IT took almost a century to untangle colonial hegemonic control of our affairs with the liberation fighters showcasing a combination of heroics and devastating prowess that has come to characterise this country’s history.
Those heroics highlighted the borderline of success and failure.
The famous Chinhoyi Battle exposed some shortcomings that needed immediate remedy culminating in the many successes that came in the aftermath of the launch of the North-Eastern offensive in the 1970s.
April 18 1980 was the culmination of those remedies.
That triumph was established via a paradigm shift that saw women assuming the critical role of leadership that the legendary Mbuya Nehanda played successfully during the First Chimurenga.
Such is the long-term memory of the liberation struggle that it incorporates great names like Mbuya Nehanda, Amai Sally Mugabe, Ruth Chinamano and Mai Chaza among a plethora of golden girls who epitomised the struggle for freedom.
The will to battle was forged, laying the foundation stones for the construction of a modern Zimbabwe that endorses the rights of women and the girl child.
President Robert Mugabe, the man who superintended the decisive phase of the struggle still recognises women and girls’ rights with vigour and zeal.
The story of the struggle cannot be fully explained or understood without mentioning the role and impact of these great women.
Mbuya Nehanda
There is arguably no story in the history of the liberation struggle that has had such a huge impact as that of Mbuya Nehanda Nyakasikana, that great woman.
Mbuya Nehanda was an inspirational, spiritual and religious leader 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 the British High Commissioner to South Africa Mr Alfred Milner and endorsed by the British Imperial Secretary on March 28 1898.
The execution was done on the authority of Judge Watermayer, with Mr Herbert Hayton Castens as ‘the acting public prosecutor sovereign within the British South Africa Company Territories, who prosecutes for and on behalf of Her Majesty’.
According to the death warrant, Mbuya Nehanda was to be executed within the walls of the goal of Salisbury, between the hours of six and 10.
It is said on the day of her execution, wires were hot with telegrams to London with ‘news’ that the war had ‘ended’.
Mbuya Nehanda was brutally murdered on allegations of banditry and rebellion by the British South Africa Company government founded by Cecil Rhodes.
The original Rhodesia police dockets and court judgments that saw the iconic Mbuya Nehanda executed are now on the Memory of the World Register, recognising her role in changing history.
Amai Sally Mugabe
President Mugabe’s first wife and Zimbabwe’s First Lady who passed on in 1992 was a pillar of strength as President Mugabe led the struggle from Maputo.
Born in 1931 in Ghana Amai Sally Mugabe was raised in a political family.
She met President Mugabe at Takoradi Teacher Training College where they were both teaching and went with him to Southern Rhodesia where they were married in April 1961 in Salisbury.
With President Mugabe’s release in 1975 and subsequent departure for Mozambique with Edgar Tekere, Amai Sally Mugabe rejoined her husband in Maputo.
According Wikipedia, she cast herself in the new role of a mother figure to the thousands of refugees created by the Rhodesian Bush War.
In 1978 she was elected ZANU PF deputy secretary for the Women’s League.
She was elected secretary general of the ZANU-PF Women’s League at the party’s congress of 1989.
She also founded the Zimbabwe Child Survival Movement.
She died on January 27 1992 from kidney failure.
In 2002, to mark the 10th anniversary of her death, Zimbabwe issued a set of four postage stamps, of a common design, using two different photographs, each photograph appearing on two of the denominations.
Ruth Chinamano
Wife to hero Josiah Chinamano, she was a great heroine who was detained at Gonakudzingwa Restriction Camp in 1964 for political activism with her husband and spent the next decade in and out of detention.
The couple were transferred from Gonakudzingwa to Wha Wha Prison where they remained until 1970, when they were released but confined to an eight-km radius restriction before being arrested again and being released in 1974.
She was elected to parliament when Zimbabwe held non-racial elections in 1980.
She died on January 2 2005 and is buried at the National Heroes Acre.
Mai Chaza
A relatively unknown but mercurial leader and founder of Guta raJehovah, Mai Chaza was crucial in providing the spiritual flair to the struggle.
The Church was founded in 1954.
Mai Chaza was reputed to have the ability to successfully pray for women to conceive.
These great women deserve our respect.