I Miss Jats: A Short Tribute to Brian Mujati, an Underrated YouTuber

Around the time Casey Neistat “ended” his vlog, I stumbled across a Reddit thread looking for alternatives. Along the options listed was The Life of Brian by Brian Mujati, a Zimbabwean-born rugby player. Given that I’m Zimbabwean as well as a former rugby player, I decided to give it a go and I was instantly hooked.

Every Friday I’d look forward to a new vlog where he went about his life along with him telling a fun story. Whether it was his rugby training, cooking, and braiing¹, trying to run a beer company, reviewing beers or annoying his wife and kids, he soon became my favorite vlogger. Along with his great sense of humor that has just enough edginess and his decent attempts to dabble in philosophy and political topics, it was the one thing I looked forward to every week. Also helped that he had a great taste in music (not that it wasn’t blatant copyright infringement).

After years of uploading weekly vlogs, he has health issues which made it hard for him to continue uploading. Coupled with insufficient support having just under 17k subscribers, he deleted most of his videos. It’s hard to pick a favorite video since they were all really good but the most memorable one to me was the one in which he talked the time he got kicked off the South African rugby team before his first match. He wasn’t a South African citizen at the time and due to a PR shit storm where he was accused of being funded by his father who was a beneficiary of Zimbabwe’s land reform scheme. He was really real in that episode and I’m not sure I can verify his side of the argument, but it’s amazing how he was able to rebuild his career in Europe.

It’s a shame that he no longer makes videos. He was such a great storyteller and I really wished I had done my part by at least sharing his stuff, an act that costs $0. Whatever he decides to do now that he’s getting closer to retirement, I wish him the best!

**Update 29 July 2021: ** I was moving my site over and I discovered this post. I decided to look through his old channel and it looks like he went back to making videos for a bit. He also unprivated a bunch of his older videos. Given the pandemic, I understand why he isn’t posting much again. Still, I hope he gets back to it once he’s in the right headspace.