Intrigued by one so young

(Random Trails )

Ilooked at the young man with utter admiration. Wow! I mean, honestly I was impressed! Beyond measure, I was.I doubt he was a day past 19 years old — very young and tender by any adult standard.
I looked at him again trying to make out what made him tick. Clad in jeans and a snow white, crisply ironed t-shirt, revealing some broad shoulders threatening to grow bigger than they were in a few more years; of medium built and with a self-assuredness that could put even Barack Obama to shame, all I could do was give thanks.

And yet he had a devil-may-care attitude. But alas, he must have cared otherwise how could he have done what he had just done at that tender age. And in public too, among all those people. What kind of wind is beneath his sails, I wondered. And blessed is the woman who gave birth to such and grew a specimen like him to this point, I concluded.

It was one busy morning when I found myself with no choice but to get into a kombi (car had packed up). The kombi driver was driving at a runaway speed. Going too fast in very rough terrain, cutting other drivers, leaving in his wake blaring horns from fellow drivers he would have cut or caused to apply emergency brakes. We all could see how precarious it was but each passenger timidly and docilely kept their fear and discomfort bottled in until the young man mentioned above, sat up and spoke loudly and bravely chiding the driver. Point blank with no apologies, fear or favour!

“Iwe mudhara uri kufamba seiko iwe?  Hausi kuona kuti uri ku cutter vamwe here (driver what kind of driving is this?) and you are driving too fast. We are people not bags of maize,” he boldly challenged. And everybody quietly held their breaths expecting the driver and his side kick the tout/conductor, better known as hwindi in the local parlance, to come out guns blazing in rebuttal to the young passenger. One moment went, another passed, yet another, but none of that came. Neither the driver nor the hwindi retorted. What’s more is that, that way chastened, the driver actually did reduce his speed a bit. And for the rest of the journey into town, the ride was smoother. Well, as smooth as it can be in a squeaky, old, used-past-its-shelf-life vehicle on a pot-holed Harare road.

Clearly the young man had fought for all of us. 
Risking abuse, verbal or even physical from the driver and hwindi for the safety of all of us, he had stood in the gap. And to think that none of us other passengers threw in a word or even a squeak in support to add weight to the young man’s stand. None of us. I am even ashamed to admit it, but yes, yours truly included — we were all mute! Yet the young man had dared. How many accidents have occurred on our roads where drivers were over-speeding and passengers who were too mute and scared to speak out had seen the accident coming but dared not say anything? Like sheep to the slaughter, driven to their death by a reckless driver.
So it was that I spent the rest of the journey into town looking at this man and marvelling at his bravery from one so young. And silently congratulating the woman (and man) who bore and raised such a courageous young man. That should not be taken for granted. In a country like ours where people suffer in silence like frogs in a boiling beaker, such courage to speak up is rare. In fact that is what is wrong with our lives as we have known them here in this country — we just keep quiet and stomach it. As a people we have stomached far too many things that have been thrown our way either by the powers that be, by business owners, service providers and others. We apparently have no sense of what we are entitled to. Good service, good leadership, civil liberties, our rights. None of that.

As I dropped out of that kombi, I realised within myself that what we, in fact need, is 500 of such young men across the country and we are all set.  People who can stand their ground and defend their own safety, their own freedoms and their own right to what is best for them.
– E-mail maggiemzumara@yahoo.ie. Or follow on Twitter @ magsmzumara