When guns fell silent, writers kept the memory alive

Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore

AS Heroes Day approaches on Monday, Zimbabwe once again turns its gaze towards the men and women who gave everything for the freedom we enjoy today.

It is a time for remembrance, but remembrance is not only about wreaths, monuments, parades and names etched in stone. It is also about memory, and about those who have carried that memory forward so that the sacrifices of the liberation struggle do not become distant echoes.

Among the most important custodians of that memory are the writers who lived through the war. Zimbabwe’s freedom was not presented on a silver platter. Sons and daughters of the peasantry sacrificed limbs, eyes, families, dreams and, in many instances, their mental well-being for this beautiful country formerly known as Rhodesia.

Some never returned, while others returned carrying invisible wounds that would remain with them for the rest of their lives.

As such, Zimbabwean literature becomes a battlefield of another kind, where individual biographies are juxtaposed with the national one and its ethos, particularly when it comes to the liberation struggle and its aftermath.

A perusal of our literary cache reveals the different ways in which the revolutionary zeal and ideology have been portrayed, and the immense human cost of war.

Writers like Alexander Kanengoni, Freedom Nyamubaya and Thomas Sukutai Bvuma, because of their experiences in the liberation struggle, use the autobiographical mode to capture their own travails and expose the dehumanising nature of war, the hollowness that comes with death and the fear of losing loved ones. Kanengoni and Nyamubaya use the novel and short story, respectively, while Bvuma uses verse and prose.

Their souls live on in us today because they refused to allow the war to disappear into the silence of history. Through their works, Zimbabweans grasp that heroism is not a matter of dates and statistics, for the heroes we celebrate today were young men and women with fears, desires, weaknesses, families and dreams. They laughed, loved, suffered, bled and died.

And, above all, they were human.

In “Echoing Silences” (1997), Kanengoni, like Nyamubaya in “That Special Place” (2003) and Bvuma in “Every Stone That Turns” (1999) and “The Chosen Generation” (2021), uses characters drawn from the war-time and post-war zones.

But unlike Bvuma, Kanengoni effectively employs the metaphor of madness and the symbol of ghosts to express himself.

Using the protagonist, Munashe, who abandons his university studies for the higher calling, the writer depicts war as dehumanising and deplorable. In his eyes, war produces victims and “is the greatest scourge of mankind”.

Munashe suffers psychological damage during and after the war. The traumatic experience of the war burdens his psyche as “the walls of (his) mind had already fallen in”.

“Echoing Silences” highlights the profound suffering that guerrillas faced. The sense of hopelessness pervading the novel is explored through Munashe, Sly, Kudzai, Bazooka and the Section Commander, who was once a teacher.

Munashe survives the torture, hunger, killings and brutalities, probably because he “had died at Chimanda. What survived through the war was (his) ghost”.

Like the others, he is a victim of circumstances as he finds himself embedded in a labyrinthine snare which he cannot undo.

His only escape becomes hallucination and drugs, which reduce his life to a mere reverie.

Throughout the bloody war, “the routine killings, the unabated savagery and the dying”, he yearns for an opportunity to tell the Section Commander how “disillusioned he had become”.

This is where the literature of the liberation struggle becomes particularly important to the present. As we commemorate Heroes Day, it is easy to romanticise the past. We remember courage, sacrifice and victory, but the writers compel us to remember the pain beneath those noble abstractions. Female combatants like Kudzai, as is also evident in Nyamubaya’s “That Special Place” and Bvuma’s “The Chosen Generation”, were at the mercy of the vagaries of war and the sadistic nature of man.

Their desires and dreams were shattered as some of their fellow comrades thought in carnal terms, repeatedly raping them until what was left were fragmented souls and empty shells.

Hopelessly reduced to a sex machine by the perverts in their midst, Kudzai laments: “Three abortions in one year. My life in the war. What sort of credentials are these? I don’t want to be considered anything. I am nobody. I am nothing . . . I no longer menstruate and I am not pregnant. Menopause at twenty.”

Because of the travesty that has become her life, Kudzai yearns for death, and Munashe, who is in love with her, wilts inside.

The first-person narrator in “That Special Place” is similarly deflowered by the sadistic Detachment Commander, Nyati, who continues to molest her as she hopes against hope that the war will abruptly end.

Bazooka is followed by “phantom witches that possessed his mind”, culminating in his demise as he vainly attempts to escape from them. His disorientation is only equal to Sly’s, who thinks he could slip into civilian life easily when he decides that he is “tired of the endless killings . . . tired of everything”, and that he is “not a hero and I don’t want to be one. I am just a poor ordinary person who wants to live”.

This dark side of the war is also depicted in Bvuma’s “Every Stone That Turns”, especially in the poems “Survivors”, “Private Affair” and “Mafaiti — he loved to pluck a plump louse”.

Whereas Kanengoni examines the psychological realm, Bvuma uses crude vulgarity and comic rhetoric to lay bare the dehumanising effects of war. Like Kanengoni, Bvuma shows how the families left behind are also victims. Munashe’s family suffers when he brings the ghosts of war to their doorstep, while Mafaiti “fell somewhere at the front”, leaving behind a young family that he so much adored.

In “Private Affair”, Bvuma explores how moral values are thrown to the wind as defecating is communalised because it is no longer private.

Like Kanengoni, the poet examines the hardships of war, the hunger and thirst.

Freedom fighters deliriously fight over their urine and engage in combat with phantom soldiers. The level of disorientation deplored by Kanengoni, Bvuma and Nyamubaya reaches a crescendo when combatants fail to differentiate dreams from reality. In “Echoing Silences”, Munashe moves about in the rain “opening his palms to try to hold the downpour, behaving as if he were insane”, while Bvuma’s Mafaiti “loved to pick lice from a comrade’s hair”.

These seemingly trivial actions explore the psychological effects of war at a deeper level. War, in Bvuma’s “The Chosen Generation”, is the ultimate theatre of cruelty; a space where the grotesque is routine and death wears the face of inevitability. Bvuma’s searing novel offers a haunting, yet necessary engagement with the liberation soul.

Like Kanengoni in “Echoing Silences” and Nyamubaya in “That Special Place” and “Dusk of Dawn”, Bvuma candidly bares his soul. Soaked in remembrance, the book refuses to flinch from the horrors of war. And in remembering, it demands the same of us. At the heart of the novel and the nation’s own anxious memory is the Chimoio massacre of November 23, 1977.

This was no ordinary wartime skirmish, but a devastating attack by Rhodesian forces calculated to cripple the ZANLA liberation command and crush Zimbabwe’s dream of self-determination. The raid targeted not only trained cadres, but schools, clinics and nurseries — unarmed civilians, pregnant women and infants. Bvuma, himself a liberation war veteran, renders this tragedy not as an abstract historical event but as a lived catastrophe.

His fictional protagonist, Cde Nyika Yababa, is in training at Chimoio when the bombs fall. His recounting is as vivid as it is traumatic: “For Selous Scouts, it was sweet and proper. It was sweet to slaughter thousands of unarmed boys and girls. It was decorous to massacre black ‘terrorists’.” Nyamubaya’s “Dusk of Dawn”, a collection of short stories and poems based on the liberation struggle and its aftermath, provides another dimension.

Though the defeatist tone of “That Special Place” is also prevalent, the freedom fighter is not portrayed simply as sadistic or implacable, but as humane and fallible.

In “The Works of Mudzepete”, Nyamubaya examines the psychological effect of war through Temba, who seeks escape from the trauma of battle through the illicit brew mudzepete.

The brew intoxicates him until he directs enemy troops to their hiding place, calling out: “Hey! We are here! You are lost! Please come this way!”

In his drunken stupor, he challenges his fellow comrades: “Hey comrades! Don’t be cowards. We are here to fight!”

With Rhodesian soldiers in hot pursuit, the “rogue” fighter hides under “a long 30-metre drum which had been brought for cleaning”.

Nyamubaya turns the scene into one of sacrifice when a young woman risks everything to save him, deliberately pretending ignorance of his whereabouts until the soldiers leave.

Such is the nature of sacrifice driven by hope and unity of purpose as the masses join the struggle alongside their liberators.

In “The Bangle”, Nyamubaya focuses on the mythical side of the war through Comrade Zuda, whose larger-than-life prowess is associated with the bangle he wears.

As a leader, humility is his forte, making him a darling of villagers and subordinates.

Unlike Nyati in “That Special Place”, Zuda is not driven by sadistic carnal desires. He is “quite popular with the men because he never touched or showed an interest in any of the young or old women”. Though he is regarded as having the strength of “a section of 15 soldiers”, Zuda remains human. He falls in love with a teacher and promotes his second-in-command to his own rank, insisting on doing the work alone “single-handed and for Zimbabwe”.

Though Comrade Zuda’s story may read like an epic plucked from folklore, such fighters existed in the liberation struggle, and their exploits are among the fruits of the Independence we enjoy today. This is why, as Heroes Day approaches, the writers who experienced the struggle deserve to be remembered alongside those whose names we invoke at national commemorations.

They became witnesses when the guns fell silent and carried the war home in their memories, scars, nightmares and words.

Kanengoni, Nyamubaya and Bvuma may no longer be with us, but their souls live on through the pages they left behind.

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