IN RESPONDING to such an article as was written by Nathaniel Manheru in the Herald of August 28, I run the risk of glorifying gibberish and sanitising trash.
All the same, since Nathaniel Manheru is the mouthpiece of the sinking genocidal dictatorship in Harare, it is fitting that his falsehoods must be contested at every corner and curve, lest some people are fooled.
Manheru wrote on behalf of his boss to explain why Gibson Sibanda was not accorded national hero status. In that offending article, titled “Sibanda: Exorcising the heresy of Matabeleland”, Manheru treated grave matters of Ndebele history, culture and experience with insulting negligence and flippancy. He took it upon himself to collapse Ndebele experience of Zanu PF genocide to child’s play and expressed his unfortunate wish that the victims of this genocide will surrender their future to serendipity and not seek justice or freedom from economic marginality and political persecution perpetuated by his boss.
Chief among my objectives in writing this article is to kindly ask Nathaniel to look for other toys to play with and other topics to try to please his master with, and not the bleeding issues of ethnic cleansing and genocide, or else, he becomes the proverbial idiot who provokes a crocodile before he crosses the river. Especially when, at long last, Gukurahundi has been declared internationally as a genocide.
Secondly, I would like to answer some of the questions Manheru asked and contest most of the provocative and irritating falsehoods that he postulated.
In the beginning of his article, talking about the Heroes Acre, in his typical Shakespearean diction and Chaucerian syntax, Manheru insists that “Zanu PF, the sole creator of that acre, indeed the deserved sole author of the rules of entry to that shrine” should be the one that decides who should be buried there.
My question to Manheru and his boss is why then do they still describe it as a national heroes’ acre when it is, as Manheru says, a Zanu PF cemetery? It is a burial place for Zanu PF heroes not a national heroes shrine.
As if drunk or stack insane, Manheru goes on to argue that “Matabeleland is neither a geographical place or a socio-cultural entity, it is a political construct.”
This is a scandalous fabrication and a mischievous attempt to edit history and temper with reality. Mashonaland as a country that had been conquered by Mzilikazi was colonised by the British in 1890 and Matabeleland was conquered by Starr Jameson with the assistance of the Batswana and the Mashona in 1893. Matabaleland and Mashonaland were two separate countries ruled by one king although later they were decolonised as one country. This makes Matabaleland a geographic, cultural, historical and political reality.
I know Manheru is in the employ of a personality who now and again drifts from seizures of violent senility to bouts of confusion, but Manheru as a young and educated person should moderate some of his boss’s arguments before he commits them to paper, lest he insults himself the way he is doing.
Manheru’s laughable attempt to apologize for tyranny and deodorise Mugabe’s smelly political legacy punctuated with genocide knows no bounds. He asks “how ZAPU and ZIPRA became Matabeleland remains a mystery to me?” This is hypocrisy that smells to the high heavens from Manheru and his sinking master.
ZAPU und ZIPRA, for Manheru’s education, became Matabeleland organisations when Mugabe spared all the Shona-speaking ZAPU officials and targeted only the Ndebele for murder and imprisonment. The Fifth Brigade itself was a totally Shona-speaking militia, and for Manheru’s information, there are hundreds of people who lie in mass grave in Bhalagwe, Kapane and Ezinyangeni in Matabeleland, killed by Gukurahundi because they could not or refused to speak Shona. Gukurahundi criminalised and punished Ndebeleness.
The next time Manheru wants to know how ZIPRA and ZAPU ended up Matabeleland organisations, he should wait for his boss to recover from his now frequent explosions of senility and ask him why he conducted ethnic cleansing and killed the spirit of nationalism that Nkomo and ZAPU were cultivating.
It is a vulgar question for Manheru to ask why ZAPU is no longer there at Zvimba as it used to be in the past. It is Mugabe who divided the country on tribal lines. If I may ask Nathaniel, is there a single Gukurahundi victim in Mashonaland or a single mass grave? The answer is no, the ZAPU supporters in Zvimba were spared death because they were Shona. That was your boss’s evil design, so don’t burden us with your questions.
Continuing to pretend that Gukurahundi is a problem that has been solved and that which he can play with, Manheru drops another scandalous falsehood. He claims that “Breaking the Silence”, a Catholic report on the Gukurahundi atrocities, “became the MDC’s launch manifesto” in Matabeleland.
The truth is that the MDC-T has actually shied away from Gukurahundi as a crime against humanity, to the extent that it is arguable that when it comes to Gukurahundi, Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC-T are protective of Mugabe. Even in the government of national unity negotiations, the genocide was never raised or included in the agenda.
Manheru should know that victims of Gukurahundi and survivors are alive and hurting, and that the chapter is still not closed since justice is still to come. It is dangerous negligence for Manheru to treat such grave matters with levity and monkey-like silliness. That Zanu PF and MDC-T have jointly enjoyed the fruits of terror and genocide thus far, should not blind Manheru to fact that come thunder come lightning, Gukurahundi victims will one day achieve justice and even more.
Manheru claims that what prevented Gibson Sibanda from being granted national hero status is not his work in ZAPU but his involvement with the “darkened soul” of the MDC that brought sanctions and the interests of the whites to the forefront in Zimbabwean politics. I think Manheru should not be the one to talk about conspiracies with imperialism and “darkened souls”.
Mugabe conducted Gukurahundi with British support. Tiny Roland, a British businessman, fired the editor of his newspaper in London for reporting on Gukuranhundi as genocide. One of the kingpins of the genocide Perence Shiri was rewarded with a British scholarship to study at a prestigious British defence school after Gukurahundi, and Mugabe was knighted by the Queen of England in 1994 with Gukurahundi blood still dripping from his hands. Is there any soul that is darker and bloodier than your own boss Nathaniel?
We have also been told by Manheru that Lobengula, like Nehanda, is just “a myth” and not a reality that we should work by. It is Manheru’s suggestion that ancestry exists in the mind and in folktales and must not have a bearing on our daily decisions as modern people. I think Manheru has taken leave of his senses or his senses have taken leave of him.
In Harare, there is a tree that stands protected in the middle of a double lane tarred road. When real stories begin to be told, people will know who visits that tree in the intestines of dark nights to chant incantations and pour libations to Nehanda at the tree on which she was hanged. The same person who came out on national television to declare that Zimbabwe will not suffer fuel shortages again, only not telling the nation that he had been told by a spirit medium that his ancestors are sending him fuel from down under a mountain.
Manheru should spare us the trash, Lobengula Wamawaba cannot be a myth and will never be. Who does Manheru want to forget their ancestry when he so venerates his and believes that they can send him gallons and gallons of processed diesel from the soil?
Dumiso Dabengwa and Welshman Ncube, we are told, are just riding “high on the regional sentiment”. Manheru is reproducing an old Shona feeling that any organisation that is led by a Ndebele person is regional. From civic society organisations to political parties, anything led from Bulawayo is tribalistic and not national and credible enough.
On this one, Manheru is just being the peasant putting on a university gown that Mthandazo Ndema Ngwenya spoke of. Dabengwa and Ncube would be unwise to take seriously Manheru’s tribalist and primitive rantings.
No amount of linguistic embroidery will turn sunset into sunrise. This, Manheru should urgently understand. He is contracted into the service of a sinking tyrant who is cornered by old age, demands of a young family that he has, the impatience of the service chiefs he used to commit genocide, the ever feuding factions in his party and the growing anger of Gukurahundi victims and other enemies that he created in his days of strength.
The task of trying to defend this man Manheru and make him acceptable again is an impossible one. No amount of linguistic deodorisation and revision of history will make Mugabe smell good again. You will try Nathaniel, every trick in the big bag, but the enemies that your master created will catch up with him, hopefully in his lifetime, since nature is also visibly closing in.