WeeklySA_AdminPHENOMENAL:Humble Segwagwa loved people, culture & farming
By Victor Mecoamere
Some among us are born, live uneventful lives, impacting no one and nothing, whatsoever, and then, they die.
But, others – like Mabe Gabriel Thobejane – are an exception, because they leave indelible inscriptions with their God-given talents, and build memorable monuments with their rich human traits. I had always known about him as a part of the formidable Afro-ethno sounds duo, Malombo, and only got to know him better after I had contributed a short poem to Frank Leepa for Sankomota’s album that was dedicated to several of the group’s departed members: “Your sorrow may be monument high, today; But may gone, like a sigh, tomorrow.”
At the time, we had no inkling that Leepa would soon be gone, succumbing to illness, soon, thereafter. To cut a long story short, we ended up sharing a hotel room in Nairobi, Kenya as part of a huge contingent of journalists, artists and radio and television bigwigs who were attending an African Union of Broadcasting, AUB conference in the early nineties.
The affable gap-toothed pocket dynamo spoke less but played a storm on percussions for Sankomota at the event, and we spent several evenings dissecting the pros and cons of Black Consciousness and Ubuntu. Of course, one was encountering a man who had started pounding the African drums as part of the formidable Malombo duo, together with his mercurial uncle, guitarist extraordinaire, Phillip Tabane, back in 1965. Thobejane loved people, the Pan Africanist Congress, indigenous African culture, and agriculture, so much that he used to boast about “my small farm, back home, in Garankuwa”.
For someone who looked nothing but an act of God could faze him, tears would well in his eyes, and he would bawl if he were drunk, each time he regretted the disintegration of his beloved Sakhile, the Afro-Jazz band in which he used to blow up a storm together with the likes of bassist Sipho Gumede, saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu and guitarist Menyatso Mathole.
The same as yet another departed percussionist, Makhaya Mahlangu, Thobejane did not know the word, “rehearsal”. Illustratively, back in Kenya during the AUB event, we used to spend whole nights high, sloshed to the gills, and would be predictably unprepared for another lifetime of socially-acceptable behaviour the next morning.
But, as you might have guessed, the best performer on the night would be the diminutive phenomenon.
It is not surprising, then, that from 1977, after more than a decade with Tabane, Thobejane has played percussions in collaborations with fellow local greats like Dizu Plaatjies and his Amampondo Marimba band, Madala Kunene, Busi Mhlongo, United Kingdom alternative music group Juno Reactor, Pops Mohammed and the equally-peerless percussionist, Tlale Makhene. In many ways, Thobejane – who has died last Thursday after he had reportedly suffered a stroke age 74 – was a divine soul, starting no conflicts and bearing no grudges; and possessed a disarming humility.
In the end, a review of his life and times resonates with an affirmation I read somewhere, which says, “A human being is a single being, unique and unrepeatable.”
Robala ka khutso, Segwagwa!
