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By Lenin Tinashe Chisaira Zimbabwe commemorates its Heroes Day in August each year. The 2016 commemoration comes at a time when the political relations between the state, citizens and most interestingly the war veterans are not cordial. In that regard, a review of one of the latest and most informative memoirs about the liberation struggle, […]
Ever since that fateful day, May 28 2014, I have struggled to come to terms with the reality that you have indeed left this world for good.
Soon after independence in 1980, Zanu PF came up with the criteria to be used to accord hero status to the fallen nationals. The main criterion was one’s “consistent” participation in the national liberation struggle. The other was one’s contribution to the development of the country after independence.
The recent passing away of Dzinashe Machingura inspired me to appreciate that we must never live our lives limited by the ideas of other men or their expectations of us because, in our graves, we shall be alone. Other men will never honour us for whom or what they became through us.
In the last two weeks, I attended two absorbing funerals. The first was that of Dzinashe Machingura, a long forgotten liberation struggle hero. A man who, during the liberation struggle, rose to being the national political commissar of the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA).
When someone like Dzinashe Machingura dies we wish we had known them more, much more. We wish he had lived longer and given us more time to get to know him a little more. I had the once in a lifetime chance to talk to him after we started ZUNDE.
My first encounter with the late Cde Wilfred Mhanda or Cde Dzino as he was and will always be affectionately known by many, was a brief, personal but thorough impromptu lecture in the early 2000s. We had been debating the legacy of Marxism in the liberation struggle and its placement in the struggle for further democratization of the country.
HARARE – Liberation war commander Wilfred Mhanda was buried yesterday with vital body organs missing, family members said. Family and friends gave grim finality to the fallen war hero, whose nom de guerre was Dzinashe Machingura, as he was laid to rest at Glen Forest Cemetery.
HARARE – President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF has flatly refused to confer national hero status on Wilfred Mhanda, the commander of the party’s armed wing Zanla during the 70s liberation war against white minority rule. Mhanda, a genuine national hero who fought tenaciously to free this country, died on Wednesday night at the State-run Parirenyatwa Hospital of colon cancer.
Former guerrilla commander Wilfred Mhanda, who died in Harare on Wednesday, is an unsung hero who played a large part in the liberation of Zimbabwe. This was said on Friday by Happyson Nenji, a close friend of Mhanda and a Zimbabwe Liberation Platform board member. The two first met in Tanzania in 1970.