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Misleading title by a ‘freedom fighter’

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Freedom Fighter by Stephen Lungu with Anne Coomes
Published by Monarch Publications (1994)
ISBN: 1 85424 198 2

GETTING hold of the book Freedom Fighter by Stephen Lungu was refreshing, hoping for yet another intriguing read about the first-hand experiences of the liberation struggle from the black man’s perspective.
At first I was baffled by the fact that Lungu co-wrote the book with Anne Coomes as I wondered how two people who stood for two different views during the war could tell the true black experience during the Rhodesian era.
Reading the book answered the questions as I began to question the ‘blackness’ of the author as it is clear from the onset the book was aimed to please the white community.
One would be forgiven to conclude that it might be Anne Coomes telling the story using Lungu as a front.
For starters, Lungu fails to translate the meaning of his father’s original surname Tsoka which he writes means ‘unlucky.’
Tsoka means feet in Shona and feet are associated with luck as they help one move from a place to place in search for better surrounding.
Lungu opts to change his surname from Tsoka to Lungu in a bid to escape from the misfortunes surrounding the name.
Yes, the writer can fool the white audience as to why he changed, but it is clear the switch was a way to try and get closer to the white man he adores.
Lungu in the Ndebele language is derived from the word abalungu which means the white man.
In the book, the writer chronicles his life experiences from the time he was born, his childhood days in the township of Highfield at a time it was reserved for blacks, recruited to join the armed struggle and when he left to join the missionaries.
Born in 1942 in a family of three, Stephen was the eldest and he and his siblings John and Malesi were abandoned by their mother and were left in the care of an aunt.
Lungu was ill-treated by his aunt and early in his life as he chronicles was riddled with poverty, misery and hunger.
It was at this stage in life where Lungu is introduced to the white man whom he describes as saviours as they were the answers to his misery.
Had it not been for the scraps of food he scrounged for in dustbins in residential areas reserved for Europeans, Lungu would have died of hunger.
It was during this ‘poverty stricken’ period that he was recruited to join the liberation struggle and fight against the white man.
“The communist army recruited from the tens of thousands of poor black youths who had little education, few jobs and scanty prospects in life,” writes Lungu.
“Most were not politically minded.
“Like everyone else, these young men simply wanted a better life, food and shelter for their families.”
Lungu writes as though he questions the truth behind the agenda of the liberation struggle, neither does he tell the reader whose political system had made these thousands of black youths poor, uneducated, with few jobs and scanty prospects in life.
“The communists promised these young men unlimited prosperity,” he writes.
“They told them that one day they would all have their pick of the white men’s belongings, the luxurious bungalows, the glamorous cars.
“All they had to do was join the liberation struggle.”
Lungu paints a picture that the liberation fighters were more concerned about the things money could buy leaving out the fact that it was the need to own important things like land and mines that drove the struggle.
It was during one of his assignments as a freedom fighter where he was to lead a team to petrol bomb a church gathering organised by missionaries from South Africa, where he received Christ.
Lungu first goes into the tent where the church was being held that the word of the preacher turned his life around.
It was at this gathering, Lungu writes, he realised that what he was doing to ‘fight the white man’ was a ‘sin’ and he had to repent.
The writer then abandons the struggle to join a Bible School.
Lungu was the first student in Hannes Joubert’s Bible School.
It is not surprising that the writer speaks glowingly of Joubert.
“He (Joubert) was going to civilise me, teach me to read and write, and then put me through his Bible College,” he writes.
To the writer, his life begins when he meets Joubert as he helped him become a ‘real man’ unlike the liberation fighters.
Lungu seems to forget to enlighten the writer the real reason behind the bringing in of missionaries to Africa.
At a time when Christianity was being introduced to Africans, the West took that opportunity to plunder the continent’s resources.
To Lungu they came to ‘save’ Africa.
Just as King Leopold II of Belgium wrote in a letter to colonial missionaries in 1883, the underlying reason for bringing evangelisim to Africa was not to ‘save’, but to ‘inspire above all the interests of the coloniser.’
It was these missionaries that had the aim of making people like Lungu lose sight of the thrust of the liberation struggle and abandon it.
It is a good thing that not all freedom fighters fell for the same trap.
The resilient continued with the liberation struggle which birthed Zimbabwe.

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