The genius son of Mafalala has gone; the fast and deft feet that learned the game on the rugged streets of Maputo, in Mozambique, have been laid to rest. They called him the Black Panther and the Black Pearl; whatever they called him, he left defenders speechless in his wake.
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On the streets of Mafalala, as rough as a flying tackle, Eusébio learned the football that was to take him from poverty to stardom with a ball made out of newspaper wrapped with rags. Mafalala was a tough training ground of cuts, bruises, grit and stones; where, to this day, barefoot youngsters trap and pass. I have stood on that makeshift, sandy pitch in the twilight of another warm Maputo day, listening to the shouts of the young and hopeful. If you close your eyes, you can see the young Eusébio and Mario Coluna—two world class players who emerged from Mafalala—passing to each other and laughing their heads off. Maybe, I am merely a football romantic.
Eusébio’s mother’s house is a free kick’s distance away. The street that runs by it, is named after the man.
With his skill on the ball and explosive pace, Eusébio shone over football in his hometown like the sun. He signed for Sporting Clube de Lourenco Marques at 15 and soon caught the eye of scouts.
Legend has it that a chance encounter in a barber’s shop, in Lisbon, sealed Eusébio’s chance of a glittering career. In the barber’s chair was a scout, for Brazilian team Sao Paulo, who had just returned from Mozambique where he had been bowled over by the skilful young Eusébio. Listening to the scout’s story was legendary Benfica coach, Bela Guttman, who flew straight to Mozambique and persuaded the young man to sign for around $10,000. Eusébio’s mother put the money in the bank and said she wouldn’t touch it until her son had made it as a professional. Imagine that, in this age of avaricious football agents.
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There was controversy in Portugal before Eusébio kicked a ball. Sporting Clube de Lourenco Marques was a feeder club to Sporting Lisbon, who didn’t take too kindly to rival Benfica snatching a young star from under their noses. Sporting appealed Eusébio’s registration in a wrangle that lasted five months. Eusébio was cloistered by Benfica in a fishing village in the Algarve until it was all over.
Eusébio scored a hat-trick on his debut for Benfica; two weeks later, he scored a hat-trick in a friendly against Santos, which had Pele in the side, in Paris. Few, including Pele, had seen anything like him. He was a new breed of striker: fast, robust, good in the air, a master at free kicks with a fearsome shot; a forerunner of the great nimble goal scorers of the modern era like Maradona and Lionel Messi.
In an illustrious career, that exceeded all expectations, Eusébio scored 473 goals in 440 games in 15 years at Benfica. For Portugal, he played 64 times, scoring 41 goals. His finest hour was during the World Cup in England in 1966 where Eusébio scored nine goals in six games, winning the golden boot, and could very easily have won the tournament for Portugal. The 1966 Portugal side was considered the greatest ever and was captained by Coluna, the other sensation from Maputo. The Portuguese journalists christened the midfield colossus Coluna the “Sacred Monster” because he was both terrifying and beautiful.
The night before the semi-final, in which Portugal was to play England at Goodison Park in Liverpool, the English Football Association switched the game to
Wembley, in London. It meant the Portuguese traveled down from Liverpool by train, overnight, arriving sleepless and in poor shape.
Even then, Portugal lost narrowly 2-1 with Eusébio scoring the goal. You could not imagine this kind of conniving
gamesmanship in the game of today. No surprise that, in Portugal, this semi-final is known as the ‘Jogo das lagrimas’—the game of tears.
Eusébio also stamped his name on the European Cup and scored twice in a 5-3 win over Real Madrid in the final in 1962. After the match, the 19-year-old swapped shirts with his boyhood hero Ferenc Puskás.
In that game, Eusébio displayed his trademark politeness. Benfica were awarded a penalty and captain Coluna prepared to take it.
“Senor Coluna, may I take the penalty?” Eusébio asked.
The one man from Mafalala passed the ball to the other; Eusébio scored and the cup was secured.
In 1968, Benfica lost 3-1 to Manchester United at Wembley. Many remember the game for a superb solo goal by George Best; many more will remember it for the moment Eusébio stood and applauded United goalkeeper, Alex Stepney, for
saving one of his bullet shots.
That was the gentleman and sportsman Eusébio was—a humane and gentle spirit who lit up the game and did Africa proud.
In Mozambique, Eusébio was revered during his many visits, but never tempted to return home. Among some in
Mozambique there is a tinge of regret that the great man never brought his energy and skill back to the land of his birth. Coluna did; when his playing days were over he came back to coach the unfashionable Text Chimoio to the national championship followed by many years of work in the
administration of the game in Mozambique. Coluna, who played nearly 700 times for Benfica and 57 times for Portugal, is retired in the quiet suburbs of Maputo, a long ball away from Mafalala where it all began.
Maybe, Eusébio gave his all to the game in the name of Africa and that was enough for one life.

Homage To The Black Panther  And Sacred Monster

Millions loved her, millions more hated her; few could ignore her. When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel in London, on April 8, it knocked the rest of the news off the bulletins for days.
It was the end of a life that made waves from Brussels to Africa with an attitude that could both divide and inspire. When she joined Parliament in 1959, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham was one of the few women in a legislature that resembled a gentleman’s club. In her years in Westminster she overcame prejudice against women and people from humble backgrounds.
“You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning,” said Thatcher in one of her most famous speeches, in 1980.
The Iron Lady—as the Russians dubbed her—criticized Europe, sacked her ministers, went to war with Argentina, poured harsh words and legislation on the unions and scorned Africa’s biggest liberation movement.
Thatcher called the African National Congress (ANC) terrorists, she refused to recognize the party and cast doubt on its ability to govern. Despite this, according to Thomas Wheeler, a research associate at the South African Institute of International Affairs, Thatcher found apartheid unacceptable, even though she didn’t believe in sanctions. Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda, clashed with Thatcher over apartheid at a Commonwealth conference in Lusaka, but the two ended up dancing the night away in the ballroom.
“We acknowledge that she was one of the strong leaders in Britain and Europe to an extent that some of her policies dominate discourse in the public service structures of the world,” the ANC was gracious enough to say.
Thatcher also had little time for the liberation forces of Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. In 1979, Thatcher banned her envoy from meeting with ZANU leader Robert Mugabe; refusing to talk with someone she regarded a terrorist, until he became Prime Minister. At the time, Britain was mulling over whether to recognize the interim government of the late Bishop Abel Muzorewa. His was the first black-led administration in Zimbabwe, but nationalists saw it as a puppet regime.
Many Rhodesian British passport holders helped vote in Thatcher in the May 1979 election in the hope that it would postpone independence. Ironically, it was Thatcher who pushed through the Lancaster House talks in London, later that year, that ushered in independence on April 18, 1980—the night when the Union flag came down for the last time and Bob Marley played to jubilant thousands at Rufaro Stadium in Harare.
Two years later the Iron Lady was rusting. Her social welfare cut backs angered the poor and led to riots in 1981; by 1982 she was the most unpopular British Prime Minister in history. When British forces repelled the Argentinians from the Falkland Islands in 1982, Thatcher rode a wave of popularity to a landslide victory in 1983.
On that night, covering my first election, I asked one of the more experienced journalists what this victory meant.
“Fewer and fewer people are going to get richer and richer,” he had said on that night.
So it was. Thatcher borrowed free market theory from the Chicago Business School to turn Britain from a dowdy backwater, laden with regulation and exchange controls, into a dynamic capitalist economy. When she deregulated the financial markets of London in 1986, it made fortunes for the dealers and drew capital and expertise from around the world.
On the way, Thatcher crushed the trade union movement, including a victory over the powerful National Union of Mineworkers in 1985, the union which had brought down the Ted Heath government in the early 1970s.
“If you want to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs but she picked up the shells and smashed them against the wall,” said her former opponent, former Labor leader, Neil Kinnock.
Unrest over the growing inequality of wealth and a riot over a highly unpopular Poll Tax in 1990 sealed Thatcher’s fate and by the end of the year her cabinet colleagues had ousted her in favor of John Major.
In death, Thatcher may have won over many sympathizers from Africa. Thousands of British people organized parties to crow over her death and many people on this continent are likely to frown upon that.
Thatcher was cremated after her funeral on April 17, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

THE IRON LADY AND THE TERRORISTS

With a glint in his eye, Nelson Mandela used to introduce Arthur Chaskalson thus.
“This is my lawyer… he managed to get me 27 years in prison!”
Chaskalson used to tell the story, against himself, with a laugh. Like the great man himself, the veteran human rights lawyer was a man of impeccable integrity, who never took himself too seriously. Chaskalson was born in Johannesburg in 1931 and studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand from where he graduated in 1954.
In court, Chaskalson was a serious man, who quit a lucrative practice to stand up for the oppressed. For the best part of half a century, he argued for human rights and freedom.
It was a passion forged at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria in 1964, when Chaskalson was a young member of the team that defended Mandela in the famous Rivonia Trial. It was the trial where Mandela and a number of his comrades were accused of sabotage—an offence that carried the death penalty. It was also the trial where world opinion turned in favor of the accused; overnight, criminals transformed into the freedom-seeking Benjamin Franklins of Africa.
“It was mid-winter and I remember he was wearing prison clothes with short trousers. He was in short trousers and the idea of putting people into short trousers was really to humiliate them. But it was impossible to humiliate Mr Mandela, he had this tremendous dignity, which transcended anything anyone could do to him. And from the very beginning of our very first meeting and discussions with everybody, it was clear that everybody respected him and saw him as a leader. Whereas he in turn respected them and insisted on decisions being taken by discussion and consensus not imposed upon anyone. And throughout the trial there was that collegiality and discussion,” Chaskalson told me in 2010.
Chaskalson was also in court when Mandela made his world famous speech from the dock, which took more than more six hours, in which he vowed to die for his beliefs.
“The court was packed, the people were silent and at the very end when he said that these were ideals for which he had struggled and hoped to live for, but if needs be he was prepared to die, there was a dramatic silence which we could actually hear the silence, in the court, and feel it. And it was absolutely quiet, not a sound, and then the judge said Mr Fisher, you can call your next witness.”
The next time Chaskalson saw Mandela across a court room was in 1994. Then President Mandela had made Chaskalson the first president of the highest court in South Africa, the Constitutional Court, and attended the opening ceremony in Johannesburg.
Among the first business to be considered by the new court was an application to restore the death penalty—a weapon that had been used ruthlessly by the apartheid government and abandoned by the new government.
“He sat next to me on the bench and I remember he started by saying: ‘The last time I was in a court it was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death.’ That’s how he started his comment but the next day we were going to consider whether or not capital punishment was consistent with the Constitution. So it was quite a dramatic, quite a dramatic opening and if he had been executed what would have happened?”
A rhetorical question made possible by brave lawyers, like Arthur Chaskalson, prepared to swim against the dark swirling tide of oppression.

A Giant Of The Courtroom Who Stood Tall For All

The last time I saw Alf Kumalo, it was a fitting place to meet one of the true greats of journalism. He was working, a camera slung around his neck, as always, on one of the biggest stories on the planet that day. We were at Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg, in early 2011, where hundreds of journalists from around the world descended after Nelson Mandela had been admitted in poor health.
Kumalo, the man who had been photographing his friend, Mandela, for more than half a century, was his gentlemanly self. He stopped his car, smiled and shook my hand with a warm greeting. He didn’t quite look himself that day but as he drove off, I mused that the man epitomized everything I respected in journalism: hard work; professionalism; integrity; a sense of fun; guts and grit; in short, qualities of man lauded across Africa, for more than half a century, for capturing the history of the struggles of his continent.
In this trade, riddled by braggarts and self-promoters, where even a spin doctor can command columns in newspapers—Kumalo was a man who wore his eminence lightly. He also wore the finest, smartest, clothes. Now, most photographers wear jeans and scruffy jackets; Kumalo dressed to the letter with a handkerchief nestled in the top pocket of a sharp jacket.
Kumalo appeared in the first edition of FORBES AFRICA in October 2011 when we interviewed him about his role, where he played himself, in the The Bang Bang Club, a film about the rough world of journalists covering South Africa’s political troubles.
“The Bang Bang started in the 1990s, but we’d been banging on for years,” laughed Kumalo.
It had been a long journey for Kumalo from his birth, more than 82 years ago, in Alexandra Township, just down the road from the FORBES AFRICA offices in Sandton. He went to college in Evaton, in the Vaal just outside Johannesburg. His eye for a picture saw him work for a number of publications, including South Africa’s Drum magazine and The Star, photographing every step on the road to freedom for millions of Africans. It was a fascinating journey that would see him befriend boxing giant Muhammad Ali—Kumalo was a successful amateur boxer himself—along with everyone from Moroka, Mbeki and Mandela.
I got to know Kumalo in 2009, when I interviewed him for the CNBC Africa documentary Liliesleaf—The Untold Story. It was a trilogy I produced on the underground movement in the 1960s, which hid out at Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia. Their capture, in a raid on the farm, led to the world-famous Rivonia trial, in which Mandela was sentenced to life.
Kumalo was at the raid and trial. He was lucky enough to have won a car in a photographic competition, so he was able to drive to cover the raid. In the car he packed a blue overall so he could disguise himself as a worker and avoid manhandling by the police. Here, he used his famous techniques to shoot, without anyone knowing, which included balancing a camera on his head and clowning around while the shutter clicked away. This hard work and guile brought Kumalo some of the most stunning pictures of his generation. He told me that he took a picture inside the court at Mandela’s Rivonia trial in Pretoria—an action that would have meant prison back in the day—and hid it away when his editor disapproved.
“I think I still have the negative somewhere, I will have to look it out,” he said to me, but took the secret of the missing Rivonia photograph to his grave.
As a fellow journalist, from the days before cut-and-paste hearsay, I always appreciated how much Kumalo had been an eyewitness to history; that he had felt, as well as recorded, the momentous stories of Africa. I shall never forget the pain in his face when he told me of how he saw police tossing casually the bodies of dead schoolchildren in piles during the Soweto uprising in 1976.
Kumalo suffered for his craft. He was beaten up and arrested more times than he could remember. Once the South African police cracked his skull with a rifle butt and then charged him with fighting police and resisting arrest.  The case dragged on for nine months, before charges were dropped on condition that Kumalo stopped shooting pictures. It was like telling the Limpopo River not to flow.
“I shot pictures all the more; I was angry and defiant,” said Kumalo.
Through it all, Kumalo never lost his sense of fun and love for the job. I recall the twinkle in the eye, when he told of driving to Francistown, in Botswana, to cover the escape of two South African underground activists from Liliesleaf: Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe. The two had broken out of police cells in Johannesburg and fled to Swaziland, hidden in a car boot, before flying to Botswana dressed as priests. Kumalo recalled the hectic night drive, with a journalist, along the dirt road to Francistown where they were more afraid of lions than speed traps. Kumalo risked the lions as he jumped out of the car to retrieve the game road kill for the pot, his colleague was afraid to follow.
“He was in the driver’s seat taking a pee through the door saying, ‘I am not taking the risk, I am not mad like you!’” chuckled Kumalo with a laugh that could light up a room.
It was a more somber occasion, laced with tears, at City Hall in Johannesburg when those who knew Kumalo gathered, on a warm October afternoon, to remember his life. Winnie Mandela was there, as was legendary photographer Peter Magubane, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Kumalo in shooting many of the stories of the day.
“Bra Alf never hurt anyone’s feelings. I never heard him make a derogatory comment about a colleague,” says poet activist, Don Mattera.
Veteran journalist Hopewell Radebe recalled how the gentle man, with a camera, always had time for rookie reporters.
“On a job, he used to call you aside and say, ‘This is how you behave and when things get tough you do this…’ Alf proved the lens of a camera can be as powerful as an AK-47 in freeing the people from the yoke of oppression,” he says.
There were tears from the many young photographers trained by the great man, who lamented how he struggled to raise money for his college in Soweto. Kumalo could have been forgiven for thinking that he was denied the monetary reward of an illustrious career. He complained to me that people often stole the images he had fought hard to capture.
All of the photographers in the room lent their cameras for the photographic equivalent of a 21-gun salute. As the shutters clicked away everyone paused for a moment to contemplate a world of journalism that is much poorer for the loss of Alf Kumalo; the kindly king of the lens.

Farewell, The Kindly King Of The Lens

“Is there anything that you haven’t done, that you’d still love to do?” I asked Zwelakhe Sisulu towards the end of the interview.
After a deep sigh, he pointedly and regrettably replied, in his trademark baritone voice, “The reason I got into journalism was because of my love for writing. Then I was diverted. I never did what was my first love. I hope that one day I’ll get a farm in some remote area, age gracefully and write.”
Well, it was not to be.
Just over a month later, death would put paid to that wish along with the hope of the journalist who was interviewing him.
On Thursday October 4, I was chairing a public discussion in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape when, the Managing Editor of FORBES AFRICA, Chris Bishop, sent me a text message saying that Zwelakhe Sisulu had died.
It was barely a week after we had published, as part of our October issue, a nine-page focus on the increasingly volatile mining industry in South Africa. Five of the nine pages focused on the chaos in the platinum sector, while the other four were dedicated to manganese mining, looking at whether new players like Kudumane Manganese, of which Sisulu was chairman, were doing anything different to avert the crisis that the platinum sector was experiencing.
Sisulu’s encounters, and views, were the thread that held together the manganese article. Chris and I had subsequently spoken about going back to Sisulu, with the hope of possibly getting him to grace the cover of one of our future issues. The leftovers from my interview would form a good basis from which we could build a really strong lead story about the rise and rise of a journalist-turned-entrepreneur, who had so excitedly told me, “There’s nothing as exciting as being an African in Africa today”.
I knew that it would be one of the easiest stories I would ever be able to tell, for Sisulu himself was the master story teller. Like a good journalist, he had the amazing ability to tell so much, so well, in so few words. When, for example, I asked who had inspired him the most in his life, he gave a simple yet sophisticated reply, “It’s difficult to say, but the man I admired greatly was Oliver Tambo. He’s somebody who stood head and shoulders above everybody else. Joe Matthews looked through you like a prosecutor. Madiba tapped you with a jab. Oliver Tambo hugged you.”
I immediately got the picture, or rather, the message.
Like his hero Tambo—the man who held together South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) for decades in exile, while other leaders like Mandela were in prison—Sisulu appeared soft, yet his intellect was so sharp, his organizational skills impeccable and his determination steely.
Never the one to shy away from new challenges, in July 1978, a mere three years after kicking off his journalism career as a cadet reporter and merely 28 years old, Sisulu was elected president of the newly founded Media Workers’ Association of South Africa; the same year he was appointed news editor of the Sunday Post.
Two years later, he would lead the longest and biggest strike by media workers in the country, ending in successful wage negotiations, albeit the authorities would retaliate by forcing the proprietors of the newspaper he worked for, The Post, to close down.
As if that was not enough, Sisulu—alongside fellow journalists who had led the strike—would be banned for three years, placed under house arrest and would not be allowed to work as a journalist, attend public meetings or even go to townships other than the one in which he lived.
Following the lapse of his banning orders in 1983, Sisulu would get a Nieman Fellowship, a mid-career journalism award entitling him to a year’s study at Harvard University. And it was during this time, sitting among the audience listening to a speech by his hero, that he would not only rekindle his childhood memories of how warm Tambo was, but find other good reasons for admiring him.
“Oliver Tambo stood up and spoke. There isn’t a speech in the world that has made more of an impression on me than that one. The thing about that man was the way he would marshal his facts and use them as galloping horses. He was quite unequalled. I had always thought of the struggle in emotional terms. But when Tambo spoke I understood, for the first time, that there was actually a rational contestation, that it wasn’t just Amandla! Amandla!” recalled Sisulu.
On his return to South Africa in 1985, Sisulu was appointed editor of The New Nation, a new weekly publication sponsored by the Southern African Catholics Bishops’ Conference, one that, in more ways than the publications he had previously worked for, would become a bigger thorn on the side of apartheid’s apologists. Needless to say that more bannings, gagging orders and imprisonment would follow.
When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Sisulu became his press and private secretary, traveling the world with the revered statesman.
“No one would see Madiba if I didn’t want them to see him. The question rose to me very fundamentally when I was working for Madiba, do I want to be a gatekeeper all of my life?”
Following the historic 1994 democratic elections, after which Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president, Sisulu was deployed by the ANC-led government to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the national public broadcaster, as its first black Group CEO, a position he would hold until 1997.
After leaving the SABC he would become a businessman, with stakes in a string of companies that straddle mining, energy, telecommunication and the media.
As more messages came through to my cellphone on that fateful day, from, among others, board members of a community television station that I chair and which Sisulu’s broadcasting outfit generously supports through funding, equipment and training, and as tributes continued to appear on social media sites from fellow journalists—who either worked with him or who were inspired by his activism as  a journalist—my mind raced back to our encounter a
month earlier.
From the bits he had told me about the years he had spent outside the limelight focusing on building his business empire, I could not help but be in awe of the kind of model entrepreneur he had become, in a continent so desperately in need of them. He told me the story of how he was working with government of São Tomé and some Chinese business people. The terms were that the São Toméan government wouldn’t pay a dime, but after 18 years would own
the station.
Brutally frank, as he was kind, provocative even, he sneered at ongoing suggestions for the nationalization of mines in South Africa. Not surprising for a mining magnate, I pointed out to him during our interview, but he insisted his reasons were more practical than ideological. He cited as examples telecommunications utility Telkom as well as the SABC.
“The major challenge facing this country is the management of public assets. Until and unless we perfect management of public assets, we must not even talk of nationalization.”
Not far from the auditorium, from where I had just received the news of his premature death, was the state of the art minerals polishing factory Sisulu had urged me to visit. Based at the East London Industrial Development Zone, the factory was very special to him, he told me. He was passionate about the project because it was, in part, his way of giving back to the Eastern Cape, the largely impoverished province that gave birth to both his parents, struggle stalwarts Walter and Albertina Sisulu, as well as other outstanding South African liberation heroes like Steve Biko, Mandela and Tambo.

Tag: RIP

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Homage To The Black Panther And Sacred Monster

THE IRON LADY AND THE TERRORISTS

A Giant Of The Courtroom Who Stood Tall For All

Farewell, The Kindly King Of The Lens

It Was Exciting To Be An African In Africa