the worst end of the stick. He would pick up any hard object near him and hurl it at you. I cannot remember how many times he threw hoe or axe handles at me. Fortunately, I always quickly ducked away from his intended target, and he always missed his targets whenever he threw these missiles in a fit of temper. Otherwise, I would have had one of my lower limbs or both broken. In one incident, he threw an axe at me. The instrument of death missed me by a whisker; I ran round the corner of a brick building and the force of the axe was, luckily for me, wasted on the foundation stone. That man was hard.
In a large section of this book, I have no choice but to present a caricature, as best as I can, of him as a man who ultimately became my father. As a result of his over-indulgence in substance misuse, especially alcohol drinking, my father died of suspected liver cirrhosis in 1979. Presuming upon your goodwill, reader, I sincerely hope that the image of my father that I will portray in this narrative, without any intention on my part to exaggerate it, will not seem egregious to you. However, given that I sought to make it abundantly clear the nature of his character traits, I hope that by juxtaposition, it will also be easy for you to understand the difficult childhood I endured at his mercy.
As the story unwinds, I also write at considerable length about my mother, Leah, or ‘Rheya’ (nee Muguto). Expressing my thoughts about her in this book is like a blast from the past which I find therapeutic after some of the harsh realities of life I have encountered so far since she died over thirty years ago. Finding herself in a polygamous marriage with a husband none other than my father, she relentlessly worked so hard to set all her children up in the world, the seven of us, in grim circumstances of life as one of the farmer’s three wives. She did so, at huge expense to her personal health, to equip us with capabilities which in later life would not find us wanting amidst a myriad challenges of life that lay ahead for each one of us, her seven children. In this book, I include a singular and colourful description of my maiden bus-ride from a bus terminus in Enkeldoorn (now Chivhu).
I highlight that flashback as an example of the immeasurableness of my mother’s support for me by the painstaking efforts she takes to prepare me for that maiden journey and to personally accompany me to the bus station on foot. Up to that point in my childhood, I had never seen the inside of or travelled by bus or train before. So, in that description, I left my rural background behind to travel to Gwelo (now Gweru) aboard a bus and a train for the very first time. I will treasure forever the memory of my mother walking with me a distance of ten kilometres, with my clothes’ case carefully balanced on her head because she wanted to see me off at the bus station, the very first time I had ever gone off on my own to travel on a bus. Having reached the bus station, it took a long time before the only bus to a place called Umvuma (now Mvuma) arrived. My mother and I waited for the bus to arrive in a crowd of other would-be passengers.
Then, orderly, and more civilised entrance routines into modes of public transport or the queues that have become commonplace today in banks, superstores and so on, were unheard of at that stage of my growing up in colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). In other words, if it were not for my mother’s mad dash when the bus arrived as she heaved and handed over my clothes’ case to the bus conductor who stood on top of the bus carrier while I engaged in what amounted to a physical combat with other would be passengers in a brutal competition to enter the bus, there would have been a risk of my failing to catch that one and only bus on the day. I am eternally grateful to a countless of things my mother did out of her maternal instinct to support me, and my other six siblings, as a I grew up at the farm. In later life and a few years after the start of my teaching career, the gentle giant experienced complications arising from a broken marriage, high blood pressure and sugar diabetes, all these combined led to her passing on quietly on one dark night in March 1986, leaving me and my six other siblings to thrash our own paths through life and chart our own individual destinies.
In keeping with the policy of ‘separate development’ in colonial Rhodesia of my childhood, children of Africans who lived in ‘reserves’ or in ‘lines’ were supposed to attend schools and complete their education in their designated places of abode, appropriately called Tribal Trust Lands. The few government-funded primary and secondary schools found in urban areas for Africans at that time in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) were meant to cater for just those few Africans who had left their homes in rural areas to come and find work as cooks, garden ‘boys’, waiters, labourers, cleaners etc. on properties that belonged to Europeans.
Those of us like me who unknowingly drifted to towns to look for school places but unfortunately did not have parents or close relatives with town passes that authorised them to live and work in European areas, were regarded as ‘unregistered’ for purposes of enrolment in the few available urban government schools. In the likely event that one did not find places to attend school in urban African townships, the only alternative one had was to return to seek enrolment in schools which did not exist in our rural areas. Thus, thousands of my counterparts suffered an abrupt end to their dreams of an education. However, mindful guardians, supported and assisted by kind and helpful political activist ‘landlords’ who rented houses in towns and cities, resorted to devious means whereby hapless children like me were enabled to continue with our education in urban government schools, untrammelled by prevailing restrictions.
For me finally to be able to attend schools in Harari Township (Mbare), I had no choice but to resort to the use of undercover names for my middle to upper primary school, as well as my secondary school education. The trick of using pseudonyms may have surprisingly worked for me in my quest to gain or complete my education. Yet the larger number of pseudonyms by which I was known, some of them double-barrelled and very offending, caused me serious grief and inconvenience in my first few years as a teacher. The utter confusion the litany of surnames on my personal profile presented fell on me. I made a solemn vow that before the time came for me to pass-on, my wife Margaret, and my children Gerald, Audrey, Lorraine, and Valerie would never be placed in the same predicament of finding themselves in possession of distorted identities as I had because I omitted to do the right thing when I was still alive.
Five years into my teaching career, and interestingly with my father assisting me, I used the services of a Notary Public to straighten things out officially. Consequently, I had the litany of undesirable and conflicting surnames that had been appended to me deleted, leaving me with just my clan name ‘Moyo’ as my official surname. In line with the practice at the time, I had already dropped my first name at birth, ‘Kingston’, when I was baptised and confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church in 1962. The only noteworthy survivor of the name-culling was my current middle name ‘Dzenga’ which I requested should be retained for spiritual and emotional reasons, remaining a permanent fixture in my name configuration until eternity. Most other people’s names, especially those of members of my immediate and extended family, stated in this book are true and correct as this book goes to the publishers. But names that refer directly to owners of small patches of land in the neighbourhood as I grew up at Maronda Mashanu in Enkeldoorn (Chivhu), including other people I got myself mixed up with as a teacher trainee and while I offered my services as a teaching practitioner and educational administrator, were either omitted altogether or pseudonymised to protect the individual identities of the persons concerned. The full story of who exactly I am and who the ‘VaRozvi’ people in Zimbabwe are, is a long, tedious, and complicated one, which would need to be researched upon more deeply before a book could be produced separately on that subject.
Meanwhile, I will make a small input to assist my readers who will be wondering where I derived the inspiration to write a book of this magnitude with the emotive title: ‘Pursuit of the Elusive Dream.’ In addressing this matter, I will consider the fact that although I am a British Citizen by naturalisation, not only am I not a native English language speaker but also that, for reasons I have already briefly outlined in paragraphs above, I did not have a proper grounding in studies of English Language and Literature as a fulltime secondary school pupil.