The Sunday Mail
Heroes’ and Defence Forces Days are very important national public holidays, right up there with Independence Day, and need to be commemorated with a degree of seriousness and national unity that is sometimes lacking among some sections of the community.
Some tend to see them as the Government’s events, or even political events. They are wrong. They are national commemorations and should involve everyone in the nation.
Our former colonial master got many things wrong, but one thing they got right was the annual remembrance of those killed fighting and winning the two world wars.
The whole nation takes part, from the king and royal family to the leaders of all political parties.
In some ways, it is a tragedy that leaders of our opposition parties do not join the leadership of the Government at the commemoration of National Heroes’ Day and the celebration of the Army and Airforce on National Defence Forces Day.
Seats could easily be found for them, perhaps next to the Cabinet, and their presence would help to reinforce national unity, while retaining our political diversity.
We sometimes forget that our political differences — and these will be celebrated in just over a week when we line up to vote for our President, Parliament and local councils — are just one factor about being a Zimbabwean.
More important is the fact that we are all Zimbabweans, that those who fought and those who died for our freedom fought and died for all Zimbabweans, and that our Defence Forces are sworn to serve and protect all Zimbabweans.
We need to be able to distinguish where we are united as a nation, and be able to keep our political differences where they belong, in that important and continuous debate about what our laws should look like and what policies should direct the next stage in our national development.
We are one nation and we should be able to celebrate our unity and our diversity, and know when to celebrate each of these.
The national nature of Heroes’ Day will become ever more important as the years pass.
Initially, those declared national, provincial and liberation heroes were those killed fighting the liberation war, and the first heroes holidays were designed to commemorate them and the thousands of others who died winning freedom.
Now, with the youngest person who fought in the liberation war now over 60, we are going to start seeing in the years ahead ever more veterans of the war joining those who fell in battle and we need to be able to cope with this and make sure they will never be forgotten as the decades roll by.
They deserve that as they remember, as all old soldiers do, what they did in their youth and they need to be assured that we will not forget.
Already, a significant majority of Zimbabweans are born free and they need to know that this freedom did not just emerge as a free gift, but had to come from a prolonged and deadly armed struggle with much suffering.
And they need to understand why so many saw that struggle as so necessary and so important, despite the gaps in the ranks on parade, because this tells everyone why freedom is so important.
Defence Forces Day came a couple of years after the first Heroes’ Day and was moved to the day after Heroes’ Day a little later because it was appropriate to express the continuity between those who won the freedom and those who now defend that freedom.
At that time, there were serious wars in Southern Africa, as the apartheid regime in South Africa lashed out in a determined effort to put off the day of freedom in that country by causing havoc among the neighbours.
But even with our region at peace, there are still threats to that peace and to the freedom we now all enjoy across the region. We are united with our neighbours, for example, in helping Mozambique at the moment successfully overcome one threat. None of us knows where the next one will materialise, or even what it will be.
All we do know is that it can appear at any time and in any place, and that we all have to be ready.
The defence forces understand this, and understand why they are part of the nation and have to remain part of the nation, not just a group sitting on the outside.
The veterans of the liberation war, and the last still in the defence forces must soon be reaching retirement age, taught the younger generations that have taken up the burden that they won because they were with the people and of the people; and those they fought were the outsiders trying to preserve something that was wrong in thought and deed.
That living tradition is vital and of critical importance when we look around parts of Africa and the world and see where it never was or has been forgotten.
Defence Forces Day is when we live and breathe that tradition, and both civil society, on one hand, and the soldiers and air personnel, on the other, remember that we are all “us”.
So, for all these reasons we need to participate in these national holidays and celebrate them as a nation.
