Source: Matemadanda burial on Friday – herald

Zanu PF secretary for Legal Affairs Cde Patrick Chinamasa shares a conversation with Apostolic Faith Church elders at the funeral of national hero Ambassador Victor Matemadanda in Mt Pleasant Heights, Harare yesterday. – Picture: Edward Zvemisha

Joseph Madzimure

Zimpapers Politics Hub

NATIONAL hero Ambassador Victor Matemadanda, who died on Sunday, will be buried on Friday at the National Heroes Acre, Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage Minister Kazembe Kazembe has said.

Cde Matemadanda, who passed away at the age of 66 after a short illness, was Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to Mozambique and the Kingdom of Eswatini.

In an interview yesterday, Minister Kazembe said the body of the national hero will be flown to his rural home in Gokwe today, where family members and friends are expected to give him a befitting farewell.

From Gokwe, the body will proceed to his Sanyati farm the same day, where it will lie in state before returning to Harare on Thursday, ahead of burial on Friday.

Said Minister Kazembe: “Yes, our national hero Cde Matemadanda will be buried at the national shrine on Friday. We are expecting our mourners to come out in their numbers as usual.”

Yesterday, mourners from all walks of life gathered at his Mt Pleasant Heights home in Harare to console his family.

Zanu PF Treasurer-General Cde Patrick Chinamasa said the national hero’s death was a great loss to the nation, as it was untimely.

“I went to Maputo in March this year and I spoke to him on the phone, and he told me then that he was in the Beira area preparing for the rehabilitation of the shrines of the war veterans at our shrines in Mozambique. Little did I expect that in less than three months he would be taken away from us,” said Cde Chinamasa.

He narrated the journey he had travelled with Cde Matemadanda since the country’s independence, describing him as a dependable cadre.

“Cde Matemadanda is a person I worked with very closely during the 2017 November leadership crisis. He was very dependable, a man of his word. If we agreed to do something, it would be done to the letter and spirit. That was Cde Matemadanda,” said Cde Chinamasa.

In a statement yesterday, ZANU PF Secretary for Information and Publicity, Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa, paid an emotional tribute to his comrade-in-arms, crediting him with saving his life during the darkest days of the liberation struggle.

Ambassador Mutsvangwa described Cde Matemadanda as a “stalwart of the Chimurenga-Umvukela National Liberation War from the expatriate community of Zimbabwean exiles based in Zambia”.

Recounting the role of the exile community during the war, Ambassador Mutsvangwa said: “This patriotic exile community played a crucial role in supporting the fledgling ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrilla armies at the incipient stage of the armed struggle.”

“Training principally in Tanzania, and deploying from Zambia, the two intrepid guerrilla armies sought to implant a permanent foothold on the soil of Zimbabwe as they militarily confronted the army of Rhodesia, the settler racist colonial outpost of the increasingly expanding British Empire.”

Explaining Ambassador Matemadanda’s role in saving his life, he said:

“Word of the hunger plight stalking Tembwe reached the exile community in Zambia. Comrade Matemadanda, together with the late Comrade Kombayi, the post-independence Mayor of Gweru, organised a hunger rescue convoy of food trucks from Zambia to Tembwe.”

Former Cabinet minister Walter Mzembi, who was also among the mourners described the war veteran and diplomat as a “distinguished patriot.”

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