Frightening past confronts President

Source: Frightening past confronts President – herald

Raymond Jaravaza

PRESIDENT Mnangagwa was yesterday confronted by an unsettling fragment of his own past as he walked through the Zanu PF pavilion at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair in Bulawayo, where history did not sit quietly behind glass but reached out, raw and disturbing.

Among the exhibits was a hangman’s noose — a stark, heavy symbol of a moment when his own life once hung in the balance during the liberation struggle.

It was not merely an artefact on display; it was a reminder of a narrow survival and a fate that claimed many others.

The noose, hanging silently among the carefully arranged displays, stood as more than a relic of a bygone era.

It embodied the cruelty and calculated terror employed by the Rhodesian regime in the 1960s, when the gallows were a weapon to crush resistance and instil fear among those who dared imagine freedom.

At ZITF’s premier annual showcase, the past pressed firmly against the present.

As President Mnangagwa, accompanied by visiting Botswana President Advocate Duma Boko, was guided through the pavilion, their tour paused at the section housing pre-independence artefacts.

There, an impromptu demonstration unfolded, vividly illustrating how political prisoners were executed in that brutal era.

The demonstration was brief but heavy, casting a sombre hush over those watching, as the mechanics of death were explained in matter-of-fact tones that only heightened the horror.

For President Mnangagwa, this was not distant history.

In 1964, he had been arrested in connection with sabotage operations linked to the Crocodile Gang, including the bombing of a train near Fort Victoria, now Masvingo.

The price of that resistance was severe: a death sentence by hanging. The noose he stood before yesterday echoed a judgment once passed upon him by a system determined to extinguish rebellion.

He survived by the narrowest of margins.

At just 18 years old, President Mnangagwa was below the legal age for capital punishment, sparing him from execution.

Others did not share that reprieve.

His comrades, Victor Mlambo and James Dlamini, both older, were executed — their lives ended by the same apparatus now displayed under exhibition lights. Survival came at a cost of its own.

Instead of the gallows, President Mnangagwa spent a decade behind bars, beginning at Khami Prison on the outskirts of Bulawayo and moving through detention facilities in Bulawayo, Hwange and Victoria Falls.

In 1972, he was deported to Zambia, where he joined fellow liberation fighters in exile, carrying prison scars into the next phase of the struggle.

Amid this heavy communion with memory, the tour took on a deeply personal turn.

President Mnangagwa paused to meet two of his former wartime colleagues, Cdes Richard Maporisa, now 101, and Thomas Ziki (89), both invited to meet the visiting Heads of State.

Time had weathered their bodies but not their spirit, and the meeting bridged decades of separation forged by prison walls and battle lines.

For the two elderly liberation fighters, the day overwhelmed restraint. Rising from the immaculate sofas at the stand, they embraced the First Citizen with visible emotion, their arms closing around a shared past that words alone could never fully capture. The years seemed to fold in on themselves in that moment of reunion.

At 101 years old, Cde Maporisa remains sharp and steady, his memory intact. Asked how it felt to meet President Mnangagwa after so many years, his response carried the quiet weight of a life lived inside history.

“The long embrace that I shared with the President says it all. It was an honour to meet him after all these years. I would like to thank prison officials who kept the history of our incarceration together with the President at Khami Prison intact and all the people who tracked me down in Mhondoro Ngezi until they located me,” said Cde Maporisa.

Born on April 12, 1925, Cde Maporisa recalled that President Mnangagwa arrived at Khami Prison long after he himself had already been condemned and was facing execution. His recollections unfolded slowly, each detail precise.

“I see the President as a son whom I shared prison cells with during our incarceration at Khami Prison. I was the first prisoner to be condemned to death after my sentence and President Mnangagwa became the sixth prisoner to arrive at Khami facing the death penalty.

“My sentence was later commuted to life in prison while the President couldn’t be executed as he was still a minor. On April 17, 1980, I was pardoned and released and by then he (President Mnangagwa) had already served his time and re-joined the liberation struggle before the country attained independence,” he said.

For Cde Maporisa, pride in sacrifice is inseparable from concern for the future.

“As the first freedom fighters who took up arms against colonial rule, it pains me when some of the young generation fails to defend the gains of the liberation struggle,” he added.

Cde Ziki, a war veteran from Masvingo, also shared a history tightly woven with that of President Mnangagwa. He had worked alongside him on sensitive sabotage missions in the then city of Fort Victoria, a period defined by secrecy and constant danger.

“I worked with the President when we were a group of 11 freedom fighters, who trained in Egypt in 1963, before I went to China for further explosives training. During the liberation struggle, President Mnangagwa’s nom de guerre was Trabablas while mine was Mupeta Bere. After the Fort Victoria train sabotage mission, the President was arrested and sent to Khami in Bulawayo, while I was also arrested on allegations of being a terrorist in Gutu, Masvingo,” said Cde Ziki.

Even after decades apart, recognition was instant.

“President Mnangagwa immediately recognised me and his first words were ‘how are you my old friend’.”

As the tour drew to a close, President Mnangagwa and President Boko returned to the stand housing the hangman’s noose and other artefacts.

There, they signed the visitors’ book, leaving their names beside objects that testify to a harsh past and a hard-won freedom — a quiet gesture sealing a day where memory, survival and history stood face to face.