The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
IT had to take the Roman Catholic Church’s intervention before Joshua Nkomo could wed Johanna MaFuyana.
The situation had been complicated from the beginning. When Joshua Nkomo’s mother passed on, his father married a younger wife, Elizabeth Mafehlefehle Fuyana.
At the time, the man whose large hands would shape the political future of his country was still in South Africa. It was on visit home when he saw Johanna MaFuyana, Mafehlefehle’s younger sister and the woman that he would share the rest of his life with.
It was love at first sight, but like in all good love stories, there were twists and turns at the beginning. The big elephant in the room was the fact Johanna was, Mqabuko’s step-mother’s sister. This sparked immediate objections to the two lovebirds’ potential union. She was, after all, technically his mother-in-law.
“My grandfather was married to Mlingo Hadebe and they had seven children with Joshua Nkomo being the third,” says Thandiwe Nkomo Ibrahim, the couple’s eldest surviving child.
“When Mlingo Hadebe died my father remarried a younger woman, Elizabeth Fuyana, my mother’s older sister.
When my mother was visiting her sister and my father had come from South Africa, he saw this beautiful woman and said I want to marry this woman. The elders told him that this is your “mainini” so you can’t marry her and it was a problem in the family. It had to be taken to church and that’s when the church decided that there is no blood between them so they could go ahead.”
Joshua Nkomo and Johanna
MaFuyana and Mqabuko’s story is a tale of the endurance of true love, a love that stood strong when the might of the Rhodesian security apparatus was thrown against it. However, before colonial forces could test the depth of their love, they had to contend with resistance from within. MaFuyana was of royal stock and in the 1940s memories of the Ndebele state’s caste system were still vivid. She was from the Fuyana clan, royal stock which had a rich history.
She was from the same bloodline as Mdilizelwa, a chief and warrior that was famed for dealing a death blow to Captain Allan Wilson, plunging a spear into him in the famous battle of Pupu-Shangani. This was an illustrious family with an illustrious history, so who was this Nkomo commoner that had swept their daughter off her feet?
“The Fuyana family is a royal family. We have Mdilizelwa who was the one in the papers because he stabbed Moffat.
He has not been recognised enough for that but the likes of Magwegwe were also from the same line. It was such a royal family to the extent that when my father wanted to marry my mother, they said no, you are pure blood Nguni, how can you want to marry that mixed blood, Nkomo? They were a bit reluctant and uppish thinking a Nguni needed to marry another Nguni,” Thandiwe said.
An affair and a union that was beset by resistance in the beginning would, over years of dedication and sacrifice, blossom into a love that would capture a nation’s imagination. From the outside looking in, the relationship looks like a Romeo and Juliet tale that had a happy ending. However, Mqabuko’s love letter to MaFuyana, written to the 27th anniversary of their wedding, gives a glimpse of the extent that their love was tested even at the march towards liberation neared its end.
Forty-four years after he wrote it, the letter is still on display at the couple’s former home, the restrained passion of the nationalist, who no doubt felt the pangs of loneliness away from the loving arms of his better half, shines through from every word. While the dark ink on the letter might be threatening to fade, the care, love and concern from the nationalist threatens to burst through the museums glass that today imprisons his words of affection.
“My dear Joana, please accept the white Benz that I brought towards the end of last year, it was meant to be a present for you from me on the 1st of October 1976 which was the 27th anniversary of our wedding. Although late, it represents the 25th anniversary. Then I thought I should give it to you on 1st January 1977 but I had to leave home before that. Seeing that I will be returning home later than I thought I would be back home, I thought I should write the letter to pass the car to you.
“Please my darling accept this gift from me as a little token of love from me after 27 years of our wedding. You have been a good wife to me and a very good mother to our children. Use this car and keep the maroon car as your spare car. Please look after my cars. Don’t send them to anybody; they are meant for my private work only,” the letter reads.
MaFuyana’s reputation as a fierce woman who withered all storms, some of them violent, thrown towards her by Mqabuko’s political foes is well documented. At the Joshua Nkomo Museum there is a sewing machine that is on display, and its black metallic surface tells a story of MaFuyana’s resistance and resourcefulness in the face of a colonial onslaught. It is this machine, as MaFuyana took the role of breadwinner in her stride, that fed their young children when the nationalist was in jail. Through the years of adversity, she was the rock on which a nation was built, bound by love to a man whose destiny was to free a country.
“Baba Nkomo wrote in his book that the best decision he ever made was to marry Mama MaFuyana and you can see why. If she had been the kind of woman that cried and complained, asking about when they would gain independence then they would not have gone far.
“The struggle took a long time. It took 30 years and when they got married, she had thought the country would be free in five or 10 years like the other countries. She supported him, stood by him and made it possible for him to free his mind and do the work,” she said.
Dr Joshua Nkomo, later on to become the country’s Vice-President and adored countrywide as Father Zimbabwe, died on 1 July 1999, making last Thursday the 22nd anniversary of his passing on to eternity.
