Becoming The Muse

Baller To Blogger

I have never been competitively athletic.

Back in school when people were picking extracurricular activities, I picked Quiz and Public Speaking because what else could I do with all the bits of information swirling around in my head. I read widely, and for dessert, I read the dictionary for fun while snacking on almanacs, encyclopaedias and the Student’s Companion.

Our Quiz Team made it to the Nationals, we would have won but we got cheated. Our team got the hardest questions while the other schools got warmup round trivia, the quizmaster seemed to have something against an underdog mission school triumphing over an elite A school (historically, those schools were attended only by white students and to date despite integration those schools carry an elite classist standard fuelled by the wealthy who can afford to send their kids there.)

Since I was part of the Public Speaking Club, I found myself being assigned to address the school during Monday Assembly to give updates about the Quiz Club. I must have done it decently because no one ever threw rocks at me… which, by the way, was a very real risk and not many people wanted to stand in the centre of the amphitheatre, which we knew as muGato.

That is how I found myself an honorary member of the school basketball team, the College Rustlers. I was their roving reporter, which meant got to travel with the team whenever and wherever they travelled. I spotted a huge head of Afro which earned me the nickname Kobe as in Kobe Bryant

But haters will hate and they preferred to call me Mavhudzi (which roughly translates to Big Hair) a character from the setbook we did Nhume yaMambo an epic historical fiction set in precolonial Zimbabwe.  

The only time my school called my mother, which made it a shocking call on so many different levels, was when the school secretary called to inform her that I would be staying over at school when they closed, because, I would be attending a National Basketball Competition… Considering my lack of sporting interest it seemed so out of the blue… and also it’s how the phone call played out;

“Hello this is the school, are you Beaton’s mother?…..”

She must have gone through 1001 scenarios of why my school was calling her and none of them being that I was staying behind at school to report on a basketball event…

Reading that last line just made me realise how I have taken the scenic route from baller to blogger.

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#WinterABC 25