From Tanzania Corespondent Lute Wa Lutengano…

I have failed not to write something about football. After all, all talk now is about the ‘beautiful game’ taking place in ‘Ku-Joni’ as my tribal ancestors used to call what is now the land of Madiba a.k.a. Mandela – South Africa.

You see where I come from in Benaland, now in the newly established region of Njoluma – I hope this silly name will change soon – all young men of those yesteryears in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and even the early 60s, used to be taken to South Africa.

They were taken there to provide cheap labour in the famous Kimberley Gold mines of that land of then apartheid. Actually this means my ancestral land was part of what the mining conglomerates in South Africa used to consider ‘reserve labour region.’

In no time this going to the mines became fashionable. For after two or so years these young men would come home with a new bicycle, a suit, an iron trunk and the mining torch perched on ones forehead with its batteries hung on the back.

You can imagine their impact in the Bena villages, and I believe the same was the case in all villages in the other neighbouring tribes. It must have been cool. A young man donning an old woollen suit, pushing a bicycle with a torch on his forehead leading a group of elderly villagers at night from one drinking hole to the next was quite a sight. He was naturally a superstar. And all parents wanted their daughters to wed this young man.

And so the legend of the ‘ku-joni’ was built around these famous young men who when their spirits were blown high by the local ‘ulanzi’ bamboo wine or traditional beer – ‘common’ or ‘kangala’ – would also do a strange jig called jive or crooning. Later on I was to learn that ‘ku-joni’ simply meant ‘ku-johannesburg’.

I believe many village belles of those years when our land was under the Germans and later the British do recall these ‘ku-joni’ young men. Naturally these former belles are now great grandmothers, if at all they are still alive.

This also explains why in the early 60s and early 70s most young men and women in primary and secondary schools in the southern highlands region – Iringa, Mbeya and Songea – organised themselves into jiving and crooning groups singing basically Zulu and Xhosa songs popularised by the ‘ku-joni’ boys.

These groups became so popular until someone in the Ministry of Education got wiser or rather envious and banned them. I for one, for example, was a member of the popular Skylarks Group at the then Mkwawa High School. We used to mesmerize the Iringa Girls belles and once we even managed to convince the school management to ferry us all the way to Mbeya, some 300 kilometres away, to render a similar service to the famous Loleza Girls members.

One thing, however, which I am told by the elders, is that these ‘ku-joni’ boys were not into the many sports which were mushrooming in the colonial territories then. These sports included football.

The ‘ku-joni’ boys were rather more into booze, music and dancing and ofcourse into ladies as well. No wonder therefore, much as the World Cup is taking place in Africa, and we had six African teams for that matter, the African presence has simply wilted. I am beginning to wonder whether it is not the ‘ku-joni’ syndrome revisiting us.