adminRichard Mahomva
The 32nd national commemoration of the Unity Accord evokes emotions of solidarity born out of the pitfalls of national-consciousness.
The colonial reproduction of violence saw us becoming victims of Western hegemonic tensions, which were fought on the African soil.
Before our independence, we found ourselves in a state of turmoil.
The civil disturbances that rocked Matabeleland and Midlands in the 1980s, commonly referred to as Gukurahundi, broke out to suppress the Soviet Union’s Communist spread in Southern-Africa under Zapu.
The apartheid regime, in its conniving hand with Rhodesians, catalysed the process.
Britain silently observed it all and only spoke out at the brink of the land reform.
To this day, the remembrance of this gloomy side of our past is selectively manipulated by sponsored activists and neo-imperial political grandstanders to advance a memory of dismemberment.
The concealed influence of colonial interests in the construction of post-colonial violence is ignored.
The same applies with the Biafra experience in Nigeria.
Zimbabwe, like many other African states entrapped in civil unrests, has been conferred the typical ‘failed’ post-colonial status.
The generic characterisation of state failure attributed to Zimbabwe is a construction of neo-imperial hegemony which is sustained by oligopoly capital, colonial scholarships, regime change civil-society and human rights activists propelling the fight against nationalist movements all over Africa.
All these institutions preserve a clear agenda of constructing the idea of failed African governments which must be replaced by more market-oriented regimes which attract western direct investments and access to colonial credit lines.
This explains the numerous visits by the MDC-Alliance to the American Congress to consolidate the Zidera sanctions.
The same neo-colonial agents push the good governance, human and property rights narrative underpinned on impeding the realignment of property rights.
This reaffirms their mandate to maintain the economic disparities invented by colonialism.
This explains why the Zimbabwean agrarian revolution attracted wholesale hostilities from the West. The agitation of the empire, about our reclamation of our space and the values of our liberation through the hondo yeminda, activated the reconstruction of the Zimbabwean national identity.
Immense efforts were deployed to erase the philosophical essence of national remembrances.
ln the corridors of sponsored anti-establishment perspectives, our Independence Day, Heroes Day, Defence Forces Day and Unity Day, were relegated to mere partisan commemorative events.
However, there is nothing wrong with having anti-establishment actors.
After all, we are a democracy.
But the propensity to challenge the ruling Zanu PF, since the launch of the land revolution, was grounded on erasing its legacy as a precursor of our liberation. The idea was to create an ahistorical political space and culture to give legitimacy to the pro-settler opposition led by Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, which was only born after the pro-peasant land revolution.
To supplement the anti-land reform trajectory, all binding elements of national memory, like this sacred Unity Day, continues to be vilified.
In all these continued efforts to deconstruct the emotive meaning of this day to patriotic Zimbabweans – particularly those of us who remain radically opposed to vestiges of colonialism, Unity Day is a reminder of the catastrophic effects of the colonialism.
It reminds conscious anti-colonial souls that the empire continues to infiltrate the hopes and aspirations of independent nations in Africa.
In our Zimbabwean context, the day is a memoire to our struggle for liberation, as a force for decisive nationalism which graduated far beyond ethnic trivial predispositions.
From the outset, the cradle of the struggle against Rhodesia in the late 1950s was a product of collective national consciousness.
The mobilisation of cadres for the armed struggle was on the basis of the African emotion to dismantle the colonial system.
Tags of ethic belonging were buried in the assumed identity of resistance and ideological intention to liberate Zimbabwe.
Subconsciously, regional balancing become the pivot of nationalist cadreship.
Likewise, the pan-African essence of belonging wired our aspirations with those of our brothers and sisters in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Ghana, Azania and every other part of the dispossessed world.
Therefore, the idea to unite the nationalist movements in 1987 after they were worn down by the cold-war dynamics was a strategic revert to the subconscious unity against colonialism.
The Unity Accord was a restoration of the principle of regional balance.
It was a clarion declaration to peace-building, national healing and reconciliation.
The unity of the nationalist movements led the armed struggle.
Indeed, the Unity Accord reaffirmed the political brotherhood of the gallant nationalists of our liberation – Cde Robert Mugabe and Father Zimbabwe, Cde Joshua Nkomo.
Through the Unity Accord, Zanu PF was born and the nationalist vision was redefined.
The Unity Accord gestured the rebirth of collective nationhood epitomised in PF-Zapu and Zanu PF’s engagement in the armed struggle as unifying agents of the decolonisation project.
Far beyond the Unity Accord, Zanu PF carries the obligation of challenging imperialism.
Political construction under Zanu PF must disentangle every pro-imperial arsenal designed to downplay our history to appease the ghosts of coloniality.
This day, 22 December, continues to be a symbol of our cohesion and shared national aspirations beyond all the frantic efforts to dissuade us from remembering ourselves and our dignity as a people.
Online Reporter