Grace Mutandwa

Remembrance day: At The Going Down of the Sun

The Foreign Office has an enthusiastically amateur choir. As our poppy day service begins in Harare, I remember standing with fellow diplomat-cum-choristers on the steps of the FCO’s grand staircase in Whitehall and singing the ethereal anthem ‘For the Fallen’:

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning,
We will remember them.

The audience for our annual efforts in London is the families of diplomats killed while doing their jobs. Diplomats like Charles Morpeth, killed in a helicopter crash in Bosnia in 1995 while trying to establish peace there.

We have formed a similarly hit-and-miss choir in Harare and stand singing the same anthem. It is baking hot in Harare’s small garden of remembrance, though the last blossoms of the jacarandas give a little shade. The air is tense with the foreknowledge of the monsoon, which will hit us any day now, washing dust from the air and creating new life from Africa’s fertile red soil. Around the country, impala stand poised to drop young into the exploding grass. Storks are arriving from Morocco, ready to harvest juicy frogs.

But somehow, as we sing, Zimbabwe’s human inhabitants are not taking up nature’s offer of new fertility. Doug Taylor-Freeme, one of Zimbabwe’s last large-scale farmers stands looking at fields which the police have – insanely - ordered him to leave fallow. A local ZANU-PF man believes it will be easier to steal Doug’s farm if it is first rendered economically worthless. Likewise, ten thousand communal farmers stand wondering what maize they might have produced had they been able to buy seed.

We are pledging, by our song, to remember, and we have many dead to think of in Zimbabwe this year. We are thinking of Colonel John Kane, a hero in war and peace, who died here earlier this year. John was our defence attaché. His job was to work with and help local armed forces, though this was obviously difficult in Zimbabwe. But John never stopped planning for and longing for a better Government he could work with. He might have died in the first gulf war if a shell had flown the wrong way. But he died in Zimbabwe, waiting for a peace that he strived to achieve. Today I miss the splendour of his dress uniform and the acidic wit with which he cut to the heart of any problem.

I can’t help also thinking of the victims of Zimbabwe’s almost civil war this year. I can’t help thinking of the MDC activists burned to death in Zaka in June. Of Ignatius Mushangwe, an election official who we fear has been cruelly killed because he tried to tell the world that he was being ordered to pervert democracy. There is no remembrance - or justice - for these dead. Zimbabwe’s authorities even steal the corpses of these victims to cover up the horror of their crimes.    

In truth the Second World War means little to young, black Zimbabweans.  In African textbooks, Europe’s great struggle looks like the rutting of failing imperial powers. Even Zimbabwe’s liberation war of thirty years ago seems like old news. The struggle Zimbabweans face is to stay alive, to find food. This time of year should be a time of hope, of new planting, of renewal. But Zimbabweans have a dread sense that the promise of change offered by the elections in March is being choked to death by old men who seem to be living in the past, not just remembering it. 

Other Zimbabweans – then Rhodesians – sacrificed greatly, giving their lives for wars on other continents. An amazing number of veterans are with us today. The oldest fought in the Second World War, while others served in Korea, Germany, Egypt and other points round the world. They are tough and spirited and wiry, despite advancing years. It is impossible to look at them without admiring the lives they have led. Sadly for some, memory offers more pleasure than living in the present. I meet a dispossessed farmer, Buster, who tells me about his mother who served throughout the Second World War as a Wren, before returning to Zimbabwe. She is now 84 and has no pension from the UK or Zimbabwe. Buster is struggling to afford her medicines. 

So we stand in Harare, remembering the dead and hoping for a better future. Others are sitting elsewhere trying, with varying degrees of earnest, to draw up a just and workable arrangement for a new government, which we all hope for, even if that hope is getting weak. As our anthem ends, the thunder rumbles in overhead.

Posted at 11:45 10 November 2008 by Philip Barclay  |  Comments[2]