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Ambuya Tangwena (82), widow to national hero Chief Rekayi Tangwena, succumbed to respiratory problems at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals in Harare last week.
She had been unwell for some time.
Zanu-PF Secretary for Administration Cde Didymus Mutasa confirmed the development yesterday.
“We are hoping to meet tomorrow (today) as an extraordinary session of the Politburo to finalise on the status of Ambuya Tangwena. Politburo is meeting to deal with that matter only,” he said.
Zanu-PF Manicaland Province last week requested that Ambuya Tangwena be conferred national heroine status considering her contribution to the liberation struggle.
Besides being wife to a liberation war icon Chief Tangwena, Ambuya Tangwena was a distinguished spirit medium who helped guerrillas to evade Rhodesian Forces during the war.
She also instructed her husband to guide President Mugabe and the late national hero Cde Edgar Tekere to cross into Mozambique through the eastern Highlands in April 1975 soon after Cde Mugabe was released from an 11-year incarceration by the Smith regime.
Ambuya Tangwena was a brave fighter in her own right who resisted attempts by the Rhodesian regime to evict her people from Nyanga to Gokwe to make way for white commercial farmers.
This was during the height of brutal colonial dispossessions during which many black families were moved to the country’s poorest agro-ecological regions
So proud is the Tangwena family about Ambuya Tangwena’s contribution to the liberation struggle that they also want her declared a national heroine saying it was their wish that she be buried beside her husband at the National Heroes Acre.
After the Tangwena family relocated to Mozambique at the height of the war, Ambuya Tangwena assisted freedom fighters with food.
She was given a piece of land by Frelimo where she would grow food to feed the guerrillas.
Last week, Mbuya Victoria Chitepo hailed Ambuya Tangwena as a vigilant fighter.
“We cannot question her contribution. The nation has to appreciate the role she played befittingly. She helped us a lot, and specifically President Mugabe and Cde Edgar Tekere,” said Cde Chitepo.
Zanu-PF Central Committee member Cde Mandi Chimene concurred.
“She is a true hero. She saw and experienced all during the liberation struggle. She was the conduit of the passage of both war cadres into Mozambique. She endured a lot as a mother in making sure that we escaped without detection by the whites. She never gave up when Sekuru Tangwena had left. Zimbabwe’s history will be incomplete without her name and the national shrine will not have the befitting value without her,” she said.
Online Reporter