Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
RICHARD Mpabanga Ncube is no ordinary old man. Or so he and his children and grandchildren believe.
Born on 21 March 1921, Khulu Ncube is one of those rare people, not only in Zimbabwe but around the globe, who have lived over a century, a milestone hit by those with the gift of unusually long life.
In fact, Khulu Ncube says he was born three years earlier than what is written on his national identity document, which makes him 104 years old!
Even this rarest of feats is not what sets Khulu Ncube apart. Unlike most elderly people in Zimbabwe, most of who are younger than him, Ncube does not feel any particular attachment to any part of rural Zimbabwe.
He does not spend days obsessing over shape and form of clouds, the biology of his soil in the fields or any of the countless things that might spell doom and gloom for any potential harvest.
Born near what is now the Mhlahlandlela Memorial Site, Ncube was bred in Bulawayo, and it is in Bulawayo where he feels like he belongs.
Richard Ncube and his children Sikhumbuzo and Beauty Ncube
“Growing up, we never had rural areas to visit like other children,” his daughter, Beauty Mpabanga Ncube told Sunday Life.
“He has never been an old man who worries about things like farming. He loves the soft life.”
As his 101st birthday beckons, with most of those spent in the City of Kings, there is no man who is qualified to speak on the evolution of Bulawayo than Khulu Ncube. The city is ingrained in his DNA and with his remarkably photographic memory, even at 101 years of age, Ncube is one of the few walking, talking encyclopedias left in the city. He is the history of Bulawayo made flesh.
His earliest recollections of Bulawayo begin from a point of heartbreak, however. For Ncube it all began when his family was chased from Mhlahlandlela by white settlers, driven from their lands and forced to settle in the mountains and caves of Matobo.
“We used to stay in the rural areas in Mhlahlandlela. They chased us from there and we went to the mountains in Matobo. We stayed there a while and then I came to town to look for a job.
My mother was here in Bulawayo and she had started running businesses. She had separated from my father and after I finished Standard Three she said I should come to Bulawayo and that’s how I ended up here,” Khulu Ncube recalled.
Like most black people who relocated to Bulawayo at the time when a city had not yet truly finished being born, Khulu Ncube stayed in Makokoba. Later on, he would relocate to Barbourfields, a part of the Bulawayo African Townships that was named after H R Barbour, the city’s mayor from 1924 to 1926.
Back in those days, before the city’s upwardly mobile black folk could set foot in the western half of Bulawayo, let alone own prized real estate there, only the elite among the oppressed masses could own houses in spaces like the posh Barbourfields suburb.
“You had to qualify financially to have a place here. If you were earning between 15 and 20 Pounds per month, then they would allocate a house for you in BF. Those days white people were really not paying those kinds of sums to their black workers. So, at the council where I worked, I was earning about 2,5 Pounds per month and this was despite the fact that I had over seven years of experience working there.
“Then I was approached by Morgan’s Wholesalers, which had recently relocated from South Africa. They were a big company.
They offered to pay me 20 Pounds a week which was far ahead of what other people were earning in a month. That’s how I ended up with the house because I was financially eligible,” said Khulu Ncube.
By that time, Khulu Ncube had already met Rebecca, the love of his life and the woman with whom he would father eight children, five girls and three boys. Only five of those children remain today, while Rebecca passed away in 2000.
However, while he has never fully recovered from his one love’s passing, Khulu Ncube remembers how they fell head over heels at “the Power Station, where Bulawayo’s now iconic towers are now located.
“I met her when I was working at Chronicle, delivering newspapers. We would wake up early around 4 or 5 AM we would be done. Then we would go back and get more copies and each of us would have a corner where we stood and sold papers. We would earn a commission. It was around the same time that I met Rebecca.
At the time I was living with my older brother who had a house of his own at what is known as the ZESA power station. So, Rebecca came to visit her older sister, who was married to my brother. It was during her visit from Tsholotsho that I saw her and I was stunned. I decided that this would be a girl I would marry,” he says.
Khulu Ncube has never moved from the house that Beauty and her other siblings were born in. She remembers how in those days her loving parents were different faces of the same coin, with their father providing a tender touch while her mother was a disciplinarian who believed a child could be set on the right path by a crack of the whip.
“When we were growing up, he was a cobbler and you would find him wearing his apron made of leather, fixing shoes. The verandah would be full of shoes brought in by people who just loved the way he would fix up their shoes.
There were a lot of other cobblers around but they preferred him. Then he stopped and became a bartender for a while in one of the council bars.
He used to love his alcohol.
“I don’t remember in any time of my life being beaten by my father. The most that he used to do was pour water on us as punishment. It was different with my mother. She used to whip us into line. The apple tree that was planted in our yard was not for fruits but for beating us whenever we strayed,” his daughter said.
According to Beauty, Khulu Ncube has always been a kind-hearted man that brought sunshine into the lives of his loved ones with his naughty and clever sense of humour.
“One of the most vivid incidents that I remember from that period is how at one point he said he should be named Rebecca and my mother Richard.
The police came looking for him and he said it’s not me that you seek because I am Rebecca and she is Richard. So, he said my mother was the one that they were looking for.
It was right to me because Richard and Rebecca were man and wife so I couldn’t see the problem . . .We call him sbare because he used to call himself my mother’s big sister. He would come home and say all of you here, I’m your sbare,” she says.
As he has watched a city and township change and evolve over the decades, Khulu Ncube has accumulated an impressive array of names. In every different corner of BF and Makokoba, he is known by a different moniker, befitting a man who seems to have lived several lifetimes.
“It might come as a surprise but he has a lot of names,” said his son Sikhumbuzo Ncube. “If you go up and down BF, you would hear some referring to him as ND. Some call him Professor. You get to another place and you hear him referred to by another name.”
Sikhumbuzo also said while some might be itching to find the secret to Khulu Ncube’s long life, they did not need to search further than his obsession with living a clean and healthy lifestyle.
“His memory is still so good. Only the other day he was being asked by a relative about our family tree and he was unearthing some details that would normally be impossible for a person his age to recall.
His memory is still so sharp and he recalls things that we have forgotten. He is someone who has prioritised self-care all his life. He has not touched things that might have compromised his health over the years.
Even when it comes to what he eats, he is very selective.
While we might be gravitating towards these unhealthy foods, he still loves the traditional dishes that have kept him healthy all these years,” she said.