Freddy Mkwesha, who died this week at the age of 74, was one of the greatest football players this nation has ever produced.
CONWAY TUTANI ECHOES
The legendary striker made his name at Dynamos Football Club, where he was among illustrious founding players such as Bernard Marriot and Alois Meskano, among others, with the diminutive Sam Dauya taking care of the administrative side in 1963.
The record shows that DeMbare are the most successful team in Zimbabwe by a big, big margin.
It’s partly due to that solid foundation laid by Mkwesha and others that the Dynamos institution has stood the test of time.
I must admit, I only watched a handful of matches — maybe four at the most — featuring Mkwesha because I was too young at the time when he was at the peak of his powers, making waves on every football pitch he stepped onto.
But those few times I watched him were more than enough for me to appreciate his greatness as a footballer.
Did one have to watch Diego Armando Maradona many times to be convinced of his magical ability as a footballer or just once in 1986 as he sliced and glided through the entire England defence in the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Mexico?
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In my case, seeing Mkwesha once might as well have been enough. That was way back in 1966 when I was still in primary school in rebel Rhodesia. This was my first time to watch a top-flight football match.
The venue was Callies Stadium (long before it became Motor Action Club) in Eastlea, Salisbury (now Harare), right in the middle of white suburbia, deep into enemy territory, as it was then.
This was a Rhodesia National Football League clash between the all-white Salisbury Callies and the all-black Dynamos. The line-ups reflected the racial divide of the time.
But you can imagine my disappointment when Callies quickly raced into the lead and were 3-0 up with less than 10 minutes to go.
But, well, little did I know that the best was still to come. In those last tension-filled minutes, who else but Mkwesha rose to the occasion and rescued the situation? Unbelievably, he struck a hat-trick — yes, three goals all by himself! — to salvage a point for Dynamos.
He virtually single-handedly tore Callies apart. When the referee blew the whistle to end the match, it was too soon for me. Mkwesha’s hero status, which had preceded him, was sealed in my eyes.
I saw with my own eyes what I had heard before about Mkwesha. As soon as he touched the ball, Callies players would panic, screaming at each other: “Mark Makwesha! Mark Makwesha!” much to our delight on the terraces at not only their mighty dread of him, but also their failure to correctly pronounce his name, calling him “Makwesha” instead of “Mkwesha”.
Any football fan of that time will tell you that “Mark Makwesha” became a sort of slogan of pride providing much laughter and delight as blacks had proved that they could beat the white man at his own game despite legalised racism.
From then, I began to watch top-flight football regularly until the era of Moses Chunga, another great player of his generation.
I remember very well that Sunday afternoon at Callies as if it was yesterday. Mkwesha’s dazzling dribbling skills left the Callies players in a heap.
The same way some decades later in the 1990s, young Peter Ndlovu’s mesmerising footwork would leave Tunisia defenders colliding with each other at Barbourfields. Yes, every generation has its greats.
It must be admitted that white players were not the worst of the racist lot as quite many of them were for fair competition and rightly recognised that if they were to prove themselves as footballers, they would have to play against the best — whether black or whatever colour.
Stadiums provided equal and fair ground for competition — unlike at the workplace where the white person, no matter how unqualified and incompetent, was always the superior and was paid much more merely because of the colour of the skin.
There in stadiums blacks were taking on the white man and beating him at his own game. Taking delight in beating whites was not sadistic, but liberating, cathartic.
It provided psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions, that release of emotions or emotional tension to restore or refresh the spirit by bringing repressed feelings and fear to surface.
But that did not make blacks — to their immense credit — attack and kill Callies players when they came to play in township stadiums such as Gwanzura in Highfield for their away matches. Obscenities were thrown back and forth, but it rarely escalated into all-out war.
Diehard racists had their own “apartheid” leagues which completely excluded blacks, so blacks could clearly distinguish that it was possible to work and play with some sections of whites — despite whites being poisoned by the racist system — as fellow human beings at various levels.
It must be stated here and now that not all whites were racist, but the system was.
In the same vein, it must be stated that the heinous and hideous monstrosity that Zanu PF has become does not make all Zanu PF members monsters. We know who the diehards are.
There are many good people in that party, who are being stifled by the system as much as those in the opposition. There are real grounds for co-operation across the board instead of trying to decimate each other. We are all Zimbabweans and our destiny is tied together. How productive has polarisation been in the development of Zimbabwe?
Mkweshas are not born every day. Every generation has its heroes. My generation had heroes like Mkwesha. There were great players before and after him, but to us, he was a point of reference. He is what we grew up knowing. You can only talk of what you intimately know.
I know that I grew up faster by going to football matches and being exposed to both the undertones and overtones of a racially divided society The formation of Dynamos itself was a loud statement of defiance and independence. People could get one over the system at stadiums. Like they were saying: What you can do, we can do better.
Mkwesha, with his fabulous skills, played a great part in this. Can it get more heroic?
Rest in peace, “Mark Makwesha!”
lConway Nkumbuzo Tutani is a Harare-based columnist. Email: [email protected]
