Online Reporter
Samuel Kadungure
News Editor
THE first thing that draws your attention in Chief Makoni’s courtyard is the smell.
Not of incense, but of rain on the red soil, wood smoke clinging to old blankets, and history that has been breathed in and out for six centuries.
It is a smell that clings to Mr Cogen Simbayi Gwasira himself – war veteran, former headmaster, a master’s degree graduate, traditional leader and now Senator for Manicaland – as he sits on a carved wooden stool.
Last week, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission laid 24 slips of paper on a table in Mutare and counted.
Seventeen (17) went to Chief Makoni, and seven to Chief Zimunya.
With that count, Chief Makoni, walked into the Senate chamber, to join Chief Mutasa, filling the seat left vacant by the recent death of Senator Chief Mapungwana in April 2026.
Kusina mai hakuendwi
Chief Makoni’s voice drops when he speaks of 1976. He was 14, a Form One boy in a pressed school shirt, when he slipped away from the classroom and into the bush.
“The war of liberation hardened me. That was the foundation upon which my character is anchored on. I was hardened as a soldier. You were trained, given tactics, survival skills, use of terrain and terrain features for use in the guerrilla warfare.”
He added the words in Shona: “Kusina mai hakuendwi (Without a mother, one does not go far.”
Yet he went. Six years without a mother. Six years learning how to read a ridgeline, the way other boys read textbooks. He returned at 20, a man carved by absence. That absence never left him.
It sits beside the Master’s Degree in Public Administration he earned in 2016, and the BA in History and Languages Degree from the University of Zimbabwe he completed in 1985.
“History shaped me to understand where we are coming from and going as a country,” he said.
The academic and liberation war fighter now share the same body. One reads archives. The other remembers ambushes. Together they judge land disputes and draft Senate interventions.
Mrs Redempter Gwasira, his wife, now watches him leave for Harare as a Senator.
She was beside him in 2022 when hundreds of their subjects flooded Rusape’s Chingaira Street, then Manda Avenue, Chimurenga Street — the Mutare-Harare Highway itself — and brought traffic to a standstill in protest over the partitioning of their ancestral land. Rain hammered their backs – a sign that the ancestors had heard their pleas.
A dynasty written in ink and blood
The Makoni chieftainship, he insists, is “the most well documented history ever in Zimbabwe.”
He argued that it began in the 15th century, and has remained intact. Colonialists in 1890 fought Chief Chingaira over that same land. The Rozvi king, Chief Dombo, pleaded with Chief Chingaira in 1790 when the Portuguese pressed him. “It is not like Makoni has started fighting today,” Chief Makoni said, eyes flashing.
“We fought the war to protect Zimbabwe. Chingaira refused to give up his land to whites. It is the same blood that inspired me to join the liberation war at a tender age.”
That blood now compels him to lobby for the repatriation of the late Chief Chingaira’s head from Britain.
He serves as vice chairman of the lobby group. “It is a Government-to-Government initiative. We cannot go beyond being a pressure group.”
But pressure, in his hands, has moved mountains before.
In 2022, a Government Gazette published General Notice 335 of 2018. It redrew boundaries in Headlands and Nyazura, placing vast resettlement areas under Chiefs Chiduku, Chikore, Chipunza and Tandi.
Chief Makoni’s name was absent.
Chiefs Chiduku and Tandi began installing headmen in areas his clan had governed for generations.
The response was swift and sensory – the thud of feet on the tarmac, revolutionary songs echoing off shop walls, and rain soaking protest banners until the ink ran.
Police tried to disperse them. The crowd stood. Traffic died for nearly an hour.
“Have you subjugated us so that you can pass our inheritance to someone else?” he quipped.
Chief Makoni later demanded: “You cannot equate us to our son-in-laws that we gave land to settle.”
President Mnangagwa intervened in 2023 and stayed the notice.
Chief Makoni’s argument is archival, not emotional – though emotion runs beneath it like an underground river.
“The whites had a four structure system – paramount chief, sub-chief, headman, kraal head,” he explained.
“After independence, Government abolished paramountancy and sub-chief titles, putting all chiefs at par. That information is in the archives,” he said, listing the numbers like a headmaster taking roll – 19 substantive headmen, 300 substantive village heads under him.
“If you combine the areas of (Chiefs) Chiduku, Tandi, Chikore and Chipunza, it is not bigger than areas under the jurisdiction of my headmen.”
He is called controversial for it. Extortionist. Bully. He smiles at the labels, tired, but unmoved. “When you are a leader with principles, and you stick to them, people see you as controversial. It is not being controversial. It is stating things as they are,” he said.
Inside his court, justice is measured, not shouted.
He speaks of judgements the way a teacher speaks of marks – they must deter, but not destroy. “As judges, the judgements should be deterrent enough to retrain the offender, but you should not be too harsh to the extent of forcing that person into committing an offence to pay for the previous one. That is wisdom.”
He applies the same wisdom to old political wounds.
In February 2015, he traded public barbs with Cde Didymus Mutasa, a fellow Makoni clansman.
The elders, led by Chief Makoni, and endorsed by the clan’s daughters – the vazvare – censured Cde Mutasa, saying he was “a nephew and not of royal blood,” masquerading as Nyati of the Makoni Clan.
Today, he calls it “bunter.”
“You know when people are fighting over chieftainship, you can say anything because you will be fighting. Cde Didymus Mutasa is part and parcel of our family. We were fighting for a bone, and now that the bone has its owner, we have to mend bridges. That was an in-house issue, and it is now water under the bridge,” he said.
Senate priorities – welfare, land, dignity
Now, in Parliament, Chief Makoni said his priorities are immediate and earthbound.
“We need to have traditional leaders organised in the province. We need to have our welfare – that of our wives and families improved to befit our status, and make sure we can assist community during times of need. That makes our job easier.”
He spoke of “sacred places as well as natural wealth,” and of ensuring traditional leaders are not spectators as those resources are exploited.
“We should not lag behind… but at the forefront in line with the President’s vision of Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo,” he argued. It is a vision of owners building their country. For him, owners start with chiefs who can feed their families and still have enough to help a widow bury her husband. He lost a Senate bid before, and shrugs at the memory.
“That was an election, with an election, there is no champion, it is a contest, you win today and lose tomorrow. It depends with the campaign strategy and manifesto at the time,” he said.
This time, 17 chiefs believed his manifesto.
The weight of the chair
Back in Rusape, the chair he sits on has borne many men. Some fought the Portuguese, while some faced British rifles. He left school at 14 and learned to survive on roots and rainfall.
Now it bears a Senator.
Mrs Gwasira watches him from the edge of the courtyard. She remembers the boy who left, teacher who returned, Chief who blocked a highway, husband who now commutes to Harare.
“Leadership is not a title. It is bowls of sadza shared after meetings. It is settling a quarrel between neighbours without breaking the family,” she said.
Chief Makoni nods. The same blood that refused to surrender land to colonialists now argues for better allowances for chiefs’ wives. He is war veteran. Teacher. Headmaster. Academic. Traditional leader. Senator.
Each title is a layer. Cut him open and you will find 1976, 1985, 2016, 2022, 2026 — all living in the same grain.
“I do not fest the paramountancy title on my clan,” he said, almost apologetically. “But our history and boundaries are well researched from the 15th century.” The archives agree. The ancestors, he believes, agreed too, sending rain on the day his people blocked the road.
As he rises, the Senate pin flashes once more. He walks toward a waiting car, a man moving between gunpowder and Parliament, between the bush and the bench, between a boy who survived without a mother and a Chief who must now mother a province’s traditions.
