Tendai Ruben Mbofana
Let us suppose lithium were to be discovered beneath the grounds of the National Heroes Acre in Harare today.
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Would the government permit giant excavators to tear open those revered tombs and exhume the remains of the nation’s liberation icons to make way for a processing plant?
Would the families of national heroes be handed gazetted notices giving them thirty days to clear out, accompanied by small token allowances for reburial elsewhere?
The answer is obvious.
The sacrosanct nature of that shrine would be fiercely defended, and any proposal to disturb the quiet sleep of the ruling elite would be met with outrage.
Yet, across the length and breadth of our country, from the rolling hills of Mberengwa to the dusty valleys of Buhera and the historical mining grounds of Shurugwi, ordinary Zimbabwean families are forced to watch this exact nightmare unfold.
In recent years, the frantic global scramble for green-transition minerals—most notably lithium—has unleashed an unprecedented wave of displacement and desecration upon rural communities.
Under the banner of economic progress and multi-million-dollar foreign investments, mining conglomerates have swept onto ancestral lands.
Public notices now routinely appear in national newspapers, casually announcing the planned exhumation and relocation of dozens of graves at a time to expand open-cast pits and construct heavy processing facilities.
At Sandawana, over fifty ancestral graves and over a hundred households face displacement to make way for massive lithium developments.
In Buhera, family resting places were dug up to clear space for extraction plants, with traumatized villagers alleging that heavy earthmoving machinery was used to unearth the bones of their loved ones.
In African tradition, graves are not merely plots of dirt containing biological remains; they are sacred anchors linking the living to their ancestors, their history, and their right to the land.
Unearthing a grave without the utmost reverential care and complex traditional rites is widely believed to bring spiritual devastation upon a family.
Yet, in modern Zimbabwe, the sacred bond between a people and their dead is treated as a minor administrative inconvenience, easily cleared away by a corporate permit.
What makes these exhumations so bitterly painful is the glaring double standard.
The dignity of the dead has become strictly determined by social class and political leverage.
If you are poor, rural, and voiceless, your family cemetery—containing generations of grandparents, parents, and children—can be declared a mining concession overnight.
A foreign enterprise can secure the rights to your ancestral heritage, and you will be expected to stand aside quietly while backhoes tear through your legacy.
When corporate interests clash with the rights of vulnerable villagers, the state apparatus rarely steps in to protect the weak.
Instead, officialdom facilitates the process through obscure gazetted notices that rural communities barely have access to, leaving families to discover their ancestors’ imminent exhumation only when mine surveyors begin driving stakes into the soil.
Traditional leaders, who ought to stand as guardians of cultural heritage, are too often co-opted or pressured into granting permissions, leaving their people feeling utterly betrayed.
This ruthless prioritisation of corporate profit over human dignity raises a fundamental question about the direction of our nation.
Can a country truly claim to be progressing when its economic growth is built upon the literal desecration of its people’s heritage?
Wealth generated by tearing open the graves of the powerless is not development; it is exploitation.
Every Zimbabwean, regardless of their status or location, deserves the peace of knowing that their final resting place will be respected.
The bones of an impoverished peasant in Mberengwa or Buhera hold no less human dignity than the remains resting under monuments in the capital.
Until the rights, culture, and sacred memory of the poorest citizens are protected with the same ferocity as the shrine on Warren Park Hill, our mineral wealth will remain a curse to those who live atop it.
Profit achieved through desecrating ancestral memory remains a national tragedy.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com