The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Correspondent
WINKY D was not telling the truth when he said he was the Lionel Messi of reggae music.
In a career that has sizzled and sparkled for over a decade, Winky D has called himself many things but that one sticks. After all, it is not everyday that one compares to that pint sized dynamo from Rosario, Argentina, a man whose very presence on any pitch seems to dwarf opponents who sometimes look twice his size. Messi is a David who strikes fear into many a Goliath and comparisons with him are not made lightly.
Ndini Messi weReggae, Winky once chanted, putting himself in the same sentence with one of the 21st Century’s most remarkable sportsmen. Taken on its own, the line was perhaps not a moment of deep lyrical brilliance from the Kambuzuma-born wordsmith.
Winky D’s pen has always been brilliant, that has never been in dispute. It is a pen that can be sweet, giving birth to neat, clever lines that can sweep even the most steadfast woman off her feet. It is a pen that can be healing, like soothing balm, mending the broken with the promises of brighter days ahead. It can be harsh too, and in the few dancehall wars he has been involved in, he has shown that the ink in his pen contains a fair bit of venom.
But when he sat down, wrote and went to the studio and put his lips to the microphone and shouted that he was the Messi of reggae, perhaps he was not telling the whole truth. He is not the Messi of reggae.
There is only one Messi and he does not juggle metaphors or similes in song. He chases an oval ball for millions of dollars at the Camp Nou. There is no one quite like him and they may never be another.
Winky D, like the millions that adore him, should just be glad they live in the same era as Messi. The over seven billion people that populate the earth are lucky to breathe same air and share the same sun as him. However, whether it is true or not, Messi is not the only identity that Winky has claimed in his already glittering career.
At one point the man who was born Wallace Chirumiko has been an igwe, a (ninja) president, a Gafa (whatever that is) and by the time of his last album release he was a guiding spirit (gombwe). He can be anything and anyone.
It is in that sense perhaps Winky D resembles a child. He is just like the younger versions of most of us who, in one moment imagined ourselves as Angus MacGyver outwitting our foes and the next as the dazzling Peter Ndlovu in Reinhard Fabisch’s enchanting Dream Team.
In those days, one could find themselves covered in dust from head to toe be after slaying imaginary bad guys on the dusty streets as one of Captain Planet’s sidekicks. Or one could imagine oneself as Oliver Mtukudzi, strumming an ear-bending tune on a makeshift guitar fashioned from discarded Olivine oil containers.
In those distant days you could be anything you wanted. However, time passed and people grew up. Life after all, demands to be lived and everyone grows up — everyone but Winky D. And that perhaps is his greatest strength, a strength that has made him one of Zimbabwe’s most compelling popular figures. He still maintains that sense of wonder and spirit of experimentation that defines childhood.
While for many the poetic licence to be anything that one imagined was withdrawn with dawn the adulthood, his was not. It is perhaps the reason why he does the things he does the way he does. At heart, he is still a child and Zimbabwe is reaping the fruits of that childlike imagination. That is the only way one can imagine he thought of a song and video like the now record breaking MuGarden which featured the equally wonderfully talented Gemma Griffiths.
The world is Winky D’s playground and we are just spectators watching him rush from one joyful experiment to another. In MuGarden that imagination reaches its peak. Adam and Eve will always live in human imagination not only as the first man and woman, but as the two that fell victim to the serpent and condemned their descendants.
In their video, Winky and Gemma want us to instead re-imagine these two not as a tale of weakness to temptation but as a love story. They were, after all, the first woman and man who ever fell in love. Amid an explosion of beautiful colour and life, these two re-imagine the story of these two biblical lovebirds.
Exchanging beautiful verses that stand up with anything written in a Zimbabwean love song, these two delight in showing the viewers a glimpse of what life was like in those first, innocent days when God’s first children found joy and love at a time when the world was pure and untouched.
Unlike in Adam’s dilemma, the stakes are not so high in Winky and Gemma’s Eden. For example, Winky can even afford to toss aside the apple handed down to him by the love of his life. Adam bit the apple and condemned mankind to life away from the beauty and splendour of the Garden of Eden. Winky D, the man who is too strong for such temptations, tosses the apple away as if he has no care in the world. In his garden, the fate of humankind does not depend on the bite of a fruit.
Rarely has a video matched a song in quality and theme in such a way. Winky tossed MuGarden towards lovers on Valentine’s Day and while that day has come and gone, 800 000 views later, the song has landed safely in the history books. Almost a decade since he emerged as a major force on the local scene, Winky D does not show any signs of letting up.
There’s a child that lives in him, trapped in his 35-year-old body. From time to time that child rears its mischievous head and gives the country a taste of the crazy ideas and experiments that go on in its head.
Zimbabwe better pray that child never dies or perhaps even worse, grows up.
