By Tanonoka Joseph Whande
Facing down the monster that he had created with great optimism and expectations, Malawi’s late Henry Chipembere, a young independence pioneer, made his last speech as Cabinet Minister and MP on September 9th, 1964. Malawi had become independent on July 6th, 1964.
Mindful of their tender ages, Chipembere, Kanyama Chiume, along with the Chisiza brothers, Dunduzu and Yatuta, invited Dr Kamuzu Banda, then a practicing physician in Ghana, to come home and take over the leadership for the fight for Malawi’s independence. He obliged.
Hardly two months into independence, Banda turned tyrant, arresting and sending into exile the young men and women who had co-opted him into the leadership for the fight for independence.
Now, the Animal Farm script was unfolding right before their eyes. It was already time to run.
“History takes long to declare its verdict,” Chipembere said that September day in Parliament before fleeing into exile. “The villains of today may be declared saints tomorrow; it may be after their death.”
Chipembere’s deceptively subdued but stinging statement, although made under duress 52 years ago, echoes around Africa today.
In Zimbabwe, history will cough up all our heroes soon enough; we have many. In the meantime, we have already identified thousands of villains, sell-outs, oppressors, thieves, murderers and those to walk behind Robert Mugabe in the long procession to the gallows.
Heroes don’t rot; villains do.
Mugabe and his party have killed our country. We are now pioneers of doom. The fact that we still see Zimbabwe kicking a leg once in a while is our persistence to live.
We do not wish to die; we want to continue living. A natural life is all we want but we are being denied.
Zimbabwe fought one of Africa’s most brutal wars for independence – a testimony to the bravery and belief in self of our people.
To this day, evidence of such bravery and individual determination of our people are scattered around the country. Genocide. Unmarked graves. Skeletons in disused mineshafts. But we soldier on.
Zimbabwe was liberated by volunteers; young people who believed in life after battle – and they won.
The youngsters left their homes, schools and families and went forward, travelling hundreds of miles into forests to reach unknown destinations where clearly nothing but the worst was expected. They were young, with no hope in their past, in their present and certainly hoping for a better tomorrow.
They were experienced in nothing but were overwhelmed by a desire to be free; a yearning for their people to be independent. They were connoisseurs in hope and they liberated Zimbabwe.
To the best of my knowledge, no one under 25 years lies at the so-called Heroes Acre. How old is the youngest lying there?
On return home after the war of liberation, there were ‘shefs’ – high ranking political leaders who make up the highest number of heroes at the Heroes Acre; and there were the ‘povo’ – the so-called ordinary people whose participation was so pivotal in war. No povo lies at the Heroes Acre, only shefs.
‘Povo’ and ‘shef’ are of Portuguese origin but they were adopted to set the parameters of class long before independence was achieved.
The freedom fighters, who were basically uneducated owing to them having left school early to join the war effort, were first awarded a demobilization cash amount as they were released from active duty. Soldiering was a totally different affair from guerrilla warfare.
That was far from enough for people so severely traumatized by killing and escaping death. They witnessed their comrades being shredded to nothing and saw children burned alive. They spent their young lives killing or trying to kill while they had to stay alert to avoid being killed.
On return home, there were no special hospitals to cater for their special needs. To this day, Zimbabwe does not have a single Veterans Memorial Hospital to handle the peculiar issues that those who saw combat still need addressed.
Even the traditional “cleansing ceremonies” were laughably held in the National Sports Stadium instead of them being undertaken individually.
There was no meaningful jobs training programmes or simple preparation for them to transition from a life of war to civilian life governed by acceptable norms and societal laws and expectations.
They became outcasts in their existence and did not even fit in well within their own families. Suddenly, their efforts were diminished as they joined the ‘povo’ in wars of survival. They had fought a war to make Rhodesia look better than Zimbabwe.
Uneducated. Untrained. Hungry, Unemployed. Unemployable. Angry. A recipe for disaster.
They went on a rampage; demanded money and violently took over farms only to hand those farms to the ‘shefs’. They threatened judges, beat up people, murdered people – all in the name of having fought for the country’s liberation and in support of Mugabe.
That is not how war veterans behave. Mugabe used them.
Now their organisation, led by violent, loud-mouthed, self-serving, publicity-seeking idiots is divided and humiliated.
They have been abused and neglected. They lost direction and now sing hymns of praise to Grace Mugabe, of all people!
Elsewhere, War Veterans are elders in their nations. Respected people who put nation first, not political party or individual. Soldiers who sacrificed for the common person and who await to be honoured and respected without demanding anything for having served their country.
Our War Veterans became mercenaries the moment they demanded and accepted payment. They became criminals the moment they killed civilians, their own people, oppressed their kin in support of a political party and an individual.
The real war veterans are there, watching silently. They have been shunted aside. They saw combat. They are physically, emotionally and psychologically maimed. But they delivered the country to the people then Mugabe stole the country from the people.
No one knows more of the sacrifices made by villagers during the entire war of liberation than war veterans – real war veterans, not the charlatans we read about in the papers every day.
Real war veterans, as custodians of liberation and protectors of people, do not wish to see anymore conflicts yet are powerless to stop the rot. But in their silence, they too are to blame; they too are victims of a good process they started in good faith and with courage but which has now been hijacked. They have been robbed of their sacrifices, of their dignity and of their country. Their dreams lie in ruins as fake war veterans benefit at their expense.
On the other side of the same coin sit ‘national heroes’ who are now just as much despised as war veterans because they are seen to come from the same stable that supports the oppressive government.
The problem with national heroes is that they are not chosen by the people but by a reviled individual. We know who our heroes are; I will salute and honour my hero, not Mugabe’s hero. Mugabe cannot pick heroes for the nation.
The acrimonies between war veterans and Mugabe, on one hand, and the one between the people and national heroes, on the other, are very unsettling yet not many people care for either because both are tainted by a murderous president.
War veterans and national heroes are selfless people who were mistreated and used by Mugabe and whose statuses are tainted by the same masters they created, supported and served.
Henry Chipembere, who attended Goromonzi Secondary outside Harare, died in exile in California in 1975. Today, from Zimbabwe to Uganda to his homeland of Malawi and across Africa, Chipembere’s solemn prediction rises to the top.
Yes, history takes long to declare its verdict. Wherever we are, whatever we are, we are our own liberators, our own heroes.
