The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva, Pivot
…late National Hero was among first people to bring in arms to fight colonialists
When the roots rockers reggae sound of Burning Spears gives a lamenting chorus: ‘No One Remembers Old Marcus Garvey’ pan-Africanists and sympathisers to the African anti-colonial movement are quick to discern that the song is condemning how the anti-imperialist movement continues to forget its past. Surely how can we forget the Great Marcus Garvey? In another song,
Burning Spear also instructs the Black race to take stock of its years of colonial humiliation and ‘recall some great men who have been fighting for our rights’. These two songs inform the premise of my analysis as I reflect on the life and times of the late ZPRA Commander and national hero Cde Abraham Dumezweni Nkiwane.
His place in Zimbabwean history is as old as the birth of the Second Chimurenga. He is a man who was there when it all started, but he remains unknown to many Zimbabweans who benefitted from the sacrifices of his youth.
He walked the path of trials and tribulations with former Vice President Joshua Nkomo. By 1961, the late Father Zimbabwe appointed him a political apprentice to the United National Independence Party (UNIP) under Dr Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia.
Cde Nkiwane was the first person to bring in arms for the liberation struggle as early as 1962. His place in Zimbabwe’s history speaks for itself. While we accept that this generation is being slowly elevated to glory, it’s sad that we have few to no exhaustive books about them.
His demise symbolises yet another archive of national memory which has been burnt to ashes. However, it is delighting that in as much as he was forgotten in our history books, the state saw it fit to accord him National Hero Status.
This underscores the philosophically proverbial that while human beings forget, history does not forget. In 2019, When Cde Misheck Velaphi Ncube passed on he was accorded the same status though it will be recalled that his modest life was inconsistent with the contributions he made for the liberation of our nation.
In a condolence message on the passing on of Cde Nkiwane, Dr Obert Mpofu (ZANU PF Secretary for Administration) went down the trenches of the ZPRA history and emotively spoke about these great men we have allowed ourselves to forget:
“It will be recalled that as early as 1962 Cde Nkiwane alongside the late Misheck Velaphi Ncube and Kennias Mlalazi initiated the entry of the first set of arms which pioneered the ZPRA rooted revolt against the settler regime. This inaugural pledge to the making of our independence by Cde Nkiwane and others produced the unequivocal triumph of the nationalist movement against the illegitimate Rhodesian state. The present success of the liberation movement in Zimbabwe and the region is indebted to individuals like Cde Nkiwane and many pan-African minded cadres of his time.”
While narrating Cde Nkiwane’s history in his eulogy, Dr Mpofu went further to call out some faces and names of our revolution:
In 1965 Bra Nkie (as we affectionately called him) served as the Chief of Personnel and Training in the ZPRA Special Affairs High Command. When I joined the struggle in 1967, the late hero served ZPRA alongside decorated high command members like Retired Col Tshinga Dube, late Dr Dumiso Dabengwa, Ackim Ndlovu, Arnold Gombakomba, Gibson Mayisa, Robson Manyika, Phelekezela Report Mphoko and Ambrose Mutinhiri.
No doubt that some mentioned by Dr Mpofu in his condolence message have politically fell by the wayside.
Their political locus only depicts how ideological contradictions evidently cast their weight on the continuities and discontinuities of the revolution as a ‘thoroughgoing process’. The example of the Unity Accord and the granting of national hero status to the late Dr Dumiso Dabengwa by a party he was opposed to in the last years of his life symbolises how the liberation legacy transcends the pettiness of partisan fights.
This even explains why the late Edgar Tekere was conferred the same national hero status regardless of his later disassociations from ZANU PF –the party which had dignified him to a national father figure. Likewise, the same can be noted through the late Retired General Cde Solomon Mujuru. His contradictions with ZANU PF at a more personal level did not erase his place in history.
In the thirst for political expedience, we have also seen how some even within ZANU PF have tried to demonise the late former President of Zimbabwe and African icon, Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe. And surprisingly, his successor President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa has been consistent in acknowledging the former President not only as his political God-Father, but he duly respects him as the ‘Founding Father of the First Republic’.
The late Cde Abraham
Dumezweni Nkiwane
After the events of 2017 which were a culmination of ZANU PF’s re-discovery, people would expect Cde Robert Mugabe to be forgotten and demonised with his memory redacted in the body politick. However, that will never be the case.
The major lesson of it all is that no matter the contradictions that revolutionary actors may have, they always have a way of connecting to the emotive philosophical ties which bind them beyond trivial contradictions. Many of these contradictions are very protagonist than they are antagonist in character. This even explains why Cde Mugabe’s exit from office was officiated through a ‘Restore Legacy’ ritual.
Now, when the profundity of history resurfaces and brings into national limelight some rarely and even belatedly renowned revolutionary stalwarts like Cde Nkiwane one would be excused to consider such gestures as propaganda ploys to manipulate ‘forgotten’ national fathers and mothers for state public relations.
But that view is not entirely true considering the deep-seated reality of the effects of the colonial erasure of African memory. This is not unique to Zimbabwe, we have seen how Africa has forgotten Steve Bantu Biko, Jacob Zuma, Josiah Tongogara, Thomas Sankara, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah and many other liberation doyens.
Through the imperialist uprooting of memory, Africa was made not to only become a Zone of Non-Being, but Africa was decimated into a tragic site of memorilessness and idealessness. Meanwhile, the trauma of the post-colony is celebrated and preserved through the consistent donor-funded emphasis on nationalist contradictions and problems with a totalled systematic silencing of nationalist victories.
While the narrative of ‘’genocides and impunity’’ in Africa by our merchants of democracy, anti-land reform civil society academia are not bothered about the criminality of neoliberal Memoricides manifesting through the sponsored forgetting of Africa’s liberation story, Africanists must expose the lies deployed by coloniality to divide us.
The Africanist has the mandate to uproot the colonial memory which has collapsed African memory to death and arrogantly planted itself as a homogenous commodity of defining what it means to be human; of policing knowledge production, democracy, governance and human rights.
The Africanist scholar today has a huge mandate to remind Africa not to forget African revolutionaries. Forgetting Africa’s liberation stalwarts is forgetting the very essence of our revolution. Lest we are found caught up in praising the history of the oppressor.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado.
Feedback: Twitter: @VaMahomva & Email [email protected]
