MY father never reconciled with the fact that our cousin, Never, had skipped a promising academic career to join ZANLA in Mozambique.
Never was a bursary student at St Augustine’s Mission in Penhalonga and expected to sail through his ‘MPC’ at A Level.
He and others skipped the border weeks before their ‘A’ Level examinations in 1975.
Father, who was working in Mutare, had acted as Never’s guardian.
When father brought the news to the village he wore a bereaved face.
He kept shaking his head in disapproval.
Never had ‘betrayed’ a family that so much looked to the fruits from the genius they were investing in.
Never was the family academic standard.
Father gave a long stare to Munaro, a Grade Seven drop out or ‘home defender’ as we called them, driving his cattle a distance from where we were.
“Never should have left people like Munaro to join the war,” my father reasoned loudly and angrily.
Despite the anger, father was supportive of the war.
From father’s sermons we assumed the war was against Ian Smith and was for “one man one vote”.
To my father the bright minds needed nurturing and protecting to prepare them for election to national leadership.
Fighting for fatherland had to be left to the not so gifted ones, the unfortunate ones, the ‘home defenders’.
As fate would have it, Munaro joined the war in 1978.
Both survived the war.
Never joined the army and had a successful career.
Munaro was demobilised and rejoined the village where he died an outcast.
That’s another story.
Both Never and Munaro had inner satisfaction in having liberated Zimbabwe. After the war and on separate occasions, Never counselled me on ‘wanted and unwanted truths’ while I first heard of the Guzuzu brothers from Munaro.
Both had secured for us and celebrated “one man one vote”.
They had given us majority rule, kuzvitonga kuzere.
Never is retired, Munaro and my father are late, but their stories ring loud in my head.
Recently I have been retracing the story of the vote that Never and Munaro fought for.
It was a vote Zimbabwe exercised with gusto in 1980.
The result was emphatic, but it was also a strange and new concept.
In the minds of Never and Munaro’s parents, the vote had only developed as a concept in the last 30 years before majority rule.
Throughout colonial rule the vote had been a topical issue within the white settler regime which sought to qualify franchise on race, property, income and literacy levels.
A voter had to be someone of means.
From 1896 up to 1953 voting qualifications favoured males aged over 21 and who were British subjects, had property (real estate) and could read and write in English.
In reality this meant white people.
Africans, because of land laws of that time, had no real estate, property.
When land laws later created Native Purchase Areas with title, there was consternation among whites fearing creation of an African voting bloc.
In 1951 the property qualification was raised from 75 pounds to 500 pounds.
The result was a voters’ roll that was 99 percent white.
Among early nationalists many were not opposed to qualified franchise and universal suffrage, one man one vote, did not become a key demand until much later when Never and Munaro joined the fight for it.
In 1980 a prospective voter was any Zimbabwean aged 18.
Vote, as in electing rulers, is a concept alien to our political/cultural history.
There is no Shona word for it.
Fittingly we have had to create Shona terms around it, “vhoti/kuvhota/kuvhotera/kuvhoterwa.”
We may term it ‘sarudzo’ and equate it to ‘sarudza’, but it just does not fit.
Sarudzo is a courtship concept as in the child’s play ‘Sarurawako’ or in ‘kusarudza nzungu’ as in grading nuts.
In courtship ‘kusarudza’ is a gamble influenced by mundane issues like facial beauty, complexion and height.
In our traditions and customs leaders were not subjected to ‘sarudza’ selection trivia.
They were identified and ordained/installed.
It was a process based on established rules, implemented by elders under the direction of the ancestral spirits.
Leaders were born leaders and our earthly task was to identify and install them when their time came.
Since the 1950s we have sought to inculcate in our societies the concept of choosing them for their earthly attributes.
These attributes usually relate to leaders’ ability to buy our vote.
Consequently prospective leaders must have fat pockets to back promises to build heavens.
As a teaser they must buy scuds and donate various trinkets to ever impoverishing communities.
Surely, even in their widening diversity, Never and Munaro would never have imagined that this was the “one man one vote” they fought for.
In high school I had a friend who, when opportunity arose, always wanted to read to us excerpts from the Green book of the Libyan Jamahiriya revolution.
The passages helped us question the assumption that democracy was the vote and Western.
Through the readings we developed a basic appreciation of the tenets of democracy that underpinned our own indigenous governance systems.
The Chinese have persevered with their own governance system that the West has come to accept.
In our case we partly took up arms for the vote and have religiously gone for the vote every five years since 1980, but the West still calls us a dictatorship.
The vote has been a cancer to our political systems, divisive and an albatross.
It has made us short-term planners and selfish.
A prospective MP budgets for campaign scuds and donor handouts.
He must have a fat pocket or be backed by some fat pockets.
Once elected they must repay the fat pockets backers with business opportunities.
The MP has no opportunity to pursue a medium or long-term visions.
Before they have hardly settled in their compromised MP role they are back on the campaign trail for the next election.
The cycle repeats itself and development evades us.
The vote has proved divisive and a tool for short-term planning.
Clearly this is not what Never and Munaro had in mind.
Is it too late to reform it in line with our traditions and customs?