The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
LAST Saturday Lovemore Majaivana celebrated his birthday.
Few among the legion of fans that cling to his old tunes have known that the man whose music they love was celebrating his 67th year on earth.
In a world that has become much smaller and closer because of advancements in technology, Majaivana is a figure that is as distant as ever.
He is the man who is given Lifetime Achievement Awards in absentia as if he were an artiste that passed away a long time ago.
This is maybe because, in musical terms, Majaivana is all but dead.
Artistes very often brag about how they will not retire, how they would rather pass away on stage. It is a vow made by the greats, the likes of Oliver Mtukudzi and Hugh Masekela, great men who thought they would lose a part of themselves if they ever left the stage.
It is a vow that came true for Miriam Makeba who suffered a heart attack while singing her hit song Pata Pata in Caserta, Italy.
Majaivana, however, is cut from a different cloth. He is Majaivana, the proverbial good dancer who knew when to leave the stage.
Many people obsess and speculate about why this man, whose music has come to define Bulawayo as a city, packed his bags and left. He has never looked back, as if afraid to turn into a pillar of salt should he steal one last glance.
Was it the notorious lack of appreciation that Bulawayo has for its stars that drove him to self exile, an exile that he refuses to resurface from for even the briefest of moments?
While his last album Isono Sami was a hit, he did not get or feel the love that his level of talent demanded.
Jeys Marabini, a promoter once upon a time before his own career took off, remembers Majaivana’s last dance in Bulawayo, a show in Bulawayo that might have been the final nail on his relationship with the country of his birth.
“What made it really painful for him was that about six months prior to that show he had come to Bulawayo with Oliver Mtukudzi. During that show people had turned out in their thousands. So he felt that he had the support of the people of Bulawayo but when he came for his own show there were only a handful of people. That’s what pained him. He felt that those people that had come six months earlier had only been there to see Oliver Mtukudzi,” said Marabini.
“I was still staying in Lobengula West at the time and he came to my house and sat down with me and told me his decision. He was just fed up after that show. I gave him 200 Pounds in cash and that was it,” he said.
On Isono Sami, there were hints that Majaivana wanted to call it quits, that he had been disappointed enough.
That one show at White City Stadium was just the tiny straw that broke an already heartbroken camel’s back.
The people, for whom Majaivana made music, should have seen it coming. He had neatly packaged his pain in song, making his sorrow a thing of beauty, something that people could dance away their nights to.
They should have seen it coming. What they had not seen, however, was the extent of his exile.
Majaivana simply does not want any sort of contact with his old life. It is buried and Majaivana is the one musician who is dead while still very much breathing. It is a peculiar kind of suicide because the man who committed it is still very much alive.
“He doesn’t want to speak about music or anything about his old life. It is a topic that he goes out of his way to avoid,” said relative and fellow artiste Albert Nyathi.
Promoters have tried in vain to lure Majaivana for one last dance with fans. They speak with a sense of frustration about his refusal to budge. A Majaivana farewell gig would be a massive coup for any promoter, a big payday that would rival any major gig in the country. However, even the lure of a quick buck is not enough to convince Majaivana to come back alive.
So, what has become of Lovemore Majaivana in exile?
There are many rumours about the lifestyle he lives in his adopted country.
According to some, he is now a man of God, dedicating himself to Christ after an earlier life spent entertaining the often drunk and sometimes disorderly in nightspots around Zimbabwe.
Some claim that he is now a well to do businessman, an affluent man living it large in Texas in the United States.
It is all speculation and no one really knows the truth about his life now because he has been careful to hide it from nosy fans.
Despite all that, he still much has his eye on Bulawayo. He keeps tabs on the Bulawayo arts scene and even has a Facebook profile. It is a profile that only those that are close to him know about and it has a recent photograph of the Soweto stand at Barbourfields as its profile picture.
As careful as he is about keeping his identity secret, it does not bear his name, instead using an alias.
He refuses to grant any interview and is uneasy with any journalist gaining access to his contact details. He wants to be silent and anonymous, unnoticed and unreachable. He is the man who buried himself alive.
