Nathaniel Manheru - A misbegotten son of a foul mother?

After reading the latest article by Nathaniel Manheru in the Herald of 27 December 2014 titled "Southern Zimbabwe: Ending an overdue myth", I thought the article had a lot of positives covered in excess fat. Well, he apologised for writing it in full stomach. His writing can be improved by a little liposuction. Some sections strike me as products of a writer who is too clever by half and is rushing to the convenience room. However, the article was well toned down from the grandiloquent and portentous articles by the same pseudonym of about 15 years ago, I have never met someone in life who belittles his mother as you epigrammatically called her, "little mother" in your article. It must be the most demented person I can imagine, referring to some morally dead mother, who does that. In short, a misbegotten son of a foul mother.

In my reaction I will explicitly refer to the issues of Gukurahundi and misspelt isiNdebele words in national media about which your writing in the article was elliptical in the very least. The two issues, to a nation which has been subjected to over forty years of deprivation, denigration, persecution, ceaseless chastisement and underdevelopment are somewhat related since language is the only thing they can take pride in and literally own. It's a seething anger which has been building up over the years as they watched their dreams broken down and trampled underfoot, their government turning a blind eye to their suffering while taking an active role in their impoverishment. There are several reasons why no one has taken you up on your challenge for a "debate" on the subject of the Red Berets.

Mr Manheru, there are no owners of Gukurahundi. It wasn't a movie or a research article governed by Copyright laws. It is a sad story with real life characters whose victims are still paying the price even today. I was not in the mainstream of the savage attacks perpetrated by Red-bereted Barbarians, but I will give you a brief outline of the few incidents in my life that have over the years slowly contributed to the anger and sadness which has driven me, lazy as I am, to respond to your article.
The first incident occurred in 1983, on a Saturday afternoon. I was still very young back then and most of these happenings didn't have a political let alone tribal connotation to me. As was our custom , every Saturday after church we would go and play at the bus stop waiting to see who gets off the only bus from town and stand a chance to get some sweets by assisting with luggage. That day my friend's brother got off the bus and gave us some groceries to take home. He instructed us to tell his parents that he was proceeding with the bus to visit their relatives who had recently lost someone some 30 or so kilometres down the road. Four stops down the road, at our local shopping centre buses stopped for the bus crew to refresh. This particular stop was to be different in that camped there was a Gukurahundi battalion, which had been terrorising the young people who went to buy at the shops for a week forcing them to do Shona slogans and sing praise songs. They ordered all men of a certain age group off the bus. That was the last time these men were seen. My friend's brother was one of them. A family had lost a breadwinner! I still remember that school fees was $20 a year and they failed to pay the $5 for that term.

The second incident occurred just a year later, in August 1984. Most of our parents were away attending Camp meeting, the granaries were bursting with the good harvest we had had that year. Three ZUPCO buses (Called Omnibus at that time) came with people singing in Shona (although I didn't know the language at that time). They burnt several homes in our village razing everything to the ground. I can still recall the bomb-like explosions made by granaries as they exploded like one giant popcorn. No one had a chance to save anything, people were left with the food in their bellies and the clothes on their bodies. We were left with nothing to eat; the following year, 1985, was a year of drought. It was just over a year after my grandfather had passed away so my uncle and grandmother had piled all his clothes to take them to the dry clean before customarily sharing them. When the buses arrived, they beat my uncle to the point of death before burning everything and breaking windows of the main house which they didn't burn down in respect of my grandmother who was still wearing her mourning clothes attending to my uncle who had lost consciousness. My uncle is still alive to tell the tale if you are for real.

In all these incidents no one ever mentioned in my hearing that they had to do with tribalism or I was still too young to hear it. The incident which still drives me crazy at times even today happened almost 10 years later, in February 1994. I had just collected my O' Level results; happy to score only A's and B's in a poor rural school, I went to a High School in Gweru City Centre to look for an A' Level place. I was late, I admit, but the headmaster, who I gathered from other neutral teachers who had seen what I have while I was still in the queue and expected to see me in their classroom was from Mberengwa,  "jokingly" told me that I would have got the place if I had "Rs" instead of "Ls" in my name. I was so naïve and still young to understand what that meant. It was only years later that it dawned to me what he actually meant. I could have got a placing in any of the high schools in Matabeleland, but my mother had just been admitted with cancer at Gweru General Hospital. As the eldest boy I couldn't go far from her. I didn't do anything else that year, but that never kept me down. It only left me with anger at a system built on tribal grounds surviving by corroding the social fabric of its citizens.

Again, Mr Manheru, you cannot call people for debate on this issue. Gukurahundi is not an academic subject. It's personal. It happened to the helpless poor citizens who had no other agenda than to fend for their families and survive. It was a cowardly act which can only be matched by the actions of a faceless individual who hides behind a sobriquet and uses his privileged background accorded to him by the accident of his language and the "Rs" in his name to challenge poor, starving villagers whose sons and daughters disappeared without trace to a "debate". That's pathetic. It is possible your challenge didn't reach them. How did you broadcast your challenge? Via Herald? It is only read in towns and in Mashonaland. Via Radio? Until recently there was no Radio coverage most parts of Matabeleland. You must know that because your Khalanga relatives used to listen to Radio Botswana whose coverage spilled into the south-western parts of Zimbabwe.

The incidents I narrated above are those which I directly witnessed or affected me. I have heard other scary stories, but those can only be narrated by the people directly involved. We do not need a debate. We need a Commission of Enquiry. There are some people alive today who know where our brothers were buried, help them come forward. Blackmail by ZANU-PF over the years has also prevented the truth from coming out. We know there are some villagers who saw or know something. But they have been blackmailed into silence. You know your Party is good in using both the stick and the carrot. Recently The First Lady tried to use a carrot to keep people seated at a rally in Bulawayo when they would rather not.

We don't expect everyone to speak isiNdebele or isiShona. Neither do we expect the languages to stay the same, language is dynamic, but understand that the anger people exhibit today has some underlying social challenges which need to be addressed. I personally want to see Zimbabwe united as it was before 1963 when ZANU-PF was formed.

Pardon me for my poor grammar,  I am a product of a primary school where the only person who could utter a complete sentence in English was the headmaster at assembly. The rest were 3rd rate perennial underachieving dropouts who landed their positions by the ability to tell the difference between moroyi and muroyi . The only English words I can remember from my Grade 3 teacher are "something of a goat, numskull". I must have a numskull because I still don't know what they mean even today.

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