The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

participation in annual heroic commemorations”. Heroes Acre may have been described
in official brochures as “an expression … of the indefatigable will of Zimbabweans” and
as “a symbol of the masses’ struggle for freedom” that “arouses national consciousness”.
But it was a means of imposing an “official version of nationhood and national order”
and “inscribing nationhood as ranked distinction” by a regime intent on constructing
“an imprint of itself” on the Zimbabwean landscape. 72
Initially ‘national heroes’ buried at Heroes Acre were drawn exclusively from the
leadership of the ruling party, ZANU (PF). This was extended in the late 1980s to ex‐
combatants of ZIPRA after the party Unity Accord, and in the mid‐1990s to a
commercial farmer, who had no liberation struggle or political pedigree, but who was
seen as symbolic of African achievement and distinction in the modernisation of
agriculture. This “extension of the ranked inscription” served merely to widen the
boundaries of the “inner circle with elite members”, but failed to resolve political
tensions over the recognition of war heroes and national sacrifice, and the resultant
access to war pensions and political patronage. Cast by North Koreans (in spite of the
world fame of Zimbabwean sculpture), Richard Werbner has remarked that Heroes Acre
contained the “identifying signature of postcolonial pastiche”. However, it also
represented more than a passing influence of Stalinist cults of memorials to political
leaders. 73
Heroes Acre was more than merely a controversial memorial pantheon of national
heroes. It placed the dead heroes into a memorial art environment of black granite
gravestones, memorial statues depicting heroic figures, Great Zimbabwe high walls,
chevrons and Zimbabwe Birds, murals depicting the course of the liberation struggle
and an eternal flame. This constituted a triumphalist visual history, through which the
formation of the Zimbabwean nation was defined and narrated, and where resistance
biographies of national heroes were a defining element. These “personal identities of the
dead” and “exemplary biographies” of the nation were set out and recited at some
72 Richard Werbner, ‘Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun’, pp 77‐78.
73 Richard Werbner, ‘Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun’, pp 79‐82.
76