Christmas and Easter were two public holidays that could not come soon enough for us, growing up in rural Limpopo. We were not alone; children everywhere famously count down the remaining number of nights to any important day.
These days were punctuated by better food, new clothes and other treats - commonly provided by makarapa.
This was what we called migrant workers, returning briefly to their families, mainly from the mines in Joburg and its surrounding metropolis - to quote the late great Hugh Masekela.
True providers and blessers these men were.
They appreciated our anticipation of their arrival in the wee hours of the morning and they never disappointed. Conversely, they obviously also looked forward to being with their families, but we were way engrossed in our own excitement to empathise.
As long as they delivered the goodies, they were heroes. Music was another welcome feature of such times, as they dished out their latest records through their amplifiers for all villagers to hear.
Often, the music was exotic. We called this kind of music senyasa but it was mainly from Zimbabwe, not Malawi, which was known as Nyasaland after breaking away from the British Central Africa Protectorate, which included Zimbabwe. When I read the story about the alleged go-slow by South African immigration workers at the Beit Bridge border post this Easter, a song by a defunct Zimbabwean band came to mind from the 1980s.
It was called Devera Ngwena Zhimozhi by, you guessed it, the Devera Ngwena Jazz Band from Zimbabwe. The song was a very popular up-tempo dance tune in my village when it came out.
The full lyrics elude me but who needed the lyrics when festive season merry-making was the name of the game! My Zimbabwean friends, however, would later tell me that devera ngwena means "follow the crocodile".
One will probably never meet the crocodile the band was singing about in the 1980s but today Zimbabwe has only one Crocodile - and methinks it is worth following, at least until July.
Homeward-bound Zimbabweans were rattled by the slowness of the South African immigration officials in processing their papers.
When you are a breadwinner going home anywhere in Zimbabwe this Easter, the last thing you want is a delay at the border post when the Crocodile is beckoning out in Harare.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, nicknamed Ngwena, is not your regular Devera Ngwena jazz band vocalist.
His tune offers something irresistible to those Zimbabweans who had been left forlorn in foreign countries, such as Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa, by the political and economic stand-off which ended with his inauguration in late November last year.
Since then, the Crocodile has been on the rampage: calling back money stashed in foreign bank accounts back home, lobbying investors at international roadshows such as the Mining Indaba in Cape Town and the World Economic Forum in Davos, as well as strengthening the state machinery back home.
He has not had the resounding success he expected with his call for the repatriation of money stashed abroad.
He had only raked in $250 million (R2.95billion) of the anticipated $1.5bn when the deadline expired on February 28. He produced his "looters list" to the chagrin of some of Zimbabwe’s Chinese friends on it, but his efforts to rebuild the country have not been without critical breakthroughs.
Having identified mining as one of the priorities in resuscitating the economy, he knows how much he needs electricity. In the first three months of this year, he made telling strides. One was the commissioning of the 300MW power expansion project - 300MW added to a grid of about 1580MW, according to Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority stats, is a big boost.
The $1bn Hwange power project has stalled under his predecessor since it was signed in 2015. The other was a $4.2bn platinum mining deal last week, thanks to the policy certainty he created around indigenisation.
Early days, but with elections in July, following the Crocodile seems the only way this Easter.
* Kgomoeswana is author of Africa is Open for Business, a media commentator and public speaker on African business affairs, and a columnist for Destiny Man.
Follow him on twitter @VictorAfrica