DURING the liberation war, pitting the Rhodesian forces against liberation war fighters, different tales of survival were told.
Many people believed guerillas could change into different animals — from lions to ground hornbills — in order to avoid detection by the enemy.
However, what the liberation war fighters simply did is called mimicry. By mimicking other creatures and backgrounds, the fighters gained an edge in the struggle to survive.
Mimicking is part of nature as some plants and many animals mimic characteristics of other species, usually to avoid being eaten.
Disguises have helped certain plants growing in deserts to survive. These plants resemble rocks and pebbles, except for a brief period when they bloom.
All of these kinds of imitations involve people, plants or animals that look alike, or mimic common background objects and so greatly increase their chances of being overlooked by predators or enemies.
According some former liberation war fighters, the most common mimicry was done by some light-skinned fighters who were encouraged to smear mud on their faces so that they could blend well with their backgrounds, it was also common to see white-skinned Rhodesian fighters smeared in mud.
In another form of mimicry common during the struggle, guerillas would appear to be people they were not in-order to attack the enemy; they acted in effect like a wolf in sheep’s skin and were involved in a prey-predator interaction that scientists call aggressive mimicry.
For example, some liberation war fighters disguised themselves as herd boys or villagers in order to attack the enemy.
In nature, the same tactic is used by a praying mantis which can disguise itself as a dead leaf.
The mantis surprises and eats unsuspecting insects that fail to detect the disguise. The guerillas behaved similarly and improved deception by attaching small bits of vegetation on their bodies in order to fool the enemy.
Mimicry also occurred in detention centres like Gonakudzingwa, Sikombela and Wha Wha where some liberation war icons were detained.
They blended well with their environment in order to survive attacks by wild animals and other predators.
Rhodesians thought by putting them in detention areas, such as Gonakudzingwa, they would be killed by wild animals but the detainees mimicked their environment to stay alive.
In the mid-1960s, Rhodesian authorities unveiled new areas that were specially established to restrict and detain ‘subversive’ persons who, in the opinion of the Rhodesian Minister of Law and Order, ‘presented a threat to the maintenance of law and order’.
Before 1963, Rhodesian authorities only focused on detaining leaders of African political formations in existing prisons using laws such as the Unlawful Organisations Act (1959) or the Preventive Detention (Temporary Provisions) Act (1959), and there was no need to establish new detention areas.
Because of arrests of hundreds of African political activists in 1964, newer centres of detention had to be established.
In addition to detention provisions in the Law and Order Maintenance Act (LOMA), the 1966 Emergency Powers (Maintenance of Law and Order) Regulations generated an enormous number of Africans detained for political reasons.
The purpose of detention, according to a Rhodesia’s Minister of Law and Order, was to cut off African political activists from circulation in their communities.
Whereas previously, Rhodesian authorities could restrict political activists from entering or exiting certain areas in Rhodesia, newer and repressively sweeping security laws gave Rhodesian authorities the power to round up as many political activists as they could and detain them in specially designated detention centres.
The sheer number of Africans detained as a result of these laws was exacerbated by the fact that political detainees’ length of stay in detention centres was usually ‘indefinite’, meaning that, upon the expiration of a ‘Detention Order’, Rhodesian authorities could simply impose another order of detention.
To accommodate the increased upsurge in African political detainees, Rhodesian authorities established three major centres of detention: Wha Wha Detention Centre in February 1964, Gonakudzingwa Camp in April 1964 and Sikombela Camp in June 1965.
The geographical location of these detention centres was striking because they were all established in remote and inaccessible parts of the country, but through the acts of mimicking, the detentions were rendered useless as the political activists still survived.
For many detainees, the wild animals were there to ‘guard’ them rather than prevent them from running away. The only police supervision at Gonakudzingwa was from a little frontier police post on the Rhodesia/Mozambique Railway Line called Villa Salazar and from another Portuguese-Mozambique police outpost called Malvernia.
In his autobiography, The Story of My Life, Joshua Nkomo writes with humor incidents of detainees’ encounters with dangerous animals.
He recalls, for example, how his two friends, Joseph Msika and Stanislas Marembo, had developed a habit of taking early morning walks around the Gonakudzingwa detention area.
“One morning they met a lion,” recalled Nkomo, “a big male lion on the path but it could not attack them.”
This confirms how they had mimicked their wild environment and blended well with the animals.
Nkomo later remarked that: “The animals (that lived around Gonakudzingwa) were dangerous, but not hostile by intent…”
Many detainees at Gonakudzingwa also opted to construct their own accommodation to blend well with their environment.