Every struggle has its children who join it as it unfolds.
But first, the struggle has to have the fathers to found it so that the children can join. And Elliot Pfebve, the veteran change champion who passed on over the weekend, was one of the fathers of Zimbabwe’s democratic struggle.
Elliott, who passed on at exactly 14 minutes past midnight on the night of Saturday, 23 May 2026, was an illustrious and patriotic son of the soil.
A founding member of the Movement for Democratic Change in 1999, Elliott leaves behind his wife Dorothy, four children and one grandchild.
He leaves behind a rich legacy of patriotism, consistency, loyalty, bravery, hard work and genuine love.
And in this era of feigned fondness, the virtuous trait of genuine love needs to be emphasized.
Elliot was a father figure and a veteran cadre who truly loved his country and its people.
By accident of history, some of the milk-nosed “children” fronting the democratic struggle today have no idea of the paternity (and maternity) of the country’s tenuous democratic struggle.
This struggle has its ancestors. And Elliot Pfebve was part of the unsung ancestry of Zimbabwe’s democratic struggle.
True, the struggle should never be a one-generation struggle. And it is good that the democratic train continues to load new and fresh passengers, even though some of these arrivistes are boarding the train purely for positions, for attention, for benefits, for trinkets and for trappings from those oppressing our nation.
Granted, as the democratic struggle has unfolded in recent years, a younger generation has entered the fray, employing modern tools to prosecute the national fight for change. In the main, some have done well in carrying forward the struggle that was begun in the late 1990s by Elliot Pfebve, Morgan Tsvangirai and others.
Only that some of these Gen Z change warriors are mere desktop activists who lack the requisite traction in rural communities where social media is a luxury that ordinary people cannot afford.
Indeed, some among the new generation of change cadres have cheapened the democratic struggle and have made it a mere haven for “content”.
They have unwittingly taken this sacred and inexorable struggle as a social media stunt, nay a skit that is “performed” in order to reap the false dividend of “followers” and “likes.”
Elliot had no such luxury. For him, the struggle was neither a tweet to savour nor a post to “like.”
For Pfebve and his generation, there were no “emojis”, but only real, gory images of brutalised and murdered people in Centenary, Mbire or Rushinga.
For Pfebve and his generation that led the struggle in Mashonaland Central, the struggle was not a social media stunt to behold or a “screenshot” to gaze on the iPad or on the smartphone.
The only “shots” they ever knew were not screenshots but live gunshots fired by living people that left many innocent souls dead at Chaona, in Mukumbura, at Chakonda in Bushu and in the Kanyemba valley, down in the Zambezi escarpment.
Elliot lived the daily grind of the hard struggle, beginning in 1999 in Mount Darwin in Mashonaland Central province, then the cauldron of Zanu PF violence.
I first met Elliot around 2000 when I was still a political reporter at the Daily News, then viewed as an opposition mouthpiece.
In those days, you could be killed for merely being in possession of a copy of The Daily News, especially in the rural enclave where many a ZANU PF vigilante group roamed free, terrorising villagers and killing them for daring to support the idea of change.
By then, The Daily News was still the acme of brave journalism. The newspaper in our time did not fawn and grovel at the ruling elite, as it now routinely does with neither shame nor compunction.
For Pfebve and others fronting the democratic struggle those days, the struggle was a daily grind, a tenuous lived experience as they introduced the gospel of change in volatile rural areas, particularly in Mashonaland Central, the hotbed of unmitigated Zanu PF violence that was mainly instigated by Border Gezi, Elliot Manyika, Chenhamo Chimutengwende, and many others.
Pfebve and his campaign teams largely walked on foot, moving door to door to sell the gospel of change in Mashonaland Central’s politically volatile rural enclave.
At one time when I covered Pfebve’s campaign activities at Musiiwa growth point near Shamva in 2000, decent food was a luxury as he and his team tried to secure a safe place to sit down and eat dry bread and sugared water.
It was difficult to find such a safe place as ZANU PF’s terror machinery was always in the tail, combing every village and every shopping centre to sniff out these “dangerous” peddlers of change.
So in my other life as a journalist, I covered ZANU PF’s violent onslaught on the MDC campaigns forays ed by Pfebve and others in Shamva, Chiweshe, at Nyava growth point and in the rural hinterland of Nyakatondo in Mount Darwin, where Pfebve hailed from.
Ironically, among the main forces driving ZANU PF violence in Mashonaland Central at the time was none other than Saviour Kasukuwere, then a youth leader, who today stands exiled by the same party on whose behalf he brutalised communities.
On a fateful night in November 2017, Saviour fled a torrent of bullets from the same regime whose violence he personally fronted for years.
Cruel, cruel fate.
Today, Saviour finds himself with no saviour. He is firing volleys against ZANU PF from the safety of exile, never tiring to tell us that his former party is wicked.
As they say in the Shona adage, puppies never gain sight on the same day!
Elliot Pfebve was to gather national prominence in 2001 following the death of Border Gezi when he battled Elliot Manyika for the Bindura Central seat in a by-election that we dubbed “the battle of the Elliots.”
In the run-up to that by-election, ZANU PF just went rogue. They deployed thugs to Pfebve’s rural home in Nyakatondo, Mount Darwin, where they callously killed his brother, Matthew, in a tragic case of mistaken identity.
They had mistaken Matthew for Elliot but the result was the same.
ZANU PF thugs also abducted and killed Trymore Midzi, Pfebve’s campaign manager.
In 2002, Elliot would flee Zimbabwe to the UK, where the late President Morgan Tsvangirai later appointed him the MDC’s chief diplomat covering the UK and mainland Europe.
When I came to the UK 12 years ago in July 2014 on a diplomatic trip with President Morgan Tsvangirai, it was Elliot who took care of business and meticulously arranged all our diplomatic engagements, culminating in a highly successful rally that we held with party members in Birmingham at the conclusion of our fruitful tour.
I love football. I am an ardent Arsenal fan. And it was Elliot who took me to my first visit to the Emirates stadium well over a decade ago.
After he came to the UK, Elliot advanced his education and became a lecturer. At the time of his death on Saturday midnight, mkoma Elliot had a PhD under his belt.
Sadly, a few years ago, he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Elliott made history when he became the first person in the UK to receive the personalised mRNA cancer vaccine at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital.
But sadly, he lost the battle with cancer. His wife, Dorothy, told me that he was hospitalised last Friday, got worse on Saturday morning and passed on at exactly 14 minutes past midnight in the presence of his wife Dorothy and other close family members.
Mkoma Eliot will be buried here in England but the specific burial arrangements have yet to be finalised.
Mkoma Elliot , as I called him, was passionate about the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe. He died deeply pained by the fact that the MDC, the party he had helped found, had become a damaged brand, sold out and bastardized by Douglas Mwonzora and his acolytes.
We often talked with mkoma Elliot, reminiscing about the painful democratic struggle to which we both dedicated almost all of our adult working lives.
Sometime in November last year, mkoma Elliot asked me to join the board of Pfebve Cancer Support, a charity organisation he founded to assist people living with cancer.
He asked me, by dint of my competences, to help the trust in the area of media and public relations.
I would never say no to mkoma Elliot. So, I duly obliged.
Go well, mkoma Elliot. You fought the good fight. You left unique footprints on the sands of history.
To Dorothy and the Pfebve family, we say be comforted by the great works Elliot did in the furtherance of the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe.His valiant effort was definitely not in vain.
Rest in power, Nhari Unendoro.
Takakuona kubata kwenyu, Nyamasvisva.
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