Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa
Conway Tutani was my dear friend at the time of the University of Rhodesia in 1975.

I was from the ‘Skuru’ (school), St Augustines Penhalonga (Tsambe) and he was from the government Fletcher high school.

Our academic prowess had to be best rewarded with a post of secondary school teacher. Nothing more to imagine as African super brains.

Being of underprivileged African descent, our pleasure-seeking efforts have subsisted on the subordinate vote given to the Shona company.

It gave us a very valuable chance to occasionally visit Zimbabwe on chicken buses. Short of funds, we drank traditional or opaque beer in the bars of the townships.

For weekend nights, we stayed in rustic African hotels like Mangondoza in Nyanga.

It was a time when the London swing plagiarized black American music and turned it into all kinds of genres that would transform the entertainment world forever.

Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix have all been thrown into a music cauldron along with Stevie Wonder, Berry Goddy’s Tamla Motown, Chuck Berry and the rest.

Then there was jazz and blues as a base.

All this would resonate with the African drums of Osibisa, the Chacha of Congo, Mahlatini and his dancers Mahotela Queens, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

Zimbabwe offered its own polyglot of evolved or imitating musicians; Eye of Liberty, Lovemore Majaivana in Bulawayo, Manu Kambani, Jethro Shasha, Dorothy Masuka and Faith Dhauti.

Then there were the enduring Oliver Mtukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo.

All in all, Tutani exuded the cultural blend of his time.

Tutani was born and raised in the generation that would put freedom and democracy above his own life and his members.

When the moment called for wholesale and collective self-sacrifice, many volunteered to join the national liberation war effort.

Even though he did not enter Mozambique, Zambia or Botswana in the 1970s, he has remained true to the values ​​and ethics of this chosen generation of Samora Machel / Soweto 1976 uprising of the sub-region. .

No transgression offended Tutani as much as an attempt to cast contempt or laziness over the valiant guerrilla efforts of his classmates and contemporaries who fought in the heroic war, dead or alive.

It didn’t matter that he worked for private media which tended to have an inveterate inclination to denigrate sacred national values.

Candid and objective, self-introspection has never tolerated what he considered to be betrayal.

Resorting to disrespect for national glory and its precepts was sure to provoke fierce criticism from Tutani.

Perhaps being a Zimbabwean of Xhosa descent in the early colonial era may have shaped his collectivist and pan-African vision.

He also grew up in an urban setting in National, Mbare, that crucible of the nascent African nationalist resurgence.

The cosmopolitan outlook on life gave him a remarkable tolerance which tended to avoid excoriating controversy in his literary discourse.

Unless one of them was Hopewell Chin’ono, who really came into his sights because of a perceived charlatan and cavalier approach to current issues.

He was a rare type of patriotic journalist from Zimbabwe.

He would never sully the proven attributes of the revered profession by regressing to ideological fads or descending into the pits of geopolitical rumor.

He loved Africa with passion and used his keen intelligence and powerful pen to defend and exalt it.

I managed to come back alive from the Human War sausage machine.

Conway was so relieved and happy at the sight of me.

He started asking for other mutual friends who had also run away and after a dozen names were empty he collapsed into the silence of the grieving.

He realized that the war had been neither a walk in the park nor a dinner. Certainly not a football match between Highlanders and Dynamos after which all the players come back alive except for the same muscle pain.

For the remainder of our 40 years of post-war knowledge, we never broached this subject again. Instead, we preferred to remember the avant-garde music of our generation.

Our memories of death and pain tried to avoid the agonies of the time willingly and enthusiastically embraced by the Generation of Sacrifice.

Yesterday I continued to post to my favorite Facebook blogger.

I had given his name to a civil engineer who was leading the design of the new city being created by the Mvuma-Chivhu-Manhize Steel factory.

The Covid-19 was not helping us meet.

Yesterday morning, I received a message of condolence from the civil engineer. Yes, another page of my eventful life had been torn away for eternity.

Tutani wrote extensively on even the various subjects of his time on earth. His mind is all there to read and savor.

Tutani was appalled at the ignorance, laziness and neglect that underlay the Mugabeist regime.

He passionately believed that he was not serving the cause of the youth sacrifice of his generation in the 1970s.

Those who hated Africa crowded into a jubilant train of Afro-pessimists.

Tutani lived for the eternal hope of his country, of his African continent, of his diaspora and of all positive humanity.

He firmly believed that after surviving slavery, after fighting colonial rule, history would still give Africa its due.

Most of all, glean and learn so that we can strive to be dedicated residents and loving citizens of the nation. How to bury a friend and seek closure in these times of a pandemic