Dr Tafataona Mahoso
FOLLOWING 15 years of being held in the diaspora, the prestigious and pioneering Zimbabwe Achievers Awards (ZAA) was brought home and held in the capital on August 30, 2025.
The ZAA’s fitting theme of homecoming that night fired my imagination and inspired me to write this piece instead of delivering an acceptance speech.
So, upon receiving my ZAA shield (plaque) I only said: “Zvavanhu, African Pride”.
I felt that it had been a long evening; and many award winners coming ahead of me had given many really profound speeches already.
Perhaps my true feelings of humility and gratitude could best be conveyed if I wrote something other than an acceptance speech; if I wrote something intended maybe more for future use than for just that gala.
Zimbabwe Diaspora as a web of growth rings
In African metaphysics, following an elliptical orbit-like movement symbolises a journey, an adventure with an in-built homecoming plan.
And growth is marked radially like rings of clay being pushed outward to create a Great Zimbabwe-like pot.
The Dariro assumes that elliptical shape, so that when there are more people than one ring can take, we create concentric rings of growth surrounding the pith like that of a growing boabab or mahogany tree: an outward adventure with a homecoming plan built in.
That is how I see the potential of the Zimbabwe Diaspora.
I was especially honoured to be included among the first ZAA recipients to get such prestigious recognition on home turf.
Indeed, the theme of homecoming resonated with much of the writing for which I humbly accepted the title of Global Fellow for Academic Excellence.
Homecoming was a theme dear to my heart.
For example, when my Sunday Mail column called “African Focus” ended its ten-year run (1994 to 2014), I deliberately named my next column for “The Patriot” newspaper “Homecoming”.
And, I can also add, for those who read poetry, that my second book of poems called “Rupise: Poems of Love Separation and Reunion” is both about the land and about overcoming permanent diasporisation — overcoming the negative effects of exile and self-exile — through homecoming.
For a once colonised people, homecoming is defined as coming into one’s full self and reclaiming one’s own nhaka, which means being proud of one’s African identity, redeeming one’s own inheritance and celebrating one’s own heritage.
That homecoming in the poems is presented as ultimately due to the speaker’s love for his girlfriend left at home, love for his mother, and love for the land and soils of Zimbabwe, with poems such as “Why I took you to Great Zimbabwe”, “Manna from the Great Savanna”, “Boabab Bonus” and “Zumbani Zest” indeed celebrating some of the land-based treasures beckoning the exile to come back home.
Education vs Schooling
To underline the full significance of this theme of homecoming, it is important to digress and mention its opposite as experienced by us Africans in our history.
As we once emphasised with the late Dr Vimbai Chivaura and the late Professor Sheunesu Mupepereki on the TV programme “Zvavanhu”, we attended church mission schools and went abroad to Western universities to be schooled and not really to be educated.
We did not go to school to learn to be human beings, vanhu, but to be schooled.
I have experienced my life-long learning in two distinct phases: the first being my Dariro-based African education from infancy to about 15 years or so; the second being my schooling from what were then called Sub-Standard A, Sub-Standard B and Standard One in Rhodesia, all the way up to the PhD level at Temple University, in Philadelphia, USA.
Both African and European scholars of African indigenous education perhaps exaggerate the individual roles of the African mother, father, grandmother and grandfather in educating children.
In fact, the bulk of the African foundational education I experienced was the responsibility of the children themselves educating one another, under the supervision of older children as critical mentors reporting to parents, elders and other adult relatives, of course.
Mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, if they were around, relied on the daily reports of mentors reporting back the activities of the children at the end of each major event or task.
The purpose of this Dariro-based, mentor-empowered education system was to teach the philosophy and practices of Unhu/Ubuntu in which homecoming was a critical component.
Moving from the community-based self-education of the village to colonial/missionary institutions of schooling was a dramatic, often traumatic, experience for the native child of our time.
The symbols and structures of indigenous education were the family as Dariro; the children’s Pungwe (Jenaguru) as Dariro; the mother’s hearth in the rondavel with its mapfiwa; various versions and genres of Dariro as community arenas and conclaves for self-organising participants; discourse arenas signifying the growth rings of constant creation/creativity depicting life and movement as radial rather than linear experiences.
In contrast, colonial/missionary schooling was deliberately designed not only to reverse the entrenched beliefs and practices of African foundational education but also to introduce the Dariro-educated native child to the imposed and now dominant and dominating symbols of linear and Euro-centric schooling.
These symbols of removal and escape from the relational included the prosenium stage; the straight and narrow path to the narrow gate; the chapel and church pew; the selective queue of competitors who stare at the backs of those ahead; the dividing window; the grill; the marching procession; the sermon on the mountain replacing the call-and-response Dariro of kuparura, kushaura nekutsinhira — all to be replaced by the sweeping metanarrative of “civilisation”.
For the African child embarking upon a colonial education career, therefore:
Schooling itself was presented as a series of graded steps in linear escape from Ubuntu;
Salvation through religious conversion was presented as a linear escape from one’s sinful past characterized as primarily African;
The route out of poverty (itself precipitated by conolnial dispossession and oppression) was presented and characterised as a straight escape through upward mobility to be achieved by pursuing linear schooling made synonymous with progress; and, later on,
Global economic “development” and “progress” were also presented as linear processes; so that, in 1960, MIT Professor Walt Rostow described the “development” of nations and peoples as a linear global march behind which all nations had to queue and admire the backs and tracks of those described as already “fully developed”.
Rostow’s book was called “The Stages of Economic Development: An Anticommunist Manifesto.”
African homecoming, therefore, needs a clear philosophy to guide its practices away from the now entrenched Eurocentric view of development as linear escape.
The power of homecoming and its criminalisation
The historical meanings of homecoming are tied to those of diaspora.
For centuries, the concept of diaspora in English exclusively referred only to the so-called “Lost Tribes of Israel” and to Hebrew people forcibly removed from Palestine to long years of captivity in Babylon.
It took time before Africans pointed out that their people, now all over North and South America plus Europe and the Caribbean, also constituted an African Diaspora with a history perhaps far more horrendous than that of Hebrews in Babylon.
Since then, “diaspora” is used in a much wider sense which Zimbabweans have also adopted.
Likewise, “homecoming” in its Pan-African sense has also assumed a meaning far wider and deeper than just the physical repatriation of only those once forcibly removed from their homeland.
Therefore, from the First Chimurenga to this day, homecoming in its wider Pan-African sense has come to refer to a process indispensable for the full realisation of our emancipation: geographical, strategic (in the military sense), intellectual, psychological and spiritual.
Just like the African foundational education which preceded my colonial schooling, the First Chimurenga contained the software for true African emancipation.
However, within the evolving global context, both the First Chimurenga and my African foundational education needed certain levels of further hardware development which colonisation foreclosed by cutting off the radial growth of autonomous African relations with the rest of the world.
These autonomous relations with the world were always implied in the Dariro and its view of development as a web-like or growth-ring-like process reaching out to the rest of humanity and enabling Africans freely to go out from the pith to the outer rings and still come back home.
Indeed, the founders of the African Chimurenga philosophy understood that their first revolution against settlerism and imperialism was defeated because the settlers received military and moral reinforcements from Britain, South Africa, North America and elsewhere; reinforcements which the now colonised natives would not be allowed to match due to their enclosure by the former.
From then on, it became clearer and clearer that the future of Chimurenga depended now on being able to go out, being able to reach out again to the rest the world, and being able to come back home.
To the astonishment and disappointment of many, my PhD dissertation research on Zimbabwe (1986) demonstrated that the white-liberal sponsorship of the advanced schooling of most leaders of the African nationalist movement had the effect of neutralising or controlling, rather than radicalising the homecoming of the same.
This neutralisation, moderation or control of the African nationalist leaders was in the long- term interest of the imperial powers who often generously contributed to the funding of the same advanced schooling against the shrill protests of the local white settlers.
But the political education obtained from the disastrous defeat of the First Chimurenga was not entirely lost on African youths of the time: that the movement of Africans out of the colony and their homecoming held the key to a successful Second Chimurenga, if only such movement could be carried out independent of white rulers, whether they styled themselves as conservative or liberal.
This is the history lesson which the resurgent Diaspora movement of Zimbabwe should perhaps consider: The shooting war ended with independence in 1980; and we have enjoyed 45 years of relative peace.
But we remain under a regime of sanctions even broader and far more illegal than Smith’s UDI. And sanctions mean an ongoing economic, cultural and ideological war.
What is to be the relationship between the Diaspora’s homecoming, our homecoming now and these sanctions?
It did not take long before successive Rhodesian regimes realised that African homecoming in all its facets posed an existential threat to white settler rule.
Especially from the time of the Rhodesia Front’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 onwards, the settler regime came to rely first on declaring states of emergency and, later, after the start of guerrilla war, on actual martial law throughout the country, with hundreds of African rural communities rounded up and enclosed in concentration camps called “Keeps”.
These “Keeps” were meant to quarantine villagers from any contacts with their homecoming sons and daughters now trained as guerrillas.
From the mid-1960s, therefore, successive white regimes began to fear the return of every African from abroad, whether or not that African left the country legally or illegally.
The most feared African returnee was the young person who had undergone military training in a friendly foreign country and had come back armed and ready to join the growing ranks of trained guerrillas.
Such a young African, after surviving hunger and thirst, after fighting wild beasts along the bush route home, after surviving the razor wire and land mines lining the border, could still be shot on sight before he or she could reunite with parents and relatives.
That was what martial law meant.
That was how critical, how expensive homecoming was and still is.
The only difference is that now the razor wire and the landmines are ideological and economic.
Homecoming and the role of the pungwe as Dariro in uniting people
The Rhodesian colonial regime banned the pre-war Pungwe in 1964.
Derived from the children’s Pungwe (Jenaguru), the war-time Pungwe of the 1970’s became a radicalised arena where homecoming young guerrillas and home-based youths taught one another the new politics and philosophy of African liberation forbidden in colonial government schools and church mission schools.
There were countless perceived and real divisions among Africans which the white settlers exploited in their determination to destroy African unity and cohesion.
African unity and cohesion were symbolised by the Pungwe as a wartime structure for conscientisation derived from Jenaguru as Dariro.
Among the perceived and actual divisions to be exploited were the following:
* Differences between followers of one political party or faction and those of others, especially after splits within nationalist ranks;
*Differences between Africans schooled in the West and those schooled at home;
*Differences between Africans converted to Christianity and those adhering to indigenous beliefs;
*Differences between those able to read and write and those who were unable to read or write in any language at all;
*So-called ethnic and tribal differences which also often translated into language differences; and, most important in the war, differences between youths who left the country and returned armed and trained to fight the regime, on one hand, and the majority of unemployed and impoverished youths who remained behind but were resisting colonial rule in their own ways.
The last division became most dangerous to the liberation movement when the colonial regime began to recruit, to brainwash, to bribe and to arm large numbers of internally based youths with the help of internally based African political factions.
Now, as David Lan showed through research for his book “Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe”, the armed guerrillas created conditions for unity, not only by refraining from a pre-mature shooting war and engaging in a prolonged campaign of conscientisation (through pungwes), but also by developing a sophisticated doctrine of homecoming.
*They introduced themselves to elders in the community who, in turn, introduced them to headmen and chiefs who took them to spirit mediums who represented the trans-territorial ancestors who, in terms of Arican metaphysics, are the true owners of the land for whom chiefs were mere administrators.
*They presented themselves as vana vevhu (children of the soil) coming from different parts of Zimbabwe but united in their purpose and desire to help free all of the land through waging war if the ancestors, through their spirit mediums, would grant them permission to do so.
*They asked to be instructed in African living law as it applied to ownership and governance of the land and to rules for waging war and spilling blood for justified reasons.
In the light of African relational philosophy and living law, it should be easy to understand the alliance between ancestors who have become ruling trans-territorial spirits on one hand and African guerrillas crisscrossing the land of Zimbabwe in search of the best ways to liberate the whole country and to unify the people.
As the late Aeneas Chigwedere wrote in his book “From Mutapa to Rhodes”: “The ancestors (of Zimbabwe) do not discriminate against each other as we living beings do. They are proud of their progeny and want all their descendants to work together. Furthermore, when they themselves ‘come back’ to take up mediums, they already know their relationships as ancestors (of one people) and do not hide these from us.”
Commenting on the problem of regional chauvinism and so-called tribal divisions, Chigwedere observed that trans-territorial emergencies and disasters have historically forced the chauvinistic and ‘tribalistic’ leaders to abandon their parochial attitude and seek trans-territorial solutions, that is to appeal for solutions to the true owners of all the combined territories facing emergency or disaster.
Being colonised and dispossessed was one such trans-territorial disaster.
This was the reason the First Chimurenga had to be named and waged with the permission of and in the name of Murenga.
All the numerous local and class interests which authors such as Norma Kriger have listed as causes of division and conflict within the liberation movement during the Second Chimurenga may be true.
But to the true owners of the land and in terms of African relational philosophy, it was trite that this land had been carved into Tribal Trust Lands, European Urban Areas, European Farming Areas and African Purchase Areas, giving rise to a myriad petty and divisive interests.
After all, the Vagrancy Act of 1899 presumed that every African in a white settled area was a vagrant unless he or she could prove otherwise by providing a pass written and signed by a white boss.
These and more obstacles were indeed recognised and accepted as hurdles in the path of the liberation movement.
They could not be worse than the ever-present danger of being shot on sight just for trying to come back home from abroad.
Indeed, we have just passed through a phase in our history, during which certain media and our detractors worked hard to misrepresent the Zimbabwe Diaspora as the exclusive rear-base of one political party or faction here at home.
The work of the organisers of the Zimbabwe Achievers Awards at home and abroad — culminating in this profound homecoming — will go a long way to defeat such divisive misrepresentations.
By developing a multisectoral approach to these awards, by bringing together Zimbabwean achievers based at home and abroad, the founders and organisers of the ZAA have followed the path of Murenga, Chaminuka, Nehanda and Kaguvi, who enforced nation-wide unity and cohesion in the two liberation wars against fragmentation orchestrated by successive imperial and colonial regimes and their co-opted African stooges.
Congratulations Zimbabwe!
