Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
AS the nation gathers on August 11 to commemorate Heroes Day, it becomes ever more important to interrogate the roots of our struggles.
This is not merely to bask in the glow of our freedom, but to confront the cost at which it came and the heritage that it sought to reclaim.
The fight for independence was more than a political confrontation. It was, and remains, a contestation for heritage – both tangible and intangible.
Nyaradzo Mtizira’s compelling novel “The Chimurenga Protocol” locates the beginning of this contest on September 12, 1890, when the Pioneer Column brazenly raised the Union Jack atop Harare Hill in what was then Salisbury.
In doing so, they claimed “Mashonaland and all other unpossessed land in South-Central Africa,” on behalf of Queen Victoria and the British Empire. The very notion of “unpossessed” land in a region already inhabited by diverse communities was not just a legal fiction. It was a flagrant denial of African humanity.
Heroes Day, therefore, must be more than a moment of ceremonial remembrance. It is a call to reflect on the enduring legacies of dispossession and to remember that colonial conquest was not an accident of history, but a calculated dismantling of identity, land, and spirituality.
All this was executed under the guise of “civilisation” and imperial expansion.
Ideological foundation of conquest
The colonial enterprise was rooted in the dehumanisation of Africans – a view that persists in many of the structures that postcolonial states like Zimbabwe are still grappling with today.
Mtizira’s novel vividly captures this struggle, drawing on historical and philosophical foundations that illuminate the motivations of colonialists and the depth of African resistance.
Mtizira invokes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s infamous assertion that Africa was a place “removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night.”
This racist framing rationalised the theft of African land and the violent imposition of Western values.
It also fed into the European literary imagination, such as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, where the continent is painted as an accursed and eerie wilderness, with Africans portrayed as mere shadows in a pre-civilised past.
Kingsley Fairbridge’s memoir, “The Autobiography of Kingsley Fairbridge” (1927), adds to this colonial illusion.
As a child in Rhodesia, Fairbridge ponders: “Why are there no farms here? Why are there no people?” That such a question could be asked in a land full of life, history and civilisation reveals the deliberate erasure of indigenous presence and ownership.
Mtizira’s narrative does more than recount historical injustices, for it intricately maps how land was and remains the soul of African existence. The colonial theft of land was more than economic as it struck at the very core of African identity.
Cummins, one of the settler characters in “The Chimurenga Protocol”, concedes that traditional Shona society is rooted in agriculture and therefore in the land. To strip Africans of their land is to strip them of their dignity, spirituality and identity.
It is not surprising then that the land issue remains central to Zimbabwe’s postcolonial challenges. The post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme is often presented as a crisis, but Mtizira presents it as a long-overdue historical correction; a spiritual and material reclamation.
The friction it generated was the reopening of old wounds that were never truly healed; thus, it was not merely economic.
The character Mason, a settler, reflects on how to “secure this stolen land permanently” for his descendants. His acknowledgment that settlers had a “short window of opportunity to enrich themselves before the indigenous people reclaimed their noble heritage” underlines the inherent urgency colonialists felt in maintaining their ill-gotten gains.
This intergenerational thinking – heritage as something passed down – was understood differently by Africans. It was not just about wealth. Heritage encompassed identity, dignity and continuity with ancestors.
Mtizira makes it clear that reclaiming land is reclaiming the self.
Shrines as resistance: Language, land and spiritual anchoring
In Zimbabwean cultural and linguistic terms, land is sacred, not just terrain. As Magosvongwe, Nyamende and Gwekwerere (2013) observe, the Shona lexicon is replete with expressions that illustrate the profound spiritual bond with land: ivhu rinorwa nenguva yaro (the land fights in its own time), mwana wevhu (child of the soil), mupambevhu (land usurper) and mubvandiripo (illegitimate child).
These expressions are lived philosophies. They speak to a worldview in which land is mother, heritage, and ancestral link.
In “The Chimurenga Protocol”, Mtizira employs “Operation Mwana Wevhu” as both a military and spiritual metaphor for liberation. The idea of reclaiming land becomes a sacred duty, a spiritual rite of return, rather than just a political act.
David Lan, in “Guns and Rain” (1985), supports this assertion by documenting how land, for the Shona people, is the domain of ancestral spirits. It cannot be commodified.
It is not for sale because it is not simply owned — it is belonged to, in the most sacred sense. Cummins, again used by Mtizira as a conduit for ideological reflection, admits that for the indigenous people, land is “the spiritual nexus of life”.
The implication is powerful: colonialists knew the damage they were doing. They were not ignorant of the land’s spiritual significance. They sought to destroy that significance intentionally and replace it with a system that could exploit, displace and dominate.
To understand the resistance of the First and Second Chimurenga wars, one must grasp the spiritual dynamics at play. The struggle was never simply military; it was metaphysical as well. The spirits of the ancestors, invoked through mediums and oracles, were active participants in the liberation process.
Chiefs, as custodians of land and tradition, were administrative figures and spiritual stewards.
Chigwedere (2014) reinforces this by noting that a chief was given soil from his chiefdom at installation, symbolising his sacred duty to defend it. Thus, the war against colonialism was for the soul of a people.
Mtizira writes of awe-inspiring figures like Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi, whose spiritual leadership animated the fight against settler invasion. Their execution was both punitive and symbolic. Settlers sought to sever the line between the living and the dead, to break the cycle of ancestral guidance, hence they killed them. After witnessing the potent role of indigenous religion in rallying resistance, the colonial regime declared war on Shona spiritual practices. As Chigwedere notes, anyone claiming to be a medium of national spirits like Nehanda or Chaminuka was to be shot on sight.
This spiritual violence was part and parcel of the physical and cultural conquest.
The introduction of Christianity by settlers served to further delegitimise African belief systems.
As Fanon (1967) asserts, colonisers projected African culture as “the quintessence of evil”, while their own gods were positioned as civilised and benevolent.
This calculated spiritual displacement weakened African self-perception and enabled easier domination.
Reclaiming memory, rebuilding identity
Heroes Day offers Zimbabwe an opportunity to confront its past without flinching. It jolts the memory that the war was fought not only for political rights, but for land, for dignity, for cultural and spiritual integrity.
As Mtizira insists, true liberation is never complete without the restoration of heritage.
Today, debates on land, compensation, and national identity remain unresolved because the ghosts of dispossession continue to hover over Zimbabwe’s present. The psychological effects of dispossession; blame on ancestors, fractured identities, poverty, and spiritual alienation, cannot be resolved through legal reform alone. They require a reawakening of memory and collective healing.
As Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes in “Wrestling with the Devil” (2018), “Africans were worse than animals (in the eyes of the colonisers), because they asserted their humanity in the very threats they posed to settlerdom.” Heroes Day honours those who dared to declare that humanity.
As the flag flies high this August 11, it must not only symbolise the defeat of colonial rule, but also hoist the hopes of a people reclaiming their whole heritage – spiritual, cultural, and material. This is what Mwana Wevhu fought for. This is what the soil remembers.
Indeed, “Ivhu rinorwa nenguva yaro.” (The land fights in its own time.)
Symbolically, Heroes Day is that time.
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