The story of Cde Maria
I DO not claim to do full justice on the role of women in the liberation struggle, but to give them space, especially in their role on the battlefield and behind the battlelines where they were in action along with the male fighters.
I recall a battle in which one chimbwido, Cde Maria, survived
to tell the tale.
I operated in Manica Province, Makoni Detachment.
From nowhere a Lynx rolled overhead.
It made one spin fit for a display at an air show, then went into a steep dive like an eagle descending on its prey with its engines vibrating in a gut-wrenching whine as it bore down on its target spitting fire and brimstone.
The thunder of its canon was drowned by four Alouette III helicopters that simply dropped from the sky.
Their machine guns spat orange flames and tracer bullets fusing with liquid sulphur from the helicopters.
In a split second, Cde Maria froze, overwhelmed by the speed of events around her.
Several things happened simultaneously in that moment of paralysis.
Cde Torai Zvombo snatched his AK 47 amidst a flurry of expletives: “What the c****”
He looked up once at the hell descending on them then bent into a crouch and burst into full flight.
Before she could say a word, he had disappeared round a boulder.
Cde Chaminuka had already vanished, leaving an opened bag and few other items.
Cde Zex took a few steps before he went down under a hail of bullets and collapsed in a heap.
He caught several bullets in his right shoulder.
“Mukoma Zex!” she screamed.
The Lynx, in another of it aerobic maneoevoures, pulled out of its dive as it came to the tree-tops disgorging a huge black object out of its ugly shapeless frame.
With its engines screaming at full throttle, it pulled out of the dive into the sky setting itself up for another bombing run.
The ugly oval egg whistled its way to the ground.
It crashed through the branches and the foliage and hit the ground a few metres from where Cde Zex lay motionless.
“Mukoma Zex!” she screamed again still in a state of shock.
Her scream was cut short by a deafening explosion.
She pitched forward headlong crashing against a tree trunk.
Her mouth hit the base of a thick msasa tree with the full force of a sledgehammer.
She was too mesmerised and confused to feel any pain, but she tasted the salt in her mouth.
A huge cloud of dust enveloped her like a raging desert storm.
Rocks and metal fragments flew in all directions, singing sickly tunes as they screeched past her.
Some of them were uncomfortably close.
They clipped fairly big branches and a huge piece of metal drilled itself into the tree trunk just above her head.
Bullets hissed around her, cutting little furrows like a disc plough.
Two Aloutte helicopters with fat bellies and clothed in sickly greens and browns droned above her.
They swarmed around the post like a swarm of angry bees.
They were huge ugly birds with glass heads on a mission from outer space: to claim human soul for the devil.
Their long tails tapered off upwards like an anopheles mosquito at rest.
The metal beasts shimmered and seethed with fury like demons breaking from the shackles of hell.
Through the glass, she could see the occupants – one murungu with face painted in black, resembled a zombie with a sickly grin splashed all over his face was peering down into the catacomb like a devil coming to collect condemned souls.
She patiently waited for one bullet, just one bullet, to end her misery and agony.
The second bomb jolted her into action.
There was nothing rational about her decision.
It was action purely propelled by fear.
She had to fly.
Fly for dear life.
It was flight to survive and nothing else.
Naked to the waist, Maria rose from her lair and resumed her retreat.
She finally took shelter under a clump of bushes on the fringes of the villages.
She was now out of the danger zone.
She settled down to wait for sunset, some two long hours away, then she would move under the cover of darkness.
It was only then that she burst into a torrent of uncontrollable tears.
This is an abridged version from the Chimurenga experiences of Professor Charles Pfukwa in his book, A Moment in Time and Other Stories.