Thoughts on a man called Ndi

How does one eventually pin down a DIY tour guide who’s constantly out of town mingling with Cabinet Ministers and pitching ideas to potential funders? This when he’s not at a gala to receive an award or been invited to promote the Northern Cape province at some tourism imbizo. Or when it’s a Saturday but as a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, his day is mostly scheduled to God?

The answer is that it’s a mission that makes one appreciative of those mortal stupidities like WhatsApp and Facebook or else we might never get to speak to Mbulelo Kafi, our associate at Toverview/eParkeni and owner and CEO of Sakhisizwe Tours.

After weeks of working the phones he almost slips through our fingers. Again. This time he’s just landed from KwaZulu-Natal, has a jacket strapped over his shoulder, a stick in one hand, and is off to the homecoming ceremony of a cultural initiate.

In KZN, he says, he spent a week setting up a tourist route. ‘Destination promotion’ he calls it, where he arranges for signage and putting up GPS to the various tourism sites on those hallowed grounds of Zulu heritage. The place is riddled with historical sites dear to the South African historybook, not least because Shaka, amongst a host of other illustrious names, once did some of his business there.

The Khuzumuntu Farmhouse, built on a rural village in the Eshowe area had approached Kafi with a pressing gripe: ‘So many things to see here, but why aren’t enough feet coming through the gates?’

‘I mean just a stone throw away we have isiHlahla saMagwala (Cowards Bush) where Shaka would have those ‘cowards’ who’d not shown satisfactory valour on the battlefield dispatched to a hideous death’, despaired the owner Mr. Mbongi Khuzwayo.

Says Khuzwayo: How about that monument over there in memory of Mzilikazi, King of the Matebele, forced to flee to what would rise as the city of Bulawayo in the former Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) following a bloody battle with the pioneering voortrekkers Hendrik Potgieter, Gerrit Maritz and Piet Uys? In between are storied, albeit vicious tales of conquest including the King’s encounters with the missionary Robert Moffat and William Cornwallis Harris whose Narrative of an Expedition into Southern Africa during the years 1836 and 1837 were prized Africana. So you see, this is supposed to be a multi-cultural tourism haven.

At this lamentation Kafi scratched his head, smiled, and said he thought he knew exactly why. A few years ago he’d been met with a similar matter in the Northern Cape. He says he was once charged with developing the Karoo ANC route which starts off in Colesberg to Hanover, Victoria West, all the way to Williston. The goal was to put up signage, call a GPS company to put up the necessary technology, and ‘develop’ the road so that tourists would be aware of the history of the road they were driving on. Khuzumuntu Farmhouse, he thought, was simply faced with a similar
hurdle.

As a colleague, one must resign to the reality that Kafi is not the sort of guy who’ll be there to answer your questions. Always on this mission or that and a popular figure in the provincial tourism space, he is one of the people that the local government has on speed dial when there’s a tourism endeavour to get to. Like most freelancers, he is often swamped and there is too much happening to get every detail down. Add to this that he is apparently one of a handful of local tour guides around here and his tours uniquely straddle the gulf between the history of black Kuyasa with white Colesberg. He is an indispensable middleman to those who seek the big picture.

One day he’s out taking a group of German pensioners on an adventure through the township. The next he has a busload of soldiers who wish to see the battle sites of the South African War.

Be that as it may, he’s been here from the start, when our respective publications were mostly nothing but dreams in our collective minds. Over the years, we’ve written of some of his exploits which include his tours through Colesberg, the play he once wrote, got a team to rehearse but, sadly, seemingly never got to perform. Film crews have come down to record his story. Some have come down because they’d heard he was the man who could take them to the locales they needed to shoot. He has enough pictures of the Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille to say she truly lives up to her nickname, Auntie Pat, as far as our man is concerned.

Recently he bagged a provincial tourism award, the Northern Cape acknowledging the man’s selfless talents. Perhaps the one truly striking thing about Ndi (as he’s affectionately known down here in the boondocks) is how he embodies the spirit of the Toverview/eParkeni ethos: that spirit to just go ahead, don’t wait, sometimes death only comes because you’re just not moving around enough. And through it all, he has never forgotten that he grew up in the church. As such, God remains a constant presence in his life and sometimes features regularly even in conversations with heathens like Yours Truly. To that we say Amen.