THE French, like most Europeans, are obsessed with their history.
They know it, love it and live it.
This week I am in France as I write this article.
Walking the streets of Paris, I cannot help noticing France’s history-littered streets and buildings.
This evening I wondered around the Place de la Republic, a massive monument headlined by a beautiful woman.
It is a personification of the French Republic and the often repeated French revolution values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Never mind the irony of the heavy presence of armed policemen swarming the area.
Tomorrow I will create time to visit the Place de la Bastille where the famous Bastille prison once stood before its storming on July 14 1789 to mark the beginning of the French Revolution.
These two monuments and many others are symbols of the French National Day, the equivalent of our Independence Day.
Contrast this with vitriol that some fellow Zimbabweans were directing at our Independence Day concept last Monday.
On one social media platform, people were even questioning whether Independence ever happened!
This is total madness, for what else can it be, perhaps deriving from real or imagined frustration with today.
The thousands of armed police on Parisian streets and the prying CCTV cameras all over the capital have not resulted in the French trashing their historic attachment to liberty and the sanctity of July 14.
I spent Independence Day reading Alexander Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences.
Interestingly, someone on social media had quoted from it to justify trashing our Independence Day.
But that is Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences.
It is a masterpiece, a mad book, a difficult read.
I found one passage particularly inspiring.
It is a passage that reminded me of my late father and Never, my cousin war veteran.
I have often repeated the Never incident.
Never was a bursary student at St Augustine’s Mission in Penhalonga and had been expected to sail through his Maths, Physics and Chemistry at Advanced Level.
He and others skipped the border weeks before their ‘A’- Level final 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, as he stood in the middle of our village courtyard, gave a long stare to Munaro, a Grade Seven drop-out or ‘home defender’ as we called them, who was 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.
In Echoing Silences I came across an equally profound passage in which Munashe’s sister berates him for his decision to go to the war: “But why?
“Why do you want to bring so much pain and suffering to us by abandoning your degree and joining something as risky as the liberation war?
“Why should you sacrifice your life for something so impersonal, something that does not belong to anybody?
“And when you are eventually killed, who will mourn your loss?
“Who will cry for you?
“Who will bury you?
“Why should you carry the burden of the nation on your head?
“Just tell me why, my brother!”
A former teacher of Munashe had, in a letter from Ian Smith enforced exile, answered the questions much earlier:
“Remember, freedom is God-given.
“The most honourable fight in which one can engage is the active pursuit of freedom.
“So one day, when you are a man among free people, those of you – alive or dead – who were involved in the fight for freedom, will stand to be acknowledged as the heroes of your struggle.”
Ours may be a very young nation, lacking in the antiquity and monumentality of the French National Day, but its independence was born out of profound sacrifice from the greatest depth of patriotism.
In Never and Munashe, we must hail true patriots and national heroes who sacrificed their all for you, me and the future to be free.
These represent the sons and daughters of the soil who sang, “Amai nababa, musandicheme, kana ndafa, nehondo.
“Ndini ndakazvida, kufira Zimbabwe.”