adminFreedom Mutanda
AS the country celebrates its 36th birthday on Monday, it is important to look at the role female freedom fighters played in liberating the country.
A famous 17th century philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, from France, felt that women were not as important as men. He noted they were sentimental and frivolous and naturally suited to be subordinate to men. It is this belief system that has been pervasive from time immemorial that has to be part of our past and not our present. However, during the liberation struggle, there were a lot of activities that women performed during the liberation war that have been recorded by archivists and today this writer wants to take a look at just a few things that women did for the country. Women cooked food for the comrades and during the ‘Keep’ days, they would go to great lengths to give food to the comrades against great odds. They disguised themselves as if they were pregnant and go to the fields with food inside their floral or ordinary maternity dresses. These are the people who made the war continue to be waged without hindrance.
These are the people who sang along as the comrades sang, “Gandanga haridye derere mukoma.’’ These women slaughtered chickens, ‘’road runners,’’ for the ‘’vakomana’’ who fought diligently to deliver Zimbabwe to the indigenous people. Chimbwidos may not have gone to the war front, but they cooked food and went with it to the freedom fighters. These are the people who motivated comrades at pungwe meetings as they sang liberation songs. Indeed, Pongweni (1982) noted that songs won the war. It was during renditions of popular songs such as “Tora gidi uzvitonge’’ that other young men and women decided to skip the border and join other cadres in training camps.
The decisive stage of the armed struggle saw thousands upon thousands of people making a bee-line to skip the border in order to fight and dislodge the regime that had turned more and more callous in its bid to stem the tide of the war. Women played a big role in that.
Women were care givers to wounded guerrillas and that job made Rhodesians fail to see who is who in the villages. When they arrived at a homestead and see a man or woman being attended to, the woman of the house would simply say she was attending to her son and she was prepared to be tortured for what was right. This thing of comrades disappearing into thin air was largely as a result of the women who saw the fighters as their children in the African context of one being a mother of the community.
As women continued to sew clothes for the comrades, the regime became more and more ruthless going as far as beating up the women to pulp. I remember VaChivhiko, a woman at Smaldeel Estate who swept the shoe marks of the comrades who had walked past her house after they had killed a suspected sell-out in the compound. When the soldiers patrolled in the morning hey saw the shoe marks only to see them swept later. Soldiers used the butts of their guns to beat her up until she was unable to cry.
Cases of women teaching the ‘’watoto’’ abound and when the enemy crossed over to bomb defenceless civilians at Chimoio and Nyadzonia, it is the women who cradled the terrified young children and at Nyadzonia, they actually helped the young children cross the Nyadzonia River. Women are there to comfort the horror stricken child. In 2005, 16 percent of women were in the legislature and it shows how far the world has to go before gender equity can be said to have been reached. The late cdes Victoria Chitepo and Vivian Mwashita fought for that to happen as they were legislators themselves at one time or the other.
Mao ze Dong, the iconic Chinese leader once said women hold half the sky and they should be respected. As the country makes a first by burying two heroines on the same day, it is time to reflect on what they fought for. Are we economically and socially free notwithstanding the political freedom we got in 1980? Aren’t we copycats of Western culture and practice corruption with sheer tenacity?
Women will always be there for their children and we say to the two heroines who joined the late Julia Zvobgo, Amai Sally Mugabe, Mama Mafuyane, Ruth Chinamano and Sabina Mugabe among others, “you fought a good fight for your children and it’s time to celebrate your life.’’
Online Reporter