I was fortunate enough to be educated at the best school Zimbabwe has to offer. I think it’s fair to say Peterhouse is one of the best educational institutions in Africa. I believe some skills I learnt at school such as public speaking and debating have contributed greatly to my personal growth as an adult. Looking back I sometimes wonder how it is that I ended up at Peterhouse, through to a university, into a 12 year career with the best FMCG business in the world and an MBA.
While it is easy to take the credit for how my life has developed and the opportunities I have had, there are a lot of events that are difficult to explain where the dice have fallen in my favour. I will recount some of these stories broken up into smaller parts. Today is part 1 which deals with a particular event that happened before I was born.
a. Who reads old newspapers anyway?
Many years ago in the mid 1970’s a young man had completed his secondary education and was sitting around in the rural areas of Zimbabwe. One of his uncles came to visit from the town and had with him an old newspaper. Browsing through the paper the young man noticed an advert by a big global mining company for graduate trainees. The closing date for applications had expired but the boy decided to apply anyway. He filled in the necessary forms and posted them.
b. Communication in an age before cellphones
In those days the only functioning phone in the area was the local Church mission. The mining company phoned the mission and asked to speak to the young man whose application they had received. The friendly priest requested that they call at a set time the following day as they would have to send a messenger to the village to notify him.
A day later the nervous rural boy arrived at the mission to wait for his call. When the phone rang the recruiter told him he would need to travel to Harare which was over 300kms away to attend an interview. Elated the young man returned to the village to inform his parents. There were still some challenges to overcome. Firstly it was not likely that his family would have enough money to pay for the transport required to Harare. Second, he did not have any known friends or family in Harare who could provide him with accommodation there and thirdly he actually did not know the city very well and had no idea how to get to his interview. Lastly, his passbook had been stolen a few weeks earlier and under the Ian Smith regime it was illegal for black people to travel around the country without a passbook.
The family scratched around and managed to rustle up enough money for a return trip to the big city. The accommodation plan was for him to sleep in the train station, then attend the interview in the morning and catch a train back on the same day. He would ask around in the city to find out where exactly the mining company’s offices were. The biggest challenge, however, was that of the passbook. His father decided to give him his own passbook. The hope was that the police wouldn’t pay much attention to the name in the book but would be just happy that he had one. This was a serious gamble because at the height of the guerrilla war any fraud related to passbooks would have had severe sequences for both parties. His father could have been beaten, tortured or imprisoned for this offence.
c. Rain can wash your problems away
The young man boarded a bus to Harare a day before the interview. Full of anxiety and excitement at the adventure he was embarking on. Some time into the journey they came across a police road block. This was going to be the first real test of the plan as the police were surely going to ask for passbooks. By pure act of God there was a sudden downpour of rain. The police decided to abandon their posts and seek shelter in their vehicles and the bus was able to proceed. The bus arrived in Harare and as the young man was disembarking he bumped into an uncle of his he hadn’t seen for a long time.
d. Do you have uncles in the police force?
This uncle was a policeman who had been injured on duty and was recuperating at the police barracks in town. The uncle invited the young man to spend the night with him at the police barracks, rather than at the train station. He fed him and the following morning escorted him to the door of the building where the interview was being held. No need to ask strangers for directions any more.
As they say, the rest is history and the young man got the job. You have probably worked it out already but that young man I refer to is actually my father. Through this opportunity with this mining company he ended up studying overseas and launching a very successful mining career. As a result of this success, his offspring, such as myself have been privileged to be able to get a very good education. If all goes according to plan, my own offspring should be able to get similar or better opportunities. Our family’s trajectory has shifted slightly. One day they will read this and hopefully laugh at my liberal use of the term offspring.
e. All sorts of what-ifs
What if he hadn’t read the paper that day, or the mission phone wasn’t working, or it didn’t rain as the bus approached the roadblock, or he didn’t meet some long lost uncle at the bus station? It’s a peculiar series of fortunate events. Only God knows how and why it came to being and I am very grateful.
Are there any fortunate events that you have experienced in your life that you just cannot explain? Or do you take credit for your planning and ingenuity being the 100% contributor of who you are today? Sometimes things are just not in our control, but just as there is suffering we cannot explain there sure are a lot of blessings we cannot explain that we need to be very grateful for too.
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Reblogged this on The Chronicles of Cupid Black.