Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
AT any time of the day or night, villagers in Mataka Village under Chief Bango in Kezi, Matabeleland South Province know that they can call Mbunga Maphosa, and ask for the contact number of anyone in the local community and he will give it to them.
Legend in the village has it that the 63-year-old has over 500 phone numbers stored in his head.
Last week, a Sunday Life crew sat down with Maphosa as it sought to prove to the wider world that what the people in Mataka say about Maphosa is indeed true.
Sitting under the shade of his humble house and staring blankly at the table before him, Maphosa started reciting numbers off the top of his head in front of the news crew.
He started in Harare, recalling the numbers of relations in the capital, then made a beeline to Bulawayo, where he recalled the numbers of everyone from long-lost relations to bus drivers.
Mbunga Maphosa and wife
In the end, he returned to Mataka, where villagers’ numbers came to him at breakneck speed.
In between, the news team would test his memory by asking him to recite some numbers. Unfailingly, Maphosa would always get it right. After reciting 220 numbers, all written down, he was finally stopped, as it became clear that he would continue plucking numbers out of his mental phonebook until the proverbial cows came back home.
The uncanny ability to save all numbers given to him in his brain has made Maphosa an invaluable asset to the community, where he is regarded as a human directory.
“He has an extraordinary intellectual capacity and astounding ability. You have to see him to believe him,” St Joseph’s Mission Father Makawule Ndlovu had warned Sunday Life before the visit to Maphosa’s homestead. Surprisingly, Maphosa said he only discovered this extraordinary ability when he lost his sight due to diabetes eight years ago.
“I wouldn’t say I had a gift for numbers when I was younger. Even before I got blind, I only had a few numbers that I kept committed to memory. However, when I went blind I suddenly developed the ability to store a lot of phone numbers in my head. This is something that just happened to me and I guess someone can say that it is miraculous.
“I remember when I was working in South Africa, I could keep up to 30 numbers in my head. These were mostly the numbers of the colleagues I was working with at the time. In fact, I had a little notebook that I kept with most of the numbers I knew I needed. Now I keep this notepad in my head,” Maphosa said in an interview. Maphosa believes that his ability was a gift God gave to him when sight was taken from him.
“When I retired around 2014, I had my eyesight but around 2016 I started to lose it and by the end of the year, my eyesight was completely gone. I just accepted it as a new part of my life because even the people who are at Jairos Jiri did not make themselves that way. This was all in God’s hands and I have to accept it. I am not the first person who has gone through something like this. If I was the first person to whom this happened, I would have been worried. As a young man, I also used to see blind people when I was going to school. So, I accepted my situation as it was God’s will. You can’t run away from such a situation. If it doesn’t happen to you, who do you expect it to happen to?” he said.
Maphosa said in his younger days, he had been a keen student, which may go a long way in explaining his proficiency with numbers and photographic memory.
He attended school at Ganyungu Primary School in Gokwe before he moved to Chegutu where he continued his primary education at Lower Waze School and his secondary education at Waze School up to Form Three from 1974 to 1976. His plan to work at the school’s farm in Chegutu to pay his fees did not bear fruit, so he returned to Kezi and eventually went to Bulawayo.
“I used to love school to the extent that I would even steal my mother’s dollar whenever I saw it lying idle just so I could pay and go there. Things were different for black people during those days so I only went as far as Form Three,” he said.
Like many young people in an area famous for producing the late nationalist Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, Maphosa heeded the call to join freedom fighters in Zambia and crossed to Botswana’s Selibe-Phikwe-Transit Camp in 1978. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1980 following the ceasefire announcement. After leaving Zimbabwe in 1980, he spent the next 24 years of his life in South Africa.
“I left Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980. So, I left the country on the very day that we were celebrating our country’s independence and our right to vote. As soon as I left Barbourfields Stadium, I was on my way to South Africa. We were drinking Takura Tiende, the five-litre opaque beer that was being sold at the time. We took it with us as we were transported to South Africa via Botswana. I got to South Africa and worked at a building site, then I worked at a golf course and then for 15 years I was at another company working as a driver,” he said.
Now back home, Maphosa told Sunday Life that he was proud of his new-found role as the community’s human phone book. Regularly, villagers call his home or ring his phone as they search for contacts that they cannot find anywhere else.
“Villagers are always coming to my home, looking for numbers of people that they want to get in touch with. Sometimes my wife and I are disturbed by phone calls in the middle of the night from people living in town who are also looking for numbers of other people. I am in everyone’s directory now. There’s no one in the village whose number I don’t have in my head,” he said.
However, despite the fame he had garnered in the village for his uncanny ability, Maphosa said he was not insulated from the problems that afflicted other villagers. Like other areas in Kezi, Mataka is a very dry village, and as a visually impaired person, Maphosa’s life is made doubly hard by a lack of access to clean water.
“My wish is to get access to a steady source of water in my homestead. If I could get that, my life would improve tremendously.
That is something that would improve my life because, besides myself, it would also help with the upkeep of some of my livestock that also struggle for water,” he said.
Maphosa’s wife, Alfeli Kulube echoed her husband’s sentiments, highlighting the fact that the burden of sourcing water made it difficult to take care of her gifted husband.
“For people who live in the rural area, getting access to water is not easy. We live with two of our grandchildren and they are still very young so a lot of responsibilities fall on me. Given my husband’s condition, I must make sure he is catered for. I have to make sure he eats on time and takes his medication. I also have to make sure the children get bathed on time and go to school,” she said.
