By HRH Princess Eugene Majuru
Sovereign Heritage Custodian, Cultural Historian & Advocate
The true measure of a nation’s military capability is never just its armaments, but its political will to protect human life. A powerful historical contradiction is unfolding in Southern Africa—one that exposes a painful double standard in how Black lives are defended across our borders versus within them.
Just a year ago, when devastating warfare escalated in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), hundreds of South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers found themselves trapped, surrounded, and gravely wounded by M23 rebel forces near Goma. With the local airspace shut down by active conflict, they were stranded in a war zone. In that hour of desperation, regional solidarity stepped in. Zimbabwe did not turn its back.
Using an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767, a massive emergency evacuation mission was launched. Zimbabwean aviation and strategic coordination successfully rescued nearly 200 wounded and trapped soldiers from South Africa, Malawi, and Tanzania, flying them out through Rwanda and returning them safely to their families and military hospitals. Zimbabwe answered the call of pan-African brotherhood, ensuring that South Africa’s sons and daughters returned home alive.
The Unforgivable Failure at Home
This brings us to a deeply disturbing and heartbreaking question: If regional state machinery and political will can seamlessly mobilize to rescue South African soldiers from active artillery fire in a foreign war, how can the South African government and its military stand by while fellow Africans are hunted, traumatized, looted, and murdered on South African soil?
Today, the streets of South African townships have become a different kind of war zone—not from foreign rebels, but from targeted xenophobic violence and vigilantism. Foreign nationals, many of them the very Zimbabweans whose home country provided the wings for SANDF’s rescue, are being violently targeted. Their businesses are looted, their families are traumatized, and lives are being cut short in broad daylight.
Yet, the response from the state mechanisms that we know are fully capable of rapid deployment remains slow, indifferent, or entirely absent. We are watching a humanitarian crisis unfold in real-time, while the security forces that should be maintaining law, order, and human decency fail to protect vulnerable civilians.
A Duty to Act and Remember
We cannot watch quietly. The blood spilled on these streets cries out to the entire continent. For Zimbabweans, this trauma mirrors the painful memories of the liberation struggle, when our people perished mumasango (in the forests) striving for an Africa free from oppression. We did not fight to see Africans turn on Africans.
If South African forces could be saved through regional unity and Zimbabwean intervention in the DRC, then South Africa owes a moral and sovereign duty to protect the citizens of those very sister nations within its borders.
We continue our urgent appeal to President Emmerson Mnangagwa to expedite an immediate emergency rescue and evacuation plan to bring our people home to safety. Simultaneously, we demand that SADC and South African leadership wake up to their continental responsibilities. True Ubuntu cannot be a one-way street; human rights and the sanctity of African lives must be protected everywhere, without exception.
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