Khumbulani Mpofu
4 min readNov 9, 2022

--

It's all I got in my name.

There’s the three cars and the apartments. Some savings in a few pension fund schemes and some furniture spread across a few friends' places. There's some cash, offshore, if I don't get to spend it all on a whim.

I didn't put anything in storage, I thought that I could become minimalist and just have only a few things to take me through each day. I gave away some clothes that I felt I no longer had a need for. I think my brother won a suit that probably doesn't fit his tall frame.

Some of the textiles were sporting mementos of my favourite football team that I had abandoned when they fell on hard times and I lost my interest in them for a while. I kept a few t-shirts that reminded me of the places that I had travelled to for leisure and work.

But then some of the old clothes couldn't fit the rotund frame that I had acquired during the lockdowns anyway. I'm taking the gym seriously now though.

In that time when my head went fuzzy, I had no patience and penchant for television, and it was mostly switched off in my new residence because the noises in my head were too loud anyway, and I was mostly quiet and I wrote away all of the thoughts that were racing through my mind.

I had started on a journey of finding myself back then. I travelled to the old country and countryside searching for my family and my clan and my clan names. Some of the conversations I recorded on my phone, at the time I thought it useful to have the voices for future reference. I asked all of them the questions and they revealed to me what I thought I needed to know.

And I plotted a family tree with pen and paper, and I would later translate it and transfer it to a free Android app that I found. But I'm told now that it was all wrong from the start, and that I didn't belong on that branch of the tree. For a while, when I received that news, I was lost and confused. I wasn't angry. I was torn and hurt.

But I have let it go. I think in the self-discovery and the search for identity, one thing I came to realise was that there is this life in the present, and yes, it has been affected by an entire existential journey, which is made up of the environment and the relationships and relations from back then and into yesterday.

There is mistakes and errors. There is wrong judgment and poor decisionmaking. There is love, lovemaking and loss and there is drama and arguments and fights and altercations. There is a new generation born and a changing of nappies. And a learning of the alphabet and the periodic table. There is exams and tests and awards and certificates.

There is also mischief and successes and failures and setbacks. Stuff which doesnt just arrive with DNA or testing. I have taken time to absorb all of that.

But in the now of it all, there is a distance that gets created from the past, and the sensing for what happens in the future gets decided by what happens from the instance of this moment on. And then time moves forward.

I know that that doesn't make sense. But for a long time, I was stuck on trying to appear to myself with an image of a spiritual understanding and a grasp that I was seeking. And I thought that there was a particular elevation that didn't require the use of medicines and would just make everything make sense.

But I now think that perhaps all of that was just grandiose anyway and that it was a product of the symptoms. But for a while, I thought that would explain why certain things had happened in the past and why my mind was disposed and predisposed to its own occasional loss of self. And I was haunted.

I had it all in my name and I thought it made me who I am. But now I am asking myself about my name and which one I choose, and I’m realising that there is the truth in all of that which was said to me in passing. To just let it be and forgive them all.

And to just be glad to be alive fam. After all that we have been through.

These are some of my thoughts for today. Sorry I’ve been away. We’ll have some more frank talk later. Bless.

--

--