Steve and Tellmore Vickers are celebrating 30 years of marital bliss.
The couple is celebrating the Pearl Annivesary on a cruise ship from Durban, South Africa and are currently in Pomene lsland in Mozambique.
THE MATHS TEACHER WHO DUMPED MATHS FOR FOOTBALL COMMENTARY & PAYING LOBOLA – THE STEVE VICKERS STORY
By John Masuku
Steve Tellmore Vickers our mukwasha, umkhwenyana, mukwambo, son/brother-in-law on the airwaves came to Zimbabwen in 1993 from the United Kingdom as a Mathematics teacher at Warren Park 1 High School in Harare under a scheme spearheaded by the post-independence government of Zimbabwe.
This was to fill skills gaps in critical subjects where there was a shortage of local teachers. Other educators came from different Commonwealth countries like Canada, Mauritius and Australia and were also deployed to polytechnics to teach business and technical courses.
One afternoon Farayi Mungazi our Sports Editor at then Radio One now ZBC Classic263 currently headed by Terry Mapurisana brought Steve Vickers to my office at Pockets Hill, Highlands recommending that we engage him as one of our part time reporters/ commentators on the three hour long programme “Saturday Sports World”.
After listening to Farayi’s usual sweet talk and Steve’s excellent demo tapes I agreed.
I didn’t predict that Steve was going to completely abandon Mathematics classes to go into radio full time and also earn himself fitness trainer/ motivational speaker Tellmore aka Amai Rufaro one of our beautiful Zimbabwean daughters as a wife.
Steve went through all the Shona marriage processes and payments- the lobola included six cows for rusambo, vhuramuromo, matekenyandebvu, mombe yehumai and roora/lobola etc.
Vickers moved from Britain in 1993 and three years later would marry Tellmore.
The radio personality’s signature name has wife’s first name as his middle name. He is calles Steve Tellmore Vickers aka Mukwasha.
Vdid extremely well in the Radio One sports department which included likes of Stanley Katsande , Charles Mabika Mabika , Lovemore Banda,Ben Nyabadza, Kelvin Sifelani Peter Lovemore, Admire Taderera, Dean Du Plessis, Terry Yates-Round and many many others.
On numerous occassions Steve and Farayi would cover African regional soccer matches like AFCON and other CAF competitions for BBC World Service for Africa and we would benefit a lot from other content they would package for us on the sidelines.
Farayi even ended up working full time for BBC World Service Sports at Bush House in London for a number of years.Nowadays Zimbabwe is still represented at BBC Broadcasting House, London by our own Stanley Kwenda.
I visited him twice and he introduced me to Focus on Afica hosts Sophie Ekenyi of Kenya and late Komla Dumor of Ghana.
Vickers is the current head of programming at Star FM.
-JM Archives #fblifestyle
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