MUTAPA DAY: A NATION RECLAIMS ITS SOUL, NOT A PRESIDENT CELEBRATING HIMSELF
President Mnangagwa has not invented a power. He has exercised a power that the Constitution and Act of Parliament have vested in him. And he has done so not for himself, but for the nation.
Kwedu News 
By Dr Masimba Mavaza
The declaration by His Excellency, President Dr Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, that the 15th of September shall henceforth be commemorated as Mutapa Day and observed as a Public Holiday in Zimbabwe, has been met with the usual, predictable chorus of cynicism from the usual, predictable corners. Let us put the law, the history and the facts on the table, so that ignorance does not masquerade as analysis.
The President Has Absolute Legal Right To Declare A Holiday
First, the law. The President does not need permission from a newspaper editor or a social media activist to honour his nation’s history.
Under the Public Holidays and Prohibition of Business Act [Chapter 10:21], Section 2, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe is empowered, by statutory instrument published in the Gazette, to declare any day to be a public holiday.
This is a discretionary, executive prerogative exercised by every Head of State the world over. It is not self-glorification. It is statecraft.
President Mnangagwa has not invented a power. He has exercised a power that the Constitution and Act of Parliament have vested in him. And he has done so not for himself, but for the nation.
To suggest that because 15th September coincides with his birthday it is self-glorification, is cheap, pedestrian politics. Does America not celebrate Presidents' Day?
Did we not celebrate Robert Gabriel Mugabe's birthday as a national youth day because of his contribution? The calendar of a great leader often converges with the destiny of his nation. That is providence, not narcissism.
What Was Mutapa? The Empire That Gave Zimbabwe Its Name and Its Pride
To understand Mutapa Day is to understand Zimbabwe itself.
Long before the Union Jack ever touched our soil, long before Rhodes ever dreamed of our minerals, there was a colossus in Southern Africa: The Kingdom of Mutapa, the Empire of Monomotapa.
Founded around c.1430 by Nyatsimba Mutota, the first Munhumutapa, who moved north from Great Zimbabwe to find new salt and new life. His son, Matope, expanded it into an empire that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Kalahari, from the Zambezi to the Limpopo.
At its zenith, Mutapa controlled the gold trade that made the world marvel - the gold of Ophir, the gold that built Sofala, that fed the Swahili coast, that reached Arabia and Persia.
The Portuguese, with all their cannons and crucifixes, called him the Emperor of Gold. They wrote in awe of his court at Zvongombe, of his armies, of his spiritual power embodied in the Mwari cult and the sacred fire.
Mutapa was not a tribe. It was a sophisticated, centralised African state with diplomacy, with mining engineers who dug 40 metres deep without machinery, with international trade treaties, with a standing army and a judicial system. It was the evidence that Zimbabwean statehood is not a 1980 invention. It is a thousand-year-old civilisation.
When President Mnangagwa declared Mutapa Day, he was taking our children out of the textbook that starts our history in 1890, and putting them back into a history that starts in 1430.
Why Mutapa Day, Why ED Mnangagwa, Why Now?
President Mnangagwa is a Karanga man. The Mutapa is a Karanga empire. Its heart was in Chivi, in Zvishavane, in the lands where his own umbilical cord is buried. To link Mutapa to the present is not to create a monarchy. It is to remind a Karanga child in Zvishavane that his ancestors built empires while Europe was still in the Dark Ages.
More importantly, President Mnangagwa's entire political philosophy of 'Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo - A Country Is Built By Its Owners," is pure Mutapa philosophy. Mutapa never relied on donors. Mutapa built with its own gold, its own salt, its own people.
This is the Second Republic’s ideological anchor. We are not a client state. We are heirs to an empire.
Those who whisper that this is an attempt to create a monarchy betray their own ignorance of both monarchy and Mutapa. Mutapa was never a dictatorship of one man. It was a confederation governed by councils, by spirit mediums, by chiefs, by the Dare.
The Munhumutapa was a custodian, not an owner, of the land - exactly as President Mnangagwa has always described himself: a servant, a listener, a custodian.
He is not crowning himself Emperor. He is crowning the Zimbabwean people as descendants of Emperors.
A Day For Zimbabwe, Not For One Man
On the 15th of September, Zimbabwe will not celebrate a birthday. Zimbabwe will celebrate itself. It will celebrate the gold that still lies in our earth as it did in Mutota's earth.
It will celebrate the sovereignty that Matope defended against the Portuguese, as President Mnangagwa defends today against sanctions and neo-colonialism.
Let the holiday be welcomed in its true spirit: flowery, flamboyant, and full of pride. Let the drums of Mutapa sound again in every school, in every village, in every district.
Mutapa is not dead. Mutapa has risen. And on the 15th of September, Zimbabwe rises with it.
Long live Zimbabwe. Long live Mutapa Day.
