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Ranga Mataire, Zimpapers Politics Hub

WHEN the war had gathered momentum around the 1970s, many schools in rural areas were closed as students and some teachers left the country to join compatriots for training in guerrilla warfare. Only the elderly and a handful younger people living in urban areas remained behind.

It was a painful experience to those left behind. A parent waited for a day, two days, a week; a month and then months turned into a year, and the wound of uncertainty began to fester, ‘‘eating’’ away at the hearts of loved ones left behind.

The story of heroes and heroines of the liberation war has become almost like a routine story; a kind of commonplace story retold each year as the country marks Heroes’ Day. However, very few stories have attempted to look into the shattered hearts of those whose sons and daughters never came back.

Very few of the stories have attempted to unravel the tormented souls of survivors — the recapping of horrors that constantly visit their psyche 44 years after the end of war.

How does one deal with grief?
The grief of losing a child, a sister, a brother, a cousin, an uncle, a friend — who left without a word and never came back. A young child who was full of hope and dreams of new Zimbabwe. What happened to them? What happened to their tormented souls?

These are the sort of questions that the late writer, journalist and war veteran, Alexander Gora Kanengoni grappled with in “Echoing Silences”, — a book published in 1997. Kanengoni’s book cannot be read as a fiction.

It is a riveting historical account, born out of personal experience. A war veteran of the liberation struggle who crossed into Mozambique in 1974, Kanengoni trained as a teacher at Kutama College, before deciding to cross to Mozambique.

He received military training and was deployed on the front. War was not some kind of game of thrones.
Kanengoni encountered ghastly experiences that inflicted a permanent scar on his memory of the war.
Without explicitly saying it, Kanengoni forces his readers to believe his account as he was not an observer, but a direct participant.

Like Sankofa — an African concept that compels us to retrieve things of value from our past, Kanengoni, through “Echoing Silences” journeys with us to the past — a past with inconvenient warts that continue to trouble us today.

Like Sankofa, Kanengoni compels us to “return to our past” because it is in that past that we can fetch valuable lessons needed to manoeuvre the vagaries of present day living. Visually and symbolically, Sankofa is expressed as a mythical bird that flies forward, while looking back with an egg (symbolising the future) in its mouth.

In other words, wherever we go, our past trudges along with us. How we utilise that past shapes our present and future.“Echoing Silences” resonates with Sankofa in that Kanengoni obliges us to retrieve or go back and get what defines who we are as a nation.

 

He teaches us that we need to go back to our roots to move forward. He insists through his main character, Munashe, that we must reach back and gather the past for us to achieve our full potential as we move forward.

Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone, or been stripped of can still be reclaimed, revived, preserved and perpetuated if only we acknowledge and seek national restitution and healing. Like the Sankofa represented by a bird looking over its shoulder while an egg is its mouth, Kanengoni tells us that it is never too late to look back and claim or learn what you have lost or forgotten.

In fact, it helps one move forward in life and plant seeds for the next generation. We are often too arrogant to think that we need to learn from our past- it is a cautionary reminder to learn and claim the lessons from our lives and defining moments in the nation’s historical epochs.

“Echoing Silences” is a historical account that traces the personal psychological torment of one combatant by the name Munashe Mungate. Munashe is harrowingly haunted by what he encounters in the war. His torment typifies the psychological torment that must have been felt by his fellow comrades.
In crafting the story of Mungate, Kanengoni employs the technique of flashbacks in which Mungate constantly slips into real and surreal worlds.

He encounters a ghost without being aware of it. The same person directs him to someone in Mutare who was to offer him a job at Border Timbers. What traumatises Mungate is that the same black Rhodesian soldier who spared his life and directed him to a less dangerous route after being the sole survivor of his group during the war, is the same person who was to direct him to his uncle’s homestead in Musana after the war.

Shockingly after the war, Mungate was to meet the same black Rhodesian who advised him to go see his relative in Mutare for a job vacancy. Much to his horror, when he gets to Mutare to meet the said relative, he is told that the man who had directed him had long died in the war.

“Yes, he was my cousin. Most of us advised him to quit the Rhodesian army, but he wouldn’t listen. Poor fellow. The war was almost over when he came home for the weekend, just a few days before the ceasefire. He had never done so before.

Little wonder that our elders say that death lures us on. In any case, it was stupid of him. The guerrillas got wind of his presence from the mujibhas and they shot him. He was left in the sun in the middle of the village for nearly a week.

You could smell his decomposing body from a kilometre away, recounts the man who claimed to be a cousin of the slain Rhodesian soldier. Mungate is beyond shocked. He had interacted with a ghost that knew about a job opportunity in Mutare.

Why was the ghost so sympathetic to him to a point of directing him to see someone in Mutare?
How can the dead be still in control of the present? Was the slain Rhodesian soldier a conscript?
Mungate is probably not the only ex-combatant who constantly grapples with the recurring horrendous episodes of the war.

Kanengoni’s recounting of Munashe’s mental torture is a cry for national restitution or spiritual cleansing for both the departed comrades and survivors. Like Sankofa, “Echoing Silences” uses history to demystify the narrow interpretations of the past.

The “silences are echoing” are calling for spiritual attention. This is precisely the reason why organisations like the Zimbabwe Fallen Heroes Trust have been frantically undertaking exhumation and re-burials of freedom fighters from mass graves.

In most cases, a relative possessed by the spirit of a fallen comrades directs people to the burial site.
It is the clamour for closure and rest that is still an outstanding task to be undertaken. As Zimbabwe commemorates Heroes’ Day today, let us reflect on the enduring homage that we must pay to ordinary villagers, without whom it would have been unthinkable to execute the war. Ode to Kanengoni for reminding us of the need to fetch that which is valued from our past.