Through the prism of the son. Rest in Peace Reverend Thobela.

We become the people our world ultimately shapes. We become the education we have or have gone through. We become the experiences we have had. We are the background that shaped us. Most importantly, we are the window from whence we originate. 

 

Those who do not know where we come from rely on who we are for them to understand where we come from. We become the prism through which a story of other generations before us could be written if not assumed. Our lives are a veneration of those we are named after or who came before us.

 

When we meet outside the on-earth reception space we call our home, we meet as colleagues, schoolmates, kasi ouens, and many other possibilities. We would have already established who our mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers are. Cousins, nephews, aunts, and uncles would have already determined that we only have to appear before them; otherwise, we are already credentialled about them. 

 

In all these earthly and sometimes spiritual relationships, there are relationships we are deliberate about entering into. We select those we want to label the type of relationship we are defining. These deliberate relationships will make and complete our self-concept, requiring commitment and responsibility. 

 

We choose to be mentees to those we subject ourselves to their authority. We choose to be husbands or wives to those we would have loved and still love, as well as respected or still respected. We choose those we call friends. We choose those we call business partners. In the relationships we choose, we commit more to them than those we do not choose or did not choose. What is inevitable is that those we choose come with those they did not choose one way or the other. Some that we did not choose become the consequence of the choices we would have made; hence, there are sons and daughters. 

In this maze of relationships, we become the threads connecting the various complexes attached to the human nodes we inherit, choose, or are given. This is why we have become a more prominent family called humanity. What brings us together can easily create new nuclei of us, which we almost instantaneously call a family away from the true and authentic family we come from. 

This is why friends become brothers or sisters,  mentors become fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, and those who are whatever to those we chose become the same to us who decided. 

In the prism of Nkosana, the son of Reverend Thobela and his family, including the many complexes and the choices Nkosana made about my relationship with him, I became many titles to the Thobela complex. When I meet with them, I realise what I am to them and what they are to me, and inevitably, who I am in their midst. I do not know them as people, but I know how he presented them to me. I know how to relate to them through the prism of how he relates to them. I give them the respect he gives them, acting or real, acknowledging their role in shaping his legacy. 

 

This is the only way I have a claim to the various and several relationships I have had with Reverend Thobela, Nkosana's dad. First, he was a dad because I knew him through his son, and he was a Reverend because I knew him as a man of the cloth. In his son, I have experienced the Reverend he was in multiple ways; in his other children, I saw the father he was; in his congregation, I saw the church leader he was; and in Nkosana's nieces, I saw the grandfather he was. His legacy is one of reverence and respect. 

 

It is a pity that, although we had been planning with XQ to do so, I could not have more prolonged and extended moments to sit in front of the well he clearly was and directly drink what many that I met, except his biological children, have testified of the purity of the thirst-quenching wisdom he became to them. 

As we accept his passing, bid farewell to him, and prepare to lay his mortal remains, let us allow his immortality as an African spirit that lived with us through the prism of his son to prevail in the solidarity platform we have become. May the Soul of Reverend Thobela rest in eternal peace. In his passing, we are united in our grief and our celebration of his life. 

On behalf of you and the others birthed by your son, the BPI Family and Complex, we thank you for the pioneer and trailblazer your son is and will grow to become. We thank you for the training you gave him to manage a complex and diverse constituency the BPI has become. If you were iNkosi, and I submit you were, in your way, one, thank you for the iNkosana that must now burst out and become the true iNkosi you anointed him to be. We are grateful for the influence of Reverend Thobela. Thank you, Reverend. RIP.