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The end of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia

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By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

THE pace and intensity of the Zimbabwe liberation struggle increased with the passage of time, but particularly so after the Geneva Conference (October 1976 to January 1977) as freedom-fighters’ operational area widened in the country’s eastern, north-eastern, northern, north-western and western regions.
Large areas were ungovernable by 1977 as the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA) guerillas pushed further into the eastern and the north-eastern from Mozambique, and the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) forces bulldozed their way into the north and north-west from Zambia.
Some ZIPRA guerillas were using even the north-western sector of Botswana to cross from Zambia into the western region of Zimbabwe.
That made some parts of what is now known as the Bulilima District ungovernable by 1977, especially the central and the northern Nata region, from Makhekhe Store at Tokwana right up to Makhulela, and from Ngwana School up to Nanda.
The Smith regime correctly read the writing on the national security wall, and tried to destroy the revolution by offering a section of the African National Council (ANC) leadership a role in the country’s administration.
That section comprised Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and James Robert Dambaza Chikerema.
The three signed an agreement in March 1978 to be a part of the Rhodesian regime under what they named Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with Bishop Muzorewa as the prime minister. a
The other members of that discredited, short-lived arrangement were Chief Jeremiah Chirau of Mashonaland West, Chief Khayisa Ndiweni of Matabelaland North and Ian Smith himself, with Josiah Gumede as the country’s ceremonial president.
That treacherous regime was recognised only by the South African Boer administration.
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) now African Union (AU), the Commonwealth, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) and the United Nations (UN) all refused to recognise that Zimbabwe-Rhodesia arrangement as representing the political wishes of the majority of the black people of Zimbabwe.
Real implementation power of the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was in the hands of Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front, and the black faces were only a political front.
A few months after the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime had been in office, in early 1978, it decided to invite Joshua Nkomo, co-leader of the Patriotic Front (PF), to join it as its most senior leader, to take over from Bishop Muzorewa in fact.
Smith was actually sent to Zambia to request Nkomo to return home to take over the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime’s top leadership.
Smith met the Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, Joshua Nkomo himself, and the then Nigeria’s foreign minister, Brigadier Joseph Garba, at a Government guest house in Zambia’s Eastern Province.
Nkomo told Smith that he would accept the Zimbabwe-Rhodeisa regime’s offer only if it included Robert Mugabe, co-leader of the Patriotic Front.
He said that offer or invitation should not be directed to either ZAPU of which he was the leader, or to Mugabe the ZANU leader, but to the Patriotic Front, that is to say to both himself as well as to Mugabe.
Smith strongly explained that the Zimbabwe-Rhodeisa leadership wanted Nkomo in his capacity as the most senior Zimbabwean nationalist leader, and certainly not Mugabe. Nkomo was not moved by that whereupon the Nigerian Foreign Minister, Joseph Garba, suggested that he should fly to Maputo in Mozambique to talk to Mugabe.
Meanwhile, Smith returned to Salisbury to brief his Rhodesia-Zimbabwe team comprising Bishop Muzorewa, Reverend Sithole, Chikerema, Chief Chirau, Chief Khanyisa Ndiweni, and the Rhodeisa-Zimbabwe president, Josiah Gumede.
In Maputo, Brigadier Garba briefed both Mugabe and the Mozambican Head of State, Samora Machel.
Mugabe contacted Julius Nyerere who apparently took particular exception that such a meeting had been held (with Smith) in his absence.
He telephoned Zambia’s Kaunda very strongly, criticising the very idea of holding such a meeting with Smith, and also for what he described as favouring Nkomo to the exclusion of the majority of the people of Zimbabwe.
He said the decision as to who should lead Zimbabwe should be left to the people of Zimbabwe.
That was the end of that Zimbabwe-Rhodesia project.
It had, in any case, been poorly conceived in that it excluded the colonial authority, Britain, from being an actor, if not a major actor, in resolving the Rhodesian colonial impasse.
Its other weakness was that it was not, in fact, a solution at all in that it would have lent legality to an illegal regime that could not have resolved the land question, in effect, the real cause of the liberation war.
The British government had to preside over the decolonisation of Rhodesia just as it had sponsored the country’s colonisation by granting Cecil John Rhodes a Charter, and later assisted his company with security forces to consolidate the British settler-administration in both Mashonaland and Matabeleland.
That constitutionally correct approach was, however, not practicable for Smith because he had cut relations between Rhodesia and the British Government first by his November 11 1965 regime’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), and followed that four years later (1969) by declaring Rhodesia a republic, a decision that severed relations between the rebellious country and the British Crown.
Smith had thus hoodwinked his black Rhodesia-Zimbabwe colleagues into the an illegal situation his Rhodesian regime had created in 1965.
It was into that same treasonable situation that he wanted to drag Nkomo.
Had Nkomo agreed to become a part of that treacherous Zimbabwe-Rhodesia set-up, the ZAPU armed wing of ZIPRA, would have ceased fighting the Zimbabwe-Rhodeisa forces, and would have turned their guns against ZANLA.
That would have created a most unfortunate situation in which Mozambique as a ZANLA base would have continued to support ZANU to the exclusion of ZAPU, and Zambia, a ZIPRA base, would have continued standing behind ZAPU to the exclusion of ZANU.
That confusing situation could have benefited the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe and the South African Boer regimes and their Western allies.
Following Nkomo’s rejection of Smith’s Rhodesia-Zimbabwe offer, the armed revolution continued unabated.
The ZIPRA commander, Alfred Rogers Mangena whose nom-de guerre was ‘Nikita’, was in early 1978 killed by a landmine in the eastern front in Zambia’s Southern Province, some 50-or-so kilometres south of Kabanga Mission in the Choma administrative area.
Mangena’s death was a very unfortunate loss to the Zimbabwean struggle in particular, and to the entire southern African region in general.
He was a committed nationalist whose revolutionary outlook covered the whole world, to say nothing about his focus on Zimbabwe.
Politically, Mangena was a socialist and his major concern was that comprador – bourgeoisie were likely to highjack the Zimbabwean revolution, and make an independent Zimbabwe economically meaningless to the majority of the people.
He was a fearless visionary and Zimbabwe was indeed the poorer because of his death.
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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