Online Reporter
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
In the context of the West’s exploitative criminality and the indelible footprints of genocide in Africa, history fosters and justifies reminiscence as a commodity of national consciousness.
As such, history remembers, revives and redefines the values of a nation. It benchmarks loyalty and service to a nation. The propagation of history guards against treachery to the founding ideals of a nation. The past steers society to unity of purpose.
While the writing and telling of history has been a preserve of notable intellectuals, Zimbabwe was blessed to have benefited from the genius of the late veteran scribe Mkhululi Sibanda. A journalist by training and a historian by passion.
His ardent interrogation of colonialism and why it had to be resisted through the gun formed the basis of his weekly Lest We
Forget column in the Sunday News. After decades of Sibanda’s consistent and sterling instalments, Pathisa Nyathi, Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor (eds) (2019) selected his interviews with top-ranking military stalwarts and produced a book titled: Lest We Forget: Histories of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZPRA). Another similar, but independent project with a bias on ZPRA history was also done by Methembe Hadebe (2021) through his book, Yithi Laba: Diaries of the
Role of ZAPU-ZPRA Women Combatants in the Liberation Struggle of Zimbabwe.
As a merchant of decoloniality, Sibanda’s works exposed the grotesque side of colonialism and championed that such a past and its remnants must never re-infiltrate our institutions of power. Therefore, the column was a weekly reminder that politics was supposed to be premised on a moral grounding informed by the virtues of revolutionaries. His documentation of our history was more than a recollection. His was a manual for a decisive post-colonial onslaught on neo-colonialism. Against this backdrop, it may be correct to describe Sibanda as a decolonial journalist-historian. He wasn’t just a media professional. He was a trans-disciplinary man of letters.
Born in colonial Rhodesia in 1971 at the peak of our national armed resistance, Sibanda became a social product of Black resistance — a trait which nurtured his prominent professional orientation. Inspired by the transfer of oral history to print and digitalisation of the armed struggle archive, his write-ups served as a detailed map into the early sabotage efforts, the maturation of African nationalism, contradictions and the strategies which gave life to ZPRA — its recruitment, training, intelligence, tactical support and the international solidarity which the nationalist movement attracted. The Lest We Forget project, as an encyclopaedia of struggle, exposes in detail how Sibanda was able to distil complex revolutionary issues for the everyday reader of the newspaper. His dedication to “armed memory” simplified grand battles and ideas which delivered
Zimbabwe’s independence. His inclination to simplicity signalled a departure from the tradition of abstract and cryptic accounts of national history, which is usually packaged for educational purposes and elite discourses. Sibanda broke the rules of
Zimbabwean historiography and fractured the spine of White narrative monopoly. For this, he belonged to the group of intellectuals constantly misnamed as peddlers of an “exhausted nationalism” and the derogatively defined “patriotic history” by proponents of anti-nationalist politics. His contradiction to colonially defined journalist heroism is what makes him a cut above the rest, especially among his peers whose work advanced the illegal sanctions-infested regime change agenda.
The Lest We Forget school of thought curated a reimagination of the struggle for independence through the usually under-represented views of villagers and township comrades who rebelled against the colonial state to join the armed struggle. It was from these cadres’ raw experiences that we got to understand the essence of the fight for independence. In return, these stories continue to shape our contemporary governance values.
Hopefully, the legacy of the late journalist-historian will always evoke the past to make us constantly remember the principles which gave life to our nation and how we must never dare to forget or abandon these cardinal principles. We must never forget the past, lest the future forgets us and the good we are creating to inspire our children’s children to be defenders of our land.
Future generations must not forget us and the work we are doing now.
True to the prophetic meaning of his name, Mkhululi (Liberator) will be remembered for his journalistic genius committed to emancipating our minds from the vestiges of colonialism. His call to put together our disjointed national memory was also instructive that the vices of the colonial state were never meant to be reproduced in today’s society.
Therefore, Mkhululi Sibanda’s untimely demise must not collapse the important memory preservation endeavour he carried out via print and digital media spaces. While the generation of first witnesses and participants to the anti-colonial struggle is slowly exiting the face of the earth, sustaining Sibanda’s liberation legacy conservation is crucial in nurturing a lasting anti-colonial national conviction formed by virtues of men and women who dedicated their lives to national freedom. This way,
Zanu-PF, as a key beneficiary of this memory reconstruction exercise, will elevate the quality of its membership and produce more cadres of sound ideological clarity if what the revolutionary party truly stands for is to be eternally protected.
During the many times I interacted with Bro Mkhays, I observed that he was never obsessed with the weight of his official power. He was humble and truly willing to teach, guide and produce the next generation of philosophical custodians of our liberation heritage.
I was privileged to have been part of that small group of individuals to be inspired and intellectually directed by this patriot and selfless teller of the Zimbabwean story. In a social-media-controlled discursive space which values the vanity of cars and stashes of cash thrown to those we think are political crowd-pullers, what remains of important curators of the nationalist movement’s ideological conscience like Mkhululi?
