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Chinhoyi Battle …white supremacy theory demystified

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

TENDAI MUSUNGATE’s ‘Chinhoyi battle demystified supremacy of Rhodesian forces’ (The Patriot, April 26 – May 2 2013) was mainly an opinion piece meant to highlight the bravery of the seven freedom fighters who dared the combined might of the Rhodesian army, airforce and police on April 28 1966.
My modest contribution is concerned with the strategic thinking behind the guerilla operation code-named ‘Armagedon’ involving Cdes Simon Chimbodza, Christopher Chatambudza, Nathan Charumuka, David Guzuzu, Ephraim Shenjere, Godwin Manyerenyere and Arthur Maramba, who battled the Rhodesian forces for about eight hours and perished in the process on the same day.
According to the late Brigadier-General Felix Muchemwa, the seven freedom fighters were originally supposed to go to Charter District (Chivhu), ‘…but were somehow diverted to capture Sinoia Town (Chinhoyi).
The instruction was to precipitate an insurrection in and around Sinoia, and other instructions were to cut down electricity and telephone lines and attack European commercial farms’.
Obviously, one big disadvantage any student of strategic history of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) faces in this particular case is the fact that all the seven freedom fighters perished the same day and no commander has put on record the precise instructions given to the seven as well as the strategic thinking and theory behind Armagedon.
The change of targets from rural Chivhu to a small town Sinoia suggests uncertainty about the readiness of the population to co-operate with guerillas, let alone to rally around them in an internal insurrection against the regime.
In 1967, I moved from Biriiri Secondary School to Mutambara High School.
When I got to Mutambara, one of the underground songs popular among politically conscious students went as follows:
“Chimurenga chakatanga
Chakatanga paSinoia
Zvanzi hakuna hondo
Hondo muZimbabwe.
Chimurenga chakatanga
Chakatanga paSinoia
Zambia hakuna hondo
Hondo iri muZimbabwe”
This underground propaganda song suggested two things:
l First, the story of the Battle of Sinoia (Chinhoyi) was quickly spread throughout the country by ZANU cells.
l Second, if the purpose of Armagedon was to increase awareness of the beginning of the armed phase of the liberation struggle, then that objective was achieved.
But a student of strategic thinking in the liberation struggle has to go beyond the event itself to look at its full geostrategic context.
The value of this approach is obvious if, for instance, one contrasts Armagedon with the bombing of Rhodesian fuel tanks in Salisbury (Harare) in 1978.
The context had changed drastically in every respect and as a result, freedom fighters who infiltrated the Rhodesian capital 12 years after the Battle of Sinoia survived to celebrate their contribution.
Elements of the strategic context in 1966
The first element to consider are the theories of revolutionary change prevalent among the African nationalist elites, in light of the very fact that two years before Sinoia, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) had split into two with the formation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) on account of disagreements over the most appropriate strategies for achieving revolutionary change and full independence.
How many approaches were common among Zimbabwe’s African nationalists two years after the split of the movement into ZAPU and ZANU and how far did these influence ordinary people, especially in a small town such as Sinoia in 1966?
l There were conservative African reactionaries who believed that white rule and white supremacy were here to stay and Africans would waste time and lives taking on the Western-backed colonial state.
To them armed struggle was unthinkable.
l There was also a highly schooled petty bourgeois group heavily influenced for instance by white liberal expatriates in Capricorn Africa, the United Methodist Church (UMC) and the American as well as British Quakers and others who believed that the best path to independence was first to develop an evolved (civilised) African leadership who would then negotiate independence with Britain against the wishes of the local white settler-minority. Some of these were even persuaded to believe in a Quaker-led campaign of non-violent struggle against the Smith regime after 1965.
Following the example of Tom Mboya of Kenya who was shipping plane loads of Kenyan youths to North America for higher education around the same time, the UMC under Bishop Ralph Dodge developed a programme called ‘Safari to Learning’ which in 1965 had 85 African students studying outside Rhodesia at college level.
Western-sponsored higher education was seen as an alternative to revolution and an anti-communist weapon, especially in southern Africa.
The idea was that if all the churches and the Western development NGOs would do what the UMC was doing, then an alternative, conservative African leadership would quickly emerge to stop the sort of radicalism represented by Armagedon and the students singing ‘Chimurenga chakatanga’.
Bishop Abel Muzorewa was a direct product of the UMC’s educational efforts.
l There was a third group of African nationalist thinkers who accepted the need for armed struggle but only for precipitating a crisis which would force the British Government to take over power from the settler minority and hand it over to an African elite.
To some extent, the March 1978 Internal Settlement was based on the theory that armed struggle had served its purpose of forcing the Smith regime to negotiate with a few conservative African leaders.
So the war should end there and then without achieving any real goals of Chimurenga.
l The last group are those who believed in Chimurenga and the idea of ‘Tinoda Zimbabwe neupfumi hwayo hwose’.
What is not clear and requires further research is the extent to which those who sent the Armagedon team understood these mixed theories of revolutionary change in relation to the actual mood of the majority of the population in April 1966, let alone the level of popular political consciousness in a small white farming town of the size of Sinoia.
What my generation who were in high school at that time remember is that no part of (Rhodesia) Zimbabwe at the time was ready for an insurrection rallying around a few guerillas in the style of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary arrival in Havana from the Sierra Maestro in 1959.
Anti-settler and anti-UDI sentiment was strong, but the mood was still a brooding one, not yet revolutionary.
Worse still, even as late as 1979, the urban centres remained treacherous and fickle.
It is doubtful any town in Rhodesia would have rallied around several guerillas in a sustainable uprising in 1966.
The material conditions for a revolutionary insurrection in 1966 were so tough that the guerillas would have required more meticulous planning than those who blew up fuel tanks in Salisbury in 1978.
But it is significant to note that even as late as 1978, in the progress of the struggle, the commanders who sent the team to Salisbury did not expect the spectacular fire from the central fuel tanks to inspire an instant African insurrection in the city.
The geostrategic context of southern African in 1966
A sustainable insurrection leading to tangible revolutionary changes in Zimbabwe would need strong foreign and regional support
l But from the overthrow and assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 to the fall of the Portuguese regime in Lisbon in 1974, newly independent African states (including Tanzania) had to look over their shoulders in fear of imperialist intervention whenever they considered support to liberation movements.
From the fall of Lumumba to the time of US National Security advisor Henry Kissinger’s study of southern Africa in 1969, the global situation in southern Africa was marked by the rise of reactionary, counter-revolutionary forces which ended with US President Reagan’s pronouncement of ‘Constructive Engagement’ with the apartheid regime in the early 1980s.
l Smith declared Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) the same year (1965) Mobutu was installed by the North Americans in Congo (Zaire) as President.
This was such a turning point that by 1968 US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey actually visited Zaire.
So, 1966 was a dark period in the whole region, especially because of the fall-out from the destruction of the Congo Revolution.
l The Cubans who had tried to help the Lumumbist revolution in the Congo after the assassination of Lumumba had withdrawn in 1965.
l The call by Tanzania for newly independent African states to break ties with Britain to protest UDI in Rhodesia was not successful.
It did not cause the British to intervene against Smith in favour of Africans as expected.
In both Congo and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), it was US policy which shaped and framed external intervention on behalf of white imperial interests and in support of settler regimes.
Using the cover of the United Nations (UN) and ability to blend white racism with anti-communism, the US was able to subsume different white nationalist agendas under its synthetic whiteness marketed as global anti-communism.
The British interest expressed through South Africa and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyashaland, the Belgian interest expressed through Belgian companies and soldiers in Katanga, and the US interest and suspicion against the Soviet Union – all came together to eliminate Patrice Lumumba and abort the African revolution.
Such a scenario had strategic impact on the progress of the Zimbabwe struggle.
Significantly the US lobby group American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters (ACAKFF) did not only promote the blending of white supremacy with anti-communism in the destruction of the African revolution in Congo; it also lived to become the nucleus of the Rhodesia lobby in the US after Rhodesia, like Katanga, declared its unilateral independence in 1965, four years after the overthrow of the African revolution in Congo.
The American lobby for white supremacy in the Congo became the Rhodesia lobby after Rhodesia’s UDI.
It also became the source of diplomatic support and mercenaries for Moise Kapenda Tsombe’s Katanga as for Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.
Therefore Lumumba’s assassination had far-reaching consequences for the African revolution in southern Africa.
In short, a plan for sustainable revolutionary insurrection in Zimbabwe in 1966 had to take into account the level of revolutionary consciousness of the general population, which was still very low; the likely response of the US, UK and SA, which was violently opposed to revolution often referred to as ‘communist subversion’; and the realities so well-documented now in books such as Professor Gerald Horne’s From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965 to 1980.
The Battle of Sinoia therefore provided a critical learning curve in the history of ZANLA.
The lessons learned could be demonstrated by later missions, including the successful infiltration of Salisbury and the bombing of fuel tanks there in 1978.

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