THE day I was in Unyetu lamenting the loss of Magangara to matengesa nyika, Yona and colleagues were in Chivhu for a meeting of former collaborators in the liberation struggle.
Apparently news in the village was that their association was planning to dish out US$4 Chivhu residential stands to members.
As usual the news was met with euphoria among ‘war collaborators’ but with anger among the excluded elders.
I tried to calm angry muchemberes that this was mere mobilisation and that there was no discriminatory rewarding being planned.
She and her age folk saw no sense in rewarding what were the war’s 10-15 year olds and ignoring the gallantry of the war’s parents.
When the liberation struggle arrived in the village, masses took to the war like fish to water.
Parents, vabereki, organised themselves into logistics committees mobilising food resources and establishing cooking rosters in order to adequately serve the needs of the comrade fighters.
Adolescents and single young adults became mujibha (male) and chimbwido (female), the former providing crucial war intelligence and the latter assisting with chores like laundry and sewing.
Below these were the youngsters, my age mates, who essentially lived the war and could be called upon to help any of the above supporting groups as demanded by the situation.
Only the elderly and toddlers were without real war tasks.
Today the groups survive with uneven representation.
Two Sinyoros did make it to Mozambique and joined ZANLA.
One went via Harare and at the end of the war became a civil servant based in Harare and is now late.
The other deserted the Rhodesian army and handed himself to macomrades who whisked him away to Mozambique.
He returned via Dzapasi, joined the army and remained attached to the village. There were two Nyakudirwas, both were exemplary mujibhas and trained at the front, Buhera, in later stages of the war.
One was demobilised and returned to the village while the other joined the Army. The former is now late and died an unhappy man as society failed to re-integrate him.
A Murehwa joined the Nyakudirwas in training at the front.
At the end of the war he joined the Police.
He is now late.
Today, only Nyakudirwa, who is now a councillor and Sinyoro, who as a new farmer has left the village, survive.
Of the original mujibhas and chimbwidos, only one chimbwido, ‘Mamoyo’, remains in the village.
Most are late while others, like Okay, Stella, Florence and Mukaka, have moved on to other places.
Yona was a 13-year-old and today is one of the village’s three members of the collaborators association.
Of the group, only Mamoyo is an undisputed collaborator.
If a meeting of war veterans was to be called in the village, Nyakudirwa, the only surviving war vet from the village would not be short of company.
The elders are aware of this fraud and get worked up when too-good-to-be-true rewards like the US$4 stands are promised the collaborators and they are ignored.
I have followed the plight of war veterans and war collaborators with keen interest since independence.
At independence there was stigma attached to these two groups, unlike vabereki. For some strange reason, society was slow to celebrate the gallantry of the two. Take the late Nyakudirwa who left Dzapasi with his demobilisation package and arrived in the village with a scotch cart.
He also immediately bought two heifers and got married that same year.
The village still struggled to take him back.
Before joining the war, Nyakudirwa had been a gwenyambira of repute.
He brought the sounds of Magangara to the village.
The war took him to a spiritual level that required village and national cleansing efforts to help re-integrate him.
No one seemed to care and Nyakudirwa was left on the edge of lunacy.
To many he was the true ‘ex-combatant’ stereotype.
As budding Form Two historians, we gave him company listening to his war exploits.
We initially thought he was making up liberation war history until later in school when we came across facts from his testimony.
He passed on in the late 1980s, destitute, divorced and lonely and was interred with his war memories, most of what he had shared with our young minds forgotten.
Murehwa fared better having joined the police.
He hardly spent time in the village, but was considered a man of means.
The village embraced him.
Sinyoro the new farmer was even luckier.
He joined the army and married a fellow war veteran.
They upgraded their education and lived a comfortable middle class existence as non-commissioned officers in the army.
On the few occasions he came to the village, he was quick to remind us, at the slightest opportunity, that Nyakudirwas and Murehwa were not real war veterans, since they did not go to Mozambique.
Today I wonder how he feels on occasions he must share the revered status with ‘war veterans’ who were toddlers at independence.
The stigma attached to being a war veteran or war collaborator in newly independent Zimbabwe contrasts markedly with what happened in South Africa. After 1994, listening to white South Africans speak you would think they had all been in the trenches as Umkhonto weSizwe cadres.
They sought to appropriate the struggle for their own selfish interests.
In Zimbabwe the stigma was meant to shut out war veterans from available economic spaces.
Today this stigma has given way to reverence for the war veteran status.
Partly it’s to do with rising national pride and identity in our liberation struggle.
True collaborators, including vabereki, and war veterans suffered terribly during the war and require continuous care and attention to help them play their part in society.
They are also repositories of a rich history that should be captured comprehensively in order to protect the legacy of the freedom struggle.
Comrade Chris Mutsvangwa, “Iwe neni tine basa.”