By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

THE liberation of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 resulted in the formation of a ‘Frontline States’ (FLS) committee comprising five heads of state, an organisation whose other members were Tanzania, Zambia and Botswana.
These five countries were, of course, also members of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU), the United Nations (UN), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and four of them, (expecting Botswana), also of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO).
Still to be liberated were Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. The Frontline States committee was chaired by the Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere.
Mozambique and Angola were headed by former guerilla leaders, Samora Machel and Dr Augustinho Neto respectively.
That made the armed struggle much easier to wage, in that both those countries had gone through a similar experience and understood the needs of a guerilla war.
Military training facilities were offered by both countries, as Tanzania had done, and Zambia later.
That simply meant that a part of Southern Africa, from the Indian Ocean in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, had become militarised.
Rhodesia and South Africa had become an enclave of two white minority regimes on the African continent’s southern region.
The détente, a diplomatic project initiated by Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State at that time, was made to promote African-led political parties willing to protect the regional economic interests of the West in that virtually besieged region.
In Zimbabwe, Bishop Abel Muzorewa had emerged as one such leader.
He had initially been asked by Zimbabwe’s nationalist leader, Joshua Nkomo, in 1971, to organise an anti-Pierce Commission. He then formed and headed an organisation called the African National Council (ANC).
That organisation later signed a unity agreement with the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI) at the State House in Lusaka, Zambia, on December 7 1974.
Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole represented and signed for ZANU, Joshua Nkomo for ZAPU, Bishop Muzorewa for the ANC and James Robert Dambaza Chikerema for FROLIZI.
The accord said all those parties were henceforth in the ANC provisionally-led by Bishop Muzorewa until a congress was held to choose a leader who would be recognised by all the unity agreement signatories.
No sooner had the accord been signed, than there was a loud difference about the holding of a congress, and also that Rev Sithole could not claim to represent ZANU since he had been expelled by his ZANU executive colleagues in the Salisbury Maximum Security Prison in the late 1960s for denouncing revolutionary violence.
Rev Sithole had been replaced by his deputy, Leopold Takawira, who had unfortunately died of diabetes soon thereafter in that prison.
At the time of the signing of the Lusaka Unity Agreement, December 17 1974, the most senior ZANU official was advocate Herbert Chitepo, the ZANU National Chairman at that time.
Cde Chitepo did, in fact, attend the Lusaka Unity Agreement conference together with Rev Sithole.
Most unfortunately, he was tragically killed by a car bomb as he was driving out of his yard at Kabwata suburb, Lusaka, in March 1975.
That meant ZANU’s most senior official was then its secretary-general, Cde Robert Mugabe, who had just been recently released from jail and was in Salisbury at that time.
It was after Chitepo’s assassination that Cde Mugabe, accompanied by another prominent ZANU leader, Edgar ‘Twoboy’ Tekere, secretly left Salisbury for Mozambique.
They were disguised as elderly men and were accompanied by three Roman Catholic nuns who drove out of the city past one or two police roadblocks, quite a long distance from Salisbury and ultimately left them in the safe hands of a staunch ZANU cadre, Moven Mahachi.
Cde Mahachi guided them to Chief Rekayi Tangwena, a gallant traditional leader whose area bordered Mozambique.
Chief Tangwena later led them into Mozambique where they joined the ZANU armed revolutionaries
Meanwhile, both ZIPRA and ZANLA freedom fighters were either defending areas they had liberated or moving further into Rhodesia from their rear bases in Zambia and Mozambique respectively.
In October 1974, a patrol of a Rhodesian security operatives called Selous Scouts entered Botswana, assaulted and kidnapped a prominent ZAPU activist, Ethan Dube, from a low-density suburb of Francistown.
He was never seen again. In Namibia, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) had established operational bases in various parts of the country, Namibia, and its guerilla campaign had caused the South African administrative authorities to deploy thousands of troops all over that former German colony but especially in the Caprivi Strip and along the Kunene River, the southern boundary between Namibia and Angola.
In 1975, Henry Kissinger flew to Iran where, it was most reliably stated, he arm-twisted the Shah not to sell oil to South Africa any longer.
The Shah initially refused but changed his mind after Kissinger told him that non-compliance with the US might lead to the US refusing to sell Iran military jets that Teheran desperately wanted as it was at that time engaged in a bitter war against Iraq.
From Teheran, Kissinger flew to Pretoria to confer with the Boer regime and Rhodesia’s Ian Smith.
Hence he jetted to Lusaka, Zambia, where he met Joshua Nkomo at the Intercontinental Hotel.
He thereafter, had a long discussion on Zimbabwe with the then Zambian leader, Kenneth Kaunda.
Kissinger’s wish was that guerilla warfare should be stopped and negotiations should be started to lead to the establishment of a constellation of multi-racial states including Rhodesia and Namibia.
That was what détente was all about. It was during that high-powered whirlwind diplomatic tour that Kissinger sold a constitutional proposal to Ian Smith.
He had already discussed it with the British Government.
It was that proposal which, beginning in October 1976, was the bone of contention at the Geneva Conference.
The conference, however, was aborted.
By 1976, the South African Boer regime had realised and accepted that African majority rule was inevitable, and was contemplating withdrawing its military support for the Rhodesian regime.
That year in June, South African primary school pupils, secondary school and university students took to the streets throughout that country.
The Boer regime responded by killing them without any second thought.
Their leader, Steve Bantu Biko, was beaten to death by security personnel who, later or in the process, carried him from the Eastern Cape Province to Pretoria, more than a thousand kilometres to the north.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email: sgwakuba@gmail.com