Former Zimbabwe Leader Denied Hero’s Burial
The
Advocate, November 19, 2003
Zimbabwe’s government has refused a hero’s burial to
the country’s first black president, Canaan Sodindo Banana, citing his
conviction for homosexual offenses, officials said Tuesday. President Robert
Mugabe’s elite policymaking body, the 30-member politburo, decided Monday
that Banana would not receive a state funeral at Hero’s Acre cemetery
outside the capital, Harare. The politburo “could not accord Banana hero
status as a matter of principle,” spokesman Nathan Shamuyarira told state
radio. Banana set a “bad example to youth” with his 1998 conviction for
homosexual offenses against junior statehouse staff, Shamuyarira said.
Banana will instead receive a state-assisted funeral
“befitting a former head of state,” with full military honors in his
birthplace, Esigodini, outside the western provincial capital of Bulawayo, he
said. The date has yet to be announced.
Banana, who served as the country’s ceremonial
president from March 1980 until the end of December 1987, died last week in
London after a long illness. He was 67. Mugabe paid tribute to him, calling
him a “rare gift to the nation.”
Exposure of Banana’s alleged crimes embarrassed the
regime in 1997, coming within months of Mugabe’s denunciation of homosexuals
as “lower than pigs or dogs” and his appeal to Zimbabweans to turn
homosexuals over to police. The country’s high court heard evidence that
Mugabe’s politburo was party to a 17-year cover-up of Banana’s activities.
Banana was eventually sentenced to 10 years imprisonment but served only six
months in a newly constructed “open prison,” which allowed him shopping
trips to Harare. He continued to deny that he was gay and denounced the
allegations as “a mortuary of lies.”
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