The Sunday Mail
Agnes Mutsvairi Wanganui High School (Mhondoro Ngezi)
Placed at the heart of Africa Zimbabwe is the envy of many nations around the world. Check this, it is the last nation in the world if we have to place nations of the world alphabetically. Coming last on the alphabet seems to make it the most talked about, the most vilified, the most loved, the most hated, the most punished and the most coveted country in all the world.
Zimbabwe has its people whose history is thorny and quite painful. If we think of it we will notice that it is the only nation in southern Africa where napalm bombs were used against it’s freedom fighters. It has the bravest soldiers, peace-keepers and police forces who are emulated the world over for rendering services of preserving rather than destroying life, yet it has been treated like Hiroshima if we think of Nyadzonia, Chimoto and many other places where atrocities were committed by the Rhodesians.
Zimbabwe is the only nation that has fought hard to break the shackles of colonial domination and claimed it’s right to the most valuable resource of all-the the land. Without land we would be condemned to perpetual slavery but now even our neighbours hate us for having achieved what they failed to do in their own land; to claim authority over land. Only seventeen years ago Zimbabwe’s freedom fighters and people bravely took it upon himself to go and settle on the white owned farms.
All names were called this action like’ land invasion’ and the like. People who were claiming their birth right which had been cruelly confiscated from their fore-fathers were demonized as Invaders . Nowhere else had it ever happened that land previously owned by whites was claimed and taken over by the indigenous people.
To this day ,this pill has not yet gone down well in some quarters where former possessors fume with rage over what they wrongly claim as there’s. Some have gone to the extent of slamming Zimbabwe’s doors and threatening to lock it out of all meaningful economic interaction with some influential nations of the world. Land reclamation had been delayed for 20 years and the white farmers thought it would be easy to continue as they had always done before.
Zimbabwe has been cursed by droughts and sanctions and blessed with prophets and heavy downpours. It has its own ups and downs but what is unique is the resilience of it’s people in the face of people who opt to negatively portray it’s image to the rest of the world. The GFPS-Kasoma Africa Essay Writing Competition closed on 31 May 2017 and the Adjudication Process is now in progress.
- Students with shortlisted entries which were published to date are urged to email their Names,Contact details to Fungayi Sox on [email protected] or [email protected] on or before 23 June 2017.All writers are encouraged to continue sharing their incredible African stories on www.kasomafrica.com
