The Sunday Mail
Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa’s critique on General Solomon Mujuru’s biography “The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker” authored by Miles Tendi elicited robust debate last week on the life of the late hero. Here, we publish a reaction from Reason Wafawarova to Ambassador Mutsvangwa’s instalment.
To us, Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru) represented a young man deprived of an opportunity to realise his full academic potential by an acute colonial repressive bottleneck education system that allowed only a selected privileged few to advance with their education, including those who went to Kutama College, a Roman Catholic effort to educate brilliant young African boys.
If Rex was “semi-illiterate”, to us he was semi-literate, because we saw him as half full as opposed to half empty, and that because he represented many of us who were equally deprived of opportunities that many of us today take for granted.
For a semi-illiterate to rise the way Rex did among a group of people that valued literacy so highly, it essentially means he had an exceptional extra-literacy talent that impressed cadres in the trenches we all know were so tough that even highly literate cadres like Cde Chris Mutsvangwa could not find it easy to rise beyond foot soldier ranking.
Rex to us is the semi-illiterate who went to war to give Zimbabwe the tag of being Africa’s highest literacy at 94 percent, easily comparable to literacy in developed nations.
As for Robert Mugabe’s “dubious prison degrees”, Africa is the ultimate judge.
His record needs no defence.
The world knows him well. His principles are common knowledge.
But I digress. My point is we cannot afford to do revisionism with our own liberation war legacy.
My point is November 17, 2017 was never a war against Robert Mugabe.
I was intimately part of it, and it was an operation to restore the legacy of not only our liberation war effort, but that of Robert Mugabe too.
The enemy had Mugabe captured in his hands, and with him the party Zanu-PF.
Something had to be done, and something was done.
Cde Chris Mutsvangwa and I talked daily through the five-day operation, culminating in the return and rise of ED Mnangagwa.
Both of us know what we wanted.
Both of us had known what was needed for a long time.
Both of us know today what is needed.
We need to deal with these, not to fight posthumous wars with our departed heroes.
I have nothing but total respect for Cde Chris, and he knows it. But like him, I hide no feelings or opinion to appease anyone, and that is why we are very close.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome.
It is homeland or death!!!
Reason Wafawarova writes in his personal capacity.
