Belinda Thokozile Mavimbela, born Saturday November 14,1931

Today I am presenting you the identity of 

RELATIVE:

Thokozile Mavimbela-Phiri 

RELATIONSHIP: BY BLOOD my mother This woman is also the maternal aunt to Thembsile Sithole


CONTACT EXPEREINCE: IN PERSON


ANCESTRY: PATERNALLY

1. Father: Verimuch Mavimbela a farmer and local priest (The Brook and Lake Chrissie, South Africa).
2. Grandfather: a soldier who went missing in action, one Royal Swazi subject, Mr Mashoma Mavimbela (around Manzini areas ?Kuboyane, ?Engcwengcweni etc in the Kingdom of Swaziland)
3. Great-gran: Mnukwa Mavimbela, a famed herbalist in Swaziland?

POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS: Commendably strict on her children. I liked the way she NEVER ever had favourites among her nine (9) children, which was a far cry from my father who tended to dote on his first-born boy kid and his first-born girl-kid.  In many respects my mother is the one person who taught me hatred for unfair discrimination of any kind.  But my father was the one who gave me the FIRE  with which to fight discrimination BECAUSE I TOOK MY FIRST PRACTICE SESSIONS IN ANTI-DISCRIMINATION  when I would corner my father together with his blue-eyed boy, my elder brother, Jackson.  Or I would pillory him whenever they would wrongfully agree on something with her unduly favourite daughter, (my younger sister by three children),  Miss Grace Siphiwe Phiri.


RESIDENCE: (WITH NEITHER STREET NOR HOUSE NUMBER) Empuluzi, Mayflower, Mpumalanga Province of South Africa.

INCIDENTS: 

As her fifth child (if you include a miscarriage that occurred a year before I was born in 1961) you can imagine incidents with that woman, right from her womb, are too numerable to tabulate.  But she was thirty when she gave birth to me.

MOST MEMORABLE EVENT/ACCOUNT:  

During my early pre-teens in South Africa, despite our Swazi-speaking back-ground, we were forced by the Apartheid System to take Zulu at school... in fact there was no Siswati as an official language those days.


That, by the way, is the fate that befell every African child in the Eastern Cape, causing  EVERYBODY IN THE PROVINCE TO SPEAK ISIXHOSA (whereas there are other indigenous languages there that were suppressed for whatever design of the settler colonialists).



As a result, I struggled a lot to master my "first language" Zulu" at school, almost as hard as I was finding it to learn both English and Afrikaans.


To ameliorate my anguish over one of Africa's greatest languages, whenever I came back from my First Grades at school, my mother would seat me down and make me read my Zulu book loudly to her.


One page of such books related this strange story to do with some creature which was so thin that, in some way very much macabre, its ribs would spring out of the chest and, if nothing was done about those rib-cage protrusions and perforations, the ribs had every promise to dislodge from the sternum and to simply show a clean pair of heels.


Indeed, you don't find a mind half as fertile as that of a child, or the child Goodman Manyanya Phiri! But, in the Zulu reader we used at our school (I think we called it  Ukucathula), the story read:


 "Kuzace, izimbambo ziyabaleka."


"Kuzace"= "It is so thin"


 "izimbambo"= "the ribs"


 "ziyabaleka"= "are running away"

My imagination completely fired  by a most amazing story, I read this sentence over and over again completely lost to the fact that I was in the process killing my mother, what with her cheeks overflowing with tears of laughter.

"Mamma, you are laughing!" I complained.  "Stop laughing and please tell me what kind of a creature this has to be to survive both emaciation and a state of ribs that constantly come and go off its chest?"

My mother then took a more solemn look and said: "It is not like the ribs 'are running away'".

"Well," I stood my ground. "Those ribs have to be running around if they wrote this way in the book, Mamma...maybe you don't trust my reading.  Have a look, will you? Here is the word... 'ba-le-ka', which means 'RUN-AWAY.'"

"Your reading of 'ba-le-ka' is where the problem lies, my child." the short, stockily built and very dark-skinned woman said to me.

"Now, please read the sentence once again and put the '-le-' sound a lot lower than you have been doing.  Then you will see magic turning the entire meaning of the sentence."

Indeed, I listened to my mother and did a reading with the "ba-" a little bit higher so that I could bring "-le-" down.  And Abracadabra, the meaning changed totally with the ribs of the animal staying put in the torso, if only too ready to be COUNTED!

Aha!!! So the creature was 'so thin, you could COUNT the ribs'!

From that time on I was careful when I read any language loudly.  I developed a subvocal prescience some five words  or so ahead before I vocally pronounced the wording to my audience.

I grew up to be, in any language, one of the best readers in class even up to High School at Nelspruit/Mbombela's Thembeka Senior Secondary where on my Grade 12 I was awarded the prize of "1980 Year's Best English-Language Student, complete with my first 2-kg-heavy Oxford English Dictionary.  I struggle to this day as to whom to give credit for that achievement: the humble Grade-2 woman stuff called my mother with her Zulu intonations, or my teachers in the Queen's, notably Mr Clement Magagula, a Mr Bowling, or a Mrs Spengler.

When (many decades down the line) Mr Jacob Zuma discovered me in a Maputo jail (in 1984); redeeming me only to send me to Angola, I arrived to MK's Viana Military Camp to become now the most favoured news-reader for the guerillas prior to news analyses over South African events every morning.

My 1984-5 life in Angola has snippets towards the tail-end of a video I shot last year during the solemnization of my traditional marriage with my second wife, LaTsabedze.

Now, the best man there is one of the Umkhonto We-Sizwe officers (Mr Simon Sekgokgo Mabalane a.k.a "Earl") who, in Angola, would recommend this or that "intellectual" work be done by Terence Qwabe (my combat name with MK) only to find that their last recommendation (accepted by  Comrade Chris Hani) was that I be sent to Tanzania to help teach at Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College.

Of course that recommendation opened a brand-new chapter  in my life, simply too big for the brevity of my story about my mother. All in all, I enjoyed the company of, and experience I acquired from, Umkhonto WeSizwe cadres many of whom I am great friend with to this day!.

Suffice it to say that, going back to my original organization, the PAC's APLA-Azanian People's Liberation Army in Dar es-Salaam, Party Chairman Johnson Mlambo apparently heard reports about my good "maternal intonations" in languages.

Mlambo apprently and very authoritatively opined: "If the comrade is comfortable with the idea, please send him over to assist with our broadcast journalism with Radio Tanzania, Dar es-Salaam."


There, I became an air-waves hit of sorts with audiences ex-both my fellow-guerrillas undergoing military training around Tanzania on one hand, and on the other, a listerniship from all around the world, not of course forgetting the targetted audience, "The people of Azania so oppressed by Settler colonialism spearheaded by the apartheid regime."

When everybody was falsely blaming the PAC for being "a black racist organization hell-bent to drive every ethnic-European South-African into the sea", I was pleasantly surprised one day to open a letter from someone in Europe at my work-place: the studios of  Radio Tanzania Dar es-Salaam.


The listener was expressing appreciation at the way programmes were done by The Voice of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and its Military Wing the Azanian People's Liberation Army... particularly impressed with the reading and political analyses style of one Mordecai King.


But Mordecai King was my name for the airwaves!


I knew exactly what the European audience was referring to.   I, for an example, had one Xhosa-speaking trainee broadcaster of mine at some stage.


So, every time I'd point out to Comrade Tasco the correct pronunciation of "regime", he  would tell me point-blank that, "on the contrary, Comrade Mordecai... and I fail to understand what the Charterist ANC was teaching you now in their camps about the English and settler's language you are so eager to treat with kid-gloves, but the word ought to be pronounced 'reggie-high-em' and not your 'reggie-him'.


"'Reggie-him'" Comrade Tasco would rave on long after I had hung the gloves and rested my case.  "Does nott make any sense at all in comparison with similarly-spelt words in the English.  Plus, please remember: there is no master of English pronunciation here."


Yes I knew that the Boer regime was hated by every freedom-fighter worth his or her salt; but I'd thought taking it so low as to be well below the belt was rather like taking matters too far!

Bluntly, but truly, and because of his extraordinary pronunciation, I couldn't help thinking "Racist Vagina" every time my comrade was reading "Racist Regime" on air.

In fact I believe many listeners got the same feelings too.  Hence, when Mordecai King came on air, they felt they owed The Voice an oblique rebuke by praising those who, like Mordecai, showed some sensitivity towards "the enemy's language".

Fast-forwarding to 2012; and now for those who think "Phiri is so useless that somebody in his child-hood background is to blame for his failure status in life, "Phiri all the time only bothering about voluminous writing spells together with unnecessary care for English pronunciations", please blame it on my mother who was the one who first taught me the art of handling vocalized sounds.  

an amateur photographer's undated picture of my mother born Belinda Thokozile Mavimbela The eldest female child by Mr Verimuch Mavimbela from two wives, LaNkosi (the Princess who mothered Belinda) and LaShabangu who bore Mavimbela a number of other girl children as well, the most famous of whom is Miss Elizabeth Siphiwe Mavimbela who's also The youngest girl child by Mr Mavimbela (ex-LaShabangu)

Of course, me and my mom started with words (I'm struggling with a similar English word) in Nguni that are written the same and pronounced the same, except for intonation; all in order to produce a totally different meaning.

Both IsiZulu and even Siswati Languages are rich in such words:  like 'mema', which, depending on intonation can mean "put someone on your back" or "invite".

umcondvo ="mere match-sticks for legs/ thinness in the legs" or "idea"

emabele= "victuals" or "udders"

buza= "pose a question" or "cast off the old skin"

Goodman Manyanya Phiri (writer and Blogger) and 5th child to Belinda (two pictures above)