The Reward, Not The Struggle

Why We Told His Story

There’s something we believe at The 1839, which is that the stories worth telling are almost never the ones that sell newspapers. The commercial ones and the scandalous ones move fast and tell you very little about a place, and the real stories, the ones about how people actually live and what they carry and what they give away, are slower and quieter, and honestly they tell you everything about what a community is really made of.

That’s the niche we’re trying to fill, and it’s why, when we sat down to name the people we think are essential to this island, the ones who give Galveston something it wouldn’t have without them, Dzago was one of the first names we wrote down.

What His Name Means

I want to start with his name, because his name is really the whole story in miniature. His father was one of the leaders of Zimbabwe’s fight for independence and spent years in prison for it, and when the country was finally free and his son was born, he named him Struggle. Not as a burden, but as a reminder.

People have told Dzago his whole life that he should change it, that it sounds like a hard road, but when he first told me where it came from, what struck me was that he had it backwards from the way the world reads it. He isn’t the struggle. He’s the reward for it. His father built into his name a way of remembering, for himself and for his son, that all of it had been worth it and that the legacy carried forward. And his grandmother, who didn’t love the English word, gave him the name we know him by, Dzago, which means inspiration.

So he walks around carrying both at once, the memory of what it cost and the inspiration that came out of it.

A Gift Handed Down

He grew up in a house that never had fewer than fifteen people in it, in a small town in Zimbabwe, and he’ll be the first to tell you that his love of music wasn’t something he was born with. It was something an older brother put in him and then handed off, like a gift. Years later that gift carried him across the world. He and a few friends pressed their first real album, and he slipped a copy, with a short handwritten note, to a missionary visiting from the Texas coast, someone he’d managed to speak with for less than three minutes.

Months went by before she opened it. And on the strength of that CD and a great deal of faith, she eventually brought a handful of young men who were essentially strangers to her all the way to Texas to sing. Their first performance on American soil was a two-hour concert for the men inside a prison, jet-lagged, the day they landed, and watching those men dance to his music is the thing Dzago says changed how he understands what music is even for.

Guided By Something Bigger

The more time I’ve spent with him, the more the whole story feels guided in a way that’s hard to explain. The woman who carried that CD home wasn’t even supposed to be in Zimbabwe, because she’d gone somewhere else in Africa first and ended up there almost by accident. He’d pressed that first album only a week before she arrived.

The note sat unopened for half a year and then reached exactly the one person who could open a door. And none of it came from him asking for anything, because asking isn’t his way, and it came instead from faith and from quietly offering his time and his service and trusting that the rest would follow.

He’ll tell you he wasn’t smart enough to engineer any of that, and I believe him, and I think that’s part of why he holds all of it so lightly.

The Thread That Runs Through Everything

What I admire most about Dzago is the thread that runs through all of it. He coaches kids’ soccer, he’s spent years as a CASA advocate for children in the court system, and two of his own kids came home through that process, and he produces music with artists all over the world, and on paper those look like three different lives. But they’re really the same life, and the thread is people.

He once stood in a room in Dubai with dozens of other nationalities, each singing in their own language, all building a single song together, and honestly that’s the whole idea of him in one picture, because he is always, in everything, trying to connect people across whatever is supposed to divide them, and he does it without ever keeping score.

He told me there’s no balance sheet when it comes to giving, that you can give away everything you have and somehow come back with more, and I believe he actually lives that, which is rarer than it sounds. The honest truth is that I’m not as good at it as he is. I try to do the same thing, and being around him makes me want to try harder.

Why He Matters To Galveston

We could have written about a lot of people, and we chose Dzago because he gives this island something it doesn’t get from anyone else, and because the way he moves through the world, trusting the journey and living in the moment and looking for the light even in a dark room because your eyes are still open in the dark too, is exactly the kind of thing we started The 1839 to show people. We’re not selling a commodity here. We’re selling a community, and he’s one of the very best of it.

 I’d really encourage you to watch the interview, because he tells it better than I ever could, and I think you’ll come away feeling the way I did, which is grateful that of all the places in the world, a man named inspiration decided to put down roots here with us.

– David Landriault