The late former Bulawayo Provincial Affairs Minister, Eunice Sandi Moyo, who died at Mater Dei Hospital last Thursday, is set to be buried on Wednesday after President Emmerson Mnangagwa and ZANU PF denied her national heroine status.
Her daughter, Phoebe, confirmed the development to the Chronicle but said finer details of the burial arrangements were being finalised. She said:
My mother will be laid to rest at Lady Stanley Cemetery on Wednesday. I can only give you the finer details of where the service will be held tomorrow afternoon (today). She will, however, lie in state at the family house and will depart for her final resting place at Lady Stanley.
Sandi Moyo died at the age of 78 last Thursday at Mater Dei Hospital in Bulawayo, where she was undergoing treatment for hypertension.
Despite having played an important role in Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence, President Emmerson Mnangagwa accorded Sandi Moyo a mere “State-assisted funeral and burial” despite recognising her “outstanding services to our nation”. In his condolence message, Mnangagwa said:
A staunch, veteran nationalist who was intimately involved with the politics of the liberation of our country, the late Amai Moyo will be remembered for her sterling services to Metropolitan Bulawayo province and to our entire nation under the first republic…
The late Comrade Sandi worked exceptionally hard to rally communities for national community development, thus anticipating our policy on devolution which has become the centrepiece of the second republic and the vehicle for spatially balanced and community-specific development which leaves no one and no place behind.
Sandi Moyo joins a long list of former ZIPRA and ZAPU nationalists who have been denied hero status.
Interestingly, musician Soul Muzavazi Musaka, better known as Soul Jah Love, who was born many years after independence, was accorded liberation war hero status.
Born in 1946 in Plumtree, Sandi Moyo became a professional teacher before joining politics in an endeavour to help liberate the country from colonial rule.
When she was five, her family moved to South Africa where her father was working.
Her first school was at De Aar in the Cape Province before moving to Barkley Road High School. She then spent two years at Gore-Brown College training to be a teacher.
Sandi Moyo taught at several schools in Bulilima-Mangwe before she became actively involved in campaigns to improve the conditions of teachers under colonial rule.
In 1973 she moved to Bulawayo and joined the city council. Two years later she left for Zambia to join the liberation struggle.
Sandi Moyo’s political career progressed as she worked her way through the ranks to become a revolutionary and central committee member of ZAPU.
In 1977 she was sent to Germany for an industrial relations course, before becoming a member of the ZAPU delegation to the Lancaster House Conference, which culminated in Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.
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