A LETTER TO MAUREEN MWANAWASA
19 August 2024
Dear Maureen,
Your departure was sudden. Were you in a hurry to join and be reunited with your husband? It is not lost on us that he too died unexpectedly in the month of August, exactly sixteen years ago today, the sad day when the earth is set to swallow the small house of wood that you now occupy, cold and still and without voice. We remain wondering whether we will see a recorded video of you bidding farewell – just like your husband did – to the land that held you firmly and lovingly in its bosom. Should this not happen, the gaping hole of longing that you have left behind, the void that we feel, will keep tormenting us for years on end.
Your untimely passing, at the age of 61, is a painful reminder of the fragility of life. Yesterday it was your then 59-year-old husband. Today, it is you. Tomorrow, it will be our turn. The lesson to all is clear: let us be there for each other, take care of ourselves, and cherish the good times we share with our friends and loved ones because it is easy in the bloom of youth and health to forget our mortality. For in the end, death must come to all. Such is the current order and nature of existence, of life. We come. And we go. It has been like this ever since it all began.
Your lived experience teaches us that the relevance of death lies in its impact on those that live. It will inspire us to continually improve ourselves because it is in our quest for individual excellence that we truly become witnesses to the greatness of life and service to humanity. It will remind us to celebrate the ephemera and gift that each day is, to live now and in the present. We sometimes miss out on life when we seek more, when we seek permanence, for what we have is now, and we must live in the moment. For that is all there is to life – now. As Petersen Zagaze, has sung, ‘Ku manda kuli boring’! That song summarises what life is: alive!
Both the beauty that epitomised your life and the ugliness of its end are not lost on us.
You played your part. You loyally and diligently served our homeland. In a way, the love that you showed for the citizens cannot be matched by the love which the citizens showed you in return. It is a terrible indictment on our collective attitude that we generally only hoist and celebrate the good people among us after they are gone. How invisible, even today, the great works of so many among us. Their real honour comes by way of knowledge of the truth – the whole story that they know and, with an inner smile, narrate fully to no other but their conscience.
Your selflessness and commitment to a better Zambia shall forever be remembered. You were a friend to many, a wife, a mother, a lawyer, and a First Lady. And through your activism for social justice, community development, and access to public health, you touched many lives and served as a patron of many causes. These include the Maureen Mwanawasa Community Initiative, Breakthrough Cancer Trust, Habitat for Humanity Zambia, and the Rotary Club of Maluba. It is perhaps appropriate that your very last post on X, formerly Twitter, consists of a short but meaningful sentence that appears to have been your guiding principle in public life: “Putting people’s interests first.”
You remain a lesson and a symbol of hope to many and in particular to the girl child. This is because you started life as a nobody and ended as a star. Inspired by the awareness of the importance of education, you went to school, completed a secretarial course, secured work, and became, in later years, a legal practitioner. Your dreams, in their diversity, came to pass. The lesson to all of us is clear: in life, it does not matter how we start; what matters is how we end. Time and chance happen to all.
You married Levy Mwanawasa on 7 May 1987. Through the institution of marriage, you became a devoted partner, a mother of four, and a ‘Mother of the Nation’. You supported and stood by your man, just like he supported and stood by you. Your combined experience teaches us that our choice of a partner in life has a significant effect on our lives. It also tells us that as we come to grow, learn more about ourselves, perfect the art of living and following through our interests, we also end up inevitably fine tuning ourselves into the rhythms of those with whom we are most compatible or attuned to. Some call it serendipity – the stuff of fairy tales. Others call it a connection.
You possessed a remarkable capacity for friendship – intensely loyal, warm, and kind, expressed in a genuine interest in another’s well-being and in the most generous hospitality in conversation that encouraged as well as stretched. Perhaps more importantly, you cherished family and community. In furtherance of these values, you embraced both your biological children and those belonging to the extended family, almost always blurring the distinctions. While your husband was busy attending to national duties, you did your best to raise your children well.
Following your husband’s death, and illustrative of the general plight of the African woman when a spouse dies, you faced many challenges. Family. Career. Financial. Your life shows that opportunities and challenges come to all. In the end, all we are is human. What gives meaning to life is not fame, status, beauty, wealth, or power. For all these are fleeting. What matters most are the timeless values and authentic relationships we cultivate with other people. It is how we enhance the lives of others while enriching our own. It is how we occasion good, make others feel, and add value to their lives. Everything else is, overall, vanity.
I am sure you are seeing and hearing the many things that are being said about you in the wake of your departure. Good and bad things. False and true. Sentiments openly expressed and those expressed through hushed conversations and murmurs. Many more things will be said about you today, tomorrow, and the day after. None will be truer than this truth: in the end, you were, like the rest of us, only human. With nothing you came and without anything you have gone. Gone to the same destination where every human being eventually goes. In ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, the Irish poet, Dylan Thomas, advised us to not accept death passively, despite its inevitability. Instead, he encouraged us to confront it with courage and challenge it:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning, they
Do not go gentle into that good night”.
Go well, Maureen Mwanawasa, and rest gently into that good night, as a victor, one more time.
Sishuwa Sishuwa
A LETTER TO MAUREEN MWANAWASA
