Friday, 24 December 2021

Mum obit

 OBITUARY

MRS EDITH RUDO GWATA


 

Mrs Edith Gwata was born on 24 August 1924 to Mr Joshua and Mrs Alice Mujuru in Murehwa, Southern Rhodesia. She was the third of nine children. She grew up in a household of thirteen children that included four orphaned cousins.

She married David Ngoni Gwata of Marandellas, Southern Rhodesia on 4 February 1950 and was widowed on 25 August 2003.

As at 6 April 2021, she had six children, sixteen grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren.

Mrs Gwata’s distinguishing features were vision, courage, sagacity, a sense of humour and a caring spirit. Ferocious individuality was an element of her courage. She did not hesitate to stand alone when necessary. This contradicts the collective mindset that traditional African culture engenders. We enjoyed a very superior upbringing for it. The family’s success owed as much to her long term vision as it did to her indomitable persistence.

Her caring spirit led her into the nursing profession while her visionary resoluteness led her out of it. Asked why she did not encourage her daughters to become nurses, she said nursing was a calling that came from an internal voice rather than external encouragement.

She had the courage of her convictions and did not hesitate to defend her principles even if it put her career at risk. In the late forties she stood in a tribunal to give evidence in a negligence case against a Doctor McDowell whom she worked under in Enkeldoorn, Rhodesia. Other nurses had warned her that she would lose her job if she testified to the truth. She went ahead and told the truth anyway. She did not lose her job. Instead, the doctor in question ended up respecting her more. She overheard him praising her for being honest. She also exposed an errant evangelist when she was a church treasurer.

Her caring spirit partly emanated from her strong Christian conviction. In her more active years she was a lay preacher in the Methodist Church. In the early seventies she single handedly rescued a lightning victim from a burning hut. The hut collapsed in flames shortly after she dragged the man out. He went on to recover.

She was a visionary ahead of her time, especially regarding equality of the sexes and education. At a time when many African parents did not fully understand the value of education, she already had a tenacious vision for her children’s education. This vision took some knocking when, in the late fifties she struggled to get through to her children’s school teachers. To make matters worse the teachers were not great in her estimation. The last straw was when she discovered that one of her children was playing truant but the teachers had not said. In the end she settled on a drastic move for the whole family. They were living in the then venerable township of Highfield in Salisbury.  It was reason enough for her to move to the rural areas. Her incisive intellect brought her loneliness sometimes. Some of her family could never understand when she proposed this, especially when it meant turning down a job offer at the spanking new Harare Central Hospital. Fortunately her husband could understand and she was not afraid to forge her own path. In hindsight, that was one of the best decisions she ever made. Rural schools were not the best equipped but the rapport she managed to strike with our teachers more than made up for this deficiency. Furthermore, before the advent of information technology, education was still a great equalizer regardless of where it was obtained. The rural environment proved much more conducive to monitoring and motivating her children. She instilled in us the ethics of education and self-reliance at an early age. In her consultations with our teachers she specifically authorized corporal punishment by any means short of assault. She must have known her children very well! Without that threat my playful streak would no doubt have precluded me from making much progress in school. We did not realize it then, but she was a fierce defender of our welfare – rather akin to a lioness.

The move to the rural areas did not remain advantageous indefinitely. In the late seventies as the war of liberation intensified, it became a more risky place to be compared with urban areas. Fortunately most of the children had left home or were at boarding school with the exception of the youngest, who had to be spirited away to urban safety.

She had her idiosyncrasies. One of them was that she did not suffer fools gladly. As a result we could never let down our guard when we grew up. She did not hesitate to reproach her children even when the fault was just a weak joke. Her intolerance of incompetence was not restricted to family affairs. She walked out of a cooperative venture when a man she considered incompetent was elected secretary.

Another of her idiosyncrasies was her attitude towards sport. She believed sporting prowess and academic progress were mutually exclusive. I don’t remember her ever encouraging me in sport at all. Instead she often reminded me that no one in our clan had ever got anywhere through sport and I was not likely to change that. She never came to any of my school sports occasions but she was always there for academic functions. In fact I suspect she actually viewed sport as an unwelcome distraction. In hindsight I can see where she was coming from. Before independence, opportunities for Blacks in Rhodesia were limited and the only way to make it was through academic achievement. I was not aware of even a single Black professional sportsman in Rhodesia.

She was such a wit though. We grew up laughing.  Everyone in the family and neighbourhood had a nickname. There were even some utility nicknames for those who were either too young or not around long enough to warrant permanent infrastructure. It was only much later in life that I realized she was the only one who never had a nickname. That says something about the source of the nicknamesJ

Her mordant sense of humour even weathered stressful patches in the family history. Educational demands on the family budget peaked in the early seventies when the eldest child was admitted to the University of Rhodesia. The stresses on the family finances then were evident even to us young ones. In spite of that her sense of humour prevailed and she remained the chief excitement officer of the family. She could make you laugh in the most depressing of circumstances. She was also well aware of the futility of bitterness and so successfully sheltered her children against the racial hatred sentiments that prevailed in pre-independence Rhodesia.

Even in her old age she remained brave. On the evening of 8 March 2005 she was unlocking her front door when her masked assailant emerged from the shadows. She was struck on the forehead with a blunt object but she did not go down. Instead she turned around and grabbed him by the shoulders and effectively wrestled him. She inflicted a  scar on him that later facilitated his arrest. Not bad for an octogenarian. Then her dogs arrived and that decided the contest.

The burglar fled empty handed, leaving a blood stained shoe behind.

By the time the gardener got out of bed and staggered to the main house to investigate, the show was already over.

So mum effectively repulsed a burglar single-handedly. She sustained a cut on her forehead and a bleeding eye. She went on to recover from both.

She was a bright student in her day. She was the top pupil in her class at Howard Institute. She also went on to graduate from nursing school in the late forties with distinction. She was the top student not only in her school but countrywide. Ten years later she went to deliver one of her daughters at the same teaching hospital. When word got round, nurses went to the maternity ward just to catch a glimpse of this legendary genius.

Her talents extended well beyond nursing. She succeeded in almost everything she touched from cooking, sewing through lay preaching and church administration to even farming. One thing that even she could not save was the family grocery shop that folded in the late sixties. Fortunately that was the only exception.

Overall, she had a flair for deciphering patterns in apparent chaos. A bit of that must have rubbed onto her children, if natural ability at Scrabble is anything to go by. Our grandparents reckoned our grasp of the Shona language was outstanding. That was hardly surprising considering we learnt the language under a maestro with a massive vocabulary and outstanding capacity for appropriate word choice. She had a way with words. Naturally, superior vocabulary development came as standard for us.

In her eighties she continued a brave fight against two health challenges of old age, namely rheumatoid arthritis and tachyarrhythmiasis. Her medication for the latter included amiodarone, a cardiac depressant of last resort! In spite of this she remained a sprightly lady. One sign of age was that it was now possible to see her sitting idle. That was not possible in her day. She was always busy doing something.

Thankfully she never showed any signs of dementia. Even at 96 she remained coherent and sharp. She lived alone in the family home, only reluctantly taking on a nurse aid in her final years when her physical strength significantly declined.

Like her mother, she was an indefatigable preacher of the Good News. The last sentence of her draft will was, ‘Sarai murugare mugadzirire kudzoka kwaMambo Jesu.’ Which translates to, ‘Remain in peace and I beseech you to prepare for the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

She was a mother, mentor, humorist and friend all in one. Ours was an auspicious start in life to grow up under such a mother. We acknowledge an immense debt of gratitude to God for it. I could not have wished for a better mother. However, using her as a benchmark certainly raised the bar in my expectations of a woman. My search for a wife was probably prolonged for it.

In the evening of  2 April 2021she had a bad fall at home and fractured thoracic vertebrae. She was admitted to The Avenues Clinic in Harare the following morning. She appeared to recover but then suddenly deteriorated and died in the hospital on 6 April 2021at the age of 96. The recorded cause of death was cardio-pulmonary arrest.

Edith Rudo Gwata (nee Mujuru), nurse, humorist and mother extraordinaire: born Murehwa, Southern Rhodesia 24 August 1924; married 1950 David Ngoni Gwata (three sons, three daughters, sixteen grandchildren, eleven great-grandchildren); widowed 2003,died Harare, Zimbabwe 6 April 2021.

WG

 

Tuesday, 24 December 2019

Newsletter 2019

After marriage everything seems to be delineated relative to the wedding day. 

I have not only survived the first year of marriage but actually enjoyed it! Katharine has survived Africa. In some respects she is more African than me now :-) I suspect she now eats more biltong than me. She also cooks sadza and eats boerewors.  
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1yGpLLG--Lnpi_3FInkgG7dGDI9Uy8Ah4


Business was terrible this year. With the return of hyperinflation  https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1p58vAS4FL-JhCK_FhX0b9QSAwcdddtJP
my customer base is now impoverished. So I did not have any meaningful sales this year. Going forward there will be more focus on export promotion.  It is something I intended to pursue in due course but events of this year forced my hand to do it sooner.

With less business activity during the year there was more time for research and development. The concrete mixer took the lions’s share of the research and development effort. The concrete mixer is a tumble cooking apparatus that is designed to complement the Gwatamatic. https://youtu.be/VQfcs8yybQs https://youtu.be/VQfcs8yybQs
To catch a glimpse of how it works please visit  
 (you can safely ignore the mathematics later in that video). 

We were privileged to host my in-laws over the Easter holidays. https://youtu.be/kDnYeFcbXY4

Then I had an opportunity to introduce Kat to Johannesburg and part of my clan there. 
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1G0Ifb4ACdvAv4Z3pdwHQ9N7dMSLkgqX3https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1rkc-_RgyY4QtohXeb1ERS5ySbaBQwKd_https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1lBBs00lzkNNuh0eBxxyIg1WGFJbiXj9T
The final privilege of the year is spending Christmas with the Sutcliffes in Halifax, with Olde English fish and chips thrown in.  https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1UiiYw70FMNKLsvALG5SUr5pRCF__NN0rhttps://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1EPy93dZAUh33I8fJ9-oMaUcG_GByQi5jhttps://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1FTfW7C79kspoLiQI5f4WvKkCPUuCoc8L
My idea of heaven on earth!

Wish you all a good Christmas and New Year.

Sunday, 9 December 2018

NEWSLETTER 2018

My year 2018 revolved around one date, 18 August 2018. I can't think why :)
Here are some clues:


With a beauty like that on show, it's little wonder that the paparazzi went into overdrive.









Lesser forms of life simply spent their time plotting something or other





Laughter and passion were also in fashion






Mother-in-law tried in vain to contain the racket

The more dignified just smiled


There was even time for serious business:



The wedding party

The marriage officer and his family

The in-laws

My family

The lovely bridesmaids


The intrepid groomsmen staged a bachelor party so peaceful even ladies gate-crashed it!

The groomsmen


The Master of Ceremonies


The readers

The ushers


My classmates from the University of Surrey days

The reception


Time flew, which I suppose is a good sign.
It was soon time to give a speech:
Kerwin indeed trained me to operate a sound mixing desk. He in turn was trained by Alan Mitchell who is also here tonight. So both my "father" as well as my "grandfather" of sound engineering are here tonight.

As a toddler I had two ambitions for when I grew up. One was to buy a wrist watch and the other was to find a wife. I soon figured out where watches are sold, but where wives are found remained elusive for a very long time indeed.

When I arrived at the University of Surrey my tutor the late Dr. Brian Stace told me I had come to the right place should I think of finding a wife. In his opinion the best girls were to be found at the University of Surrey. Two of them are here tonight. I was so naïve at the time that I allowed them to be so close that they became like surrogate sisters. And of course you don’t date your sisters. So I left University without a wife.

I have had adventures in my life. However the adventure beginning today looms even bigger. I’m looking forward to it though. Not least because of the company on it. Doesn’t she look wonderful?

I’m told marriage is like going to an a la carte restaurant with friends. You order what you want but when you see what the next guy has got you start wishing you had ordered that. I’m not likely to have that problem. I’m sure I’ve picked the best item on the menu.

There are many people in Zimbabwe in particular who can’t wait to meet Katharine. I can’t think why. Some had concluded that I was a confirmed bachelor.
The brave ones did ask me exactly what kind of woman I was holding out for. It should now be easy to answer that question, armed with a wonderful exhibit like that!

In reality my circumstances also played a role. I’ve been self-employed for 20 years. The business took a lot longer than I expected to return positive cash flows. In the early years I was struggling just to feed myself, sometimes literally. So the last thing I wanted was to take on some responsibility. Then just when the business was beginning to stabilize, hyperinflation struck and I lost everything. Nine years ago I had to start all over again. Fortunately I had a business model that made recovery possible. Then I decided to scour the globe looking for a wife with a proper job.
To cut a long story short we met two years ago on a package holiday to Iceland. After the holiday we continued to meet on Facebook. A year later we met again this time in Vietnam. I’d been to Vietnam before but now there was a compelling attraction to go back. My mission this time was to clarify the vague developing relationship one way or the other.
As it happened we got on really well and before long I had ticked all the boxes. I felt there was no point in waiting any longer so I popped the question and the rest is history.

I’m so glad she said yes. I can relax now.
All my life I was afraid to eat garlic for fear of ruining my chances of finding a wife. Now that I have arrived I can eat it with reckless abandon. Where is the garlic bread?!

A big thank you to my parents in law for bringing Kat up into the woman she is.

Thank you to my groomsmen. They saved me a lot of nervousness.
Last but not least thank you to the bridesmaids. Please be upstanding and drink a toast to the bridesmaids.

We were soon on honeymoon.

After the farewells


It was time to utilise the one-way ticket

We are now living happily ever after in Harare, Zimbabwe

Kat is still meeting more of my many relatives


More of our wedding photos can be viewed at:

Little else mattered in my life this year:)

Wish you all a good Christmas and New Year.