adminTHE name Jane Ngwenya is synonymous with greatness.
It is a name that reminds people of the armed struggle and the sacrifices that some women made in a bid to liberate the country.
Born in Gwebu area in Buhera, Manicaland Province, Gogo Jane, as she is affectionately known, said the passion to enter politics was not influenced by anyone but by her surroundings. “I grew up struggling, seeing my grandfather being arrested and attacked by the colonial police as they wanted him out of the area and even wanted to sell his cattle and evict him from our home area. I was about five years old back then.
“Slowly I began to hate that behaviour and hated their brutality such that I decided to join the liberation struggle as I grew up,” she said.
Gogo Jane said she was not coerced by her peers or mobilised by anyone to join the struggle but made the bold choice of leaving her age-mates to find ways to liberate the country.
She said at one point in 1949 she was expelled from school in Shurugwi after she had asked what was then termed “a stupid question”.
Gogo Jane said they had been attending Bible lesson classes at a school where they were told about heaven, the pearly gates, abundant fruit and ever green pastures when she asked if the white colonialist would go to heaven.
“I asked if black people were going to go to heaven alone as the colonialists had such kind of attractive things in their homes already. I was sent away for being rude yet I was doing Standard 4,” she said.
She said many of her peers probably felt the same resentment she had against settler rule but were not brave enough to talk about it.
“I had an ear and an eye for things that my age-mates didn’t have. I was just different and it made me want to participate even more in the struggle,” she said boldly.
She recalls an incident while she was at a teacher training college and students were told to purchase flowers for a visiting Mrs Molly Gibbs, the wife to the then Governor of Southern Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs.
Gogo Jane rejected the call, saying the governor’s wife was supposed to understand their plight as they were hardly being paid at the college.
“Buying her flowers was like taking coals to Newcastle. She was supposed to have sympathised with us since we had a salary of about three pounds. I was almost expelled again as I had incited others not to buy the flowers,” she said.
Gogo Jane said she was such a strong woman during her schooling days who was never afraid of anyone.
“After being threatened with expulsion and being blacklisted, I no longer wanted to pursue teaching and I eventually stopped.
“I was a person who never feared trouble and the people saw that in me. I said those things that others dreaded to say; that was me,” she said.
The iron lady said the first political meeting she attended was the one addressed by Cde Benjamin Burombo near the Mazai River in Mzilikazi, at a place called the “slaughter pole”.
So strong was her will to be involved in politics that she attended that meeting with her baby strapped on her back, a situation her husband at the time was not comfortable with.
Before she knew it, she was arrested for political activities in 1959 and spent three painful weeks in Grey Street Prison in Bulawayo with her young baby girl.
This, she said, led to the crumbling of her marriage as her husband was not as into politics as she was and was not comfortable with it.
“I had a conflict of interest. I had to choose between politics and my family and eventually we divorced. I had to satisfy the burning desire to assist the nation,” she said.
After being detained at Gonakudzingwa in the 1970’s, Gogo Jane worked with the late Cde Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo who died after receiving a parcel bomb in 1978 in Zambia.
She clearly remembers the events as if it were yesterday.
“We were sitting in the office about eight of us. Cde JZ had arrived from Zambia on a Friday and he had not seen his parcel that day but on Saturday morning he was given the parcel. Little did we know it was a bomb.
“He had been expecting a parcel from Botswana so nothing seemed amiss when the parcel arrived,” she said.
Gogo Jane said the parcel was as small as the palm of her hand and when he opened it, they just saw something like lightning which shred through his body.
“Cde JZ’s intestines lay where my feet were. I was somehow thrown outside the office through a window. Dumiso Dabengwa, the late Cde John Nkomo and others were severely burnt too, that is when I injured my back,” she said.
“We expected such reactions as we were in a battle so such was bound to happen. It was a game of chance where you could either be killed or survive if you were fortunate.”
On the issue of her welfare, Gogo Jane said she sympathised with Government which she said wanted to assist other people like her but was being stopped by corruption.
“People who now run some Government departments are the ones who are not making an effort to assist us. They have no clue as to what it was like to go to the struggle so they do not relate to our needs.
“Some died and left children; others came back injured and all these people need support from the Government,” she said.
She accused some officials of spearheading corruption where they benefited alone, while sidelining those that went to the struggle.
She said some people who went to the struggle were not even office bearers in Government, so no one was fighting to address their concerns.
The plot of land she received from the Government is idle as she has no income to do any activity on it.
“I cannot afford to buy a hoe to plough the land,” she lamented.
When Government gave war veterans a windfall of ZW$50 000, she said she did not benefit.
“As a leader I gave those that were in the struggle an opportunity to get their money first as they were injured and had sacrificed a lot. I decided to go later but I was unfortunate, I did not get the money,” she said.
She said she and many others did not benefit. “I am a war vet by name, I have never benefited anything. Things like Government tractors and equipment that have been disbursed I have never received as there are people with dirty tricks who benefited,” she said.
This superwoman now lives in an old people’s home where she pays rent, water and electricity from her little pension.
She has no other source of income as all her children died save for Shingirirai, who is 43.
“I am a lodger here, I pay rent. If only this was a Government institution but I have to pay for everything and it is not easy,” she said.
The eloquent speaker who still has a sharp memory said she was lucky that she was known and was always in the Press, but other freedom fighters who were not so lucky were suffering in silence as they had no voice to air their grievances. Living legends like Gogo Jane Ngwenya deserve honour now when they are still alive as they played a pivotal role in the liberation of the country.
As the famous song, Don’t Scatter Roses When I Am Gone by Vocal Union goes: “A wreath of roses they placed on his grave and while he was living there where things that he craved. His life as a pauper was so very dim he needed the flowers while he could enjoy them.”
Let us not scatter roses when Gogo Jane is gone but let’s give them to her while she lives.
Online Reporter