How much pain is a man supposed to endure in one lifetime? The question keeps playing out in my mind as I look into the face of the man across the table.
Clement Jackson is narrating the latest episode in his drama-filled life: a blaze that gutted down his temporarily rented house in Mogoditshane and consumed the family’s entire household furniture, children’s schoolbooks and some musical instruments. But somehow, Providence chose to save what Jackson calls his “priceless items” ÔÇô a collection of guitars that includes a gift from Eric Clapton.
“We,” ÔÇô that is the family ÔÇô “are now recovering psychologically. We all had to receive counseling [because] that thing is terrible; it’s not supposed to happen to anyone. We often take things like insurance and having fire extinguishers for granted. We always think something like this will happen to the next person. Somehow, we never imagine it happening to ourselves.”
How true! But just how much pain is a man supposed to take in one lifetime?
“Man I have had my knocks in life, especially in the music business, that I have developed a heart of stone and balls of steel. Bad news has been so much part of my life,” he states.
I ask him if, given the amount of pain he has known in his life, there is ever a point he feels it’s not worth it. “Never!” he shoots back. “You always have to soldier on. I am a child of God. I know I will pull through this because God always provides. The fact that I still have my guitars, all my guitars, makes this a non-event.”
A non-event, indeed! The man shows me a thank-you-sms he sent last night to DJ Skizo, who is producing Jackson’s next album. In the communication, he is congratulating the famed producer for the excellent work he is putting into the project. I get it. He is telling me that there is good stuff happening in his life, and he is not fishing for pity.
Scion of a Zambian father and Ndebele mother, said to have descended from the Mzilikazi clan, Clement Njabulo Jackson, whose father was a mine captain in the now defunct Monarch mine in Francistown, grew up surrounded by various musical instruments. He states that within the small Ndebele community that settled in Borolong, some 20 kilometres west of Francistown, strumming the guitar, the Spanish banjo or a few melodies from the accordion or the saxophone was a daily occurrence. His father had a band called Vuk’uzenzele, sometimes shortened to “Vuka”, and therefore Jackson had unfettered access to the band’s instruments. He tells me that the one thing that really pushed him to music was that.
“I was absolutely useless in football”. The sport was his peers’ favourite pastime. So he had to find something he could excel at. Being raised in what was essentially a musicsphere, the choice came rather easily. Having started off on the banjo, which was his father’s specialty, he later graduated to the guitar.
Even a musical family had doubts about a music career. “My parents’ major fear was that music would distract me from my schoolwork. So I did it (music) under parental guidance,” he says. “I never suffered the ordeal of parents breaking my guitar like a lot of boys who had their guitars smashed.”
So, why the guitar?
“It was the guitar era,” he states, “and the era belonged to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Santana. If you could do vocals it was a bonus. It was the guitar first, second, third, and fourth. You had to play the guitar to be a man.”
Many years later, Jackson would meet and open the show for one of his idols, the great Eric Clapton. His most treasured moment was when the two-time “World’s Best Guitarist Award” winner, after listening to Jackson playing with Kgwanyape, exclaimed, “young man , there’s so much of me in you” ÔÇô and presented him with a top of the range guitar that he still cherishes and keeps to this day. It is part of the collection he rescued from the fire that gutted his house.
To win Clapton’s own approval, first he had to travel through many stations and sidings.
While a student at Mater Spei College, Jackson teamed with school friends such as Louis Mhlanga, Ndingo Johwa and Masilonyana Radinoga to establish a teeny-bopper band that became an instant household name, The Black Serpents. Though an A-student, school was something of a distraction from his passion, and he used to bunk a lot. After secondary school, he finally felt the time had come to find his place in the world. Without his parents’ knowledge, he headed for Cape Town, doing the local gig circuit. Out of fear that his parents might track him down, he would conceal his whereabouts by writing them letters with no sender’s address.
I ask why he bothered to write at all. “I wanted to assure them that I was alive and happy,” he replies.
I imagine his dear son Eugene playing the same prank on him, and wonder if he would survive the anxiety.
Unknown to Jackson, an uncle based in Johannesburg had been briefed to do some underground intelligence and trace him. And he did. With Jackson’s cover busted, he gave in to the persuasion to return home and find a proper job.
The return coincided with government’s plan to take over the national railway system. Part of the plan entailed training Batswana locomotive drivers. “Without my knowledge, my elder sister applied on my behalf to be a trainee train driver,” he recalls.
He was to be among the first batch of Batswana trained to drive trains ÔÇô a novelty in those days. After two years of training in Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique, the crew was seconded to the National Railways of Zimbabwe, who had been operating the Botswana railway system. Even in newly independent Zimbabwe, no-one had ever seen a black man driving a diesel train. Blacks had only been confined to the less glamourous coal trains.
Apart from the Batswana drivers, the only other diesel train drivers were the whites who had been part of the Rhodesia Railways, and residual racism was evident. Jackson recalls an incident when he finished his eight-hour shift and handed over to a white colleague, who first did an elaborate act of wiping the train’s controls and seat with a cloth.
“When I noticed what he had just done, I told him that if we had trained together, I would have outclassed him; that I would have been top of the class, and he would probably have been last. From that day, he treated me as an equal,” he says.
He states that though the money was good, the job was not interesting for a jazzman. But when the Botswana Railways was eventually established and the enginemen had to come home, they found that their packages had been drastically reduced from when they were still part of the NRZ. Whatever little attraction the job had, faded when the new pay package was introduced.
There is an incident from Jackson’s training days that must have been a harbinger to how his own railway career would end. It occurred in Mozambique, where a white senior colleague cheated on his wife with a black lass. So smitten was the man that he deserted his family. The wife did a bit of private investigation to establish her husband’s work schedule. On this particular shift, Jackson was travelling with him. As the train gained momentum and emerged from a curve, there stood a figure right in the middle of the tracks facing the oncoming monster. She waved, as if to say good bye. It was the heartbroken wife.
“Before we could make sense of what was happening, the train had run over her. She had wanted to be killed by her husband, and by his train. And she had waved him goodbye. Our shift was immediately called off. Suddenly, the man had a funeral to arrange. I said, ‘what type of a job is this?’,” he says with a contorted face.
Even as a train driver, Jackson kept his other life as a musician, which was how he joined forces with the late Duncan Senyatso to form Kgwanyape. Lasting well over a decade and a half, the banded commanded a massive following and got to perform alongside international acts like UB 40, Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, Shabba Ranks, Third World, Maxi Priest, and the Commodores.
In 1991, the band was riding the crest of its popularity. One particular show went till early morning. Jackson says shortly after leaving the stage an unexpected call for morning duty reached his house. “I had hardly slept and I was not fit,” he says. “I dosed off and hit another train from the back. It was a terrible accident, but fortunately no life was lost. My association with Botswana Railways ended after that incident.”
It was just one of the many knocks he would take through the journey that saw Kgwanyape disband, and the death of close friends like Senyatso. But he is still standing, and looking forward to the forthcoming album in which he features some of the elder statesmen of local music, including a reunification with former band mate at Kgwanyape, the ace drummer Makhwengwe Mengwe.
