Curse of a Female Politician

From the Association of Zimbabwe Journalists:

FUNERALS by their very nature leave you depressed and demotivated. They invariably also leave you with so many questions.

Thenjiwe Lesabe’s funeral at Fort Rixon on Saturday, February 19, 2011, left me with more questions than answers. Here I was at a funeral of arguably one of the greatest women in the history of this country, a woman whose life had traversed different generations and a multiplicity of struggles and yet no one seemed to be able to draw an accurate picture of her life.

Lesabe, whose life’s history I have had to piece together from various conversations with different people, was an activist and a fighter during the liberation struggle. She was also at the center of the post-colonial Gukurahundi era, which ended with the ZAPU/ZANU Unity Agreement in 1987.And Lesabe is probably the only prominent woman who left Zanu PF to re-join the reformed ZAPU, now led by Dumiso Dabengwa.