DREAMS THAT KANUMBA COULD NOT LIVE TO REALISE…

Dar es Salaam. Fallen movie star Steven Kanumba had won a chance to make what would have been a historic debut of a Tanzanian actor in Hollywood, we can report today.

Kanumba was planning to permanently settle as a husband and father, all dreams which have now evaporated with his death on Saturday.

New details emerging now as the country continues to mourn the passing of the iconic actor indicate that he was set for unparalleled trajectory ever attained by a local film artiste as a Hollywood role would have not only added to his fame on the global stage, but also come with a hefty pay cheque.
Based in the United States, Hollywood is the epitome of the world movie industry and rakes in billions of dollars in annual revenues and has made millionaire actors even for the simplest of hit appearances.

Held closely to his chest, Kanumba had just arrived from Ghana a few days ago where he apparently won an audition for a Hollywood appearance.

“He was heading there not as an inspiration seeker like he did in the past but this time to work. He had his US visa ready but fate dictated otherwise,” revealed Mr Dennis Sweya popularly called Dino, a friend of Kanumba since 2003 when they first met in the start-up days at Kaole Sanaa Group.

“When he broke the news to me, I told him; ‘The Great’ once you make it, don’t forget me in your ‘kingdom’ and he replied ‘I will never forget you my brother,” said Dino.

The news of the US job was given credence when Kanumba’s mother Ms Flora Mutegoa told Journalists that her son called and asked her to urgently return to Dar es Salaam for a meeting ahead of his departure.

The mother was away in Kagera Region visiting the actor’s maternal grandmother and received the call on the same night that he died. Friends say mother and son were not only family but great friends.

Meanwhile, before his untimely demise, Kanumba was deeply longing for a family of his own.
Those who knew the person behind the personality say ‘The Great’ wanted to have children more than anything else and prayed to God to bring him the right woman to marry.

“He longed for the warmth of a family of his own to complement the success he had achieved so far,” said Dino who recalled that during his last meeting with Kanumba, the actor had played and joked with his kids while expressing his wish to have his own.

Yvonne Cheryl, an actor popularly known as Monalisa, said she had been taken aback by Kanumba’s great love for children seen in his recent works.

“He was not only making movies for children; he was making friendship with children of late and my own child was his best friend…they called each other and talked over the phone several times,” she said.

Kanumba’s friend and career rival Vincent Kigosi, also known as Ray, said his last work-in progress, Ndoa Yangu, which literary translates to My Marriage initially scheduled for release this month and his recently new-found film niche (for kids) told volumes on how he felt about family.

“I will remember and immortalize his work and life by making movies for children as he did during his last days,” said Ray.

In his recent interviews, Kanumba faulted those who envied his ‘little’ success, asserting that the last time he checked his vision and mission, he was not there yet.

“I feel proud to be a source of inspiration to many aspiring actors and actresses but I want everyone to understand that I have not yet achieved my biggest dream” he once said.

He said the two had purchased an expansive piece of land at Mbezi Mpiji with the vision of developing it into a Tollyhood village—residential villas and offices exclusively for the film industry.

But according to Mr Chiki Mchoma, the Bongo Movies coordinator, Steve Kanumba somehow knew that death had come very close to him. He says Kanumba called him one week ago, praised his work and said he wanted to talk to him in details.


“I was at the border on my way to a neighbouring country, so we did not talk much. But when I came back I met another friend whom Kanumba had also called and learned that he had bought a new Bible, wanted to meet and talk to all his friends; tell them their shortcomings and apologise for his own weaknesses and wrong doings” he said and added:

“I think he has died without accomplishing this noble mission…it is something he really wanted to do and he insisted on meeting in person.

The death of Steven Kanumba has sent both the national leaders and ordinary citizens into a deep sorrow with a huge crowd of mourners of all ages flocking his Sinza home since early Saturday morning throughout Easter Sunday.

Meanwhile, President Jakaya Kikwete yesterday led thousands of mourners in consoling the family, including Kanumba’s mother who was seemingly overwhelmed and remained speechless.

President Kikwete said the death of Kanumba has robbed Tanzania of its finest performing art ambassador at a time when his services were needed the most.

“I was scheduled to travel outside the country but upon receiving the sad news I decided to postpone the trip so that I could join you (Kanumba’s family), fellow Tanzanians and all his fans all over the world in mourning his demise,” he said

According to a programme issued last night, mourners will pay their last respects to Kanumba tomorrow at Leaders’ Club in Dar es Salaam before his burial at the nearby Kinondoni cemetery later in the day.

Meanwhile, the Kinondoni regional police commander, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Charles Kenyela, said last night police were continuing with investigations into Kanumba’s death.

He said the Police collected samples of drinks found in the room of the deceased and sent them to the chief government chemist for tests.

ACP Kenyela added that the police were also awaiting a postmortem report on the body of Kamumba from Muhimbili National Hospital pathologists.

The police are still questioning the 18-year-old girlfriend of the deceased identified as Elizabeth Michael alias Lulu

MEMORY

In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientists have put memory within the paradigm of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary link between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

ProcessesFrom an information processing perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory:
Encoding or registration (receiving, processing and combining of received information) Storage (creation of a permanent record of the encoded information) Retrieval, recall or recollection (calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in a process or activity Sensory memory

Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200–500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item, and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation, or memorisation, is an example of sensory memory. With very short presentations, participants often report that they seem to "see" more than they can actually report. The first experiments exploring this form of sensory memory were conducted by George Sperling (1960) using the "partial report paradigm". Subjects were presented with a grid of 12 letters, arranged into three rows of four. After a brief presentation, subjects were then played either a high, medium or low tone, cuing them which of the rows to report. Based on these partial report experiments, Sperling was able to show that the capacity of sensory memory was approximately 12 items, but that it degraded very quickly (within a few hundred milliseconds). Because this form of memory degrades so quickly, participants would see the display, but be unable to report all of the items (12 in the "whole report" procedure) before they decayed. This type of memory cannot be prolonged via rehearsal.
Short-termMain article: Short-term memoryShort-term memory allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute without rehearsal. Its capacity is also very limited: George A. Miller (1956), when working at Bell Laboratories, conducted experiments showing that the store of short-term memory was 7±2 items (the title of his famous paper, "The magical number 7±2"). Modern estimates of the capacity of short-term memory are lower, typically on the order of 4–5 items, however, memory capacity can be increased through a process called chunking.[2] For example, in recalling a ten-digit telephone number, a person could chunk the digits into three groups: first, the area code (such as 215), then a three-digit chunk (123) and lastly a four-digit chunk (4567). This method of remembering telephone numbers is far more effective than attempting to remember a string of 10 digits; this is because we are able to chunk the information into meaningful groups of numbers. Herbert Simon showed that the ideal size for chunking letters and numbers, meaningful or not, was three.[citation needed] This may be reflected in some countries in the tendency to remember telephone numbers as several chunks of three numbers with the final four-number groups, generally broken down into two groups of two.
Short-term memory is believed to rely mostly on an acoustic code for storing information, and to a lesser extent a visual code. Conrad (1964) found that test subjects had more difficulty recalling collections of letters that were acoustically similar (e.g. E, P, D). Confusion with recalling acoustically similar letters rather than visually similar letters implies that the letters were encoded acoustically. Conrad's (1964) study however, deals with the encoding of written text, thus while memory of written language may rely on acoustic components, generalisations to all forms of memory cannot be made.
However, some individuals have been reported to be able to remember large amounts of information, quickly, and be able to recall that information in seconds
Long-termThe storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally have a strictly limited capacity and duration, which means that information is available only for a certain period of time, but is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, long-term memory can store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration (sometimes a whole life span). Its capacity is immeasurably large. For example, given a random seven-digit number we may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in our short-term memory. On the other hand, we can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory.
While short-term memory encodes information acoustically, long-term memory encodes it semantically: Baddeley (1966) discovered that after 20 minutes, test subjects had the most difficulty recalling a collection of words that had similar meanings (e.g. big, large, great, huge).
Short-term memory is supported by transient patterns of neuronal communication, dependent on regions of the frontal lobe (especially dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and the parietal lobe. Long-term memories, on the other hand, are maintained by more stable and permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the brain. The hippocampus is essential (for learning new information) to the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory, although it does not seem to store information itself. Without the hippocampus, new memories are unable to be stored into long-term memory, and there will be a very short attention span. Furthermore, it may be involved in changing neural connections for a period of three months or more after the initial learning. One of the primary functions of sleep is thought to be improving consolidation of information, as several studies have demonstrated that memory depends on getting sufficient sleep between training and test. Additionally, data obtained from neuroimaging studies have shown activation patterns in the sleeping brain which mirror those recorded during the learning of tasks from the previous day, suggesting that new memories may be solidified through such rehearsal.
Working memoryIn 1974 Baddeley and Hitch proposed a working memory model which replaced the concept of general short term memory with specific, active components. In this model, working memory consists of three basic stores: the central executive, the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad. In 2000 this model was expanded with the multimodal episodic buffer.[7]
The central executive essentially acts as attention. It channels information to the three component processes: the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and the episodic buffer.
The phonological loop stores auditory information by silently rehearsing sounds or words in a continuous loop: the articulatory process (for example the repetition of a telephone number over and over again). Then, a short list of data is easier to remember.
The visuospatial sketchpad stores visual and spatial information. It is engaged when performing spatial tasks (such as judging distances) or visual ones (such as counting the windows on a house or imagining images).
The episodic buffer is dedicated to linking information across domains to form integrated units of visual, spatial, and verbal information and chronological ordering (e.g., the memory of a story or a movie scene). The episodic buffer is also assumed to have links to long-term memory and semantical meaning.
The working memory model explains many practical observations, such as why it is easier to do two different tasks (one verbal and one visual) than two similar tasks (e.g., two visual), and the aforementioned word-length effect. However, the concept of a central executive as noted here has been criticised as inadequate and vague.