The Sunday Mail
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
IT gives abundant epistemic delight when more books are being published in the interest of reliving our liberation history. This is a critical step towards the decolonising of knowledge as such literature is crucial in re-articulating why the colonial system had to fall. The preservation of African liberation memory is also handy in encouraging attentiveness to the ever-changing manifestations of neo-colonialism. The launch of Herbert Chitepo’s biography at the National Gallery in Zimbabwe last Friday did not only reinvigorate the Chimurenga nostalgia, but it emphatically buttressed the philosophical remapping of our national question largely defined in terms of preserving the goals and principles of Zimbabwe’s independence. The biography title Herbert W. Chitepo: ‘The Life and Legacy of Zimbabwe’s First Black Advocate and Patriotic Freedom Fighter’, by Elias Machemedze underscores the prophetic nature of Patrice Lumumba’s last words before facing his heinous execution at the hands of imperialists on that ugly day in January 1960:
“History will one day have its say; it will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris, or Brussels, however, but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and both north and south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity.”
The initiative to ‘‘write back’’ Cde Chitepo to history demonstrates the organic manifestation of that retention of memory of Africa by Africans for the benefit of those who will live beyond our time. As envisioned by Lumumba, a father of Africa’s liberation 60 years ago, today Zimbabwe is picking up the disjointed pieces of her past and posting them into posterity. The historical and philosophical significance of President Emmerson Mnangagwa as the Guest of Honour cannot be emphasised considering that he is a protégé of the late national icon whose life has been literarily remembered. President Mnangagwa — a lawyer himself just like Cde Chitepo — represents the effigy of justice which extracts its existence from the spirit of our liberation struggle. In the words of Chitepo in 1974, the dire need for justice caused our people ‘‘… to take up arms to fight against the regime that oppresses them, to establish a new Zimbabwe, a new country, a new justice, a new economic system, a new society’’.
Machemedze’s reflections on Herbert Chitepo offers an African standpoint to import the past in mirroring the ethos of our contemporary political culture. Chitepo’s recorded life story is an imperative heritage asset that should facilitate a rebirth of principles of service and dedication to the nation’s liberation. As the first African lawyer –Herbert Chitepo chose to resist the comforts of proximity to privileges of the colonial system. Ironically, today the post-colonial university is producing lawyers who are emotively attached to colonialism. With this avid propensity to neo-colonialism, this new breed of lawyers has chosen the path of being imperialist consultants for the continued Western amputation of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty through the illegal Anglo-American sanctions. While Chitepo stood against the grotesque laws of the Rhodesian regime aimed at preserving the bedrock of colonial hegemony, today we have lawyers who have used neoliberal loyalties to be part of the West’s anti-land reform agenda in Zimbabwe. This group of lawyers has even gone further to serve as master conveyancers of hostile foreign policies towards Zimbabwe by Western countries. In their lack of shame to appease colonial supremacy they will, by all means, fight to sustain the ‘’Zimbabwe Crisis’’narrative. The life story of Herbert Chitepo recorded by Elias Machemedze is important in offering contemporary templates to defining the revolutionary function of our legal fraternity in Zimbabwe. We need a paradigm shift in the construction of memory for the betterment of our national interests. To achieve that there’s a serious need for more candid accounts articulating virtues of our fight for independence.
As an epic narrative, the book traces the ancestry of the late liberation hero who was a great-grandson to an African spiritualist and decorated military genius, Tateguru Chitepo. Like his great grandfather, Chitepo ‘‘who acquired the skill of making the deadly weapon, the gun’’ (p. 20), young Herbert Wilshire Pfumandini became an intellectual menace to the imperialist regime. Like his patriarchy who was a formidable force to Chief Mutasa’s military wing, the late hero of the Second Chimurenga became the brains of ZANLA’s revolutionary military craftsmanship and ZANU’s diplomatic manoeuvres. Apart from this publication which offers an open acknowledgement of Chitepo’s heroic mark in Zimbabwe’s liberation, the late liberation stalwart has been immortalised through the Great Zimbabwe Faculty of Law named after him (The Herbert Chitepo Law School). The naming of an entire university faculty after Herbert Chitepo immortalises him as a thought-power engine of Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial ideological struggle. As if that is not enough, his ideological acumen in giving direction to the liberation struggle is further substantiated by the establishment of a nationalist think-tank institution named in his honour the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology.
In 1954 Chitepo became the first Black advocate in Rhodesia after his sterling academic mark in the study of the law. Instead of conforming to the colonial system –given his proximity to imperialist privilege, Chitepo chose to align with the anti-colonial cause. Chitepo featured in the most politically sensitive court wrangles which featured several African nationalists who at the time were already taking a defiant stand against the colonial regime. The late Herbert Chitepo became the chief legal consultant for the cause of African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. In 1961, at the peak of the imperialist scourge on African revolutionaries by the Rhodesian, Chitepo was Dr Joshua Nkomo’s legal advisor at the Southern Rhodesia Constitutional Conference in London. Chitepo remained consistent in his support of the nationalist movement even after the banning of ZAPU in 1962. He then went into exile in Tanzania where he became the first African Director of Public Prosecutions. By so doing, he registered his legacy as a pan-Africanist whose loyalty to Black emancipation was not solely tied to Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial struggle. However, beyond that the fluidity of his political identity immensely features in the changing strategies of our nationalist movements’ confrontation with several colonial machinations:
So, we built up our national organisations; Zimbabwe African National Congress in the early 1950s. It was banned and the leaders arrested and detained. We thought well, we might try again. We set up the National Democratic Party. It too was banned and the leaders arrested and detained. Some of them are still there today as I am speaking! They have been 10 years in jail without trial. And others have been released and taken back again because they would never give up the struggle. We created another one, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union. Within a year, that too was banned. It became clear to some of us really, the road to independence via constitutional discussion and agreement was not open. The whites would imprison, detain, proscribe, ban and banish anybody who dared to shout in the street in favour of justice (Herbert Chitepo’s Speech 1974).
Chitepo’s instrumental role in the continuity of the imperialist endeavoured assault of the nationalist revolution led to the formation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in 1963 and he was appointed Chairperson of the party. Chitepo held this post until December 7, 1974, when the Lusaka Accord was signed before his assassination in 1975. In the face of the gross humiliation and imprisonment of both ZAPU and ZANU nationalists, Chitepo was among the remnant who held the nationalist leadership fort in the mid-60s right up to the execution of the military reorganisation of the struggle leading to the formation of the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Chitepo’s legal lead in the struggle formed the virtues of the unwritten law of reclaiming the lost wealth and human dignity as a result of colonialism. Chitepo was at the strategic helm of leading ZANLA and on the pragmatic right of his thought-leadership, there was the late Commander Josiah Magama Tongogara. The ZANU and ZANLA under the leadership of Herbert Chitepo formed the ideological and armed resistance mantle to colonialism. Cde Herbert Chitepo is an epitome of those ideological principles sustaining the longevity of the collective national agenda deriving its actuality from the liberation struggle. As such, Herbert Chitepo’s biography is pivotal in its strong emphasis on this fact.
Otherwise, our liberation memory would be useless if it does not form the moral pivot of our governance conscience. Virtues of nationhood must be organically rooted in the memory of martyrs like Cde Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara, Robert Mugabe, Simon Vengesai Muzenda, Joshua Nkomo and many other stalwarts of the struggle. This can be achieved if we memorialise these patriots by accurately recording their contributions to our liberation. That way we will be able to seek corrections for our mistakes as a nation. This is because symbols of national belonging and the anti-colonial ideological heritage remain useful in eradicating the “pitfalls of national consciousness”.
The process of decolonisation must no longer be celebrated for only trampling imperialism to death. Instead, the discourse and the performative of political in the post-colony must (de)normalise how we are slowly forgetting our past as a nation. The launched book should inspire more stories about our past as the struggle to correctly retell the present continues.
Pamberi neZimbabwe!
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: Twitter: @VaMahomva & Email [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
