Laugh now, cry later

he gave again last week when I spoke with him.

Even as the untreated cancer spread around his body, Clive would sneak in jokes about what he was going through. Life had given him a Will Smith clap, he said of his cancer.

As we texted back and forth, and my worry deepened with every paragraph that he sent me, Clive − the owner of the grief, telling me not to grieve more than the bereaved. Until the last moment, even when he had lost his voice, he was still laughing in the face of death.

To his last, he was a man who insisted on looking at the glass, or rather chigubu, as halffull instead of half-empty. Clive Chigubu was not just an act, it was who he was and even last week, as death’s knock became louder, he could not help but be himself.

On stage, people gave Clive credit for his endless bag of jokes which made every Clive Chigubu a laugh-a-minute episode.

But Clive was more than that. He was the cheeky devil who ran where angels feared to tread.

For example, many comedians prefer to stay far away from Shona-Ndebele jokes, because the issue of tribe, in any part of the globe, is highly sensitive.

In the wrong comedian’s hands, jokes about tribe can be a sledgehammer, destroying fragile community bonds that are not so easy to rebuild when they come down. In Clive’s hands, however, the jokes were a scalpel, and with surgical precision, he would dissect the little things that make us one people despite our differences.

Perhaps, as the son of a Shona father and a Ndebele mother, Clive always felt like he belonged to everyone and when he got on stage, it was clear that he did.

During any of his sets, it never felt like we were laughing at each other but rather, laughing together.

In less than two years, Zimbabwe, and Bulawayo in particular, have now lost Chigubu and Cal_vin, two young men cut down in their prime.

One cannot help but draw parallels between their short and promising lives.

They were two young men with an incredible love for hip-hop.

Clive could not rap, at least not as well as Cal_vin, but he told me that his comedy writing style was inspired by rappers, and he would make sure that he would make his punchlines sting like the best of rappers.

Both were young men who were proud fathers and hoping to shape the lives of their children in a way that their own fathers never did.

Coincidentally both of them rose to prominence at the same time and in Bulawayo, one can safely say we had never seen any of their kind before.

In the space of a year and half, both are gone and the void that they have left, will be hard to fill.

Showbiz journalist will, without a doubt, waste several barrels of ink heralding a “new Cal_vin” or a “new Chigubu”.

As he makes his way to the afterlife, it is a sure bet that Clive does so with a smile on his face.

As he departs, he probably wishes people bid him farewell with a laugh and a smile. As we grapple with the enormity of his loss, for now we should laugh.

The tears will come later. Rest In Peace, Clive Vistarolice Chigubu.

He was laid to rest in Bulawayo yesterday, in a final show with artistes of all genres on tour. He died at 31 years, and left behind a wife and a daughter aged five.