Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
As we gather this Heroes Day in August, in solemn remembrance and celebration, it is only pertinent to pause and reflect, not merely on the physical battles fought and won, but on the enduring legacy left in blood, poetry, prose and song by the gallant sons and daughters of Zimbabwe.
These are the heroes and heroines who braved the brutal machinery of colonial conquest and oppression, offering their lives, limbs and dreams for the birth of a free and sovereign nation.
This year’s event is not just a commemoration of victory, but an invocation of memory. It is a rekindling of the fire that once burned in the hearts of young combatants in the dense jungles of Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania and the bushy hinterlands of Rhodesia.
It is a day of reckoning with our past, of holding dear the freedoms we now enjoy – freedoms that were neither negotiated nor bestowed, but seized through the sacrifice of many.
The right to choose our leaders through the ballot box, the liberty to speak, write and associate freely, are not perks of modernity; they are the wages of struggle.
Even those who scoff at the liberation dream, getting misted in the plot, are free to cast the ballot in favour of candidates of their choosing.
That act alone underscores the democratic space fought for in bitter trenches, where some fell silent forever.
Yet, as the nation moves forward, danger thrives in forgetting. It always lurks in the woods, waylaying our collective story.
The liberation story – our story, is bigger than individuals. It is simply more than political soundbites.
Beneath the soil of the National Heroes Acre, in unmarked graves scattered across valleys and escarpments, lie stories not told, names never recorded and songs never sung.
Since it is in their nature for the arts, particularly literature and poetry, to help preserve those narratives, giving breath to the voiceless and life to the forgotten.
It is through the poetic voices of Tafataona Mahoso, Thomas Sukutai Bvuma and Freedom T. Nyamubaya that the struggles, victories, betrayals and lingering disenchantment of the liberation era find permanence.
Their works, “Footprints about the Bantustan” (1989), “Every Stone That Turns” (1999), “On the Road Again” (1986), and “Dusk of Dawn” (1995), do not merely romanticise war. They reveal its scars, its moral ambiguity and its psychological toll.
In “Footprints About the Bantustan”, Mahoso retraces the forced dislocation of indigenous Africans from their ancestral lands following “the Great Apportionment of 1913 and 1930.”
The titular “Bantustan” is a metaphor for the African pushed to the margins, forced to trade identity for survival.
Mahoso’s use of metaphors: dust, hunger, and rage, depicts not only physical hunger but a deep, spiritual yearning for dignity and restitution.
“Zimbabwe, Nineteen Sixty-Nine at Muroti” is not a date or place. It is a state of despair where “nothing grows, but dreams and memory.”
Mahoso’s poetry challenges not only the brutality of settler colonialism but also the complacency of post-independence leaders across Africa, who sometimes bestride the ideals of the liberation struggle.
For him and for many, like Nyamubaya and Bvuma, the struggle did not end in 1980. It merely changed form as neocolonialism, corruption and betrayal become the new chains.
In “Every Stone That Turns”, Bvuma uses visceral imagery to portray the emotional and physical horrors of war.
In poems like “Private Affair”, “Mafaiti”, and “Survivors”, we are taken into the bush with guerrillas who, though fighting for a noble cause, lose their innocence, their privacy, and sometimes their minds.
“Private Affair” is especially haunting: guerrillas, huddled in the bushes, empty their bowels side by side, reflecting on how even basic human dignity is a casualty of war.
The once-private act of defecation becomes a collective ritual, mocking the idea of personal freedom in wartime.
Nyamubaya’s “Dusk of Dawn” and “On the Road Again” offer a more intimate, feminine perspective of the war. Her poem “Journey and Half” is an unflinching account of the humiliation faced by female recruits, as they are subjected to body inspections by male commanders.
“Have you ever been asked to strip/In front of a thousand shouting eyes?” she asks, her voice echoing the indignity of a struggle that oftentimes replicated patriarchal oppression in the name of liberation.
In “Heroes”, Nyamubaya is scathing in her critique of how society defines heroism. She explores the concept of war as having no victors, especially when those who battled it out at the front appear to be forgotten.
True heroes, she suggests, are not those paraded on platforms but those left behind in the dust of unfulfilled promises.
These poets, particularly Bvuma and Nyamubaya who are freedom fighters, do not romanticise struggle – they humanise it.
They insist that for every flag raised, there were bodies lowered; that for every anthem sung, there were cries unheard. Their poetry is the real history; unfiltered, untamed and unashamed.
On the other hand, Mahoso, in his disdain for shallow individualism, warns against the commodification of struggle. His concern is that while the outward symbols of independence are celebrated in varied ways, the deeper values are eroded by avarice, materialism and political expediency.
Nyamubaya’s poem “Combatant” paints the grim reality of a former freedom fighter now reduced to a wandering soul, forgotten by the nation he helped liberate.
Yet, even in this crestfallenness, there is hope.
However, in their poetic world, Mahoso, Bvuma and Nyamubaya do not stop at censure. They call for remembrance, for truth-telling, for a return to the ethical core of the liberation ideology.
Their work is an invitation to walk “on the road again,” to turn “every stone,” to follow the “footprints” of those who came before us.
Their poetry confronts us with difficult questions: What did we fight for? Who did we leave behind? Who owns the struggle? Was the empire really defeated in the trenches?
Hence, Heroes Day should be more than a public holiday. It should be a national literary pilgrimage.
A journey back to the soul of the nation through the pages of Alexander Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences”, Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”, and Chenjerai Hove’s “Bones”.
These texts, like the poems of Nyamubaya and Bvuma, unearth the psychological wounds of war and the scars of betrayal in peacetime. They maintain that freedom is not a destination, but a continuous struggle, for imperialism and neocolonialism remain alive.
In remembering the dead, we are also called to remember the living; those who came back from the frontlines, only to be left behind in peacetime.
The “peacetime corpses” Bvuma writes about are not just metaphorical. They walk among us, haunted, forgotten, and sometimes angry.
Some now lie in the National Heroes Acre, others lie scattered across the nation’s conscience, waiting to be honoured; not with medals, but with dignity, care and remembrance.
It is our collective call this upcoming Heroes Day not to look away. The need forever arises to reread the verses written in blood and ash.
We should teach our children that patriotism is not a slogan but a duty – to the truth, to social justice, and to each other.
To that end, the arts continue to be the repository of our collective memory, the voice of the silenced, and the mirror in which our national soul is reflected.
This coming August, therefore, as we ignite our candles, raise our national flags and recite our liberation struggle hymns, we should remember to also pick up a book, read a poem, and sit quietly with the ghosts of our heroes, wherever they could be.
For, in their whispered verses, we might just rediscover the path they carved with their bones, and find the courage to walk it again.
