“Esse Quam Videri”: Who are you?

“to be and not to seem”

St Francis Xavier’s Kutama College, 2016, being here was no joke at all for anyone new, myself included. The then-current president of Zimbabwe was your proud alumnus and you boasted a plethora of cabinet ministers as a part of your old boys’ association (commonly known as KOBA). As if this was not pressure enough, you stood as a part of the top 100 academic schools in the nation. You had one of the best choirs in the country, an all-boys’ school, impressive. Everything happening around you seemed to be out of this world, to say the least. Being with you felt like being where gods are made. Kutama, you were never just a school, you were a status symbol, a school in the business of making the greats. Throw away all the facts about the place, your air felt intimidating. Getting admitted had the power to motivate anyone breathing, and make people look at them differently, but more often than not, it felt heavy on the soul that was admitted because, how does one feel like a god when they haven’t made themself worthy of the title yet? How could a person be and not seem when all that’s attached to their name are their mere details and nothing else? There was only one way to find out, get admitted, and see what the results of being in such a place would be, and so I did, among almost 200 other boys, join you.

A mini hell week, the reality of orientation. It felt like we were never escaping, and everything seemed off. The men were brutal. They definitely were not our friends, and when they made us jump, we never got the chance to ask “How high”. The one wish most of us had was to go back home. It would be comfortable. Home would not be as challenging. Home would be… safe. To be with you meant taking the leap of faith, letting go of that safety and pushing ourselves into the unknown. Did these men have permission to toughen us up like this? To wake us up in the middle of the night and ask us to dress up in our full uniforms before addressing us for 5 minutes and then send us back to sleep? Did they have permission to be brutal and take us to our limits? None of us knew, we had never been here before. Realistically, there was one way to find out, be one of them without losing yourself. The little boys had to grow. We had to look past what we thought we deserved and at some point, give up all power to take it back in due time. The first game we were learning was not some mere get the results as soon as possible game. Playing with you was playing the long game. It was a test of discipline, resilience, and patience.

In your powerful environment, I didn’t see myself with many options, just one, go up the power ladder myself. Your opportunities never seemed to be for the normal-looking naive kid with nothing but just the basics of being a student. Smart, but not the smartest. Tall, but not the tallest. Confident, but, maybe not the most confident, and completely consumed and utterly mesmerized by the challenge to be somewhat an integral part of you. It would mean the world to me. You were my world. When the first shot at being somewhat better than someone came, you know I had to take it. I was hanging in the shadows for far too long just to let it slide. Everyone at least was, some were just not aware of it, I was aware because you never took me as much of a big deal as my previous one did. I had to catch your eye. I had to impress you. I had to do something at least bigger than you. To feel your warmth, I would burn down everything around you. When the opportunity to start a fire came around, you know I did start it. Was I aware of how hot it would burn? No, I was only keen on figuring it out. Was I good enough to accomplish something? I never knew, my answer would only come from trying. Did the struggle for something meaningful in you make me feel whole again? Yes, I always wanted to be one of your gods, and you had already medalled my peers in athletics. I never even participated.

When you started handing out friends to me, it felt like you knew not what I wanted, but exactly what I needed. A brother. One that stays so close to me that even up to this day I cannot put into words how much love I have for him. You put him in the same room as me and made us connect over a silly systemic error, jerseys that we needed to collect in summer. When you gave me Nyasha, you were aware of what you were doing. You knew it would matter among disciplines that mattered most to challenge our friendship and still maintain it, you made us compete at such intense levels and still kept us close because without each other we would never be the strongest, and for that, all I have is thank you. You handed out more, never gave me more than I asked but made me feel like I had it all in abundance. You kept giving me relationships I would never fall out of and completed what I know to me as a human being. You created some love in an environment that seemed to be a one-man army warzone. You made us fight the isolated battles as a team and we never figured out how or why, but you did it. You turned into my battleground and therapy room. There was so much contrast to what you meant that it was quite easy to get lost in who exactly I was, or was trying to be. Every single product you produced seemed to have some unique identifier and I was just looking for that for myself. Everything you gave me meant everything, but it was nothing if I never knew exactly who I was or what I needed to use it for.

Who was I? I remember feeling like I had no interests, but now, it seems like I always had one thing to turn back to, and it is this. The moment they mentioned “essay”, it seemed like it was a thing for the truly capable, but being in your environment made it worth trying. Because you had a lot of dreamers and chasers with you, I had to zoom out a lot more, you don’t just sign up for international competitions when the people around you are global stars. Then again, merely because I was in your ether, I was one of those people too, which meant I could push myself towards something great, and your standards were enough to set me apart. The good and bad thing about working on something was no one seemed to believe or care, except for Mrs. Thom, thank you for her, she was truly a blessing and a gift that kept giving, never getting tired of reading the pages I filled with reflections of a life lived and an imagination of something great. This bridge between what was and what could be was your greatest gift, even when I wasn’t sure of myself, I was sure of what you had done and what it made me capable of. Whenever I looked at the walls and saw all the great faces coming from your womb and went back to look in the mirror, I wanted to be one of them. My name was the one thing I dreamed of as an echo through your walls, maybe unforgettable, and only you could make me like this. You kept asking me to push harder, beyond my limits, beyond my capabilities.

Even if I felt like I had an identity, you constantly confused me. Everyone knows how hard we all tried to be on the top of our game for you. “Just happy to be here” was not enough, there were a lot of standards that needed to be met, and constantly maintained with you. From the top 10 announcements at the end of the term to the Toastmasters of the Week award(which is the one thing I wanted so bad but never got from you), everything good about you was brilliant. They were all expressions of mastery of a craft, the craft of dominance among dominant men. You were a powerhouse and the pause button was nonexistent. The only dreams we had were dreams of being up there with the gods, a constant battle that never seemed to stop, even after achieving all there was to achieve.

You taught me how to look at and interact with women, and that was funny to me. You referred to their beauty in Shakespeare’s terms and that left me mesmerized. How your culture grew to be one of appreciation for the finest things was always astonishing. You gave a different perspective, never backing down even in the face of those perceived to be better than you. As a new member of your society, most of this never seemed to make sense, only did after I left your vicinity. One song says “You know you only love her when you let her go” and, for me, that was you. When we were together, we never seemed to appreciate each other but as soon as I realized every other place I would be in would never challenge me like you did and obviously did not have the same appreciation of the beauty of nature as you did, it was heartbreaking. I was left with one thing after everything else was said and done, I knew how to treat people, especially the ones I barely got to interact with during my school term, and I was never intimidated by anything from class to I don’t know, elitism. So with all you gave me, I could conquer most things, right? No. There were certain things I missed, but then again, this was just my first year, a lot of things were first experiences between the two of us, definitely not everything we would get up to, we had years ahead of us.

Your lessons were vital. Your punishments were vicious. You kept us at bay most times and made us only suffer when we were deserving of it. I never felt ready to be active when I was in your presence, but something about you kept driving me forward. The power and purpose behind your mission made us be. We never cared to pretend, those who did never made it far anyway. You only fueled those who were ready to go far and never hesitated to take your fuel back if they slacked off or got themselves stuck in anything unfruitful. Every single day around you felt like a new adventure. You were a matrix, but escaping from you was never the best decision, no wonder most people preferred to stay. No wonder many people begged to come back to you even if they wronged you. There was value in you that seemed to only keep getting better the more people were distanced from you, and no matter who was at the head position, somehow you kept yourself intact, preserving the culture that made you what you were, what you are, and what you will be.

It was only one year but you introduced me to so many concepts, all the boys were not able to fully just comprehend this enlightening season without trying to lose their minds. What did you have in store for the next years? We never knew. There was certainty in us needing to grow into the next ones to cater to “us”. They were coming, they would be new to you, and just like the ones before us, we’d need to show them the way in the same direction others had done this year and the years before. Knowledge of who we were at this point would seem to be a facade, we were only aware of who we were becoming.