The five years I spent working in the border town of Musina, a melting pot of cultures, in the early to mid-2000s, sometimes felt like experiencing South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique in one place.

According to Ngaka Modiri Molema in the book The Bantu past and present: An Ethnographic and historical study of the Native races of South Africa, Tabane’s ancestry can be traced back to Mokgatla, after which the Bakgatla tribe is named and is a descendant of Mohurutshe.

In the company of the then Zambian High Commissioner to South Africa, we announced our arrival by paying a courtesy visit to the mayor of Livingstone, as is customary for African folks.

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The freedom of South Africa was plotted in Morogoro, Tanzania, among the many places.

It was the late Tanzanian president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere who told us that: “Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated.”