Took me time to say anything about the death of this ghetto champion because there were lessons to learn from the terraces.
Sad isn’t it that he must bid farewell in such opulence when he lived in such poverty, accompanied by the hypocrisy of inches of newspaper and social media spaces. Yet for a year or more nobody really cared to support his craft now being spoken of in sugarcoated and pretentious attention-seeking words.
Those who now remain to gain a few likes from the death of a young man everybody loved and everybody never really cared for, are now ashamedly taking the highest seat in the funeral hall with their amplifiers speaking authoritatively of the love they now find in his music.
How many of them knew where he was staying? How many of them did he really feel were his friends? The elites of the music industry, the powerful stakeholders of the media, the DJs that needed to be paid to play his music and the corporate world that now milk his name without the shame they had of him in the past 3 or so years.
So I sit here amused by it all and laughing at the hypocrisy but also marvelling at the true love you find in the streets of Mbare, the same I saw when Fantan was arrested. Souljah Love’s true story can only be told at the heart of Matapi Flats or in Mufakose because those were the people who loved him in his poverty and understood him.
When I die, as everyone must, do not let those who never really cared eulogise over my body, buy me a coffin of ridiculous beauty and accompany me as if there were really there when we were struggling. Let the ghetto mourn me because only they respect what we are and where we came from.
Rest in peace
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