Blessed Geza: Zimbabwe’s inconvenient war veteran and the unfinished revolution

Death has a way of clarifying things. Or so we like to believe. In the case of Blessed Geza, death has done the opposite. It has produced not closure, but a strange, embarrassed quiet.

No canonisation. No official reckoning. No national agreement on what exactly has passed. Only the muffled sound of a country stepping carefully around an unresolved memory.

That silence is instructive. It tells us that Blessed Geza was never simply a man. He was a mirror. And Zimbabwe has never been comfortable with its own reflection.

From the moment he burst into public consciousness as a dissident liberation war veteran, Geza triggered a familiar reflex. He was either celebrated as a fearless truth-teller or dismissed as a reckless agitator. Yet both camps missed the deeper point.

The discomfort he caused had less to do with his words or methods than with what he represented. He was an insider who refused to behave like one. A product of the liberation struggle who spoke as though the struggle had betrayed itself.

Zimbabwe did not know where to place him because Zimbabwe has never resolved what it wants its liberation heritage to mean.

Early on, Frantz Fanon warned postcolonial societies of this very moment. In The Wretched of the Earth, he observed that “the national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settlement and transforms the state into an instrument of its own enrichment”.

It is a line that has been quoted to death, but rarely confronted honestly. Geza’s offence was not that he articulated this critique with academic finesse. It was that he embodied it from within the sacred ranks of liberation itself.

He did not arrive as an opposition intellectual or a donor-funded activist. He arrived carrying the very credentials the state has long treated as untouchable.

This is why the reaction to him was so visceral. Zimbabwe’s ruling order has always rested on a delicate moral economy. Liberation credentials confer not only legitimacy, but immunity.

To challenge the state from outside is expected. To challenge it from within the liberation fraternity is treated as heresy. Geza shattered that unspoken pact.

In doing so, he exposed a deeper anxiety. What if the revolution no longer recognises itself in those who claim to guard it?

That Geza emerged from the Chiwenga-aligned wing of the liberation establishment only deepens the unease. His dissent was not an ambush from the margins, nor a performance scripted by the opposition, but a murmur from within the security heart of the state itself.

This matters because it punctures the lazy comfort of factional reductionism. When even those historically closest to coercive power begin to speak in the language of betrayal and unfinished liberation, the problem is no longer succession. It is legitimacy.

The mirror Geza held up was not angled at a rival camp. It was turned inward, towards a political order increasingly unsure of what, exactly, it is defending.

It is tempting to personalise this fear, to reduce it to factional battles or personality clashes. That would be a mistake. What Geza revealed was structural.

Post-liberation states across southern Africa have struggled with the same unresolved question. What happens when yesterday’s liberators become today’s custodians of inequality, and some of their own refuse to age quietly into ceremonial irrelevance?

Mozambique offers a stark parallel. Frelimo veterans who once spoke the language of sacrifice now preside over a political economy marked by elite accumulation and rural neglect. Dissenting veterans are treated not as moral interlocutors, but as security threats.

Angola followed a similar script. The MPLA wrapped itself in liberation symbolism long after liberation had lost its redistributive content. When former fighters questioned the outcome, they were accused of undermining national unity.

In South Africa, the ANC faces an even more public reckoning as struggle veterans openly lament a movement that delivered political freedom without economic justice.

Geza belonged to this continental lineage of disillusionment. He was not proposing a coherent alternative programme, nor did he pretend to be a philosopher king. That is precisely why attempts to co-opt or dismiss him fell flat.

The opposition misread him as a potential ally or mascot, while the state treated him as a nuisance to be neutralised. Both misunderstood his significance. He was not a solution. He was a symptom.

What he forced into the open was a question Zimbabwe has spent decades postponing. What does a nation do with its disillusioned liberators? More bluntly, what happens when those who fought for the country no longer recognise the country they fought for?

The danger of men like Geza is not that they command mass movements. It is that they puncture the mythology that sustains power. Liberation narratives function as moral shortcuts. They allow current authority to borrow legitimacy from past heroism.

When a veteran breaks ranks, that shortcut collapses. The past can no longer be mobilised uncritically. History becomes contested terrain.

This is why the state’s response to Geza was so disproportionate to his actual reach. He was not threatening because he could overthrow the government.

He was threatening because he blurred the line between loyalty and conscience. He reminded Zimbabwe that liberation was never meant to be an inheritance for the obedient, but a promise to the governed.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela once cautioned that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy”. Replace the press with conscience and the warning still holds.

When conscience is criminalised, decay follows. Zimbabwe’s tragedy is not that it produced a figure like Geza. It is that it has become a country where such figures are treated as aberrations rather than warnings.

Geza’s death does not resolve this tension. If anything, it sharpens it. The mirror he held up has not vanished. It now hangs silently over a political culture that prefers reflection only when it flatters.

The younger generation watching this drama understands something instinctively. Liberation history is being used not as a guide to justice, but as a shield against accountability.

That is the most dangerous legacy of all. Not that Geza challenged authority, but that he exposed how thin the moral glue holding the post-liberation state together has become.

Zimbabwe can dismiss him, malign him or quietly move on. But the questions he raised will return, voiced by others, in forms that may be far less manageable.

Blessed Geza is gone. The reflection remains. And it is older, harsher and increasingly difficult to ignore.