2 weeks Ago By Eddie Cross
Eddie CrossThe decision to hold our 45th Independence celebrations there was a courageous one. Some would say foolish, but it at least put this remote small town on the map and reassured the people of Gokwe that they are an integral part of Zimbabwe.In May 1963 I collected my dog from the kennels in Harare and then drove to Gokwe via Sanyati with my new wife of just one month.
The road was just a track through the bush, we had breakfast at a small hotel just outside Kadoma and then drove the 100 kilometers to the Sanyati River crossing the river on the riverbed while the river still flowed. Climbed out and then drove another 30 kilometers to the Chinyenyetu escarpment where we had lunch with the Cahills who ran a mine and a large trading store servicing the whole district as far as the Zambezi River 200 kilometers away.We then got back on the track and climbed the escarpment and across the Mapfungautsi plains to the tiny settlement of Gokwe on a ridge of forest covered land facing the plains that stretched 60 kilometers to the East.
Herds of wildlife grazed the plains which were on a black basalt volcanic deposit that stretched from the Falls to the edge of the Sanyati valley.We spent three years there working on the settlement of 8 million acres of state land that had been designated for settlement of people from the basin of the Kariba Dam which had been filling up since 1959. A tiny village called Nembudziya was included in that area.
It was in the Valley and some distance from Gokwe. We cut a road to the River from Gokwe which today is a tarred road to the Valley from KweKwe. We drilled boreholes and made roads through virgin bush with more Elephants than people.
Would I have chosen Nembudziya as the site for a major national event, never! It was just too remote, and on top of that, in the days before and on the day in question, the Lord blessed the event with a deluge. The freshly graded access roads were just mud and nearly impassable. The venue was inches in water.
The Troops designated to be on parade, I thought, did a superb job, one that any Seargent Major would be proud. A large crowd attended and there were the usual speeches and displays and food.The last time I was there was to attend a MDC rally before the 2008 elections, that we won.
We had quite a decent crowd and Jeanette was with me in our truck. She sat in the shade as we conducted the rally and an old man on a bicycle came up to her and asked if that was Mr Cross on the podium. Yes, she said, and he explained to her that he had been one of the workers employed by me all those years ago.
Today Gokwe is a small town and Nembudziya a significant rural settlement. In the days when I was there doing resettlement from the basin of Kariba, still the largest man-made dam in the world. We paid the local Chiefs for labour with salt while the first Soviet satellite clicked across the sky.
How has the world changed in these 62 years. We are still married, and we still live in and love Zimbabwe. But it’s a very different world, would I have done anything different, not really.
I saw wild Africa like very few will ever see it again, smelt the rain on the hot earth, seen the sunrise over the veld, white with frost. I have seen men transform a wilderness into a small modern African country. Lived amongst people who had seldom seen a white man and fought for human and political rights that lay behind that rain-soaked event in Nembudziya.
Men and women who gave their lives for freedom and dignity, I understand, like few men, what it cost to get here.The event had its critics, they called it a waste of money, they looked at the failures of governance, the widespread corruption, and the lavish lifestyles of the very rich and the desperate poverty that still prevails in much of the country. But that was the National Army of an African Nation on that field, smart, not a step out of sync and proud.
They were as smart and disciplined as any Army in the world. They met in a town that 60 years ago had been wilderness, it had schools and a clinic, but most of all they had dignity. Who can value that?I can remember a meeting of our National Executive in the MDC some years after we had started the struggle to regain our standing as a democratic State.
One of our older members who had been a field doctor in the liberation struggle stood up and said to us “Never underestimate the value of freedom. That’s what we fought for and achieved in 1980”. Freedom to be who we are, I look at the 29 000 students at our local University and see young people, confident and proud, no concept of what it is to be black and to be regarded as inferior.
I well remember a meeting in 1974 with Ndabaningi Sithole where a Pastor asked him “What does a young man need to become the pilot of an airplane?” His reply sticks with me even today, he replied “Mdala, he needs Independence”. Can any of us argue with that. It was a brilliant political reply but more than that, that is why we celebrate our Independence.
Even if it means marching on a field that is under water, even if it means we have to travel across roads that are barely passable, even if it means standing in the rain. Even if it cost us US$10 million..
