Silence Gukurahundi purveyors

The way things are trending with Gukurahundi  enterprise fundis strenuously  casting a small dark cloud to discolour the armed revolution that brought uhuru to the motherland in 1980 — and appearing to get away with the mischief making — this pen believes it is imperative for our liberation movement government to weigh in with speed before irredeemable damage is caused to the genuine freedom struggle.

What appears necessary after 37 years of dithering or indecision on immortalising the genuine freedom struggle that must remain this nation's permanent legacy immortalised in cold print to guide future generations is for our government to provide requisite assistance to historians, including paid leave for academics,  to start writing an authentic account of the revolution that today makes people walk with their heads raised high, in spite of intermittent imperialist machinations to paint an image of terrorists as a way of discrediting those men and women who took up arms to free our land from racist and sometimes ruthless foreign ruling culture.

It is ironic that more than 30 years after Gukurahundi  quelled a rebellion masterminded by dissidents in Matabeleland and  parts of the Midlands,  and after the government of then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe regretted what happened, Gukurahundi is again taking centre stage thanks to so-called human rights activists obviously working in cahoots with Zimbabwe's sworn external enemies.

It is not beyond doubt that after their illegal sanctions failed to topple the Zanu-PF government over land reform, Western imperialists now rub their hands gleefully in hopes that by whipping up the Gukurahundi enterprise story, Zanu-PF, still intact in power, will be discredited and lose the forthcoming harmonised elections in months to come.

In fact, the West colluding with its local running imperialist dogs some of them in opposition to the ruling party,  believe that revisiting Gukurahundi which took place when Mnangagwa was in charge of national security  in then Prime Minister Mugabe's office will cause mortal damage to ED's presidency and to the party Zanu-PF , that he now leads as the party's First Secretary and President and give the opposition which worships the West,  a chance to romp home at the polls expected to take place within 5 months or so.

That by their utterances some Westerners appear hell-bent on making President Mnangagwa apologise for Gukurahundi, would appear  to suggest that they want him to carry the can  when he had no  overall say on matters including those threatening national security.

Mugabe, then as Head of State did in fact regret what happened in Matabeleland during Gukurahundi which, incidentally did not just happen, like a hurricane, but was in fact a response to the sad development in the region affected.

A book by this author entitled — Creatures  at the Top — with some of the fat cats now fast being forgotten by history — quotes  newspaper reports which said that disaffected former guerrillas turned dissidents had been infiltrated into Zimbabwe from South Africa in groups between twenty and thirty, that those who underwent training in Botswana were repatriated once the government there caught up with them and that villagers in the Southern parts of the country, such as Mwenezi suffered the horrific mutilations of their lips, ears and noses by the dissidents as confirmed by government officials and by newspapers.

When the national army moved in to quell the rebellion which might or might not have destabilised the entire country, or dismembered it altogether, the crackdown on the dissidents by the fifth Brigade was received with mixed feelings, even horror, by the public.

People in the areas where the dissidents operated blamed the army for the atrocities it caused in its reprisal actions which also affected civilian collaborators of the dissidents.

When commenting on the reported "atrocities" by some members of the Gukurahundi against civilians in Matabeleland, Dr Sydney Sekeramayi, then a minister in the Prime Minister's office, said the government had appointed a four-man team to set up an inquiry in June 1983 — following a promise by the then Prime Minister that those identified with acts against the civilian population would be apprehended and court marshalled.

President Mugabe himself would state in a speech in October 1997, at a memorial service for national hero Sikhwili Moyo: "Let our leaders in Matabeleland compile an inventory of those people who were affected and we will decide how to help them. We would never let a conflict situation occur with a lot of suffering, some of which still persists today. People who are out to promote disunity made it appear as if the government was not aware of the need to help those affected by atrocities. The government would not discriminate against any ethnic group in the country."

There it is and Zimbabweans  have remained united and strong in a unitary state that some Machiavellian characters would appear to want to divide by flighting manufactured statistics of "the Gukurahundi genocide"  in Matabeleland.

Ways must be found to silence these Gukurahundi genocide pandis who continue to wish ill for our country under the new political dispensation.

It is in this regard that President Mnangagwa's unflinching determination in furthering national reconciliation and peace is to be commended by all.

However the thesis of this discourse is an urgent need for the chronicling of Zimbabwe's liberation history before more revolutionaries die and are buried with vital accounts about their participation in revolutionary history of our nation for the guidance of future generations.

This writer shudders to think of foreigners from imperialist countries whose racist and repressive rule of our country that the gallant sons and daughters of the soil sort to end,  sitting down and writing a true, even complementary, history of Zimbabwe's liberation struggle.

There is no way under the sun that an authentic history of our fighters can be written by foreigners whose governments regarded the freedom fighters as terrorists.

In fact such historians are likely to go to any length in describing how the "terrorists" were trained by communist countries, the Soviet Union and China to "subvert" Western democratic systems of government.

It is also most likely that Gukurahundi will be used by such historians to discredit a government by a liberation movement in our country.

Actually, it is a tragic irony that a country with a national literacy rate of 92 percent should be unable to tell the story of its life journey through racist colonial rule to a government of the people by the people for the people.

Any more dilly dallying on putting pen to paper will see Zimbabweans waking up to write their liberation history when all those with gems of information about the revolution have gone, leaving behind sources with imaginative rather than first hand information to tell the story of the struggle.