THE indispensability of a patriotic front to the survival of Zimbabwe was tested right to its limits in the worst-case scenarios of reactionary forces working from within both the Government and the ruling Party starting from inception of the 2009 Government of National Unity (GNU) to the ouster of former President Robert Mugabe in 2017.  

The GNU was the three-party outcome of a relentless foreign-sponsored regime-change duress that had been mounting on Zimbabwe’s patriotic front ever since the victory scored by the ZANU PF-PF ZAPU December 22 1987 Unity Accord. 

The constituents of the GNU were ZANU PF and the two splinters of the MDC surnamed (Morgan) Tsvangirai and (Welshman) Ncube. 

The presidium remained ZANU PF while the new posts of Prime Minister and two deputies went to MDC-N’s Arthur Mutambara and MDC-T’s Thokozani Khupe. 

An outsider inclined to think of the 2009 GNU as suggesting an ultimate patriotic front formation of ‘holy grail’ significance would be surprised that it only translated to a new theatre of war characterised, as it were, by close-quarter combat. 

The damage, though not apparent to most observers, was as monumental as would be expected from real close-quarter combat.  

The December 22 1987 Unity Accord had sealed the political fissure that had been exploited to undermine the Patriotic Front that had waged the liberation struggle. Efforts to re-open the fissure had apparently never ceased, even while other sabotage contingencies, like student and labour movements, were being explored in the manner already discussed in other parts of this series.

Other parts to the same series also established that the Coltart-Catholic conspiracy published as: Breaking the Silence (1997) was a failed attempt to unseal the fissure with the intention of re-activating the post-independence ‘moment of madness’ that had been exorcised by the Unity Accord. 

In the longer historical context, it appears that the fail-safe contingency to the Coltart-Catholic conspiracy was to coalesce the sick suggestion into a cocktail with other mutually exclusive and hostile interests that would give birth to the MDC; a volatile cocktail that could, fortunately for ZANU PF, distill into irrelevant voices depending on prevailing political temperature. 

The distillation process first manifested as intra-party violence driven by exclusive motives right from the founding of the MDC regime-change outfit. 

And, what was most fortunate about it all for Zimbabwe was that the MDC lacked the historic and moral legitimacy to inspire the practical militancy required to sustain the Coltart-Catholic conspiracy. 

With no experience of struggle, the regime-change outfit faced the ZANLA and ZPRA veterans of the armed liberation struggle united by the 1987 Unity Accord and the war-seasoned Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) who had defeated Western proxies in Mozambique as well as in Africa’s First World War in the DRC. 

Militancy was also particularly tricky if it involved the Rhodesian war mafia that was the hand behind the MDC. 

Showing their military hand in open confrontation with ZANLA and ZPRA war veterans and the Zimbabwe Defence Forces would have turned the whole indigenous population in Zimbabwe not only against them but against the whole white settler-population whose interests the regime-change outfit was being sponsored to protect. 

The option of a British military invasion of Zimbabwe was actually considered by the then British premier, Tony Blair, at the time. 

Interestingly, it was the third time a British invasion of the same territory had been talked about. 

The first time had been requested by homosexual Cecil John Rhodes in 1890. 

It had been popular with the British aristocracy and had been approved by Queen Victoria and it had led to colonial occupation of Zimbabwe. 

The second had been requested by the incarcerated patriotic front cast (that included Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo) to stop the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) by British settlers in Rhodesia in 1965. 

Harold Wilson, the British premier of the time had rejected the idea for the racist reason that the British public would not accept the idea of British forces fighting their Rhodesian kith and kin. 

The third time had been requested by the Tsvangirai-led MDC surrounded by white settler-farmers, ‘chequebooks in hand’. 

The idea was popular with the white settler-community and the British aristocracy who included absentee owners of land in Zimbabwe. 

But, this time around, the context had changed. 

The moral and historic indictment arising from a brazen British invasion of Zimbabwe to defend exclusive white minority interests would no longer be sustainable, particularly for an already morally bankrupt former slave-trading nation like Britain.  

The idea was repulsive to indigenous victims of colonial land dispossession in Zimbabwe and former President Mugabe had casually remarked that he was hosting a significant white settler-population in Zimbabwe. 

The ominous script between the lines had not been lost to the British war criminal and the idea had been shelved not for another day but for all time. 

The longer view shows that the London-MDC alliance’s window of success was limited by the foregoing factors.  

Zimbabwe and, for that matter, Africa’s colonial experience translated to an indelible memory. 

And, that memory was etched deeper in the psych of seven of Africa’s 54 nations: namely Algeria, Guinea Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. 

They are the ones that had to go through protracted armed liberation struggles to free themselves from the colonial yoke. 

In these countries, as in North America, Australia and New Zealand, the whiteman had not come to exploit and leave. 

He had come to stay and exploit for all time.  

And, while such memory could be dimmed or blurred by the economic hardship imposed by illegal sanctions aimed at regime change, the memory would never go away. 

It was memory etched into the land by mass graves on real sites of mortal combat – mass graves of dear ones who had paid the ultimate price for the things the survivors still yearned for; the things the MDC was being paid to frustrate. 

The yearning for the things the whiteman’s rule had excluded black people from would never go away and it is a fact that showed in less apparent but irrefutable as well as inexorable ways.