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Today we celebrate the 43rd anniversary of our independence, and after taking the national ceremony to Bulawayo last year under its policy of including everyone in a practical manner, the Second Republic this year has chosen Mount Darwin.
Hopefully Mt Darwin will return to its proper name of Pfura very soon, both to continue implementing inclusion and also to honour the area that saw the longest period of continuous war in the liberation struggle, and suffered accordingly.
That tall mountain that so dominates the horizon in northern Mashonaland Central has long been a beacon of freedom right back down the centuries to when a Portuguese colonial effort, again for 90 years, was finally defeated. So it is a double landmark.
This rotation of the national ceremony is needed, to help emphasise that Independence Day is not some routine commemoration in a stadium in the capital city, but something that needs to unite us all as Zimbabweans, and must be part of our national heritage and must be a living ceremony.
However, we vote, however we act in our lives, this is one of those days when the things that might divide us, and those where we agree to disagree, can be put aside as we acknowledge one flag, the same one raised at midnight at the start of our first day of freedom, one national anthem, one country and one nation and, perhaps most importantly, one people, regardless of what language we speak at home or where we go to church, or what our name might reveal of our origins. Today we are Zimbabweans, period.
This becomes ever more important as the years pass. Already a majority of Zimbabweans are now born after independence and by now we must have what is still a small group of children, but they must be there, all of whose grandparents were born after independence.
And these generations, who have no memory of that first independence day, need to understand precisely what it means, and how it was achieved.
Unlike many colonies in Africa, freedom did not come to Zimbabwe by an imperial power simply hauling down its flag and going home when told firmly that it was time to go.
It came because we suffered from settler colonialism, and most of those settlers were eager to defy the imperial power as they fought, and fought very hard, to maintain total power over the lives of the vast majority for their own gain.
They lost, but they lost because in the end that vast majority united and then maintained their unity for years of continuous liberation war.
We also need to remember that while the liberation forces took many casualties as they fought very hard, there were more civilians killed, and killed because they refused to just knuckle under and bow and scrape.
And they maintained their unity even after the defeat of the settler forces.
There was a lot of money spent in that first proper election before independence, and a lot of awesome calculations done about how people would use their freedom to vote, and even plans made to nullify the liberation war. And the people stayed united and all the plans came to nought.
New opposition parties have arisen over the years, and some are definitely favoured and supported by outsiders, since they even boast about this support, but they are not the groups that were defeated in armed struggle and the resulting elections.
A lot of the messages that tend to surround independence celebrations in the past were of the nature of “freedom from”.
Yes independence was freedom from oppression; yes it was freedom from the condemnation of most of the population to live lives without freedom to even move around or speak what they thought; yes it was freedom from being dumped in “reserves”, and later even being locked up in “protected villages”; yes it was freedom from being permanently condemned to be the servants of the new masters.
All this was important. But we must look at what it was “freedom for”. And this is the lasting and permanent legacy of the struggle and the independence that resulted.
At its most essential level it was freedom for people to choose what they wanted to be, not what they were condemned to be; it was freedom for people to choose what sort of country they wanted.
Of course there were mistakes made; not all choices are the right choice even if many were. Some people chose to be criminals, some chose to be corrupt, some even chose to emulate their former oppressors.
But what is important, very important, is that we can see where we took a wrong turning and turn back to the proper road; we were not condemned to carry on a wrong turning but could advance the way we wanted to.
This is personified in the way the Second Republic and President Mnangagwa have been working over the past five years.
We have gone back to the basics and have decided what sort of country we want, a prosperous nation where everyone has a good chance of leading a decent, and every improving, life in freedom if they are ready to learn the skills they need and are prepared to work hard.
We are exercising our freedom to choose and are now in a phase where we choosing the right things.
One of those is leaving no person and no place behind, a political slogan perhaps but expressing the sharp truth, that none of us go forward very far unless we all go forward together as a united nation.
We won a liberation war when we were united. Almost all our post-independence achievements came from united action.
Almost all our less successful actions were when we created disunity, at least disunity in purpose and disunity in goals and stopped at least working together.
This is the sort of message that our new “born free” majority need to hear and want to hear and what makes independence day meaningful to those to whom settler and colonial oppression are chapters in a history book, not a living memory.
Rightly they want to keep moving forward, and today is the day when they, and the older generations, can once again unite in our freedom of choice and choose to just that.
We can debate, and must debate, what are the best ways to move forward.
But there cannot be really any doubt from our history that we only win when we go forward as a united nation, where we celebrate our diversity rather than ignore it or even worse try to impose a false uniformity.
These are the sort of things we need to celebrate today, and rededicate ourselves to on this day.
That our diversity does not divide us, at least in essentials, and that we can unite behind common goals of decency, of working together and using our freedom to choose a better world for us all, together. So let us remember, but also let us stay united in joy.
Online Reporter