AN anticipated bumper harvest, the iconic Mazowe Dam spilling for the first time in 16 years and an economy showing defiance and rising again are some of the many issues dominating Zimbabwe as the country marches towards its 37th independence anniversary on April 18.
Yet the point remains that the road to independence was an arduous one.
The story of Zimbabwe’s long and painful journey to freedom, a road replete with an errant colonising congregation not ashamed to loot, kill and maim owners of the country, has long been told.
It is a story that cannot be wished away by the successes we enjoy today and the wishes of an unrepentant Rhodesian occupying force.
The Rhodesians had no qualms causing untold suffering among the Zimbabweans.
They had no problems with defecating on our ideals, on our systems and on our beliefs.
They had no problems in stealing our resources and our animals.
They killed Mbuya Nehanda.
They killed Sekuru Kaguvi.
They killed innocent people at Nyadzonia, Tembwe and Chimoio.
But they did not kill our spirit of resistence, resilience and hard work.
King Lobengula, Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi were inspirational, spiritual and religious leaders who mobilised the masses to rebel against the Rhodesian settler regime that had occupied Zimbabwe in the 1890s.
Mbuya Nehanda’s execution was authorised by British High Commissioner for South Africa Alfred Milner and endorsed by the British Imperial Secretary on March 28 1898.
The executions were done on the authority of Judge Watermayer, with Herbert Hayton Castens as ‘the acting Public Prosecutor Sovereign within the British South Africa Company (BSAC) territories, who prosecutes for and on behalf of Her Majesty’.
According to the death warrant, ‘Mbuya Nehanda was to be executed within the wall of the goal of Salisbury, between the hours of six and 10’.
A Roman Catholic priest, Father Richartz, was assigned to convert Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi to Christianity.
He failed to make headway with Mbuya Nehanda, only succeeding with Sekuru Kaguvi, whom he baptised ‘Dismas’, the ‘good thief’.
It is said on the day of their execution, wires were hot with telegrams to London with ‘news’ that the war had ‘ended’.
On the morning of Friday, April 29 1898, Fr Richartz arrived at the prison at about 5.20 am and had ample time to talk to the four men.
They were ‘quiet and resigned and clearly expressed their wish to be baptised and go to heaven’.
He baptised Maremba, Joseph Peter (Martyr); Ndowa, Joseph Barnabas; Zvidembo, Joseph Thaddeus; and Gundusa, Joseph Thomas.
All of them, especially the last two, ‘died quietly and with resignation’.
While they were being executed, Fr Richartz conducted prayers for them and afterwards, the burial prayers over their dead bodies in the prison hospital.
Mvenuri, Mashindu, Munyongani and Chirisere were executed on Monday, May 2.
Richartz succeeded in persuading the last two to be baptised.
They did not stop there.
They killed traditional leaders like Chiefs Chingaira, Chinengundu, Mashonganyika, Mapondera and Chiwashira and shipped their skulls to England as ‘war trophies’.
The skulls are preserved as trophies in the UK to prove British conquest.
Chief Mashayamombe was one of the leading figures of the First Chimurenga who was accused by colonialists of ‘causing’ many problems for settlers in Mhondoro, Norton and Chegutu.
Historians say he was the military strategist behind the killing of a white settler called Norton after whom Norton Town near Harare is named.
Chief Mashayamombe is said to have engineered the construction of an intricate network of tunnels where he and his subjects hid and kept supplies during raids by colonialist forces.
After accounting for numerous casualties, British settlers dispatched a team to blow him and his people out of a hideout using dynamite.
Chief Mashayamombe is said to have been captured and beheaded, with a ransom being paid for his head.
Chief Makoni Chingaira also features prominently in the resistance narrative; operating in the Rusape area where he ultimately met his death.
In August 2015, during the Heroes Day commemorations, President Robert Mugabe called for Britain to repatriate the remains of fighters of the country’s struggle against its colonialism.
“We are told that skulls of our people, our leaders, are being displayed in a British museum and they are inviting us to repatriate them,” said President Mugabe.
“We will repatriate them, but with bitterness, questioning the rationale behind decapitating them.
“The First Chimurenga leaders, whose heads were decapitated by the colonial occupying force, were then dispatched to England, to signify British victory over, and subjugation of, the local population.
“Surely, keeping decapitated heads as war trophies, in this day and age, in a national history museum, must rank among the highest forms of racist moral decadence, sadism and human insensitivity.”
On November 23 1977, the Rhodesian Security Forces launched a ferocious raid on Chimoio Camp in Mozambique.
Thousands of ZANLA fighters were killed and other thousands wounded while only two racist Government troopers died and six were wounded.
To highlight the gruesome killings by the Rhodesians, the Liberation War Heroes Trust says there are more than 218 mass graves around the country, most with remains of liberation struggle fighters, innocent civilians as well as women and children who were massacred by the Selous Scouts and other Ian Smith’s soldiers.
The identified mass graves are in Masvingo (2), Midlands (5), Matabeleland South (7), Matabeleland North (4), Mashonaland East (46), Mashonaland Central (72), Manicaland (48), Harare (6) and Mashonaland West (23).
As we celebrate independence on April 18, we should keep in mind that we endured a painful path to freedom, a path never to forget!