Declaration of National Monument Altena Farm Monument

The Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage has declared Altena Farm a National Monument under the National Museums and Monuments Act.

The monument is the standing farmhouse itself, a building of roughly 200 square metres whose east elevation still bears bullet marks. It stands in a newly resettled area of Muzarabani District, about 40km from Centenary Sub Office and a few metres off the Muzarabani road. Altena Farm is the site of the December 1972 attack widely treated as the opening of the intensive phase of Zimbabwe's liberation war.

The Schedule fixes the boundary by nine UTM points, starting at 0303151 east / 8172445 south at the edge of the farm access road and running mostly along State land boundaries: 128m east, 117m south-west, 253m south-east, 36m south, 25m east, 21m north, 39m south-east, 121m north-west and 116m north back to the start.

Declaration brings the farmhouse and the ground inside those boundaries under the Act's protection, so it cannot be demolished, altered or built over without authority from National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. That matters here because the site sits in a resettlement area, where new occupiers may not know the building is protected.

One slip in the published text: the title and opening words use "Altena Farm" and "Alterna Farm" for the same place, and the Schedule's first paragraph runs to a point "B" that the lettering describes as the start of the next leg.

The instrument states no commencement date and creates no fees or penalties of its own.