The Sunday News
Mncedisi Buhali
“WHOEVER said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last,” wrote Kristin O’Donnell Tubb.
Her words were probably apt in describing the pain that went through the Maplanka clan after the passing on of prominent businessman Gershom Gazi Maplanka, who died earlier this year and was described as one of Bulawayo’s celebrated pioneers of indigenisation.
Maplanka was an amiable well-known businessman who was famed for his Fellowship Bus Services, commonly known as Zebulon.
A close friend of the late Chief Khayisa Ndiweni, Maplanka was also part of the group that pioneered the United Federal Party and was subsequently elected Member of Parliament for Matabeleland North in 1979.
Born on 1 January 1925 at Solusi Mission, Maplanka was the first in a family of six, four boys and two girls.
“He did his primary education at Solusi and then moved to Buttersworth in Transkei where he did his teaching training course. He came back to teach at Nyazura, Lower Gweru and Mayembe where he assumed the post of head teacher. He spent more than 10 years at this school before moving to Balule which was near the family plot number 66 in Somnene African Purchase Area,” said one of his sons Leroy Nkabinde Maplanka.
“At the tender age of 23 in 1948, his father — my grandfather, passed away leaving him with the burden of raising his siblings and taking care of his mother as he was the only one employed in the family. A close friend of my grandfather, Ananzi Dokotela Moyo had encouraged him to register for plot number 66 in Somnene. When the application for the plot was finally approved in 1963 he then registered the plot under the name of his younger brother Zebulon Maplanka since at that time civil servants were not allowed to own properties or businesses.”
He said his father married Jester Maplanka (nee Nkiwane) from Lower Gweru who was also a qualified teacher in 1951 and together they financed the birth of the Maplanka brand to what it is today.
“It was from these humble beginnings that saw him acquiring a bus from Ananzi Dokotela Moyo in 1963, registering the business in Zebulon Maplanka’s name since he was unemployed then. As this was a family entity he christened it Fellowship Bus Service. He later left the teaching profession and bought Craigle Farm on the outskirts of Bulawayo,” Leroy said.
The name “Maplanka”, meaning planks, was used to refer to Maplanka’s father who was a carpenter.
“Some people are just born to be more than average. Gershom Gazi Maplanka was born to be more than average, the focal point of an entire generation, the architect of an unsurpassable legacy and the man who held together a clan at times in danger of imploding. A man whose selfless acts became the foundation of the family’s bread basket, a man who led from the front, role modelling at all times, the reward of ambition, hard work and determination.
The innovator, the educator, the CEO, a proud father, grandfather and great grandfather and an icon in the community,” Maplanka’s first grandson, Lance Nkosinamandla Maplanka, who is based in Australia said.
