From Personnel Officer to Wealth Disruptor: Inheriting the Quiet Radicalism of My Father

 A ruler-trimmed job-ad tucked inside a book on Che Guevara brought me back to my father’s quiet resistance and forward to the work I now do through Ndisu Consulting. This is a story about lineage, strategy, and liberatory wealth work.

The Book That Found Me
Today I pulled one of my late father’s books off the shelf, The Marxism of Che Guevara. I was not looking for anything in particular. When I opened it, I found a carefully cut job advertisement pressed into a chapter titled Productive Forces and Relations of Production. The ad listed an “Industrial Relations Officer role at the Dairy Marketing Board in Salisbury, Rhodesia”.

It was not just slipped in. It was meticulously cut, the kind of clean edge made with a ruler, not scissors. The paper has frayed over time, but that precise cut stopped me cold. It brought me back to 1991.

I was eleven. Zimbabwe’s Economic Structural Adjustment Programme had rendered my mother’s salary nearly useless. Prices rose and things we once took for granted, like a pair of scissors, became unaffordable. I remember struggling to finish school projects because we simply did not have scissors at home and couldn’t afford to buy another pair. Three decades later, I held a paper clipping my father had trimmed with care, with a ruler.

He died when I was three, but his absence shaped everything. His death did more than leave a void. It set us back materially and emotionally. And yet, in that book, in that clipped ad, in that act of neatness, he showed me he was still making space for order and thought.

The Clues He Left Behind
He had written his name, M. J. Mhangami, in the first pages with a blue felt-tip pen. Only a few lines in the opening chapters were underlined. That felt like a wink from the past.

I have never read a philosophy book straight through, but I can break down the ideology like I taught the course. Most of my graduate school books still have pristine spines. My father was one of the few Black students to graduate from the University of Rhodesia. That was no small thing. The system did not educate Black people to empower them. It educated them just enough to use them. He ended up in personnel management, a Black man in charge of industrial relations for a colonial administration.

Who reads Che Guevara and saves a job ad for that role? Someone who knows how systems work, someone quietly dreaming of disrupting them.

Radicalism in Translation
I have always felt it, a hum under the surface. My father may have worked inside the machinery of empire, but I do not believe he belonged to it. He read about liberation while working to maintain labor peace.

That is not a contradiction. It is survival. It is study. It is translation. And it is what I do now.

At Ndisu Consulting I sit between the world as it is and the world as it could be. I help founders, especially Black and African-led nonprofits, translate vision into viable strategy. I design fundraising systems that honor dignity. I coach boards and executive directors to mobilize resources not through suffering, but through storytelling, clarity, and trust.

Wealth Redistribution as Lineage Work
To me, wealth redistribution is not just a strategy. It is sacred work. It is ancestral and reparative. It is me asking what would have been possible if my father had lived. What if ESAP had not gutted our future? What if Black children did not have to improvise scissors out of desperation?

Through Ndisu I challenge donors, especially those whose wealth traces back to colonial extraction, to do better. I ask them to shift money in ways that are not transactional but transformative. I ask them to fund the future my father never got to see.

Closing the Loop
My father did not write a manifesto, but he left blue ink, a clipped ad, and a daughter who underlines meaning even when she does not finish the chapter. Every time I help a client move from scarcity to sovereignty, every time I insist that people are worthy of more, every time I demand that systems be restructured to honor our full humanity, I continue his quiet revolution.

And finally, I use my own pair of scissors.