WARS are always traumatic and evoke painful memories, but we always need to heal these traumas. 

One of the ways to deal with this trauma is to fulfill the promises survivors of the war made to fallen comrades.

Among the fallen are our founding fathers and mothers who laid down their lives, forming the foundation of all the struggles we went through.

Our detractors often hold the mistaken view that the the Second Chimurenga and the Land Reform and Redistribution Programme, which we consider the Third Chimurenga, were some spontaneous explosion without a historical past

They saw these struggles as some violent process against a saintly people who were predestined to hold the land until the end of time.

Our former colonisers claimed ownership of the discourses of land, giving the impression that there were no other voices that demanded their land back before 1980.

The West remains the West.

Its treatment of Africa has not changed.

The condescending behaviour remains.

The West, like always, will continue serving the needs of the West and will continue seeking world dominance.

The relationship between the West and Africa has not changed. 

It remains that of master and servant, big brother and small brother.

If we are to think the West will treat us as equals, without us demanding it, we will be doomed.

And that is why we continue calling for the return of the remains of our heroes and heroines who are in Western museums.

They are not objects to be ogled at. 

We need to give them befitting burials.

The First Chimurenga was a realisation that the visitor intended to stay longer than he had planned and thus had to be ejected from our land.

Mbuya Nehanda promised that: ‘Mapfupa angu achamuka’.

And they rose, as evidenced by the Second Chimurenga.

We were guided by the ideals and vision of these men and women whose heads were shipped to Europeans countries as war trophies.

The third phase, Third Chimurenga, which was long overdue, was finally implemented through the Land Reform Programme in 2000 resulting in the West imposing illegal sanctions on us.

Their hope was to weaken our economy and our resolve towards kuzvitonga kuzere.

But remembering our heroes and heroines, our founding fathers and mothers, we have not faltered.

They continue to inspire us. Now we are in the fourth phase, the Fourth Chimurenga, which is the struggle to bust the illegal sanctions.

We demand back the remains of our heroes and heroines because hundreds of years after the first imperial ship landed on the continent, they continue to fight us.

There is a dangerous tendency by many to assume the imperialistic agenda is no more.

It is a naive assumption that any interest in Africa by the colonial powers ended when we won the war.

The war on Africa’s resources has intensified and it will get worse before it gets better.

The return of the remains of our ancestors is important for a number of reasons.
They remind us of an unpleasant past.

These remains are not mere bones, but were flesh and blood that gave birth to this free nation.

They are the cradle of the present and inspire us to keep forging ahead.

We must make as much noise as we can about their return.

There are constituencies that would rather we remain quiet that would want us to forget, insisting our past does not matter much compared to the future.

To forget is to commit a grave error.

We cannot afford to forget colonial injustices and the evil nature of the systems which propped up the colonial regime?

We will never forget the service, the inspiration proffered by our founding fathers and mothers.