In a suburb of Harare in Zimbabwe, a young boy sat in the garden of the family home working on a logical task set by his father. Piece by piece, the boy completed the assignment and sought his father out. “Oh,” said father to mother, “he is going to be an engineer!” The boy did not understand what this meant. But the seed was sown.
In a suburb of Harare in Zimbabwe, a young boy sat in the garden of the family home working on a logical task set by his father. Piece by piece, the boy completed the assignment and sought his father out. “Oh,” said father to mother, “he is going to be an engineer!” The boy did not understand what this meant. But the seed was sown.
Irish priests at St Francis of Assisi High School, Chivhu would further shape Mapfumo Chidzambwa’s journey towards engineering when he boarded there during the 1990s. “That’s how I came to know about Ireland,” says Mapfumo today.
At school, his aptitude for maths didn’t go unnoticed. Classmates assigned him the moniker ‘Isaac Newton’ and his maths teacher considered it efficient to use his sheet as the answer key. When it came to considering college options, he deliberated with his best friend ‘Galileo’ – so named for his gift for physics but who preferred to be known by the cooler ‘Dr C’.
They dreamed big and Oxbridge was the zenith. But would the Irish priests assist? The boys theorised that the priests might not have had good knowledge of UK college scholarships or perhaps harboured an historical bias rendering them unwilling to help. So Dr C asked for a list of Irish institutions.
Mapfumo made enquiries and sent out his excellent O Level results. His A Level grades, when they came through, were similarly brilliant. University College Dublin (UCD) replied to him and sounded keen, but the amount it offered to cover his studies for a four-year engineering degree was small and, as a non-EU student, Mapfumo was liable for thousands of euro in fees per year that his family could not afford.
“I applied for scholarships with the government of Zimbabwe,” adds Mapfumo, “but then Zimbabwe was starting to go downhill, so they said because of the relations they had with the European countries they couldn’t sponsor my studies in Europe.”
A breakthrough came when an aunt in the UK said she would pay half his first year fees, and Mapfumo took up his place on the engineering degree at UCD in 2001. The first semester was underway when he arrived in mid-November. It was a calculated risk.
“I thought, okay, I will force UCD to look for money for me by doing extremely well in my studies,” he remembers. “So I started studying hard for my course. I took the notes from the lecturers and wrote the mid-year exams in December, and they were saying I was one of the best performers. I wrote the first-year exams and came fourth in the class – with first class honours.”
Meantime, relations between the Zimbabwean government and the west were “rock bottom” and this presented further impetus for UCD to assist Mapfumo to stay on the degree programme. He continued to perform well year-on-year and graduated in 2005, having specialised in electronic engineering. Some fees were outstanding but he had a strategy at hand. Mapfumo was taken on for a PhD and UCD undertook that part of the PhD fund would pay for the arrears in his undergraduate fees. The future was, he says, “looking bright”.
Then on 1 October 2006, Mapfumo was viciously assaulted in an unprovoked racist attack outside a house party in Clondalkin, Dublin.
Luke Casey of Greenfort Gardens, Clondalkin beat him with a hurley stick and Stephen Mooney of Greenfort Lawns, Clondalkin, hit his head with a golf club, breaking his facial bones and sinking his right eye into it socket, blinding Mapfumo in that eye. Witnesses heard Mooney shouting: “Do you want to see me crack a nigger’s skull?”
The party was attended by Africans and had been good-humoured. Mapfumo, a teetotaller who seldom went to late night parties, was designated driver for his late uncle and a friend.
Casey and Mooney had gatecrashed the party before apparently going away, and at a point something brought Mapfumo outside. Perhaps he was leaving or heard the two men vandalising his and other cars outside – he cannot remember.
Mapfumo and others followed the two perpetrators to see what direction they were going and he saw them with golf clubs and hurley sticks in hand. He was set upon without provocation. Mapfumo’s next memory is waking up in hospital.
“Two jaw breaks, the lower and upper jaw... the upper jaw was broken in the middle... I couldn’t chew…” he says. “The right eye socket was broken so I was leaking spinal fluid… I could taste it at the back of my throat... it tasted like tears.”
Mapfumo was in hospital for nearly two months and afterwards had numerous corrective surgeries. He was under the care of eye, maxillofacial and neuro teams. He had to take a year out of studies to recuperate, returning in September 2007 to find that circumstances dictated he couldn't continue on the PhD programme. Instead, Instead, with the engineering department’s assistance he undertook a Master’s in engineering science that he finished in early 2010. Currently he is retraining for a Master’s in applied software engineering at Athlone IT, a course he identified as suiting his circumstances as a partially blind person.
“Emotionally I think it is still a rollercoaster and I am still on the path,” he says. “I have learnt to live with the disability I have but it is still a journey I am on, I am yet to see where the destination is.”
A strong Christian who is married and has a young daughter, Mapfumo draws strength from faith and family. He is an ordained pastor of his church, Bethesda Apostolic Church. “What happened is just a bump in the road. I will continue my path as a scholar, for my Lord Jesus Christ does not start journeys he won’t finish. He has been with me my whole life even in the time of adversity; in Him is my trust rooted and built.”
His whole family – including his Christian family – give him the strength to remain “focused and determined”.
- Casey and Mooney pleaded guilty to assault and criminal damage. In November 2011 Casey was jailed for three years and nine months by Judge Patricia Ryan after she twice emphasised that the maximum penalty available to the court was five years. Mooney was jailed for four years in July 2011.
