GUNS
&ROSES
MAY 2021
2.1 The Guns
One cold afternoon in May, right in the centre of Harare, a series of banging gun fire tore
into the silent, desolate metropolis.
Pigeons nearby flurried into the grey sky.
The dull sound of the canon rang 21 times, spitting plumes of thick white smoke into the
air.
This was to mark the unveiling of a statue monument built in Harare city centre to
honour a spirit medium and a hero of Zimbabwe’s struggle for emancipation, Mbuya
Nehanda.
Mbuya Nehanda, together with Kaguvi are said to be spirits that led the first battle of the
Zimbabweans against the white settler regime in the late 1890s and they are said to have
predicted the independence of the country from Britain.
Zimbabwe’s independence came more than 80 years later after the two had been killed
by the colonial regime.
More than 120 years later, the guns, which Nehanda predicted would lead the country’s
road to independence, were fired to honour her.
Ironically, Mbuya Nehanda’s statue was placed a couple of metres from two different
sites where soldiers shot Wisdom Mapere and Andy Manyeruke on August 1, 2018.
One of the darkest moments of Zimbabwe’s post-independence history, August 1, 2018
marked a bloody beginning of the tenure of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose
government commandeered soldiers to shoot unarmed protesters in the streets of
Harare and six were killed.
On that day, the gun led politics. But that was not the first, or the last time.
Zimbabwe’s politics has always been led by the gun.
Even during the 1980 elections, there were accusations of voter intimidation by ZANLA
guerrilla cadres, sections of which were accused of not having assembled in the
designated guerrilla assembly points as required under the Lancaster House Agreement.
This was the beginning, and 40 years down the line, the military- or rather the gun – has
always led the politics of the country.
So, it was ironic that as the statue of Mbuya Nehanda was being unveiled at a cost of
millions of dollars, and the guns fired in her honour, the victims of Zimbabwe’s politics of
the gun were yet to get any recourse, if at all any apology.
To add a little more perspective to how the politics of the gun have contributed to
Zimbabwe’s tattered human rights record, here is a brief chronology of key events.
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