COMMENT:NOT JUST A BIRD, BUT A SOUL

In two days, Zimbabwe will mark the first Independence Day where all eight of our sacred soapstone birds are finally home.

The repatriation of the Chapungu – the last Zimbabwe Bird held captive abroad – alongside ancestral human remains from South Africa, is not a mere museum transfer. As Reverend Paul Bayethe Damasane so rightly declared, it is the beginning of a broader journey of cultural restoration, healing, and reintegration.

And it could not have arrived at a more profound moment.

For those who have forgotten, the Zimbabwe Bird is not a logo. It is not a decorative motif for our currency or our cricket team. Carved from soapstone at Great Zimbabwe – the ancient civilisation that lent our nation its name – the Chapungu embodies our spiritual, political, and cultural identity. It was a totem, a messenger between the living and the ancestors.

To lose it was to lose a lung. To have it returned, on the eve of our independence celebrations, is to breathe fully again.

The story of its taking is the story of our wound. During the colonial era, under the greedy gaze of imperialists like Cecil John Rhodes, these birds were smashed, stolen, and scattered. They were treated as trophies of conquest. Alongside them, our ancestors were dug up from their graves. They were reduced to “specimens,” labelled and shelved in foreign museums like botanical curiosities. Their removal was not merely physical. It was a calculated assault on the spiritual continuum that binds our communities to those who walked this soil before us.

Now, thanks to the moral courage of South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and the transparent cooperation of Minister Gayton McKenzie, that insult is being undone. McKenzie’s words should echo across every former colonial capital: “The era of keeping what does not belong to us is over.”

But let us be clear: this is not charity. It is not an act of generosity. It is a long-overdue obligation. As McKenzie himself admitted, returning the Chapungu and the remains of our leaders is simply doing right by brothers and sisters. It is African-to-African justice. And it sets a powerful precedent for every European museum that still clutches the bones and idols of our continent.

Reverend Damasane quoted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story. For too long, the colonial narrative told us that we were savages who abandoned Great Zimbabwe, that our ancestors were mere ethnographic specimens, that our birds belonged in London or Cape Town. That lie ends now.

As we prepare to light the independence flame in two days, we must understand that true freedom was never just about majority rule or the ballot box. It is about the sovereignty of the spirit. It is about a child in Masvingo looking at the Chapungu and knowing that their history is not a relic in a foreign hall, but a living presence on their own soil.

The repatriation is a beginning, not an end. We must now ensure these returned ancestors are accorded dignity through proper burial, guided by the communities from which they were torn. And we must build a future where no African nation ever again has to beg for the return of its own soul.

The Chapungu has returned. And with it, our story is whole again.