The Promise Begins to Keep Itself: Zimbabwe Moves to Bring Its Fallen Home — and Honours the Debt of a Shared Struggle
Days after we pleaded, on Heroes Day, that Zimbabwe’s children in foreign graves be brought home, the state has moved. Zimbabwe stands ready to repatriate a second phase of South African fighters who died on its soil — and is drafting a landmark law to exhume and rebury its own fallen from unmarked graves at home and abroad. The blood debt is beginning to be paid — in both directions.
Sometimes the world answers a prayer so quickly it takes the breath away. Barely a week ago, in our Heroes Day reckoning, this journal made a plea: that Zimbabwe extend its doctrine of “no one left behind” to the dead, and bring home the children who fell in the liberation war and still lie in shallow, often unmarked graves beyond our borders. This week, the machinery of the state moved in exactly that direction — on two fronts at once.
President Mnangagwa announced that Zimbabwe is ready to facilitate Phase II of the exhumation and repatriation of South African liberation fighters who died in exile on Zimbabwean soil. And separately, the Minister of War Veterans Affairs confirmed the government is drafting a landmark law to exhume, repatriate and rebury Zimbabwe’s own fallen heroes — thousands still lying in unmarked mass graves at home and across the region. Read together, these are not two stories. They are one: a nation beginning, at last, to settle the sacred debt it owes its dead.
Two Movements, One Homecoming
Let us set out clearly what has been announced, because after so many years of waiting, the specifics matter to the families who have kept vigil.
A Debt Repaid in Both Directions
To understand why this matters so deeply, remember the shape of the sacrifice. During the liberation era, the Frontline States sheltered one another’s fighters. Zimbabweans crossed into Mozambique and Zambia; South Africa’s Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres, fleeing the apartheid regime, found refuge, training and — too often — their graves in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola and Tanzania. The soil of each nation holds the children of the others. That is the literal, physical meaning of the words Presidents Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa spoke to each other only yesterday: “we are one people.” It is written in whose bones lie in whose ground.
So this repatriation is not bureaucracy; it is the settling of a mutual, sacred obligation. When Zimbabwe returns South Africa’s fallen, it honours the shelter South Africa’s fighters were once given on Zimbabwean soil. When South Africa returns Chapungu and Zimbabwe’s ancestral remains, it honours the same bond from the other side. This is Pan-African solidarity in its most profound form — not a trade deal or a summit communiqué, but the tender, exacting work of making sure that every child who died for freedom is, at last, carried home to their own people.
A True Beginning — Now Let It Be Finished
This journal welcomes this news with a full heart, and will not diminish it. But our discipline is to honour a beginning without mistaking it for a completion — because the families who have waited decades deserve delivery, not just announcements.
So, honestly: readiness to facilitate Phase II is not yet Phase II accomplished, and a law being drafted is not yet a law passed, funded and executed. Zimbabwe’s own repatriation programme has, by the war veterans’ own account, suffered years of stagnation for want of funding — which is precisely why shrines abroad have fallen into the deplorable state the petitions describe. Exhumation is delicate, expensive, forensic work; identification may require DNA and the cooperation of ageing witnesses; and cross-border operations need diplomacy and money in equal measure. The gap between a worthy announcement and a child actually reburied in home soil is where this must not be allowed to stall.
A dedicated, ring-fenced fund so the work does not die for lack of money, as it has before. A clear timeline and public reporting, so families can see progress rather than promises. Priority for the desecrated sites — the graveyard-turned-farm, the exposed and stockpiled remains — where the dishonour is active and ongoing. And the dignity of ceremony and correct rites at every reburial, because the whole point is not merely to move bones, but to restore honour to those from whom it was withheld.
The Road Home Is Being Built
I wrote the Heroes Day piece as a daughter of Manyika, from a family that gave its children to the struggle and did not get all of them back — and I ended it imagining the day our people would finally come home, and the complete healing that would follow. I did not expect to be writing, a week later, that the state has begun to build the very road I was pleading for. I want to be honest about what that does to a heart like mine: it gives it hope, carefully, the way you cup a small flame against the wind.
Because I have learned to hold hope and vigilance in the same hand. This is a true and beautiful beginning, and I honour it. Phase II readied, a law being drafted, a president speaking the language of sacred duty and Pan-African solidarity — this is the doctrine of “no one left behind” reaching, at last, toward the dead. And the reciprocity moves me most of all: that as we prepare to carry South Africa’s fallen home from our soil, we prepare to gather our own from theirs and from Mozambique and Zambia. This is what “we are one people” means when it stops being a speech and becomes an exhumation permit, a coffin, a rite performed correctly, a mother finally able to visit a grave.
So my charge is simple, and I make it with gratitude rather than grievance: finish it. Fund the law. Pass it. Send the teams. Start with the desecrated shrines, where our heroes lie exposed and dishonoured, because that shame is active every day it continues. And bring them home with the rites they are owed, so that their spirits — which, our tradition teaches, do not rest while a blood debt stands unpaid — can at last be given the justice of a dignified return. Zimbabwe cannot soar while its children lie in foreign graves. Today, for the first time in a long time, I believe I can see the road that brings them home. Let us walk it all the way.
To our children still lying beyond the borders — in Mozambique, in Zambia, wherever the war laid you down — hold on a little longer. The nation you died to birth has not forgotten you. The law that will carry you home is being written. The permits, the teams, the rites are being readied. The promise of the song you sang from the camps — Tonosangana kuZimbabwe, we shall meet in Zimbabwe — is beginning, at last, to be kept.
And to the South African comrades who died on our soil, whom we now prepare to send home to their own people: we kept you safe in life as best we could, and we will honour you in death. Go home to your mothers’ ground. Tell your ancestors that Zimbabwe remembered. Tichasangana — muchazouya kumusha, mose zvenyu. We shall meet again — you will all come home.
To every family that has kept a vigil for a child who did not return from the war — of Zimbabwe and of South Africa alike — this news is for you. The waiting is not over. But it has, at last, begun to end.
To the fallen who are being readied for home, and to those whose road is still being built, we make this vow: you will not be left in the bush. You will be carried home, and honoured, and given the rites that were owed to you all along.
Vana vari musango — nzira yekuuya kumusha yava kuvakwa. Muchauya. Tichakugamuchirai nerukudzo, tigokuvigai zvakanaka panyika yenyu. Tovera Mudzimu Dzoka.
Our children in the bush — the road home is being built. You will come. We will receive you with honour, and bury you well in your own land. Return, O spirits of our ancestors.
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