Online Reporter
TOMORROW we celebrate the 46th anniversary of our independence from colonial and settler rule, and already a significant majority of Zimbabweans were born after that event, so the commemorations become doubly important, as a way of expressing and maintaining national unity and national pride.
It is the public holiday where our national identity takes centre stage, when we set aside what might divide us and concentrate on what unites us and the shared vision we all have for a better, free and more developed Zimbabwe.
And when we look around and think about what unites us as a nation, it is far vaster than anything that could divide us.
So it is important and far from being purely symbolic, although the common symbols are there. More importantly, independence is something that is not just an historical event. It was when we as a people took back our own country and our own lives.
We can and have made mistakes, along with far more that we have done right, but whatever we do it is our decisions and our rights.
The independence anniversary allows us to look at where we are and then look forward to where we want to be in the crucial essentials.
We need to remember that colonialism was not a viable long-term period.
It lasted just 90 years, a human lifetime if you like, and then we were restored to continuing our own interrupted national path that goes back many lifetimes.
And we have our national symbols to help us connect that past and the present.
Among the national symbols, besides the country’s name itself, are the Zimbabwe Birds, a set of eight sculptures found at Great Zimbabwe and unique to this country.
In fact, a national symbol hundreds of years old is unique in Africa.
The Bird serves to identify Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans when it appears on the flag, the coat of arms of the nation and on the insignia of many other State agencies, and on uniforms and other items needing a national identifier.
We are all so used to seeing a representation of the Bird every day we perhaps do not fully appreciate its significance until we start wondering what could replace it.
The birds were removed from Great Zimbabwe in the 1890s, sometimes for safekeeping but sometimes for more degrading reasons.
Seven of the eight were all back in Zimbabwe soon after independence.
One had never left and the batch sent to the Cape Town museum was returned in a swop for one of the Zimbabwe museum collections soon after independence.
That still left the first one to be looted.
This was sold to Cecil Rhodes for 80 pounds by a fortune hunter, who had snatched it from Great Zimbabwe at gunpoint, chopping off the plinth before taking the sculpture to South Africa for sale.
The complications involving its detour into private ownership meant it was not returned with the other Birds held in South Africa.
The hacked off plinth was recovered a few years after the first Bird was looted and eventually ended up in a German museum being finally returned in 2003.
The South African government this year slashed through the weak arguments that kept the first Bird, minus its plinth, in South Africa when the rest held in that country were returned and it came back this week, along with the remains of eight Zimbabweans, which should never have been removed by colonialists in the first place.
Seven of the Birds are already housed under special lighting in the highly secure museum at Great Zimbabwe, secure with bulletproof glass ports to prevent a second set of thefts.
The eighth Bird will be joining them. They will all be back home, not just in Zimbabwe, but at Great Zimbabwe itself.
As President Mnangagwa noted when receiving this final Bird, the eight sculptures were not carved as art, although their artistic value is high, but were representations of the chapungu, the batelleur eagle.
They were, from the beginning, thus designed as a national symbol in the culture of Great Zimbabwe, and are now all restored there to ensure they remain a national symbol. It is a good one, good when created and good now when fully restored.
