Where the Road Cuts Through the Sacred

Memory, Belief, and the Accidents We Don’t See

Another accident. Another highway. Two lives claimed. This time, a bus and lorry near Gweru. Same silence. Same rush to assign cause without asking deeper questions. In fact, there have been several of these since the writing of When The Dust Settles.

Yet this time, a radio announcer broke the pattern, or as I see things, he's seen the pattern. After making the report "sketchy details, still waiting for more information", he dared to suggest something uncomfortable:

"We need to decide if we are a Christian nation or not. There are things that happened in our history that we need to discuss, but I don't think we are ready to talk about them yet." – Pastor Simba, StarFM Morning Traffic Report, 2025-07-25

And there it was. In one sentence, the crash site became a crossroads.

The Things Buried Beneath the Tarmac

Many of our highways were built not only on land, but over stories, shrines, sacred spaces. Ancestral resting places. Ceremonial grounds. Places where the living once met the dead in reverence.

To some, that may sound like superstition. But to others, it is memory. It is the geography of belonging. And when those places are paved over in the name of development, something happens to the spirit of a place—something we are rarely willing to speak about.

It’s easier to talk about potholes than to talk about portals.

It’s easier to speak about speeding than to ask whether we are racing through landscapes we have not truly inherited—only occupied.

The Uneasy Faith of a Nation in Denial

The reaction to the radio announcer’s comment was telling. Some listeners agreed, cautiously. Others ridiculed him outright, especially Christians. And not just any Christians, but those who seemed most confident in quoting isolated verses and repeating sermons.

But confidence is not the same as depth.

There is a kind of faith today that fears context. That fears history. That quotes scripture like spells, without examining where it came from or how it has been used. And when asked to explain, retreats into slogans:

• “Spiritual things cannot be understood by the intellect.”

• “Scripture interprets itself.”

• “Touch not the anointed.”

• or the derogatory "The carnal mind cannot fathom spiritual matters."

This is not faith. This is fragility dressed as certainty.

True spirituality does not run from complexity, it kneels before it, listens to it, wrestles with it as Jacob did at the river. What we are seeing is not a defense of Christianity, but a defense of Christian comfort zones, built on selective memory and borrowed authority.

What Happens When We Don’t Talk About It

When we refuse to reckon with our past, the past refuses to be buried. It erupts, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in silence, sometimes in places like that highway, where the ground itself may be uneasy.

Are we saying every crash is caused by spiritual imbalance?

No.

But we are saying that a society that builds without listening, to land, to history, to memory, may find that what is buried will speak through the cracks.

The Bible is full of such warnings: about stolen land, unatoned blood, and desecrated spaces. Even in Christian tradition, there are echoes of this:

“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Psalm 118:22)

What if we have rejected the stones of our own history?
What if what we call progress has paved over the very stories that once kept us grounded?

Faith with a Spine, Not a Shell

We need a kind of faith in Zimbabwe, and across Africa, that is not afraid to ask:

• Why do we know the name of Jesus but not the names of our great-grandmothers?

• Why are ancestral shrines called “demonic,” but European cathedrals called “sacred”?

• Why do we defend scripture but ignore the soil?

To be Christian in this land cannot mean amputating ourselves from the land’s history. It cannot mean denying spiritual memory in the name of doctrinal purity. That is not holiness. That is historical trauma, dressed up as piety. An hundred years from now, you and I will be the ancestors our grandchildren will be casting out on pulpits. Is this the foundation we want to set? If it doesn’t make sense when it’s us, why should it make sense when we agree to desiccate the memory of our forebearers?

We need Christianity with a memory.
Not just salvation, but reconciliation, with the land, with the ancestors, with the stories we’ve been told to fear.

And So, the Accidents Continue

Until we are ready to talk—not only about infrastructure, but inheritance…
Not only about speed, but silence…
Not only about law, but land…

Then these accidents will continue.

Maybe not always on roads. But in hearts. In institutions. In families.

Because what is buried without ritual always returns without warning.