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When revolution stuck roots

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By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

ZAMBIA’s sovereignty attainment on October 24 1964 was the beginning of a period of serious preparation for a concerted armed struggle by the two Zimbabwean liberation movements, ZAPU led by Joshua Nkomo and ZANU headed by the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole.
An immediate major problem for both organisations at that time was sufficient personnel for each of them to form a guerilla army large enough to challenge the Rhodesian settler-forces south of the Zambezi River.
There was a fairly large number of Zimbabweans in Zambia, but most of them had gone there as workers to that country’s mines on the Copperbelt.
Some of them would not want to leave their relatively comfortable and secure socio-economic lives to join liberation organisations with their social and economic risks and well-known physical dangers to life and limb.
Those back home who wished to join the struggle found it very difficult to get into Botswana from where they could be taken into Zambia for military training abroad.
Only those living in regions close to Botswana could walk across the border, but that became much easier after Bechuanaland Protectorate (BP) had become Botswana in 1966. Going to work in South Africa was a counter-attraction to joining the liberation struggle, especially at that time when prospects for liberating Rhodesia were bleak indeed.
However, a number of volunteers from Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, Masvingo and the Midlands provinces did cross into the BP, and were taken by road to Zambia.
Inside Zambia, each of the two liberation organisations had to use force in some cases to recruit a reasonably large number or in order to reach a target figure of freedom fighters.
Fear among some Zimbabweans made the liberation movements, at times, employ either force or some form of subterfuge to get recruits.
A second difficulty was how to get trained personnel across the Zambezi into Rhodesia.
That was a really worrisome hurdle, but sheer determination by the two organisations made it possible for them to deploy trained personnel who carried out military operations inside Rhodesia later.
The ZANU Sinoia (Chinhoyi) contingent that engaged Smith’s forces in 1966 had crossed by sheer determination, and so were ZAPU’s group led by David Mon’wa Moyo (Sharpshoot) and comprising Embassy Tshinga Dube, Roger Matshimini Ncube, Ndondofly and one or two others.
The South African freedom fighters’ problem was worse in that they had, in addition to the Zambezi River, the Rhodesian territory to traverse.
It was in consideration of such hurdles, among others, that the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and ZAPU formed an alliance.
That resulted in the August 1967 Wankie (Hwange) battles between a combined ANC-ZAPU contingent and a Rhodesian squad in which casualties were quite significant on both sides. The ZAPU unit was commanded by Charles Tshakalisa Ngwenya, whose nom-de-guerre was John Dube (JD).
The ANC was under Chris Hani’s command.
The ZANU guerillas entered the country through Mozambique, initially near Feira and were to dominate Rhodesia’s north-eastern sector, a territory which they liberated in the early 1970s.
As ZANU freedom fighters advanced into the country from that sector, ZAPU guerillas, led by Moffat Hadebe, (a gallant commander popularly known as ‘UMabiya ngenkomo, abanye bebiya ngothango’) penetrated the country through the Sipolilo region in 1968.
By then, Zimbabwe’s armed revolution had struck roots in spite of whatever difficulties it had initially experienced in Zambia. There was no going back; colonialists were being routed.
FRELIMO was pounding the Portuguese colonial forces from the Cabo Delgado region, pushing them southwards as they liberated Mozambique’s Northern Province, south of the Rovuma River.
The then Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU), was actively supporting the freedom fighters diplomatically and materially.
African and Asian nations (Afro-Asian) offered military training facilities to the people of Zimbabwe.
In the Western hemisphere, Cuba offered similar facilities as well, and in 1965, ZAPU sent 112 patriots led by a committed Robson Manyika, to train in that revolutionary country.
Its progressive leader, Fidel Castro, and his Government decided to bring the three continents together in 1969 to oppose colonialism.
He formed the Tri-Continental Organisation, bringing together the South American nations, the African and Asian countries under one anti-colonial umbrella.
That was very helpful to the liberation struggle as it sensitised all Caribbean islands and the entire South American mainland against colonialism.
Military training facilities were offered to ZANU by China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Syria, Romania, Tanzania and Ghana.
ZAPU trained its guerillas in the then Soviet Union, Cuba, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, the then German Democratic Republic, Tanzania, Zambia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia.
As the Zimbabwean armed struggle progressed, Britain tried to create neo-colonial solutions now and then to safeguard its socio-economic interests.
First, and most important, it offered a Constitution whose acceptability or otherwise was tested by a commission chaired by Lord Pearce in 1971.
Zimbabweans overwhelmingly rejected it.
Before those constitutional proposals were made public, the British Government necessarily sounded the relevant African political leadership.
In the ZAPU leadership in exile, there were two schools of thought.
One was that the armed struggle’s aim was to pressurise the British Government and the Rhodesian regime to negotiate for a solution with the African nationalists.
The other was that the armed struggle must achieve an outright military victory and not half-measures.
These two objectives were bound to create divisions in the revolutionary movements, that is between those fighting to negotiate, and those fighting to achieve complete victory.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email: sgwakuba@gmail.com

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