Address by Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie on the occassion of the receiving ceremony of the Sacred Bird, Zimbabwe House, Harare
Your Excellency, President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa
Your Excellency, the Vice President
Honourable Kazembe Kazembe, Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage
Chairperson of Iziko Museums of South Africa Mr Martin Mdhluli
Officials from the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture
Honourable Ministers
Your Excellencies, Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Distinguished Traditional Leaders
Ladies and Gentlemen
Your Excellency, I bring you the warmest greetings of President Cyril Ramaphosa, our Government of National Unity, and people of the Republic of South Africa.
Of all the birds taken from Great Zimbabwe in the colonial era, this one was taken first. It was the first to leave. And it is the last to come home.
I have been thinking about that all morning – about what it means that this particular bird, the one that stayed away longest, chose to return the way it did. Because it did not come back alone. This morning at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport, I watched the Sacred Bird land on Zimbabwean soil for the first time in 137 years. And travelling with it, in the hold of the same aircraft, were the remains of eight Zimbabwean ancestors who have been held in a museum in Cape Town for more than a century, waiting to come home.
In Shona tradition, this bird is the sacred mediator – the one who moves between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors, carrying messages across a boundary that most of us cannot cross. Today, it did exactly that. It flew home carrying the dead. It brought your ancestors back to their soil. Whatever one believes about the spiritual, there is something in that convergence that goes beyond coincidence. The first bird taken was the last to return – and it returned in the company of the very ancestors it was carved to serve.
Your Excellency, let me reflect on how we arrived at this moment.
This bird was taken from Great Zimbabwe in 1889 by a hunter named Willi Posselt, who hacked it from its column and sold it to Cecil John Rhodes – a man who no Zimbabwean needs to be told about – for eighty pounds. Rhodes placed it in his study at Groote Schuur in Cape Town. When he died in 1902, his will vested the estate and all its contents in the South African state – protected by legislation that prohibited any alienation.
Even in death, the spirit of Cecil John Rhodes tried to keep what he had taken from the land it belonged to.
For 137 years, that law kept the Sacred Bird in Cape Town. Every time Zimbabwe asked, South Africa cited the 1910 Act.
Earlier this year, however, President Ramaphosa issued a clear instruction: find a way, within the law, and do it immediately. Eighteen days later, the agreement was signed between Iziko Museums of South Africa and the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. The speed of that response was itself a message – that when African governments decide cultural justice is urgent, then it indeed becomes urgent.
We also return the plinth – the column from which the Sacred Bird was separated by a chisel 137 years ago. They were parted without ceremony. They return together. They are whole again.
And we return, with the deepest respect, those eight Zimbabwean ancestors.
They were collected from across Zimbabwe – some removed from graves, one gathered after a violent death, two found together at the bottom of a mine shaft – and sent to Cape Town as colonial-era specimens. One of them is believed to have been a MaKalanga chief. His skull has been in a museum collection since 1910. He has been waiting for this return for 116 years.
Zimbabwe showed us how to do this. In September 2024, your government returned some of our most important South African liberation heroes who died in exile on this soil, and you returned them with honour and with love.
Among the nearly 50 heroes repatriated from Zimbabwe and Zambia were Duma Nokwe, who served as the secretary-general of the ANC from 1958 to 1969. There was Basil February, a great leader who sacrificed his life fighting with MK, and Ma Florence Mophosho, who helped organise the 1955 Congress of the People, and participated in the 1956 Women’s March against pass laws.
Today, South Africa returns your ancestors, with gratitude.
Your Excellency, this Sacred Bird was never lost. It was taken. Lost things can be found by anyone. Taken things belong to someone – and this bird has belonged to Zimbabwe every single day of its 137-year absence. Its names – whether Chapungu or Hungwe – survived. Its meaning survived. Its people survived. And now the bird comes back, not as a gift from South Africa, but as the correction of a wrong that should have been corrected long ago.
We are not doing Zimbabwe a favour today. We are doing what is right.
Your Excellency – on behalf of President Cyril Ramaphosa, and the Government and people of the Republic of South Africa, I have the singular honour of returning the Sacred Bird to Zimbabwe, on behalf of His Excellency President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, who gave the instruction to us that this should happen before your Independence Day celebrations this week.
May this bird speak again between the living and the ancestors.
May the eight who return find rest at last in their own soil.
And may this day contribute to the long journey of making Zimbabwe whole again, and making it the Great Zimbabwe we know it to be.
Tatenda. Siyabonga. Makorokoto. I thank you.
Summary
Your Excellency, I bring you the warmest greetings of President Cyril Ramaphosa, our Government of National Unity, and people of the Republic of South Africa.
Of all the birds taken from Great Zimbabwe in the colonial era, this one was taken first. It was the first to leave. And it is the last to come home.
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