AS we continue to honour the life of the late historian, Pathisa Nyathi, who passed away last Saturday and was buried at the historical Lady Stanley Cemetery in Bulawayo, we republish an article that was originally published on 18 April 2021 where Sunday Life Reporter Bruce Ndlovu, interviewed Nyathi on his journey from being a Science teacher to becoming a reverred historian.
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
PATHISA Nyathi fell in love with the smell of a book before he could even read one.
The year was 1958 and a seven-year-old Nyathi, who until then had known only his father’s goats and cattle in the great open-air and untamed wilderness of Matobo, started his education as a Sub-Standard A pupil.
It was perhaps fitting that Nyathi fell in love with the scent of a new book right exactly where he had begun the first chapter of his own life. He had been born seven years earlier to Menyezwa Nyathi and Selina Ndlovu at Sankonjana Primary School.
On that fine day at school, the smell of paper and ink ignited a love for books that would help define the next 62 years of Nyathi’s life.
“Generally, I am a person who has no memory but one memory that I have is that of the nice smell of a book. It must have been one of the books that we were using in primary school. I remember opening it, it was new. You’re touching a book for the first time and you’re smelling it and you’ve never seen one before. It a was nice feeling,” he told Sunday Life in an interview.
Despite that preadolescent love affair with books, Nyathi was just another boy with all the naughty vices of those of that age. This was long before he was a noted sage and the proverbial wise man whose fountain of knowledge seems bottomless. It was no wonder that when he reached Standard 3 and had to transfer to a school far away from his family’s homestead, he spent most of that year perched on trees, hiding in bushes and doing everything he could to avoid the classroom.
“School at Sankonjana only went as far as Standard 3. So I moved to another school that was a bit far from home. I was there for one year in 1963 and I failed. I would just sit on a tree and not go to school. I was very creative and so I would wait until knock off time then go home. I then failed which was a blessing in disguise because I went back to Sankonjana School and we were the pioneers of Standard 4 there. I then moved to Mashonaland Central. The brightest boys would be admitted at Mazowe Secondary School. The girls from Chiweshe would come to Usher.
That’s where I went to do secondary school,” he said.
It was at Mazowe Secondary School, in those days when a revolutionary generation of young Zimbabweans was beginning to find its voice, that Nyathi also experienced his own political awakening. This, according to Nyathi, was all down to an English teacher called Margaret Moore.
“It was a school with mostly white teachers. It was the English teacher, Margaret Moore who introduced us to political education. From Form 1 to Form 4 I was doing Shona and. I did at A Level and passed it because I had a flair for languages. One thing I remember is that I read a lot of political books. The school was very political. Some of us would meet in the middle of the night when other students were asleep. In 1970 the school was closed for the second time. Half the school was expelled because of that and I was one of those that survived,” he said.
As he found his political voice, Nyathi had joined the chorus of those clamouring for political freedom. Having grown up reading from a westernised syllabus however, his cultural re-education was still a long way off. In fact, when he first picked up the pen and started writing fiction, his ink reserved particular scorn for the African traditions for which today he is a notable champion.
“I remember that I entered a competition when I was in Form 3 and my story came second. The story was called No God in the Cave. Obviously now I find it stupid that I could have written something like that. Those were the days when we thought we were Christians and I was obviously referring to Matobo, where my father introduced me to it on his own experience, and I was basically saying there could be no God in that cave. But that is when it started. That was 1969. This is where my journey as a writer started,” he said.
Despite that early flirtation with writing, Nyathi does not consider himself a writer. It is perhaps true to his nature: he does not consider himself a writer although he has written countless books and he is considered an isiNdebele expert despite the fact that he only did and passed chiShona from Form 1 until A Level. Few also know that when the time came for him to choose a field after he finished his A Levels, he chose science instead of the arts or languages.
“In 1970 I had to train as a teacher. That is when I made the correct decisions. I had excelled in languages and the expectation was that I would do Ndebele and English going forward. But I stood my ground and I said I want to do science because I had also done well in physics and biology. So, I convinced them that I wanted to do science. I say I made a good decision. Sometimes we miss the point when we describe myself as a writer.
“It’s okay to do so but Raisedon Baya, Yvonne Vera, those are writers. What I have become has just became exposed through writing. If you follow my writing, you will see a lot of science. You’ll find astronomy, you’ll find biology or you’ll find physics. If I had not done those subjects, I don’t think I would have such an eye for heritage. That’s my area. My area is heritage,” he said.
Since that decision five decades ago, Nyathi has dedicated his life to looking at culture with a scientific eye. While others see culture and science at odds, he sees them as hand and glove, complementing one another.
“Later in life I became a science teacher and this confuses some people. They don’t understand the direction that my life took. The problem is that there are people who know science but don’t know anything about culture and you have people that know culture but know virtually nothing about science. You will have people that say your African culture has no science in it. That is not true. It is all science. Science has proved to be very useful to me in my understanding of heritage.
“For example, my mother used to preserve grain using ash. She was being practical and it worked for her. Her language about that entire process would never be the same as mine. I, as a science teacher, know that an insect consists of three body parts: the head, thorax and abdomen. In the abdomen, there are breathing holes called spiracles. Ash being fine, clogs those spiracles and so the insect dies from asphyxiation. My mother does not know all that. But does it matter that she does not speak of it in that way? No, what matters is to apply science, not just talk about it,” he said.
Despite an infatuation with science, Nyathi always had an ongoing interest in the arts. While he was a masterful science teacher when he had chalk in hand, he transformed into a different man when the suit and tie were off and he took charge of the school’s drama club. For Nyathi it was a continuation of his father’s legacy, the legacy of a man who never had the same chances at education that he did.
“In college my association with drama started. In all schools that I went to, despite teaching science, I would always take the culture club. That was a legacy from my father because he was a storyteller. In the evening he would look up and start telling his stories. And his stories were historical. His father had died in the influenza pandemic around 1918 and he had to go to Bulawayo and then South Africa so he had a lot of stories. He never went to Grade 1 but he would read my books later on. I don’t know how he would do it,” he said.
After he did his first degree in Geography at the University of South Africa in 1983, Nyathi got his second in 1985.
Before that, he had helped form the Mthwakazi Writers and Actors Association, alongside the likes of Felix Moyo and Mthandazo Ndema Ngwenya. As someone interested in several arts disciplines, he decided to take the cultural terrain after noticing a particular weakness in the field.
“I hate to make a choice between all these things. From poetry to drama. I had to choose because I didn’t want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. This is because I was involved in everything from creative writing to acting.
I decided that perhaps my greatest interest lay in understanding the African that is why I chose heritage as my field choice. In heritage, my entry point was that I saw a weak point in the manner in which we reach heritage. We concentrate a lot on cultural practices which is not good enough. We need to go beyond that. That’s why I got into Stonehenge. The thrust is now on the underpinnings of cultural practice. If people build things in a circle, why are they doing that? You’ll find the same style in your home or at the Great Zimbabwe. Why are they doing that?” he said.
For a long time, a lot of African traditions and customs have been attributed to superstition or a certain level of ‘backwardness’. Such views of African culture have largely gone unchallenged and in certain quarters have even been celebrated. Nyathi believes his role is to throw the spanner in the works and upset the worldview of those who thrive on denigrating the African.
“Black people have their own things. My thrust has always been to render respect to things African. If you look at the astronomy that our forefathers had, we have lost that. We lost this through colonialism, slavery and ultimately military defeat. When white people defeated us, we started to think their ways are better than ours. My mission is to remind people that the African has a story to tell the African despises himself and thinks other people are better than him and I say no. By dealing Stonehenge I want to show that there’s a universality in some of these things.
“If I’m to make a contribution it is understanding things African. We should stop trying to attribute everything to superstition. That’s just laziness. Investigate and find out. Africans could not have been stupid. Stupidity was never reserved for one kind of people. Before we move on to the next world, we should have done something to restore the confidence in culture because when you don’t have confidence in yourself, there is little that you can achieve in this world,” he said.
On this paper’s pages, Nyathi has penned one of the country’s longest running columns. In addition to the books that he has written, the column is testament to his contribution to the culture and heritage canon over a distinguished career in which he has swept through the country’s customs and traditions with a scientific eye.
“For some strange things people thought I could handle Ndebele. I never did Ndebele. So, I don’t know where Barbara Nkala got the idea to approach me to write in Ndebele. I never asked her why she did that. She became an influence in my life. My turning point was in 1993 when we were commemorating 100 years of the demise of the Ndebele State, 2 November 1993 in Gadade. Joshua Nkomo was there. That’s when I started the serialisation in the paper.
“It started in 1993. There was a lecturer called Dube who thought we should make the articles a book. It was called iGugu LikaMthwakazi. It was published by Mambo Press, and launched by Joshua Nkomo in 1994. The second was Uchubu Olungalandiswe. I needed a medium to spread the message and that’s when the newspaper came in. I can’t remember when, how or why the switch from Chronicle or Sunday News happened,” he said.
