Demythologising the liberation struggle
APRIL 18 is around the corner. It is a day for honouring the heroes who fought and died for our independence. When that is done we are then expected to hallow those who fought, survived the liberation struggle and came back to rule over us. Fortyfour years have passed, our parents who either fought or assisted the liberation fighters are dying, impoverished. As the harsh reality of what independence is and what it is not hits us with each cruel absurdity of our rulers, it is perhaps time to question the narrative of the war that has been fed to us. What was the liberation struggle? And those who fought in it, who were they?
The liberation struggle has been made to be this extraordinary event that should be hallowed. But history begs otherwise. All subjected people have throughout human existence risen up for their freedom.
This is especially so when the oppressors have been so cruel that bondage becomes a fate worse than death. In such circumstance even cowards will opt for the quick decisive death on the battlefield than the daily torture of an existence devoid of rights and decency. When a man is so oppressed in his own land he has nowhere to run to. No one race is unique in doing this. All the subjugated peoples regardless of race or clime have risen up. In Africa there were wars of liberation all over the continent. So long as there are the oppressed, the process of liberation is all but inevitable. Therefore, that Zimbabweans went to war to liberate themselves is not extraordinary. Zanu PF neither conceived of nor midwifed this spirit that is why decades earlier Nehanda, Kaguvi and Mapondera rose up without a clearly defined political ideological or movement: just the desire to be free.
The liberation struggle was as inevitable as was its outcome. None of the personalities involved played a decisive part in it, none were indispensable to the outcome. It was not an era of giants among men. We as a nation must be careful about our history to make this distinction: let us honour the heroes but let us never ever worship them.
The colonialists themselves made the ultimate tragic mistake of not having a transitional strategy. They viewed minority rule being indefinite, Ian Smith’s one-thousand-year boast comes to mind. It was extremely naïve, delusional and arrogant of the colonialists to dream that they could subjugate a majority population without any concessions or regard to their rights. Perhaps their deeply ingrained racism led them to think that blacks were not humans and therefore would not do what other human beings in their situation would do: rise up for their freedom. They became victims of their own racist thinking, propaganda and prejudices. This determination to ride roughshod over the black natives simply because they had once upon a time conquered them with ease made the wars to end this rule inevitable. The black majority had no reason not to go to war, the only alternative was to continue to be ill-treated in their own land.
We must also consider the liberation struggle to be as much the offshoot of the geopolitical turbulence and subterfuge of the Cold War as our people’s desire for independence. All the post-World War II independence wars were also about the Eastern bloc countries contending for influence in regions they had hitherto been shut out of. In that respect these wars, so long as there was a Cold War were inevitable. The war, therefore, was never only about the people who started and fought in it.
Therefore, the liberation struggle in itself was not an extraordinary war. There has never been anything unique about the war or the people who fought in it. Zimbabweans merely rose up to do what other peoples had done since time immemorial. So if this war was not in any way extraordinary were the people who fought in it extraordinary? Was anything about the conduct and/or outcome of the war extraordinary? The answer has to be a cold hard NO. The war proceeded along the mundane lines of these brush fire wars with a few large pitched battles otherwise it was a war of landmines, ambushes and the occasional gratuitous massacre of civilians by either side.
The outcome of the war has not been extraordinary either, the independent State of Zimbabwe has proceeded along the inglorious path of a newly liberated Third World country political repression, corruption, grand theft of State resources and a general incompetence that makes reality read like parody.