It's all coming back to me now

Usually when I endeavour to recall my early life in its entirety, I find that it is not possible. It's like ascending a hill to survey the prospect before me on a day of heavy cloud and shadow and seeing at a distance, now here, now there, some feature in the landscape, a hill or some wood or tower or spire, touched and made conspicous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity. The scenes, people and events I am able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order, there is no order, no sequence or regular progression - nothing , in fact but isolated spots or patches, brightly illuminated and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape. It is easy to fall into the delusion that few things thus distinctly remembered and visualised are precisely those which made a mark in my life, and on that account were saved by memory while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed how our memory serves and fools us, for at some period of a person's life, when in a rare state of mind, some scenes, people and events maybe revealed to us by a miracle that nothing is blotted out.

I had such an experience recently when I was thinking deeply about the pathetic economic and political situation that Zimbabwe is in at present. In the sheer frustration caused by the situation in this country, recollections of the politics in this nation over the years which I thought had been blotted out of memory started to come back to me bit by bit. It was not like the mental condition known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more frequently the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely emotional condition that vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was different. To return to the simile and metaphor I used at the beginning, it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible. Over it all my eyes could range at will, choosing this or that event to dwell upon, examine it in all its details, then return to another event and again repeat the process and resume my analysis of the recollections. How easy it would be, I thought, if this vision would continue but that was not to be expected and so I set myself to try and save it from the oblivion which would eventually cover it again. I got on to my laptop and immediately began to put it all down using MS Word and then saved it on my hard disk.

Let me share with you a few of those recollections.
There I was, a young girl of eight years of age and beginning to make a bit of sense of the world around me when my grandfather came from the village to my parents' house in town. Grandpa was normally a jolly old man whose infectious laugh could be heard miles away from our house and it would come out from deep within him at regular intervals which were closely spaced but on this particular day he looked nervous and never once did I hear that infectious laugh come out from him. He looked serious and intense as he discussed with my parents, some events that were going on in our village and curious me decided to eavesdrop on the conversation. In the village there was a guerilla war in which Mugabe's soldiers (they prefered to be called comrades because of their communist beliefs) were fighting the Rhodesian soldiers. Grandpa had been ordered by the comrades to go to town to buy some underwear and socks for all the comrades who were operating in the village and they had threatened to burn down our village mansion if he doesn't bring those items in three days time. Dad assured him not to worry because he was going to go and withdraw all his savings from his bank account and buy those items for grandpa to go and give to the comrades and for sure the next day he did just that.
That was how my dad contributed to the war for freedom, albeit by force but all the same quite a big contribution considering that he sacrificed all his savings. Everyone who was in the villages or had parents or relatives in the villages contributed to the struggle for freedom in their on unique, special ways be it willingly or unwillingly. Some sacrificed their livestock to feed the comrades, some had to share their farm produce with the comrades and the women in the villages sacrificed their time cooking for the comrades. Yet now Mugabe and his close circle of former ministers are clinging on to power and abusing office with corruption and justifying their wrong actions by telling themselves that they fought for freedom and so should be immune to the law of the land. What bullshit!!! Without cooperation from those villagers whom they terrorised after the March 2008 elections ZANLA forces were never going to win that guerilla war yet now they act as if they did it on their own . And no one ever said that if you liberate a country you are then free to loot the country of its resources and can be as corrupt as you want without being brought to a court of justice. No one ever said that if you liberate a country you then have a right to rule it until kingdom come.

Going down memory lane, I remembered another year another time, this time I was twelve years of age and very much aware of what was going on around me and News was my favourite program on TV so I was always up to date and knew that the guerilla war for freedom was over and done with. The Lancaster House agreement had been signed and Lord Soames of Britain was in the country to see to the smooth running of the first elections in Zimbabwe, back then in 1980. There were quite a number of parties contesting in those first elections that year and I have forgotten the names of some of the parties but I do remember the names of some of the leaders of the different parties, namely, Mugabe, Nkomo, Sithole, Muzorewa and Chikerema. I remember very vividly the helicopters and planes that where being used to campaign that year and how they would fly low while the campaigners throw campaign pamphlets and T-shirts. The child that was me then used to enjoy running around with other kids in the neighbourhood picking the campaign materials and taking them home to our parents. The campaigning and the elections that year were quite peaceful, that is if we don't count the fact that everytime there was a Zanu Pf rally Zanu Pf youths would move from door to door forcing people to attend the rallies and at these rallies all the teenagers would be forced to do a run march singing, "Simudza gumbo, harisi rako, nderemusangano," words which mean lift up your legs ,because those legs are not yours, they belong to the party.
How can your legs be said to belong not to you but to a party? If that is not the same as suppressing people's freedom then I don't know what is. How on earth no one ever questioned the force that Zanu Pf was using to make people go to its rallies and how no one ever analysed the meaning of that song and how then the majority of the population in Zimbabwe went ahead and voted for such a party that was showing at an early stage how force will always be part of its strategy, puzzles me? So now that same party is doing what it pleases with Zimbabwean peoples' lives and refusing to accept the real results of the March 2008 elections and you cry foul but you forget that back then in 1980 the tell-tale signs were there but you shrugged them off. All those who were adults back then in 1980 I blame you for allowing the snake to enter into the house and treating it like a favourite pet over the years.