A MAJOR propaganda thrust the Ian Smith regime failed to find a breakthrough was to make Zimbabweans believe that cadres of the liberation struggle were heartless murderers, who had to be wiped out.
Smith’s propaganda machinery deliberately baptised freedom fighters magandanga.
For the perception people had of a gandanga is that of a brute hired to waylay people, especially women and children, in order to kill them and get their body parts for ritual purposes.
This is the picture of freedom fighters Smith wanted us to have and therefore hate them.
It did not stick.
Instead Mao Tse-Tung’s theory of the relationship between fish and water is what flourished between the ‘povo’ and the freedom fighters.
All of a sudden the perception people originally had of a gandanga was completely transformed.
A gandanga was now viewed as a black African who was prepared to sacrifice his life in order to free Zimbabwe from colonial rule.
Much to Smith’s dismay, the supposedly hated brutes had become the darlings of the people.
But the Smith machinery would not give up easily.
Thus came the creation of the sadistic Selous Scouts.
This was a unit designed mainly to cause untold atrocities by Rhodesian soldiers who posed as freedom fighters before they committed heinous crimes.
Whites would paint themselves black to hide their identity when these evil deeds were committed.
The gruesome massacre of nuns and priests at St Paul’s Musami at the peak of the liberation struggle is one such sad case.
The masses having mixed with the comrades, as freedom fighters were affectionately known, could see through the plots of the colonial regime.
The more the beleaguered colonial regime tried to paint a very black picture of the freedom fighters, the closer the comrades and povo came together.
To the ‘povo’ freedom fighters were just their bothers, sisters, daughters and sons who did not love their lives less but loved their country more.
Rhodesian propaganda instead presented the comrades as rapists who induced submission from hapless victims at gunpoint.
This fallacy is exposed in a story of a Centenary couple elsewhere in this edition who courted at the height of the liberation war.
The girl fell in love with the section commander of her own volition without coercion.
This should not be surprising as a key section of the code of conduct for comrades forbade them from committing adultery – musaite choupombwe.
Sheilla and Peter duly married after the war in 1981.
Thirty-four years later, they are still together as useful members of society, who have benefitted from the Land Reform Programme.
The story of the Centenary couple should just be seen as a microcosm of the relationships that existed between a number of other couples whose love survived the liberation war.
To this day there are a number of people still bitter about the defeat of the white colonial regime by the freedom fighters.
This explains the existence of films like Flame which portray guerillas as lustful perverts bent on using their guns to force themselves on frightened girls.
And yet freedom fighters have proved their worth when they exchanged their swords with ploughshares.
They have excelled in a variety of fields including, education, journalism, judiciary, health, sport – in fact all facets that make a country tick.
Those who have decided to remain with the uniformed forces have done a sterling job in ensuring that peace prevails in the country.
After all we tend to agree with theorists who argue that the overriding function of a state is the maintenance of law and order – the hallmark of peace.