AT the height of the Second Chimurenga War Ian Smith’s attempt to isolate the freedom fighters from the people was a resounding failure.
Maoist ‘fish and water’ guerilla tactics had to be countered by separating the people from the freedom fighters, the Smith regime thought.
The first Protected Villages built in Chiweshe in 1974 were meant to be the beginning of a device that would cut contact between guerillas and the masses.
Though detestable, Protected Villages add to the significance of Chiweshe in Zimbabwe’s history of the liberation struggle.
For it is in Chiweshe (Mazowe Valley) where Mbuya Nehanda predicted: ‘My bones shall rise’.
It was the attack on Alterna Farm, also in Chiweshe, which opened the north-east front in 1972 in the Second Chimurenga.
And from then on those who bothered to visit the archives were readily reminded of Mbuya Nehanda’s prophecy as the liberation war quickly escalated throughout the country.
The colonial regime believed with the PVs, guerillas would be denied material supplies, food and intelligence information and become like fish without water.
Since villagers inside the Keeps would be provided with provisions, the Rhodesian forces would soon become the darlings of the povo at the expense of the freedom fighters, so Ian Smith thought.
The venture dismally failed, it became a misadventure.
A Patriot team recently visited Chiweshe for eyewitness accounts by people who were once interned in these so-called Protected Villages.
They were told of harrowing experiences.
The herding of people into these fenced villages was hated by the rural folk.
For a start they loathed being moved away from close to their fields, with their animals left to roam before being impounded and slaughtered by the regime’s soldiers.
Life inside the Keeps was hell on earth.
The promised provisions were non-existent.
Men, women and children were crammed into the Keeps with no ablution facilities.
With the overcrowding, disease outbreaks like typhoid and diarrhoea were a common feature.
A former Protected Village victim gave an account of how at one time all grinding meals were shut down and all maize meal destroyed.
The regime argued all these conditions were of the villagers’ own making because of the support they gave to the ‘terrorists’.
To crown it all, the Rhodesians would parade in the PVs and leave to rot bodies of freedom fighters they would have killed.
This, they hoped, would make the villagers realise that siding with the guerillas did not pay.
Failure was total.
Instead, all these cruel measures only hardened the povo in the resolve to help the guerillas.
After all they were their sons and daughters.
Although there were strict inspections at the entrances to the Keeps, ways were devised to take provisions to the guerillas.
There were instances when women carried sadza strapped on their backs together with their babies or walked out with food hidden between their legs.
Not to be outdone, men would flatten tyres of their scotch carts and fill them with mealie-meal.
Indeed the cruelty of the Rhodesian regime emboldened the rural folk who sneaked out of the Keeps to inform those in urban areas of how the ‘enemy’ plans were being thwarted.
Some even sneaked out of the PVs to join the liberation struggle.
This and in many other ways is how the strong bond between the rural folk and the political parties that led the liberation movements was established.
This is why, at the first one-person-one-vote elections that brought independence and majority rule, ZANU and ZAPU swept the board leaving the regime-supported UANC with a meagre three seats.
Coincidentally the UANC had used three helicopters during that poll campaign.
That is why white-sponsored parties have no chance at all to deceive the rural folk into abandoning political parties that led the liberation struggle.