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Events that led to armed struggle

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By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

JOSHUA NKOMO’S national leadership was formally launched in Salisbury (Harare) on September 12 1957 when a combined Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC) and Salisbury City Youth League held a special congress to merge the two under the SRANC banner.
Standing for the presidential position were the Youth League’s James Robert Dambaza Chikerema and Joshua Nkomo for the SRANC. Chikerema got 31 votes and Nkomo 32.
The returning officer, Willie Dzawanda Musarurwa, then most realistically proposed that Nkomo should be declared the new SRANC president, and Chikerema his deputy. The proposal was duly carried.
That development relieved Rev Thomson Samukange of a burden that had become a virtual embarrassment as some observers accused him and his son Stanlake Samukange of turning the SRANC into a family organisation.
That was because the reverend would occasionally address SRANC meetings with his son, Stanlake, interpreting from Shona into English.
That very same year (1957) was when the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was inaugurated, a political creation that imposed an additional burden on the Southern Rhodesia black nationalist organisation.
Unlike in the federal territories north of the Zambezi River, Southern Rhodesia was firmly ruled by an entrenched white settler-minority, and had been since October 1 1923 when the British granted the country by means of what was called Letters Patent what it termed ‘internal self – government’.
There had been moves and contacts as early as 1951 between the Southern Rhodesia administration and the British Government in London to lay a foundation for a Central African Federation.
None of those contacts involved a single black Southern Rhodesian person.
It was because of that obviously racially discriminatory historical background that the Southern Rhodesia black nationalist leadership had to fight on two fronts in 1957; one being for a basic universal suffrage, and the other for the dissolution of the Federation.
Admittedly, Joshua Nkomo and his SRANC team’s priority was to take the Southern Rhodesian black people’s political consciousness from the outdated era of memoranda and pleas by the oppressed majority to the minority colonial administrators to that where the Africans demanded to rule their own countries as an incontestable right.
What the SRANC demanded then was basic, unlike the black people of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, protectorates whose basic political interests were debated by their representatives in their respective legislative councils.
An inter-territorial ANC conference involving those two countries plus Southern Rhodesia was held in Nyasaland at the beginning of 1959, and the SRANC was represented by its secretary-general, George ‘Bonzo’ Nyandoro.
That conference resolved to make the entire Federation ungovernable.
No sooner had that conference ended than the respective territorial governments proclaimed a state of emergency, rounded up several hundreds of people, imprisoned or restricted them.
Chikerema, Nyandoro, Daniel Madzimbamuto, Maurice Nyagumbo, Henry Hamadziripi and Eddison Sithole were restricted to the Mapfungabusi area of Gokwe for almost four years.
When the SRANC was outlawed on February 23 1959, Joshua Nkomo had just arrived in Cairo, Egypt, after attending the historic ‘All–Africa Conference’ hosted by Ghana’s then President Kwame Nkrumah in Accra towards the end of 1958.
The Southern Rhodesia white settler-regime later banned the SRANC’s successor, the National Democratic Party (NDP) and used the same draconian measure to silence the NDP’s successor, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU).
However, the ZAPU leadership had resolved that should their organisation be proscribed, as it was in September 1962, they would defy such a measure by going underground.
That resolution was not easy to implement as some of the leaders tried to replace Joshua Nkomo from the banned party’s top leadership because, they strongly felt, he was not dynamic enough to head an armed resolution.
The pro–Nkomo leadership section, however, successfully called on the masses to rally behind Joshua Nkomo, who had by then formed a loose mass movement called People’s Caretaker Council (PCC).
The anti-Nkomo group then decided to launch its own party led by the Rev Sithole as its president, a party with a strong enough psychological backbone to lead an armed revolution.
That was how and why the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was formed at Enos Nkala’s house in Highfield, Salisbury. It was subsequently launched in Gwelo (Gweru) on August 8 1963 with the Rev Ndabaningi Sithole as its President, Leopold Takawira as the Deputy, Robert Gabriel Mugabe as the Secretary-General and Advocate Herbert Chitepo as the National Chairman.
In the initial stages, Rev Sithole was not daunted by the relatively few people who attended his rallies because, he repeatedly said that what mattered in any armed revolution was not the large number of people supporting but rather the quality of those actually carrying arms.
“It’s not the quantity but the quality that matters in every revolution,” he would declare.
It was during that hectic period that a European family was ambushed and its members killed in the Chamanimani region of the Eastern Highlands. A hitherto unknown guerilla group, the Crocodile Gang, claimed responsibility and associated itself with the newly launched ZANU. It was commanded by a guerilla named Ndangana.
For its part, the PCC attacked European-owned farms, burning one such property in the Beatrice area, adjacent to Mhondoro Communal Lands where well-nigh 100 pigs were killed.
The farm belonged to one Walter Clifford Dupont, of the governing white-led fascist party, the Rhodesia Front (RF).
The PCC also claimed petrol bomb attacks on various shops and even on the passenger trains as was the case on a Mutare-bound predominantly white passenger train one night.
John Maluso Ndlovu, Amen Chikwakwata and one or two others were later arrested in connection with that incident.
Meanwhile, the RF regime was doing two very significant things.
First, it was widening and strengthening the country’s security legal system, making the death sentence mandatory for crimes involving petrol bombs and/or any weapon or weapons in which explosives were used.
The regime also dusted an old law called Native Affairs Act (1927) one of whose clauses made it a crime to criticise any of the country’s traditional or hereditary leaders, that is either chiefs or headmen.
The fine for that strange crime was £100 (one hundred pounds sterling) or a year’s imprisonment.
The RF meant to use those leaders in their demand for independence, hence their resort to that law.
The second thing the RF was urgently doing was to pressurise the British Government to grant Southern Rhodesia independence immediately.
Measures had been afloat in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) and in Nyasaland (later Malawi) to advance the black people of those countries towards independence sooner rather than later.
Concomitant with those measures were inevitable discussions between those two countries and the colonial power, Britain, to dissolve the federation sooner rather than later.
In Southern Rhodesia, the black people’s nationalist organisation, the NDP, had in 1961 managed to get only 15 ‘B’ Roll parliamentary seats for the country’s black majority, almost five million at that time, as compared to 50 ‘A’ Roll seats for the
225 000 white settlers.
It is important to consider these parliamentary seats on the historical basis that the country’s black majority had not been represented in the House of Assembly before then.
That was the first time Southern Rhodesian blacks would be represented in Parliament.
The independence the RF demanded from Britain was being erroneously justified on the historical basis that Cecil John Rhodes had repeatedly said that he had ‘founded’ the country (Southern Rhodesia) for people of British extraction.
Southern Rhodesia was what he termed ‘white men’s land’, and so did the RF and most other white settlers, many of whom had moved from Kenya, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia to settle in this land.
It sounded very strange that Rhodes’ other ‘reason’ to claim Southern Rhodesia for his fellow white people was that the country’s climate was very good for Europeans!
How can any sane individual claim ownership of a country from its indigenous inhabitants on the basis of a natural attribute such as climate?
That was, in fact, the political argument, if we can call it that, the black nationalist leaders of Zimbabwe faced in this country and in Britain until they attained independence through the barrel of the gun on April 18 1980.
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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