On Purpose and Destiny

The Godfather remains one of my favourite all time books. The story that Mario Puzo masterfully crafts out; a story of vengeance, family loyalty and friendships spanning generations has its own high and low points. There are places where it resembles a Quentin Tarantino movie with its imagery of blood and carnage. You throw in one or two tales of unbridled debauchery, soft love stories and what you have is a masterclass.

In all of this, Vito Corleone (The Godfather) comes out as uniquely single minded man, born with that x-factor that you cannot place your finger on. A type of entitled wisdom that immediately makes him the accepted arbiter and mediator even in the toughest of situations. His authority is not imposed, but accepted, even sought out.

His thoughts on purpose and destiny I treasure the most though. They are poignant in their simplicity and naivety. Vito believes every man has but one purpose and destiny and will undoubtedly know it as soon as he encounters it. He won’t need ages of management training, church attendance or bags of books to know his destiny, but will immediately recognise it the moment he meets it.

Admittedly, destiny is a huge word. To be honest I hesitate every time I am forced to claim that I know my destiny. The hesitancy is borne out of a certain necessary scepticism that I have carried all my life and which seems to rear its head with more frequency these days. That said, I can point to one or two moments in my life, where a singular albeit controversial standpoint altered almost entirely, the path that my future took.

As it turns out, destiny or its equivalent came knocking on my door in the idyllic settings of Chongwe town in the early 2000s. My mother, God rest her soul, had managed to get me a job at a filling station to break the monotony of waiting for Grade twelve results and dangling my long skinny legs in her living room devouring book after book.

 That is how I swapped the serene surroundings of Chalimbana, to take up my first paying job in Chongwe.

The filling station was managed by a portly small man called Mr Mvula. He had one of those light complexions, a pretty pointy nose and black dots surrounding the nose. He prided himself on his ability to use a calculator at breath-taking speed without even looking at the keys. His love for choral music would be evident for all as he would break into song every once so often, sometimes in a shrill falsetto which only he found amusing.

I was a gangly teenager, skinny with an insatiable appetite for reading. Our filling station was not very busy, so it was easy for me to immerse myself in a book even while at work, much to the chagrin of Mr Mvula.

Our salaries were poor. We spent our working hours lamenting this fact. My labour was valued at 120 Kwacha, which was extremely low even for those times. It took me three months to save enough to purchase an application form at the University of Zambia.



One day, after cashing in the day’s sales, Mr Mvula called all of us into his tiny office. He had the look of a man about to make a very important announcement. There was Chileshe, the longest serving fuel attendant among us who was nervously scratching the bald patch on his head. Loveness, the only female fuel attendant, her skin pale from recent sickness, a few of the guards and myself, clutching a voluminous novel.

Mr Mvula rubbed his small hands together, fixed each one of us a beady gaze. He explained that all our dreams were about to come true. The filling station was relocating to Lusaka, where there was more business and as a result all our salaries would be at the very least tripled. Our immediate reaction was to clap and whistle in sheer joy as the images of more money swam in our impoverished heads. Mr Mvula was very happy with his announcement and immediately began making preparations for the evacuation of the business.

For a reason that I can only claim to be destiny, my initial elation, once I had time to think, gave way to a certain sadness in me. Immediately, I knew that I would not be relocating with the business to Lusaka. By morning, I was so sure of my resolution that I told Mr Mvula, even without consulting my mother, that I would be quitting and going back to Chalimbana.

He asked me “why”. I did not have a logical answer, save for this conviction that my life’s work lay elsewhere. And it did.

The rest as they say is history. Within a year, I was accepted to study at the University of Zambia. Within the same year, the Lusaka filling station despite initially being very lucrative to all parties, was closed after it emerged that a number of staff were stealing from the coffers. Mr Mvula hightailed it for a teaching course and thankfully, he is today teaching at a secondary school in Northern Province.

The rest of my former colleagues had to settle for various forms of piecework to make ends meet. I have since lost touch with almost all of them

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