The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
RASHID Jogee still vividly remembers the day he met the late Dambudzo Marechera.
It was a lazy afternoon and the abstract painter, sculptor and part time musician had decided to take a stroll and break from all things connected to art. Little did he know that at the end of that stroll he would meet a man who he would instantly befriend, a man whose character mirrored his own in many ways. Like every story that involves the late maverick writer, it is a tale that is not short of drama.
“I said let me take a walk to the Hotel International and go away from the arts scene a bit and meet the common people and see what they are thinking. I arrive at the hotel and he’s behaving crazy. He’s got dreadlocks like a Rasta and he’s jumping around. He’s a very active and lively person,” Jogee told Sunday Life.
Drawn to each other because of a mutual love of mischief, the two would instantly hit it off.
“We go to one place, probably a pub I think. Then we start to fight. He is attacking me and I am attacking me. We’re basically improvising and then everyone gathers around to see the spectacle. Then they start buying us alcohol to pacify us. That guy George Shire told me you’re just like Dambudzo and I told him that was my best friend,” Jogee said.
Marechera, a social outcast who never felt at home in Vhengere, Harare and London, had found friendship with Jogee, himself a self confessed outcast who had found himself despised by some teachers and schoolmates in the 1960s at a segregated Founders High School. Encounters between the two were always fun-filled but on occasion they brought blood and thunder.
“One day at the Meikles Hotel, there was an argument and he wanted to throw himself through the window. He did and he throw himself through the window and he was cut badly. We even had to call an ambulance came to attend to him,” he said.
Marechera is perhaps the one person that can be compared to Jogee, a versatile artiste who was awarded the Presidential Award of Excellence by former President Robert Mugabe in the mid 1990s for his contribution and outstanding dedication the visual arts in Zimbabwe.
A visit to his home, tells a tale of a man who, like Marechera, has not only dedicated his life to art, but to being a social rebel. He has declared himself a committed bachelor and recalls the one year in his 68 years of existence when he lived with a woman.
His home betrays the lack of a woman’s delicate touch. Almost every inch of what seems like a makeshift abode is covered in art. The furniture in his home looks like it came from things he salvaged himself. One half of a sofa is completed by another piece that came from another sofa. His pantry is full of the tools of his trade.
“Some people keep food in their pantries but I keep paint. I call it food for thought,” he told Sunday Life with a smile on his face.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that Jogee refers to 144 Fort Street, as his art studio.
“I have a flirtation with music. In India my family members are musicians. They play Qawwali. I couldn’t get into music here but I found my creative outlet. My cousins and I had a band called One Way Traffic. It was made up of Hindus and Muslim coloured people but it was in Harare. So I couldn’t play with them and I said since I am all alone I might as well find something else to do and so I found my creative outlet through painting”.
Marechera’s words painted a picture of a man who was at war with himself and society, a man who used his novels to sneer at people that would not accept him for who and what he was. Jogee, the son of Indian immigrants, has also found himself alienated from the local Asian community which he believes looks down on him for what some would think are his strange lifestyle choices.
“I am an outlaw in the community and I enjoy being an outlaw. I make inflammatory statements even in the mosque. I can be terrible to them because they’re terrible to me. An eye for an eye is what I practice against them.
“My grandmother came from Cape Town and she was a Boer. She was white and she met my grandfather while he was coming from India. He married her and he became an influential businessman doing cut, saw and trim and became an influential businessman,” he said.
For Jogee, his mixed ethnicity has been a source of deep personal pain over the years.
“When you propose to their daughters they refuse because they will say we don’t want him in our families. For example, my sisters attracted a lot of young Indian men but a parent would say no, don’t marry from that family. That really broke my heart.”
Unlike those who he says isolate themselves, Jogee has found himself at home among people of all races. After discovering his passion for art while doing his O-Levels, he later on saw what had been a hobby become a passion when he came under the tutelage of artiste, philosopher and lawyer Marshall Baron while he did his A-Levels.
He then went to work at Mzilikazi Arts and Craft Centre where a woman he only remembers as Mama Mguni taught him pottery. There he met some of the city’s most illustrious artistes like Dominic Nkosi, Charles Msimanga, and Mathew Zulu who counted as a good friend of his.
“I actually grew up in Mzilikazi around the age of 20, 21 years old. It was after nine months while I got my call up papers to serve in the Rhodesian Army. I was like someone who was bereaved. I was so disappointed and went the legal route and try to get exemption. But that all failed and I was almost arrested for not complying but my parents encouraged me to go,” he said.
Working as a medic during the country’s war of liberation, Jogee saw firsthand the horrors of armed conflict. Some of the blood from the struggle bled into his canvass, with one painting, Politico showing how the young artiste refused to helplessly watch as the country ran red with blood.
One incident on the battle front perhaps illustrates Jogee’s character perfectly. After a landmine had hit a truck of civilians, he found himself picking up the body parts, strewn in the bush like pieces of a gruesome puzzle, of those who had been killed.
“I found one of the people in the car and he was shaking and couldn’t talk. I tranquilise him and ask him where the driver is and he says I don’t know. There’s a funny white man who’s looking for the body and I also and after walking 100 metres I find a piece of a knee, I find an elbow elsewhere and in the bush I find a torso, no head. I pick up all the pieces and I’m not even wearing gloves. Then this man comes and says Doc can you ascertain how this man died and I said food poisoning, sir,” he said. Bus quiatis venducilis maxim ditate.
