Laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier There are so many shallow graves, disused mines, caves and rivers that consumed gallant sons and daughters of Zimbabwe, who are commemorated on Heroes Day; and are symbolically represented by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National Heroes Acre.

Elliot Ziwira Senior Writer
To the east of our rural home in Dombodzvuku Village, Murehwa, lies Sekuru Chirimuuta’s once imposing homestead.

If you were to accompany me to the now deserted place, since Sekuru Chirimuuta and his wife, Mai Rudo, are both late, and his children have found reasons to move and start their own families; you would be attracted to the family’s fenced graveyard close to the kitchen hut, and further away from the disused barn.

You would also notice Sekuru’s skeletal pride of his farming prowess, a John Deere tractor, bullishly recollecting its heydays in its ramshackle way sandwiched between the yesteryear marvel of a house and the barn.

In the graveyard are several black granite tombstones (May the souls of my dearly departed father’s maternal relatives rest in peace!), and among them are two smaller graves lying footstone to headstone. You would get the impression that they are children’s graves. But they are not.

They are symbolic graves, for Sekuru Chirimuuta’s younger sisters — Michael’s mother’s and her younger sister’s. We had known Mike since the time we could remember names; a quiet and intelligent boy, who lived under the wing of Sekuru Samuel, Sekuru Chirimuuta’s younger brother and whose homestead is a stone’s throw away from the graveyard.

We would meet in the village during school holidays. Sekuru Samuel, a butcher, and farmer, like his elder brother, is late now.

Memory records that one morning at the height of the protracted struggle for our Motherland, Sekuru Chirimuuta’s two sisters disappeared from home, and the family were to learn that the two young women had crossed the border to join liberation fighters in Mozambique. Mike was barely three years old when his mother answered the liberation call.

My mother talks glowingly of the beautiful sisters.

After the struggle, the family waited anxiously for the return of their loved ones, like thousands of other families. Sekuru Chirimuuta and his father went to demobilisation points countless times, with each search being fruitless. Though spiritually weighed down they continued to wait, and Mike waited also, for his beloved mother, who loved him more to sacrifice for his freedom, and a better life in a new Zimbabwe.

Later, much later, word came through a Comrade that the sisters had perished in an inferno, along with four other combatants, when another woman’s son or daughter sold out, and their charred remains were buried (if there was still anything to bury) in shallow graves somewhere at the front.

Follow-ups revealed that, indeed, the wait was over, as their names were on the list of those who could not make it to the Promised Land. But custom tells us that one cannot just die and be forgotten; it is unAfrican. There is need for closure, and a final resting place for the departed. So the family had to perform a traditional ceremony to bring the deceased to the fold.

It was years after Independence in 1980, because I remember the occasion, when the ritual was performed through the burial of two goat heads (as per custom) to symbolically represent the dearly departed daughters of the soil. Another ceremony was done to bring their spirits home, thus, putting closure to the anxiety of waiting.

If you were to walk towards the west of our homestead, past BaLinda Bowa’s you will get to a vlei where my mother’s vegetable garden is, among others belonging to members of our community. And if you were to stand just a few metres from the foot of a hillock after the boundary that marks the end of BaLinda Bowa’s fields, so that you face Muketiwa’s garden, which is before my mother’s further west, with Sayiriyo’s to your right, and just a gaze away from the village cemetery to the north, you would see a raised platform. At the edge of that platform was an old mutamba tree, whose stump is still visible.

It is here that herdboys gather to end or start their day in the veld. If you were to look closely around the stump, you would see a depression; and if you were to ask my mother or any other villager; not the herdboys of course, they would tell you that the depressed area marked Cde Ropa’s grave. My mother recalls that he was a young jovial freedom fighter, who left school to join the struggle when he was in Form Two. She also remembers that his parents and other relatives came to exhume his remains for reburial in Mutare after Independence.

The day that Cde Ropa fell, was the day that Cde Shacky and three other sons of the soil perished, and my late cousin Florence was shot, although she survived. She was part of Vanamukoma’s intelligence network (chimbwido). It was the day that my paternal great-grandmother (Mbuya Alice) and Sekuru Bowa’s homesteads were razed to the ground.

They were bases for freedom fighters, and on that particular day someone sold out to Ian Smith’s soldiers. The slain guerrillas’ bodies were paraded to the villagers, save for Cde Ropa’s because the Rhodesian soldiers could not locate it, before being ferried to an unknown destination. Some bodies, along with those of vanamujimbas and chimbwidos, and others suspected of harbouring freedom fighters, were thrown into Nyakambiri River behind Chitsotso, the sacred mountain, to be fodder to underwater creatures of prey, or cast into the dip tank at Guwati, and left there to rot.

Such is the sacrifice for freedom.

There are so many such stories about the liberation struggle that I gleaned from my mother, her brother, Sekuru Munetsi Chizema, and his son Sekuru Chester both late provincial heroes laid to rest at Harare Provincial Heroes Acre. May their souls rest in eternal peace! They played their part well. I especially enjoyed the stories about Cde Masweet and Cde Chihombe Madala’s exploits. Cde Masweet operated in our area, and Cde Chihombe Madala operated in Mhondoro.

Cde Masweet; that gallant freedom fighter, the star in my mother’s liberation war recollections; and the hero in my humble estimation of the story of toil, sacrifice, struggle, determination and resilience. I am told that he now lives somewhere in Kwekwe.

The stories made me both sad and happy; they were stories among thousands of other stories told across the Motherland. Stories of sacrifice, love, hope and resilience; stories of toil, collective suffering, trauma and dying; stories of anxiety, waiting, hatred, betrayal and psychological disengagement.

Even as depicted in Zimbabwean Literature, especially by such writers like Alexander Kanengoni, Freedom T. Nyamubaya and Thomas Sukutai Bvuma, who were freedom fighters, stories of our liberation struggle articulate the nature of war, as being both dehumanising and psychologically traumatising, not only to the guerrillas alone, but to their families as well; during and after the struggle.

There are so many shallow graves, disused mines, caves and rivers that consumed gallant sons and daughters of Zimbabwe, who are commemorated on Heroes Day; and are symbolically represented by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National Heroes Acre.

Their heroism is celebrated through the beautiful and symbolic artwork, which keeps the spirit of liberation and collective suffering intact.

I have always wondered why it is called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, when they are not unknown as such. The graves at Sekuru Chirimuuta’s are marked, and Mike knows that his mother died at the front, and their names are known; and all their families can still place faces to their names. When they fell at the front, were mauled by predators and slipped into the unknown void beneath, their fellow comrades felt the hollowness that comes with losing a loved one to death. Even the soil knows them; the soil does not forget its own.

Why then should they be referred to as being Unknown? Should history remember them as being Unknown, and not immortal or gallantly Known? I wondered, until I got to understand the concept behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Maybe Unknown sounds distant; maybe!

The Tomb is imposing, telling of the symbolic importance of the contributions made by heroes of our liberation struggle to free us from the shackles of colonialism. On the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier stand three bronze statues of three soldiers of freedom; two men and a woman. The depiction of the female soldier is symbolic of the universality of struggle, and the unwavering support of womanhood, and motherhood. The masculine features combine with femininity to portray both nobility and gallantry, prerequisites for sacrifice in the fight against colonialism.

Also on the statue are the national flag, and the weapons of war associated with our freedom fighters; the AK 47 rifle, bazooka and a rocket launcher. These are the weapons that brought freedom to our doorsteps. The masses loved the freedom sounds that issued from their muzzles. The base of the Tomb is covered with stonework depicting Great Zimbabwe and symbolically representing the historical heart of the nation and the land which precipitated the desire for freedom.

Because the dead live in the living, and the living speak to the dead through intercessors or spirit mediums, the link between the living soldiers and those who fell at the front is resplendent in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The standing statue depicts the living soul, and the tomb supporting them portrays the dead. Those who made it to the new country; the brave freedom fighters (war veterans), and the gallant ones, who breathed their last in the trenches, share the spirit of sacrifice; thus, all are equally depicted in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The spiritual dimension is purveyed through the shiny black granite, depicting a final resting place, and appeasement to the souls of our fallen heroes, like Sekuru Chirimuuta’s sisters, my father’s aunts, whose bones are scattered across the Motherland, lie in shallow and unmarked graves in neighbouring countries, or whose dismembered bodies were thrown down mine shafts, burnt to ashes or preyed on.

As Mike tells his wife and children about the heroine he was robbed of a chance to know beyond his mere three years, and the mother-in-law, grandmother and great aunt they could only reflect on through stories of the liberation struggle, he, like tens of thousands of others, and, indeed, all of us, should be consoled by the remembrance of the sacrifices of the gallant sons and daughters of the soil as depicted through the Tomb of the Unknown Father.

There is no greater honour than finding time to lay our wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier this coming Heroes Day, as we have always done and will continue to do every year in the month of August.

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