BY SPECIAL MATARIRANO

Part 2
In 1990, I enrolled at Sanyati Baptist High School for form one. That was when the famous Nyika Gundu, came in as the school’s headmaster. Headmaster Gundu would be classified as ‘a profound headmaster’ ahead of his time. He transformed the school far ahead of its motto of ‘Let your Light so Shine’.
It certainly would be at this school that I would let my light shine before men, true to the school motto of “Let your Light so Shine’. The school turned me into a confident and skillful player far ahead of my age and imagined capacities. I would enjoy my name being added to our Santa Blues (Sanyati Baptist) supporters’ songs as they sang joyous and glamorous football lilacs.
I started playing for the school under 16 when I was in form one. I had gained a lot of strength and stamina. I came to Sanyati Baptist High and found an undying resonance in the exploits of one all-rounder athlete, Ben Kofi who dominated both athletics and soccer at the school a year gone. Reports were rife. Comparative voices would be heard pitting the likes of Petros Moyana Midzi, Learnmore Maranda, Isaiac Nyenge, John Phiri, and Stanmore Paso to the scales set by Ben Kofi. These were the finest of our time at Sanyati in our senior team.
Kofi was an illumine at Sanyati from 1988 and 1989. He had set records too big for a lot of us aspiring footballers to measure up. But I had one conviction; that if Kofi could set big unpassable football mountains at A Level, I would start building my small anthills from form 1.
Sanyati Baptist Sanyati Baptist was a mission school built on academic prowess too. It had seen decades of great young minds. It had a history of sports excellence within the larger extreme southern corner of Mashonaland West which shared a boundary with the Midlands.
The school was as old as the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. It was built in 1966 and worked its way to be on top of its contemporary schools. It had its place amongst the first notable missionary schools built on the stroke of the first shots of liberation by the seven heroes of Sinoia (Chinhoyi 7 Heroes).
Its history speaks of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) which began work in Southern Rhodesia in 1950 with the appointment of Clyde and Hattie Dotson. The Dotsons had been in Rhodesia since 1930 with the South Africa General Mission station at Rusitu. A year after joining the SBC, they opened the Sanyati Baptist Mission in this rural north-central Rhodesia, colonially referred to as the Sanyati Tribal Trust Lands.
It would happen that Drs Giles and Wana Ann Fort arrived in 1953 and opened Sanyati Baptist Mission Hospital to meet the acute medical needs in this remote area. Hence the first hospital was a simple thatched roof pole building that stood defiantly as it took care of the health of the missionaries and locals.
It then developed in 1956 when the first wing of the hospital was built, and other wings were later developed. Along with the hospital, the mission built a boarding school that later served over 700 students. In its Hall of Fame, the SBC had missionaries like Dr. Maurice and Shirley Randall.
At this mission school, football became my passion! In my heart, football became more a religion than sport. It was at Sanyati that I learnt that communities could rally around high school football teams like they are armies going into battle! I still relive Mr Hozheri, the local chief with his cowboy hat on his horse racing down the track as part of crowd entertainment just before school soccer games. It was exhilarating, breathtaking, and mesmerizingly beautiful.
My first game for the under-16 was against St Charles, a sister day school in Sanyati. It lay to the north with the vast farmlands with sunburnt soils that gave no more than sufficient to the hopeful farmers. Our school lorry ferrying us roared through a road lineated by village huts that stood under the merciless heat of the July 1990 sun. Villagers stood on yards watching us drive through. They would be part of the spectators of the game between their school and ‘Beans Boys’ as we were fondly ridiculed.
I was playing in tennis shoes since my feet were too small for the least size 6 shooting boots at the school. The game started at a blistering pace and as always, my heart was beating. It had been like this since my grade-playing years. The heart would always beat.
“I realized later that at the time…I was scared [while playing]. These emotions are normal emotions of a human being. I couldn’t say I was scared in the changing room to my coach. I didn’t know how it would go down. I lied.” I told a friend many years later.
And I was scared. At that time, and in that space, I didn’t feel safe to share those emotions. I lied. For those in football, have you ever wondered, what might your team members be hiding? What emotions might your staff be feeling? What could you do to create psychological safety in your teammates? Allowing those emotions to be shared is key to unleashing people’s potential. I kept my fears to myself, and I got injured early in the game.
I learned that if someone is scared, they won’t be doing their best work. They will be trying to hide the fact that they are scared – energy and effort that could be going into their performance.
Coaches and trainers should always ask their players how they feel. They should not accept ok, fine, good. Those aren’t emotions. If you think someone is frustrated, sad, or angered – ask them “My sense is you might be frustrated, are you?” It isn’t about you being ‘right’, it’s about helping the other person express their feelings. Football is competition and competition heightens adrenalin pace.
Over the years, I then learned that knowing ourselves is one of the four quadrants of Emotional Intelligence (EQ). By knowing ourselves, what drives us, what motivates us, what scares us, and what we hide, we can interact better with others. By knowing ourselves we can be more effective in how we communicate, lead, and motivate others. And soccer as a team sport, calls for this.
I got injured and limped off in pain in that game and from there I learned some life lessons. If you play football, you can get hurt. It might not be a career-ending injury, but with football comes pain. The same goes for life. One thing one must do is to learn from that pain. The thing one must remember is that most of these pains are not “career-ending pains”. One must move past these pains and keep moving forward. Learn from them and move on. Remember, it is not how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get back up! I have seen this happening in my soccer life.
As always, I was playing wide. Left attack. My left foot was incisive as I remembered it. I was speedy and studded. I had great ball timing, and my precision had improved. My power behind the ball had taken shape and my ball drives were precise. All this was a result of training and practice. Our soccer trainer was Mr Madyangove, who was very temperamental. Circles had it that he had joined the army as an officer cadet but dropped off training due to some undisclosed illness. Seemingly, his soccer training methods were militant, very militant. His approach to soccer training was aggressively militant, everyone agreed to that.
The villagers came, the whole ground had a human wall, packed. Supporters of St Charles Secondary School consumed their energies in beating drums and singing songs that sent exhilarating stitches of excitement. The beauty of football! The cluster of mountains that surrounded St Charles landscape echoed and relayed the wail of thrilling voices. The air was electric. It was an under-16 zonal elimination football tournament.
I was attacking from the left while Wellington Gwila, a short, speedy right attacker was operating the right football corridor. I scored the first goal through a scorcher that the St Charles goalie could neither explain nor understand. There was grave quietness in the St Charles camp as the Santa Blues supporters went into a frenzy, crazing into the pinch at marathon speed. It felt good to score, celebrate the goal, and be patted on the back by an ocean of hands. Gwila scored a second a minute later. But I could not last the game distance.
I got hacked down and my tommy tennis shoes could not grand the cushion of a shooting boots. I limped out of the pitch, bored. As I limped off the field, I turned back and cheered my mates to fight and win. St Charles Secondary was not an easy opponent. They were good. They piled a lot of pressure on our defence, but the team held on. It was an abomination at Sanyati to be clobbered by a day school. No, it was not allowed.
I did not even go to change my uniform. I cheered my teammates. I wanted us to win, to sing to our school in victory. I realized that success does not happen in football if everyone does not do their job. I was now in a different role of a supporter after my substitution. Football wants that. If the center-back doesn’t get the ball to the midfield, there will be no score from the front runners. If the crowd does not cheer, their warrior will tire away. Teamwork and role-playing!
It is the same with life; you can’t reach success doing it alone. You need the support and expertise of others if your journey through life is going to be successful. I always tell my staff and subordinates to seek out relationships with others rather than shunning them. You will be able to reach much greater heights by standing on someone’s shoulders! On the way back to the school, supporters talked of a young Kofi in the making. The journey had started with the St Charles ant hill.

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