Remembering our gallant freedom fighters
Thousands of people; liberation fighters and their supportive masses alike, paid the ultimate price by dying and not just promising to die as some dullards do today in front of beaming camera lights, yet when death; real death glares at them they flee eve
AS YOU read this instalment from the shelves of the Bookstore today gentle reader, spare a moment for the brave sons and daughters of the Motherland, who put their lives, limbs and blood on the relentless blade of the colonialists’ machinery of brutality and plunder.
It is such selfless sacrifice that we celebrate today on Heroes Day as we commemorate the coming of age of an African, nay Zimbabwean dream, fashioned on blood, sweat and psychological traumas characteristic of war.
What makes the day even more significant today is that it has ushered in a new dispensation in the wake of a military intervention that halted former president Robert Mugabe’s catastrophe-bound individualistic train, which mockingly wailed and whistled past the graveyard of yesteryear heroes; believing them to be dead, buried and forgotten.
But on November 15, 2017, Zimbabwe reverberated with the songs that liberated us as a nation from colonial shackles, as the people’s army, true to its liberation war promise, sought to restore the legacy of the struggle that had united a people keen on mapping its own destiny.
The liberties that we enjoy today among them the liberty to exercise our constitutional rights to cast ballots in favour of our preferred political representatives as we did in the harmonised elections of July 30, wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for the sacrifice of the sons and daughters of this great nation, who selflessly laid their heads on the block.
Even Mugabe enjoyed the freedom to cast his ballot, along with his wife and daughter in favour of the MDC Alliance presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa; not surreptitiously even. Such is the nature of democracy; such is the price of sacrifice.
The right to be or not be part of a political outfit or ideology as enshrined in our Constitution did not come on a silver platter, neither was it a reward of mere utterances of preparedness “to die for this country”. Thousands of people; liberation fighters and their supportive masses alike, paid the ultimate price by dying and not just promising to die as some dullards do today in front of beaming camera lights, yet when death, real death, glares at them they flee even though no one is pursuing them.
It is against this backdrop that the reading of Tafataona Mahoso, Thomas Sukutai Bvuma and Freedom T. Nyamubaya’s poetry becomes aptly revealing and evocative.
The trio’s poetry collections, “Footprints about the Bantustan” (1989), “Every Stone That Turns” (1999), “On the Road Again” (1986) and “Dusk of Dawn” (1995), respectively, purvey the suffering of the people of colour, before, during and after the struggle for Independence.
In the title poem “Footprints About the Bantustan”, Mahoso like Bvuma in “The Real Poetry”, and Nyamubaya in “Poetry” (“On the Road Again”) and “Real Story” in “Dusk of Dawn”, is contemptuous of the trivialisation of the African’s story to mere nomenclature and stereotypical formalism. Knowledge of both the subject matter and the audience’s standpoint is the competent poet’s forte; and it is this that shapes the aspirations of the downtrodden, the marginalised and vulnerable, and it is this ability of discernment that Mahoso, like Bvuma and Nyamubaya has in abundance.
The title poem “Footprints About the Bantustans” retraces the travails of the Bantustan, who is displaced, dislocated and relegated to the periphery of existence in the Motherland. Using historical snippets, Mahoso takes his audience on a whirlwind voyage of intrigue into the world of yore where the footprints of toil remain visible after the events of “the Great Apportionment of Nineteen Thirteen and Nineteen Thirty.” The metaphors of “dust”, “hunger” and “rage” converge in a “drizzle” called “Zimbabwe, Nineteen Sixty Nine at Muroti” where “nothing grows but dreams and memory”.
The poverty, suffering, yeaning and hopelessness that pervade the poem “Footprints About the Bantustan” through adept use of symbolical elements and metaphors, in their glaringly heart-rending manner, leave the reader looking in askance at the idea of reconciliation without reciprocity. Displaced and elbowed out of the fertile lands of his ancestors, the Bantustan finds solace in the metaphysical, through nomenclature and spirituality.
Mahoso seems to be echoing Nyamubaya’s probing in “Poetry” and calling out to Bvuma and Dambudzo Marechera in the poems “The Real Poetry” and “In Jail the Only Telephone is the Washbasin Hole: Blow and We Will Hear”, respectively. Nyamubaya wonders: “One person said,/you are not a poet, but forget that,/poetry is an art and -/Art is meaningful rhythm . . ./Now what is rhythm/If I may ask?/ Some say its marching syllables/Others say its marching sounds,/But tell me how you marry the two?”
Bvuma answers: “The real poetry/ Was carved across centuries/Of chains and whips/It was written in the red streams/Resisting the violence of ‘Effective Occupation’. . . Its beat was bones in Bissau/Its metaphors massacres in Mozambique/Its alliteration agony in Angola/Its form and zenith/ Fighting in Zimbabwe, (“The Real Poetry” in “Every Stone That Turns”).
It is, indeed, “the pain and pleasure/Of a people in struggle”, hence, to reduce that to contrived formalism, as Formalists like Fish, Robert Frost (1930) and Jacobson (1916) advocate, is rather atrocious because the history of suffering cannot be articulated through “classroom lectures”, or “from the rhyme & reason of England/ Nor the Israeli chant that stutters bullets against Palestinians” (Marechera).
The people’s poet, therefore, should write “about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out” (Cesaire, 1994:21); because he/she functions as the custodian of the mores and values that inspire societal aspirations. He/she should inspire his/her people to take up arms against oppression; physical, psychological, emotional and mental.
Mahoso’s gaze, however, refuses to be dazzled with the coming of political independence to Zimbabwe, for he is all too aware of the subtle nature of colonisation. Like Nyamubaya and Bvuma, he is dismayed by neo-colonialism and peacetime violence.
Read the full review on www. herald.co.zw