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Revisiting road to Uhuru

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By Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu

ZIMBABWE turned 39 years on April 18 2019; an age that means the country has now a second generation in its post-independence national population. 

Political science and history students, concerned with the colonisation and subsequent liberation of Africa, have established that the African liberation struggle comprised three stages: 

– The first was when the African traditional leaders had the masses against the European settlers. 

In Zimbabwe, such leaders included the Ndebele King, Lobengula himself, his generals Mtshana Khumalo, Mgandane Dlodlo and also, three years later, Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi, Chief Mapondera and a numbers of others including Ndebele underground military commanders, many of whom where later tried and hanged by Cecil John Rhodes and his colleagues such as Dr Leandar Starr Jameson. 

– The second stage was when some patriots, including Sergeant Masotsha Ndlovu, T. Dumbutshena, Charles Mzingeli Nkomo, Chirimuwuta and a few others, openly demanded justice for the black people, particularly the workers. 

Those leaders had very little understanding of how the white oppressors’ political system worked. 

They only had a superficial understanding of the white settlers’ language. 

– The third and final group of anti-colonial African leaders were better educated and actually endevoured to create and launch political parties run on the same pattern as those of the colonial settlers. 

In Zimbabwe, that group’s pioneers were Aaron Jacha Rusike, his brother the Rev Matthew Rusike and their cousin, the Rev Thompson Samkange. The three formed and launched the African National Congress (ANC) in 1934 at Makwiro, in today’s Mashonaland West Province. 

There had been some local elitist political organisations headed by people of Cape Colony origin, some of whom had come to Southern Rhodesia as part of Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company’s (BSAC’s) Pioneer Column. 

They were led by such people as Martha Ngano, Maghato and Sobantu. 

The call was for inclusion into the racially privileged political system rather than for black majority rule. 

A radical departure was made by three black trade union leaders, Joshua Nkomo, Reuben Jamela and Jason ‘Ziyapapa’ Moyo in Bulawayo in 1955. 

They called for socio-economic equality among the country’s workers irrespective of their race, colour or creed.

The 1955 Bulawayo call by the three trade union leaders was also for majority rule; that is, one-person-one-vote and for equal-pay-for-equal-labour or for the same professional qualifications. 

Moyo and Jamela represented artisans while Nkomo stood for the Rhodesia Railways black workers. 

Their call for equal pay for people with the same professional qualifications was heeded by the Federal Government’s Ministry of Health authorities who virtually immediately increased the black nurses’ salaries albeit with a pro-white racial bias.

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had been inaugurated in September 1953 and brought together Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. 

The Southern Rhodesian administration of Prime Minister Garfield Todd also improved black teachers’ salaries. 

It became obvious that both Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia would become free and independent sooner rather than later because they were protectorates and were ruled by the colonial office in London. 

Southern Rhodesia would, meanwhile, remain in the hands of white settlers for the foreseeable future, if not for ever, because the British Government wanted to make Cecil John Rhodes’s dream come true; the dream being to turn the Southern Rhodesian land into an inheritance for white and not black people. 

Ian Douglas Smith’s November 11 1965 unilateral declaration of independence was meant to achieve precisely that criminal dream. 

Let us turn back to the three men whose 1955 Bulawayo decision also committed all of the country’s black workers to the nationalist cause. 

Surprisingly, in 1962, Reuben Jamela had changed his opinion and said that each individual black worker should be left to decide whether or not to support the liberation struggle instead of being guided by trade union leaders. 

Jason Moyo maintained that workers should be guided and urged to fight for their political freedom. 

He said Jamela’s suggestion could be taken advantage of by black workers from outside Southern Rhodesia, particularly from Nyasaland, who might feel that they had nothing to lose by not supporting the local liberation struggle. 

Moyo’s opinion was that of the majority of the country’s black people. 

However, Jamela stood his ground and, consequently, the black trade union umbrella organisation, the Southern Rhodesia Trade Union Congress (SRTUC), split. 

To be continued

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