The missing souvenir

AGROUP of foreign tourists disembark from a tour bus at an airport somewhere in Zimbabwe to catch a flight back home. They look haggard but excited as they make their way to the departure lounge where four men tear themselves away from the group and moments later happen into a bar, accompanied by their Zimbabwean guide and keen to take one each for the flight.

As they take periodic respites from their frothing mugs, one of the men scratches his prominent forehead, head slightly bowed, and then looks up at their tour guide.

“Jimmy, before we flew out here from Europe, I heard a story several times that buoyed me as we travelled here and it was to the effect that at over 51 percent you Zimbabweans boast the highest literacy rate on the African continent.”

Jimmy cracked a smile and said peevishly, nodding his small head with a receding hairline; “that’s very true, Sir, what you heard about us.”

He loosed a bombastic cough or two all the while nodding his head, like a cock on a fishing line.

The tourist, his long chin nuzzled in his cupped left hand went on, his baritone sounding rather forlorn.

“But as we visited your various attractive tourist sites, among them the Victoria Falls, Great Zimbabwe, Matopos as well as your rich national parks with my attention drawn by the erudite command of our language, the Queen’s language as some people describe it, I grew puzzled as I wondered whether the high literacy rate with which you Zimbabweans are touted refers to functional literacy as attested to by the impressive wood carvings of animals, knives and spoons, decorated walking sticks, wall decoratives with elaborate embroidery on them, reed mats so artistically made with wavy lines as well as other items for the foreign visitor to take home. Or is my observation offside, Jimmy?” “Wrong, Sir,” Jimmy returned. “Very, very wrong because the literacy rating is about our impressive academic attainments on the continent and not about these tourist artefacts.”

“But if you are right Jimmy, how do you natives show for it? Or have you people become so drunk on the literacy that we, Westerners, gave you to redeem you from the backwardness that we found you in when we first set foot on your continent to forget or even neglect, to tell the story of the vicissitudes and straights of the journey that you walked through colonialism right up to the country that you now call Zimbabwe?”

Jimmy scratched his head, looking down and telling himself that the tourist was being racist. But raising his eyes to his interlocutor he said.

“I don’t quite get you, Sir, so do you mind making yourself clear?”

“You’ve now been independent for 37 years, haven’t you?”

“You’re dead right, Sir,” Jimmy said and then coughed proudly, or boastfully his interlocutor could not tell exactly which. “We, Zimbabweans, are revolutionaries to the marrow, if I may put it that way,” Jimmy said, beaming a broad smile.

“But, sadly enough, you have nothing to show for the so-called revolution you beat your chest about,” the tourist said matter of factly. “To be clear as you demand, I’m saying that as a foreign visitor to your beautiful country there is a missing, unique souvenir for me and other international tourists visiting your country to take back home to our native countries for our people to know about the stuff of which you so-called revolutionary Zimbabweans are made.” “Come again Sir?” Jimmy said. “Here I come; the history of your so-called revolution is nowhere to be found immortalised in cold print in book stores or hotels for us visitors to take back home to our people as proof of our having visited a revolutionary people with the highest literacy rating on the continent of Africa,” he paused and then said slowly: “I mean, Jimmy that there is no book about the history of the journey that you people travelled to where you are today and that, for me, and I’m sure for other tourists as well, is the missing souvenir?”

Jimmy smiled, “Don’t you worry Sir, it’s coming, the book about the history of our revolution.”

Again the tourist scratched his head, rather irritably or so Jimmy thought.

“No doubt, Jimmy, it is coming,” the tourist said.

“But in those 37 years of your freedom and independence did the heroes and heroines of your armed revolution refuse to die with the stories of their participation in the liberation war still intact in their memory banks.”

That just about smote Jimmy, for he hung his head not knowing what to say in response, recalling that the former Government of President Robert Mugabe had said many years back that a panel of writers would be drawn together to write the true history of the armed struggle that saw the country becoming Zimbabwe after Rhodesia and the illegal and racist regime of Ian Smith were dead and buried forever.

[The above discourse is creative but plausible.]

But to those Zimbabweans who have waited for so long for the story of the liberation struggle to be told, that time has come although, regretfully, some gallant fighters in the armed revolution have since died and been interred with their rich knowledge of their participation in the war of liberation.

Two Professors from the British universities of Oxford and Sussex, respectively, have been busy chronicling the history of Zipra, the armed wing of PF-ZAPU, according to one of Zimbabwe’s proud historians, Mr Phathisa Nyathi.

He told this communicologist and sociologist two days ago that the professors have been to Russia to write about the training of Zipra fighters in that country as well as the training for the cadres provided in Angola as well as in Zambia where they went through their paces in conventional warfare at Mulungushi.

Mr Nyathi, who has been collaborating with the foreign historians and is himself putting together a template containing many, many themes, periodising the various stages of the struggle for independence and into which, he said, writers of the history of Zanla, the armed wing of Zanu(PF) which waged the armed struggle from Mozambique, could tap to enrich their own accounts of the liberation struggle.

The template, Nyathi told this writer two days ago, dealt not only with the gun as the weapon with which the fighters worked with in freeing the motherland, he said.

It covers the role of spirit mediums, the support povo gave fighters, songs of the liberation struggle, the clothes or uniforms worn depicting the oppressed people on a warpath, among many other liberation war-related things.

Former freedom fighters in the persons of Dumiso Dabengwa and Angeline Masuku remain as rich mine fields for information about Zipra operations in the thick of the liberation war in this country. No doubt other heroes and heroines of the armed struggle are still alive on the Zanla side as well as in the military to tell the true story of the liberation of the motherland.

When everything that is necessary has been done by both the foreigners as well as by Zimbabwe’s own proud son, Nyathi, generation upon generation of Zimbabwe’s born frees will have a clear picture of the role that Zipra also played operating from Zambia as its main foreign base in the liberation of the motherland.