Fay Chung Exposes Gen. Tongogara.
By Zimbo24news Team.
Josiah Tongogara led ZANLA to success. A military specialist, he was over six foot tall, with the upright and muscular figure of a soldier ac- customed to the rigours of war and the stresses of prolonged periods of living in the bush.
Josiah Tongogara commanded both fear and love. Feared on the one hand by his enemies as an ambitious, ruthless, and implacable fighter, he was loved and respected by his supporters and followers as a faithful and caring leader, ever solicitous of his soldiers’ welfare; as a leader who deserved to be followed; as a leader to whom people entrusted their children and their lives.
Tongogara was able to command respect from both his enemies and his friends. No one could be indifferent to him.
With a distinctive, pockmarked, light brown face, and greeny- brown eyes, his facial expression displayed seriousness and determina- tion. He was not someone you could laugh and joke with. Rather, he was someone who listened with deep concentration and seldom spoke, though when he did speak, he was animated, passionate, and articulate.
He had little time for the frivolous, and was often deep in thought. His mind was constantly concentrated on Zimbabwe: on the meaning of the liberation struggle, on the suffering of the people, and on the treachery of politicians and intellectuals. He believed that he would die through the barrel of a gun – he had lived by the gun and expected to die by the gun. This constantly recurring theme in his conversation showed his preoccupation with death: he was prepared to die for Zimbabwe. He expected others around him to be prepared to do the same.
Tongogara displayed a very profound love for his family. Whenever he visited Dar es Salaam, he would phone his wife and children in Lusaka every evening, even though the outdated telephone system in both Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970s made this quite a feat. His family obviously meant a great deal to him, all the more so when he was constantly separated from them by the demands of war.
Telephone calls from Tanzania to Zambia in those days had to be routed through Britain, and those from Tanzania to Mozambique through Britain and Portugal. This was in the period before satellite transmission. It also meant that telephone calls made by the dispersed Zimbabwean liberation movements could be monitored in both London and Lisbon.
Despite his deep love for his family, he, like many of his senior commanders, demanded the sexual services of some of the young women guerrillas who had joined the liberation struggle in their thousands. Some of these women specially chose to attach themselves to leaders, as “wives” for those fortunate enough to bear children from these temporary unions, or as “girlfriends” for those who did not.
Tongogara and his militarists practised their own code of morality based on traditional feudal attitudes: they opposed both contraception and abortion, but felt free to enjoy sexual favours as the reward for their extraordinary role in the liberation war. They recognised all their children from these unions, and were in the habit of taking these children home to be brought up by their legally married wives. Traditional society recognises the special role and responsibility of the first wife in a polygamous marriage, and many of these devoted first wives were prepared to look after their husband’s offspring from other liaisons.
The guerrilla leaders expected loyalty from these camp “wives”, but they themselves were free to have a woman or two in every camp.
Sometimes, women did not enter into these casual unions willingly, but were forced into them.
I remember two incidents when I was in Pungwe III, a military camp on the banks of the Pungwe River deep in the heart of Mozambique. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of commotion – many angry voices could be heard shout- ing from the women’s barracks situated a hundred metres from my pos- to1.
The next morning I was told by a young commander that Tongogara and his retinue had arrived in the middle of the night and had demanded women to entertain them. Such women were euphemistically called “warm blankets”. The sycophantic camp commander had immediately gone into the women’s barracks and called out the names of several young women for “night duties”.
These women knew what this meant and refused. The commotion was caused by the fight between the camp commander and the young women, whose fierce op- position to being carried off to grace the beds of the commanders was termed “rebellion”. Despite their shouts and screams, they ended up in the beds of the top ZANLA commanders that night.
Another revealing incident occurred when I visited the Pungwe III clinic. Like all clinics and hospitals in the liberation struggle, it was called Parirenyatwa, after the late Dr. Parirenyatwa, one of the earliest leaders to join the liberation struggle.
When I arrived at the clinic, I found nobody there. This was strange as there were always nurses and medical officers at the clinic. I decided to call out to see if they were nearby, and to my surprise the nurses emerged from under the high beds made of bamboo. They told me they had gone into hiding when they heard my footsteps, as they thought I was one of the commanders who had arrived the night before. They were afraid of being forced into sexual servitude.
(*1. “Posto” is a word from Portuguese that had entered the Shona vocabulary of the freedom fighters and referred to the little grass huts occupied by individuals, as opposed to the barracks or dormitories )
These indelicate excesses were accepted by Tongogara’s admirers as the fruits of victory, but criticised by the more thoughtful of the freedom fighters.
The young men in the military camps, incidentally much more numerous than the young women, accepted these excesses in silence: they believed that they could do nothing against Tongogara as long as the war was on because of his indubitable brilliance and courage as a military leader – Tongogara was necessary for military victory. It was not difficult to see that after the military struggle there would be other struggles, and some of these would be against the victorious militarists.
This feudal attitude towards women was one of the reasons the two rebellions in ZANLA, namely the Nhari rebellion and the Vashandi rebellion, both attracted very large numbers of women. While Tongogara and his top commanders were venerated by their followers, they were regarded with revulsion by many women guerrillas. However, some women commanders who rose to the top exercised the same sexual prerogatives as their male counterparts, taking their pick of the thousands of young men who had joined the struggle.
The only camp commander who to my knowledge refused to comply with this systematic abuse of some of the young women who had joined the struggle, many of them for the most idealistic of reasons, was Sheiba Tavarwisa, a top woman commander and one of the first and most respected of women guerrillas. She was a skilled and wise leader, who managed to maintain her integrity while enjoying the absolute trust of Tongogara, despite the fact that she always refused to comply with his demands for women.
Tongogara respected her combination of independence and loyalty.
The only time I saw Sheiba totally distraught was at the death of her husband, Edgar Moyo. Despite his chimurenga name, Edgar Moyo was a Shona. Moyo was a ZIPRA commander who had joined ZIPA, the Zimbabwe People’s Army, consisting of ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas formed directly under the patronage of Presidents Samora Machel and Julius Nyerere in 1975–76. ZIPA was to survive less than a year.
Moyo was a brilliant man who had been trained under the KGB in the Soviet Union. He found himself in the unenviable position of being one of the few ZIPRA commanders trapped within ZANLA after the collapse of ZIPA. He was visibly frightened of Tongogara, and found refuge in Sheiba, one of the most senior women in the liberation struggle.
Their happy marriage was shattered when he died, apparently in crossfire between the Rhodesian forces and ZANLA soldiers. However, Sheiba believed that he had been executed on Tongogara’s orders. Despite this belief, she remained a loyal supporter of Tongogara. A deeply religious woman, she believed that the ancestral spirits would protect their descendants from harm, and that included the removal of unsuitable leaders.
According to traditional beliefs, political leaders could only rule with the support of the ancestral spirits.
Tongogara was surrounded by both admirers and enemies. His admirers called themselves the “veterans”, to distinguish themselves as the oldest group of freedom fighters. The veterans were generally hardened soldiers with very little formal education.
They were suspicious of, and even hostile towards the younger, more educated guerrillas who had joined the liberation struggle from the schools and universities after the mid-1970s. Their suspicions were further justified by the fact that the two major rebellions in ZANLA, that of the Nhari group and of the Vashandi or Workers’ group, had been led by the educated.
Tongogara showed extreme concern for his followers, checking on the details of their housing, bedding, food, and milk for their babies. Whenever he visited a camp, he would make a full inspection, which would include examining the mattresses or more commonly the lack of mattresses for the camp dwellers. He made one of his periodical visits to Pungwe III when my daughter Chipo was just over a year old. He checked out how much powdered milk I had for her. This was one of the very human touches that he commonly cultivated whenever he visited a camp where there were babies. The loyalty of women was a potent political weapon that Tongogara valued and knew how to use. He understood how to win the loyalty of his followers by these little examples of solicitude. His followers trusted him and believed he placed their safety and welfare above his own.
On the other hand, the old-style political leaders regarded Tongogara with some suspicion as he represented the possibility of a “military government” in Zimbabwe after independence, whereas Tongogara himself regarded the old-style nationalists as untrustworthy, corrupt, and liable to betray the military struggle for ephemeral political gains.
The traditional religious leaders also condemned Tongogara and his top commanders for breaking the two inviolable ancestral rules of respect for life and sexual purity. Tongogara himself, while not accept- ing their moral control of his behaviour, was nevertheless seriously irked by their open condemnation of him. On one visit to Pungwe III military camp, he made the traditional leaders stand up one by one in a rally of thousands of camp dwellers, and threatened to imprison them if they continued to criticise him. Despite these threats, they continued to condemn him, on the pretext that the ancestral spirits spoke through them and they could not control what these spirits wished to say.
Tongogara was also criticised by a third group, the Vashandi, who considered him a failure by their Marxist-Leninist criteria. However, the Vashandi movement included many young militants such as Wilfred Mhanda (whose chimurenga name was Dzino Machingura), who admired Tongogara as a new-style leader different from the old-style politicians of the 1960s. This contradictory attitude towards Tongogara later made their defeat inevitable.
In contrast, his many enemies saw him as insatiably ambitious and determined to gain power and become the first president of Zimbabwe. A story is told of his anger against the traditional religious leaders for predicting that the first president of Zimbabwe would be a bald man. Tongogara had a full head of hair. The story was spread by those who believed he harboured the ambition to be the first president of independent Zimbabwe.
How could such differing opinions be held of the same man? Tongogara came to power at a period when the leadership of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle was going through a period of drastic change: the old leadership from the 1950s and 1960s was in danger of losing power to a younger generation of military specialists.
There was clear tension between the old leadership, headed by Herbert Chitepo, and the young militarists, headed by Josiah Tongogara. At the same time, a younger generation of intellectuals and students had joined the liberation struggle after 1973, soon after ZANLA’s first taste of military victory. It was not clear where and how this younger group would fit into the existing political order: would they accept the old political leadership, who included many university graduates, or would they side with Tongogara and his group of brilliant but not highly educated military specialists? Moreover, it was unclear whether this young university group would become significant in its own right in the liberation struggle or whether it would fall in line under the old divisions.
Tongogara entered the liberation struggle as a lowly soldier. He received his military training in the Nanking military academy in China and forever held the Chinese as his mentors in morality as well as in military skills and strategies. It was from the thoughts and practices of Mao Tse Tung that he learnt that the guerrilla must merge with the people. He taught his soldiers that they were never to mistreat the peasantry, popularly known as the povo, Portuguese for the people.
It was probably also from the Chinese that he learnt that it was essential to eliminate his enemies. He saw issues in black and white, and believed that those who opposed or betrayed the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe deserved to be executed, and he did not flinch from playing the role of executioner. He believed he was in a good position to judge those who betrayed the struggle. This Stalinesque aspect of Tongogara’s character revealed itself during the Nhari rebellion and its after- math, which saw the execution of more than a dozen ZANLA soldiers at the hands of the ZANLA high command itself.
Their summary executions cast a dark shadow over Tongogara’s character as well as on his career as a leader.
Tongogara was not a highly educated man, having received only two years of secondary education. However, he had a brilliant mind, which had benefited from his military training. As a military specialist, he was able to deal with military issues in a highly sophisticated and creative way.
Tongogara was an avid reader, and eagerly sought to discuss serious political issues with us university teachers. He was thus very much respected by the many Zimbabweans then teaching or studying at the University of Zambia. We were welcomed into his humble township house where we analysed and discussed possible scenarios for the future of the struggle and the future of Zimbabwe.
He was particularly close to Dzingai Mutumbuka, then a chemistry lecturer at the university and later the head of the ZANU education department and first minister of education after independence. He was also very close to Simbi Mubako, who was a lecturer in the school of law and later minister of home affairs and a high court judge.
Tongogara’s suspicion of the old-style nationalist politicians was shared by the handful of original guerrillas, as well as those who had come from ZIPRA. Tongogara believed that some of the old political leadership were so untrustworthy that they actually worked for the Smith regime while posing as leaders of the liberation struggle.
Some of them were even accused of being in the pay of the American Central Intelligence Agency. This suspicion particularly fell on some of the Zimbabwean academics who had spent many years in the United States. One reason for this suspicion was the continuing failure of the armed struggle when it was directed from Lusaka by non-military specialists. Many guerrillas had seen their comrades die in un-winnable battles, and believed that they too could equally easily be sacrificed for personal or political gain.
Although Tongogara himself had read little or nothing of Marx or Lenin, for some time his imbibed Maoism gave him some appeal to the left-wing students who had latterly chosen to join the liberation struggle. Tongogara never made any pretensions to intellectualism: he saw himself as a soldier rather than as a thinker. After the Nhari rebellion, which included many of the most brilliant, better educated, young guerrilla commanders, Tongogara became as wary of the young ideologues as he was of the old-style politicians.
The followers who obeyed his every command without question were the uneducated old guerrillas, a devoted group of women guerrillas such as Sheiba Tavarwisa, and the child soldiers. These formed the loyalists with whom Tongogara surrounded himself. They gave him their total and unquestioning loyalty.
Tongogara’s indubitable military skills meant that he could adjust his military strategies to suit the various stages of the war, beginning with guerrilla incursions by a dozen dedicated guerrillas, to the stage where he was able to deploy 300 guerrillas at the front, until finally he was able to send in tens of thousands of guerrillas. He moved inexorably and confidently from guerrilla to conventional warfare.
Having had to work with the old-style nationalist politicians, Tongogara himself had become politically adept and understood how to manipulate the elections that were held within ZANU every two years. Through these elections he was able to remove political leaders he did not trust, such as Simpson Mutambanengwe, who was removed in the 1973 elections. Tongogara also did not trust Nathan Shamuyarira, who had left ZANU earlier to form FROLIZI.
Nor did he trust the head of the external wing of ZANU, Herbert Chitepo, or veteran politician Henry Hamadziripi. He was particularly suspicious of Hamadziripi,
who had tried to manoeuvre Meyor Hurimbo into the top leadership position as head of ZANLA in place of Tongogara.
Such was Hurimbo’s loyalty to Tongogara that he exposed this plot, causing an irreconcilable rift between Tongogara and Hamadziripi.
Incidentally, both Hamadziripi and Tongogara belonged to the Karanga tribe, as did Meyor Hurimbo, making the rather over-simplified explanation of all conflicts within ZANU as “tribal” difficult to maintain.
The Karanga formed a substantial part of ZANLA as well as of the Rhodesian army. The fact that “brothers” could be found fighting on both sides of the divide was one of the important factors in the liberation struggle: many Smith soldiers and secret service agents readily crossed over to join the ZANLA forces, and were able to rise to become high ranking officers.
Tongogara’s undisguised hostility against Chitepo eventually led to accusations that he had killed Chitepo, despite the fact that there was no evidence to support this claim.
Chitepo was killed by a car bomb in March 1975. What was evident was that Tongogara had utilised his position as head of the army to surround Chitepo with “guards” who were personally loyal to Tongogara.
These “guards” were not only assigned to protect, but also to spy on Chitepo, and to report on any meetings with and messages to him. It was during this period that the security department of ZANLA, headed by Cletus Chigove, began to play the dual role of providing “protection” while at the same time spying on the person who was being protected. This dual role has continued with the incorporation of the ZANLA security department into the Central Intelligence Organisation after independence.
Chitepo was not slow to realise that he was surrounded by hostile forces in the person of the very comrades who were responsible for guarding him.
Tongogara’s suspicions against Chitepo stemmed from Chitepo’s handling of the trial of the Nhari rebels. As was earlier noted, Tongogara felt that Chitepo had been too lenient on the rebels, given that they had disrupted the liberation struggle and had killed some 70 guerrillas who had refused to join their rebellion. He therefore came to the conclusion that Chitepo was sympathetic towards the rebels, a suspicion fuelled by the fact that Chitepo belonged to the same ethnic group, the Manyika, as did some of the other supporters of the rebels, namely Simpson Mutambanengwe and Noel Mukono.
Tongogara’s reaction was to execute by firing squad the rebels who had been left in his custody, a decision that was to have far-reaching effects within ZANLA and ZANU, and to affect the outcome of the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe. In the final analysis, it was the execution of the Nhari rebels that made it impossible for the militarists to again win the upper hand in future power struggles.
When Tongogara attempted to quell opposition first by the Vashandi group led by Wilfred Mhanda and Sam Geza and later by a second group of old- style politicians led by Henry Hamadziripi and Rugare Gumbo, he was unable to destroy these two latter groups as effectively as he had done the Nhari group. The power he had given himself as executioner was effectively removed by the new political leaders of ZANU, Robert Mugabe and Simon Muzenda, who were very conscious of the tragic fate of the Nhari group.
As a result, as soon as the conflicts with Tongogara came to a head, Mugabe and Muzenda hastily arranged for intervention by the Mozambican authorities, who held these two opposition groups in detention until after independence was agreed upon. Had Tongogara’s faction not executed their critics, they could have emerged from the war as a more powerful and coherent group.
They used force and executions to impose their views, regarding their political opponents as “sell-outs” and “traitors”. Perceived as killers by outsiders as well as by their opponents within ZANU and ZANLA, they became neuralised after independence.
Tongogara’s veterans were resurrected finally in the war veterans’ revolt of 1997, and they played a pivotal role in the land resettlement programme of 2000-02. Because they were of peasant stock, the issue of land resonated more forcefully with them.
TONGOGARA ON TRIAL FOR MURDER.
Soon after the arrests at Chitepo’s funeral in March 1975, Josiah Tongogara, together with a large number of military commanders, successfully managed to escape from their base at the ZANU farm outside Lusaka to Mozambique, where they received a warm welcome from their fellow freedom fighter, Samora Machel, soon to become president of Mozambique.
ZANLA had worked closely with FRELIMO in the military liberation of Mozambique. Tongogara had formed a close personal relationship with Machel. Informed by the Zambian government that Tongogara and his group were wanted back in Zambia on charges of having murdered Chitepo, Machel insisted on a personal interview with Tongogara. Machel asked Tongogara if he had killed Chitepo.
Tongogara declared that he was entirely innocent of the murder of Chitepo. Machel then made the decision that if Tongogara was innocent, he should be prepared to prove his innocence in a Zambian court. Tongogara was thus escorted back to the Zambian authorities.
While talks about talks between Smith and the nationalists, overseen by the Frontline presidents, continued, Tongogara and members of the external leadership of ZANU languished in jail. An international commission had been formed by the Zambian government to hear of the internecine conflicts within ZANU that had allegedly led to the death of Herbert Chitepo. It was clear that the Zambian government, for unknown reasons, was not prepared to put Tongogara and his team on trial for the murder of the Nhari group, although there were large numbers of witnesses to these killings as well as ample evidence to convict the killers.
On the other hand, the Zambian government was de- termined to find Tongogara guilty of the murder of Chitepo, a crime for which there were no witnesses and no evidence. The international commission did not have the normal checks and balances of a judicial trial, as the accused could not be defended by lawyers, yet it had the power to declare persons and organisations guilty of crimes, including the crime of murder.
As I was now responsible for the ad hoc ZANU information and media department, I decided it was essential for me to know the truth. While I personally believed that Tongogara had not killed either Chitepo or the Nhari group, I realised that this was merely a personal opinion. It was necessary to find out the truth before publishing anything on these allegations. I therefore began to interview many of the guerrillas who had been at Chifombo at the time of the recapture of the camp by Tongogara.
I was perturbed to hear from every one of these witnesses that Tongogara and the high command had indeed executed the Nhari group. John Mataure had also been executed. Some of these executions had taken place publicly, witnessed even by children. Edgar Madekurozwa, a medical technician at the Lusaka Teaching Hospital suspected of having harboured the Nhari group in his house, was killed in front of children, for example.
From this incontrovertible evidence, it was clear that Tongogara and the high command had indeed killed all those suspected of having been involved in the Nhari rebellion. So convinced were Tongogara and the high command that this was the right step, the executions were carried out and justified publicly.
The killing of the Nhari group was a disastrous decision. The success that the military had experienced on the battlefield had already given them the belief that they had the right to execute those who had “betrayed” Zimbabwe. Yet some of those who had been executed by the high command had clearly not been at the front where the Nhari group had perpetrated its own killings, although they may have been sympathetic to the Nhari group. A number of the executed, like Godfrey Guvara, had worked at the Lusaka office of ZANU.
I knew Godfrey quite well, as I sometimes helped with the printing of the Zimbabwean university students’ magazine, Chindunduma.1 Godfrey delighted in annoying people in a rather childish and nasty manner. On one occasion when I was trying to wash the black ink from the printing machine from my hands, he came behind me and said, “We will never accept you even if you paint your hands black.” On another occasion when I was speaking Shona to one of the women visiting freedom fighters at the office, he made the remark, “Your Shona is so poor, that if I were you I would shut up.” These nasty, childish, and racist remarks were typical of Godfrey, a young man who had a chip on his shoulder because he had failed his first year at university.
It is quite likely that he was delighted at the uprising led by Nhari, as any defiance of authority pleased him. He could be heard jeering at military leaders like Tongogara who had never completed high school. However, it was quite a shock to me that someone as immature and as inconsequential as Godfrey should have been considered dangerous enough to merit execution.
It was clear to me that the military high command’s responsibility for the death of the Nhari group should not be allowed to cloud and confuse the need to continue the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe. The ill-advised rebellion by young men and women, some of them fired with the best of ideals, had ended in their tragic deaths. In order to end this sad chapter of ZANU’s history it was necessary that the Zambian government be forced to hold a properly constituted trial, based on real evidence, rather than on hearsay, suspicion, and innuendo.
Confessions were being extorted by extreme torture, and such evidence was necessarily suspect. Some of us therefore decided to set about the task of forcing a properly constituted judicial trial.
(*1.“Chindunduma” was the name of a revolutionary victory in the first Chimurenga or first liberation struggle in Zimbabwe in the 1890s.)
We were determined to ensure that Tongogara’s trial would be as fair as possible, and this meant legal representation. While I was still in Lusaka, some ZANU members headed by Simbi Mubako, Ignatius Chigwendere, Dzingai Mutumbuka, and Rex Chiwara were trying to collect funds for a lawyer.
Simbi Mubako was then teaching at the University of Southampton, Ignatius Chigwendere was in charge of race relations in the Catholic Institute for International Relations, while Dzingai Mutumbuka was working full time with Rex Chiwara at the ZANU London office, after being forced to flee Zambia.
When I arrived in London in February 1976, we decided to form a small committee consisting of both ZANU members and some of those outside ZANU who supported the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe.
The aim was to carry out a concerted campaign for the free and fair trial of the ZANU accused imprisoned in Zambia. The well-known African history specialist, Basil Davidson, and the Roman Catholic papal representative in Britain, Mgr. Bruce Kent, agreed to support the committee as patrons, thus giving the committee international legitimacy. The committee was named the Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee.
The committee included ZANU members such as Simbi Mubako, Dzingai Mutumbuka, Ignatius Chigwendere, and myself. Many well-known people agreed to serve on this committee. The chairman was former Labour councillor, Kees Maxey, an ardent supporter of the Zimbabwe liberation struggle. Judith Todd, a well-known Zimbabwean political activist who was linked to ZAPU rather than ZANU, agreed to work with us for the sake of Zimbabwe.
She was an indefatigable treasurer for our fundraising efforts. Two people connected with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the Rev. Michael Scott, an Anglican priest who had worked in Soweto, and Robert Molteno, a well known South African academic who had taught with us at the University of Zambia and was now a publisher in London, also joined us.
Lionel Cliffe, a specialist in African politics and economics, who had also taught with us at the University of Zambia, was another very active member. Peter Lowenstein, who later worked for the BBC, and his wife Susan, helped on a day-to-day basis. Later Didymus Mutasa, then studying in Birmingham, joined the committee: we managed to convince him that the arrest and detention of more than 1,000 full-time
ZANU workers and guerrillas in Zambia should not be analysed in terms of tribal conflict between Karanga and Manyika, an explanation that was rampant at the time.
It was essential that the liberation struggle should be supported, despite the crimes and mistakes committed by some of its participants. Mutasa’s agreement to support the committee was a triumph against tribalism, as he was one of the first Manyika to reject the tribal explanation of the conflict between Tongogara and the Nhari group.
Amnesty International played a very important role in highlighting the torture of the Zimbabwean prisoners and in emphasising the political nature of their trials. It gave immense publicity to the illegal nature of their detention and trial, and so helped to win international opinion in support of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe.
Our first task was to raise money and find a lawyer of international stature to undertake the defence of Tongogara against the charge of murdering Chitepo. We had managed to raise £30,000, quite a feat for us, but actually insufficient to pay for a top-class lawyer. Moreover, it was difficult to find a lawyer prepared to take on the responsibility, for it was clear that the trial was a highly political one, with the Zambian government accusing the head of a guerrilla army of having murdered the leader of that same movement.
Most lawyers were not prepared to take on such a politically sensitive issue, particularly as it was now well known that Tongogara had led a military-style execution squad that had killed over a dozen of the Nhari rebel group. If Tongogara was able to execute his own followers, it would not be unthinkable for him to have murdered his leader.
Given this situation, we were fortunate enough to find a brilliant lawyer to take on the case, John Platts Mills, a well known socialist. The money we had collected would hardly cover the cost of his travels to and from Zambia, but because he saw that the case involved the liberation of a country, he was prepared to take it on. So it was that John Platts Mills played a critical role in the liberation of Zimbabwe.
It was Platts Mills, a highly experienced politically oriented lawyer, who advised us on the need to lobby for more political support not only in Britain, but from the Commonwealth as a whole. He himself was prepared to use his contacts within the Commonwealth to support us. We were not slow to take his advice, and we began to lobby all political parties in Britain.
We managed to present our case to a number
of members of the Conservative Party, which was then in opposition. This stood us in good stead, as the Conservatives were to win the elections a few years later and, under Margaret Thatcher, to grant independence to Zimbabwe in 1980. Our painstaking work in explaining the details of the liberation struggle contributed importantly to the support we were to receive from within the Conservative Party.
We met with the Labour Party, whose members listened sympathetically, but we received little real support from them. The Labour Party under Harold Wilson had continually failed to support the liberation movements, despite the expectation that as socialists they should have been more sympathetic towards the liberation struggle than the Conservatives.
Instead, Harold Wilson had given the green light to Ian Smith to go ahead with his illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence by assuring Smith that he would never use military force against the Rhodesians. Wilson’s rationale, that the British should stand together with their “kith and kin”, the white Rhodesian settlers and colonialists, made it impossible for them to take the simple and logical steps that would have ended Smith’s illegal regime. We attempted to lobby the Communist Party of Great Britain, but they would have nothing at all to do with us.
As they were dedicated to following the policies laid down by the Soviet Union, they spurned ZANU. We approached Archbishop Trevor Huddlestone, so well known for his support of the anti- apartheid struggle, but he refused to assist in any way as he had heard of the killings within ZANLA.
Platts Mills was able to use his Commonwealth links to reach President Nyerere.
The Commonwealth Secretariat, headed by Sunny Shridath Ramphal, was to play a key role in the resolution of the Zimbabwean crisis, and it was Platts Mills’s political acumen and experience that were instrumental in getting these players on our side. He knew many of these top leaders on a personal basis, and he made it his responsibility to give them the fullest information about what was happening with the liberation struggle and Tongogara’s impending judicial trial.
The Frontline presidents, led by Nyerere and Machel, also played extremely critical and sensitive roles in bringing about the liberation of Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee was able to persuade the international community that the Zambian special commission set up to investigate the murder of Chitepo could not be accepted
as a judicial trial, as the accused were unable to receive proper legal support.
It was essential to have a properly constituted trial following appropriate judicial processes. Evidence elicited through torture could not be accepted. Nor could people who had not given evidence be condemned without appearing in court. Eventually, an open trial was agreed upon. There, Platts Mills’s knowledge of police and court procedure enabled him to demonstrate the occasions when the Zimbabwean prisoners were taken out of prison for interrogation under torture. This rendered the evidence elicited from torture untenable in court.
Thus he demonstrated that there was not a shred of evidence to convict Tongogara and his followers of the murder of Chitepo. Tongogara and the high command were finally released in September 1976. They had spent 18 months in prison, where, in addition to the poor living conditions and sanitation, they had been subjected to continual beatings and torture.
Their release was very much due to the brilliant performance of John Platts Mills, whose defence of Tongogara was to allow the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe to resume. Tongogara and the high command were never tried for the deaths of the Nhari group or of Mataure.
DEATH OF TONGOGARA
Tongogara died in a car crash in Mozambique in December 1979, only four months before the achievement of independence by Zimbabwe. The Land Cruiser in which he was travelling overturned while trying to overtake a lorry that was towing a large trailer. As Tongogara’s car tried to overtake, the lorry swung to the left, but the attached trailer swung to the right, killing Tongogara instantly. He was sitting on the left-hand front seat beside the driver.
The Land Cruiser overturned, but no other passenger was seriously injured. One of the passengers was Oppah Muchinguri, a member of the general staff in charge of funds for the battlefront. A close confidante and follower of Tongogara, she believed his death to be a total but bizarre accident. The followers of traditional religion believed that he was taken away by the ancestral spirits because he had continually transgressed against their rules.
By Zimbo24news Team.
Josiah Tongogara led ZANLA to success. A military specialist, he was over six foot tall, with the upright and muscular figure of a soldier ac- customed to the rigours of war and the stresses of prolonged periods of living in the bush.
Josiah Tongogara commanded both fear and love. Feared on the one hand by his enemies as an ambitious, ruthless, and implacable fighter, he was loved and respected by his supporters and followers as a faithful and caring leader, ever solicitous of his soldiers’ welfare; as a leader who deserved to be followed; as a leader to whom people entrusted their children and their lives.
Tongogara was able to command respect from both his enemies and his friends. No one could be indifferent to him.
With a distinctive, pockmarked, light brown face, and greeny- brown eyes, his facial expression displayed seriousness and determina- tion. He was not someone you could laugh and joke with. Rather, he was someone who listened with deep concentration and seldom spoke, though when he did speak, he was animated, passionate, and articulate.
He had little time for the frivolous, and was often deep in thought. His mind was constantly concentrated on Zimbabwe: on the meaning of the liberation struggle, on the suffering of the people, and on the treachery of politicians and intellectuals. He believed that he would die through the barrel of a gun – he had lived by the gun and expected to die by the gun. This constantly recurring theme in his conversation showed his preoccupation with death: he was prepared to die for Zimbabwe. He expected others around him to be prepared to do the same.
Tongogara displayed a very profound love for his family. Whenever he visited Dar es Salaam, he would phone his wife and children in Lusaka every evening, even though the outdated telephone system in both Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970s made this quite a feat. His family obviously meant a great deal to him, all the more so when he was constantly separated from them by the demands of war.
Telephone calls from Tanzania to Zambia in those days had to be routed through Britain, and those from Tanzania to Mozambique through Britain and Portugal. This was in the period before satellite transmission. It also meant that telephone calls made by the dispersed Zimbabwean liberation movements could be monitored in both London and Lisbon.
Despite his deep love for his family, he, like many of his senior commanders, demanded the sexual services of some of the young women guerrillas who had joined the liberation struggle in their thousands. Some of these women specially chose to attach themselves to leaders, as “wives” for those fortunate enough to bear children from these temporary unions, or as “girlfriends” for those who did not.
Tongogara and his militarists practised their own code of morality based on traditional feudal attitudes: they opposed both contraception and abortion, but felt free to enjoy sexual favours as the reward for their extraordinary role in the liberation war. They recognised all their children from these unions, and were in the habit of taking these children home to be brought up by their legally married wives. Traditional society recognises the special role and responsibility of the first wife in a polygamous marriage, and many of these devoted first wives were prepared to look after their husband’s offspring from other liaisons.
The guerrilla leaders expected loyalty from these camp “wives”, but they themselves were free to have a woman or two in every camp.
Sometimes, women did not enter into these casual unions willingly, but were forced into them.
I remember two incidents when I was in Pungwe III, a military camp on the banks of the Pungwe River deep in the heart of Mozambique. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of commotion – many angry voices could be heard shout- ing from the women’s barracks situated a hundred metres from my pos- to1.
The next morning I was told by a young commander that Tongogara and his retinue had arrived in the middle of the night and had demanded women to entertain them. Such women were euphemistically called “warm blankets”. The sycophantic camp commander had immediately gone into the women’s barracks and called out the names of several young women for “night duties”.
These women knew what this meant and refused. The commotion was caused by the fight between the camp commander and the young women, whose fierce op- position to being carried off to grace the beds of the commanders was termed “rebellion”. Despite their shouts and screams, they ended up in the beds of the top ZANLA commanders that night.
Another revealing incident occurred when I visited the Pungwe III clinic. Like all clinics and hospitals in the liberation struggle, it was called Parirenyatwa, after the late Dr. Parirenyatwa, one of the earliest leaders to join the liberation struggle.
When I arrived at the clinic, I found nobody there. This was strange as there were always nurses and medical officers at the clinic. I decided to call out to see if they were nearby, and to my surprise the nurses emerged from under the high beds made of bamboo. They told me they had gone into hiding when they heard my footsteps, as they thought I was one of the commanders who had arrived the night before. They were afraid of being forced into sexual servitude.
(*1. “Posto” is a word from Portuguese that had entered the Shona vocabulary of the freedom fighters and referred to the little grass huts occupied by individuals, as opposed to the barracks or dormitories )
These indelicate excesses were accepted by Tongogara’s admirers as the fruits of victory, but criticised by the more thoughtful of the freedom fighters.
The young men in the military camps, incidentally much more numerous than the young women, accepted these excesses in silence: they believed that they could do nothing against Tongogara as long as the war was on because of his indubitable brilliance and courage as a military leader – Tongogara was necessary for military victory. It was not difficult to see that after the military struggle there would be other struggles, and some of these would be against the victorious militarists.
This feudal attitude towards women was one of the reasons the two rebellions in ZANLA, namely the Nhari rebellion and the Vashandi rebellion, both attracted very large numbers of women. While Tongogara and his top commanders were venerated by their followers, they were regarded with revulsion by many women guerrillas. However, some women commanders who rose to the top exercised the same sexual prerogatives as their male counterparts, taking their pick of the thousands of young men who had joined the struggle.
The only camp commander who to my knowledge refused to comply with this systematic abuse of some of the young women who had joined the struggle, many of them for the most idealistic of reasons, was Sheiba Tavarwisa, a top woman commander and one of the first and most respected of women guerrillas. She was a skilled and wise leader, who managed to maintain her integrity while enjoying the absolute trust of Tongogara, despite the fact that she always refused to comply with his demands for women.
Tongogara respected her combination of independence and loyalty.
The only time I saw Sheiba totally distraught was at the death of her husband, Edgar Moyo. Despite his chimurenga name, Edgar Moyo was a Shona. Moyo was a ZIPRA commander who had joined ZIPA, the Zimbabwe People’s Army, consisting of ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas formed directly under the patronage of Presidents Samora Machel and Julius Nyerere in 1975–76. ZIPA was to survive less than a year.
Moyo was a brilliant man who had been trained under the KGB in the Soviet Union. He found himself in the unenviable position of being one of the few ZIPRA commanders trapped within ZANLA after the collapse of ZIPA. He was visibly frightened of Tongogara, and found refuge in Sheiba, one of the most senior women in the liberation struggle.
Their happy marriage was shattered when he died, apparently in crossfire between the Rhodesian forces and ZANLA soldiers. However, Sheiba believed that he had been executed on Tongogara’s orders. Despite this belief, she remained a loyal supporter of Tongogara. A deeply religious woman, she believed that the ancestral spirits would protect their descendants from harm, and that included the removal of unsuitable leaders.
According to traditional beliefs, political leaders could only rule with the support of the ancestral spirits.
Tongogara was surrounded by both admirers and enemies. His admirers called themselves the “veterans”, to distinguish themselves as the oldest group of freedom fighters. The veterans were generally hardened soldiers with very little formal education.
They were suspicious of, and even hostile towards the younger, more educated guerrillas who had joined the liberation struggle from the schools and universities after the mid-1970s. Their suspicions were further justified by the fact that the two major rebellions in ZANLA, that of the Nhari group and of the Vashandi or Workers’ group, had been led by the educated.
Tongogara showed extreme concern for his followers, checking on the details of their housing, bedding, food, and milk for their babies. Whenever he visited a camp, he would make a full inspection, which would include examining the mattresses or more commonly the lack of mattresses for the camp dwellers. He made one of his periodical visits to Pungwe III when my daughter Chipo was just over a year old. He checked out how much powdered milk I had for her. This was one of the very human touches that he commonly cultivated whenever he visited a camp where there were babies. The loyalty of women was a potent political weapon that Tongogara valued and knew how to use. He understood how to win the loyalty of his followers by these little examples of solicitude. His followers trusted him and believed he placed their safety and welfare above his own.
On the other hand, the old-style political leaders regarded Tongogara with some suspicion as he represented the possibility of a “military government” in Zimbabwe after independence, whereas Tongogara himself regarded the old-style nationalists as untrustworthy, corrupt, and liable to betray the military struggle for ephemeral political gains.
The traditional religious leaders also condemned Tongogara and his top commanders for breaking the two inviolable ancestral rules of respect for life and sexual purity. Tongogara himself, while not accept- ing their moral control of his behaviour, was nevertheless seriously irked by their open condemnation of him. On one visit to Pungwe III military camp, he made the traditional leaders stand up one by one in a rally of thousands of camp dwellers, and threatened to imprison them if they continued to criticise him. Despite these threats, they continued to condemn him, on the pretext that the ancestral spirits spoke through them and they could not control what these spirits wished to say.
Tongogara was also criticised by a third group, the Vashandi, who considered him a failure by their Marxist-Leninist criteria. However, the Vashandi movement included many young militants such as Wilfred Mhanda (whose chimurenga name was Dzino Machingura), who admired Tongogara as a new-style leader different from the old-style politicians of the 1960s. This contradictory attitude towards Tongogara later made their defeat inevitable.
In contrast, his many enemies saw him as insatiably ambitious and determined to gain power and become the first president of Zimbabwe. A story is told of his anger against the traditional religious leaders for predicting that the first president of Zimbabwe would be a bald man. Tongogara had a full head of hair. The story was spread by those who believed he harboured the ambition to be the first president of independent Zimbabwe.
How could such differing opinions be held of the same man? Tongogara came to power at a period when the leadership of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle was going through a period of drastic change: the old leadership from the 1950s and 1960s was in danger of losing power to a younger generation of military specialists.
There was clear tension between the old leadership, headed by Herbert Chitepo, and the young militarists, headed by Josiah Tongogara. At the same time, a younger generation of intellectuals and students had joined the liberation struggle after 1973, soon after ZANLA’s first taste of military victory. It was not clear where and how this younger group would fit into the existing political order: would they accept the old political leadership, who included many university graduates, or would they side with Tongogara and his group of brilliant but not highly educated military specialists? Moreover, it was unclear whether this young university group would become significant in its own right in the liberation struggle or whether it would fall in line under the old divisions.
Tongogara entered the liberation struggle as a lowly soldier. He received his military training in the Nanking military academy in China and forever held the Chinese as his mentors in morality as well as in military skills and strategies. It was from the thoughts and practices of Mao Tse Tung that he learnt that the guerrilla must merge with the people. He taught his soldiers that they were never to mistreat the peasantry, popularly known as the povo, Portuguese for the people.
It was probably also from the Chinese that he learnt that it was essential to eliminate his enemies. He saw issues in black and white, and believed that those who opposed or betrayed the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe deserved to be executed, and he did not flinch from playing the role of executioner. He believed he was in a good position to judge those who betrayed the struggle. This Stalinesque aspect of Tongogara’s character revealed itself during the Nhari rebellion and its after- math, which saw the execution of more than a dozen ZANLA soldiers at the hands of the ZANLA high command itself.
Their summary executions cast a dark shadow over Tongogara’s character as well as on his career as a leader.
Tongogara was not a highly educated man, having received only two years of secondary education. However, he had a brilliant mind, which had benefited from his military training. As a military specialist, he was able to deal with military issues in a highly sophisticated and creative way.
Tongogara was an avid reader, and eagerly sought to discuss serious political issues with us university teachers. He was thus very much respected by the many Zimbabweans then teaching or studying at the University of Zambia. We were welcomed into his humble township house where we analysed and discussed possible scenarios for the future of the struggle and the future of Zimbabwe.
He was particularly close to Dzingai Mutumbuka, then a chemistry lecturer at the university and later the head of the ZANU education department and first minister of education after independence. He was also very close to Simbi Mubako, who was a lecturer in the school of law and later minister of home affairs and a high court judge.
Tongogara’s suspicion of the old-style nationalist politicians was shared by the handful of original guerrillas, as well as those who had come from ZIPRA. Tongogara believed that some of the old political leadership were so untrustworthy that they actually worked for the Smith regime while posing as leaders of the liberation struggle.
Some of them were even accused of being in the pay of the American Central Intelligence Agency. This suspicion particularly fell on some of the Zimbabwean academics who had spent many years in the United States. One reason for this suspicion was the continuing failure of the armed struggle when it was directed from Lusaka by non-military specialists. Many guerrillas had seen their comrades die in un-winnable battles, and believed that they too could equally easily be sacrificed for personal or political gain.
Although Tongogara himself had read little or nothing of Marx or Lenin, for some time his imbibed Maoism gave him some appeal to the left-wing students who had latterly chosen to join the liberation struggle. Tongogara never made any pretensions to intellectualism: he saw himself as a soldier rather than as a thinker. After the Nhari rebellion, which included many of the most brilliant, better educated, young guerrilla commanders, Tongogara became as wary of the young ideologues as he was of the old-style politicians.
The followers who obeyed his every command without question were the uneducated old guerrillas, a devoted group of women guerrillas such as Sheiba Tavarwisa, and the child soldiers. These formed the loyalists with whom Tongogara surrounded himself. They gave him their total and unquestioning loyalty.
Tongogara’s indubitable military skills meant that he could adjust his military strategies to suit the various stages of the war, beginning with guerrilla incursions by a dozen dedicated guerrillas, to the stage where he was able to deploy 300 guerrillas at the front, until finally he was able to send in tens of thousands of guerrillas. He moved inexorably and confidently from guerrilla to conventional warfare.
Having had to work with the old-style nationalist politicians, Tongogara himself had become politically adept and understood how to manipulate the elections that were held within ZANU every two years. Through these elections he was able to remove political leaders he did not trust, such as Simpson Mutambanengwe, who was removed in the 1973 elections. Tongogara also did not trust Nathan Shamuyarira, who had left ZANU earlier to form FROLIZI.
Nor did he trust the head of the external wing of ZANU, Herbert Chitepo, or veteran politician Henry Hamadziripi. He was particularly suspicious of Hamadziripi,
who had tried to manoeuvre Meyor Hurimbo into the top leadership position as head of ZANLA in place of Tongogara.
Such was Hurimbo’s loyalty to Tongogara that he exposed this plot, causing an irreconcilable rift between Tongogara and Hamadziripi.
Incidentally, both Hamadziripi and Tongogara belonged to the Karanga tribe, as did Meyor Hurimbo, making the rather over-simplified explanation of all conflicts within ZANU as “tribal” difficult to maintain.
The Karanga formed a substantial part of ZANLA as well as of the Rhodesian army. The fact that “brothers” could be found fighting on both sides of the divide was one of the important factors in the liberation struggle: many Smith soldiers and secret service agents readily crossed over to join the ZANLA forces, and were able to rise to become high ranking officers.
Tongogara’s undisguised hostility against Chitepo eventually led to accusations that he had killed Chitepo, despite the fact that there was no evidence to support this claim.
Chitepo was killed by a car bomb in March 1975. What was evident was that Tongogara had utilised his position as head of the army to surround Chitepo with “guards” who were personally loyal to Tongogara.
These “guards” were not only assigned to protect, but also to spy on Chitepo, and to report on any meetings with and messages to him. It was during this period that the security department of ZANLA, headed by Cletus Chigove, began to play the dual role of providing “protection” while at the same time spying on the person who was being protected. This dual role has continued with the incorporation of the ZANLA security department into the Central Intelligence Organisation after independence.
Chitepo was not slow to realise that he was surrounded by hostile forces in the person of the very comrades who were responsible for guarding him.
Tongogara’s suspicions against Chitepo stemmed from Chitepo’s handling of the trial of the Nhari rebels. As was earlier noted, Tongogara felt that Chitepo had been too lenient on the rebels, given that they had disrupted the liberation struggle and had killed some 70 guerrillas who had refused to join their rebellion. He therefore came to the conclusion that Chitepo was sympathetic towards the rebels, a suspicion fuelled by the fact that Chitepo belonged to the same ethnic group, the Manyika, as did some of the other supporters of the rebels, namely Simpson Mutambanengwe and Noel Mukono.
Tongogara’s reaction was to execute by firing squad the rebels who had been left in his custody, a decision that was to have far-reaching effects within ZANLA and ZANU, and to affect the outcome of the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe. In the final analysis, it was the execution of the Nhari rebels that made it impossible for the militarists to again win the upper hand in future power struggles.
When Tongogara attempted to quell opposition first by the Vashandi group led by Wilfred Mhanda and Sam Geza and later by a second group of old- style politicians led by Henry Hamadziripi and Rugare Gumbo, he was unable to destroy these two latter groups as effectively as he had done the Nhari group. The power he had given himself as executioner was effectively removed by the new political leaders of ZANU, Robert Mugabe and Simon Muzenda, who were very conscious of the tragic fate of the Nhari group.
As a result, as soon as the conflicts with Tongogara came to a head, Mugabe and Muzenda hastily arranged for intervention by the Mozambican authorities, who held these two opposition groups in detention until after independence was agreed upon. Had Tongogara’s faction not executed their critics, they could have emerged from the war as a more powerful and coherent group.
They used force and executions to impose their views, regarding their political opponents as “sell-outs” and “traitors”. Perceived as killers by outsiders as well as by their opponents within ZANU and ZANLA, they became neuralised after independence.
Tongogara’s veterans were resurrected finally in the war veterans’ revolt of 1997, and they played a pivotal role in the land resettlement programme of 2000-02. Because they were of peasant stock, the issue of land resonated more forcefully with them.
TONGOGARA ON TRIAL FOR MURDER.
Soon after the arrests at Chitepo’s funeral in March 1975, Josiah Tongogara, together with a large number of military commanders, successfully managed to escape from their base at the ZANU farm outside Lusaka to Mozambique, where they received a warm welcome from their fellow freedom fighter, Samora Machel, soon to become president of Mozambique.
ZANLA had worked closely with FRELIMO in the military liberation of Mozambique. Tongogara had formed a close personal relationship with Machel. Informed by the Zambian government that Tongogara and his group were wanted back in Zambia on charges of having murdered Chitepo, Machel insisted on a personal interview with Tongogara. Machel asked Tongogara if he had killed Chitepo.
Tongogara declared that he was entirely innocent of the murder of Chitepo. Machel then made the decision that if Tongogara was innocent, he should be prepared to prove his innocence in a Zambian court. Tongogara was thus escorted back to the Zambian authorities.
While talks about talks between Smith and the nationalists, overseen by the Frontline presidents, continued, Tongogara and members of the external leadership of ZANU languished in jail. An international commission had been formed by the Zambian government to hear of the internecine conflicts within ZANU that had allegedly led to the death of Herbert Chitepo. It was clear that the Zambian government, for unknown reasons, was not prepared to put Tongogara and his team on trial for the murder of the Nhari group, although there were large numbers of witnesses to these killings as well as ample evidence to convict the killers.
On the other hand, the Zambian government was de- termined to find Tongogara guilty of the murder of Chitepo, a crime for which there were no witnesses and no evidence. The international commission did not have the normal checks and balances of a judicial trial, as the accused could not be defended by lawyers, yet it had the power to declare persons and organisations guilty of crimes, including the crime of murder.
As I was now responsible for the ad hoc ZANU information and media department, I decided it was essential for me to know the truth. While I personally believed that Tongogara had not killed either Chitepo or the Nhari group, I realised that this was merely a personal opinion. It was necessary to find out the truth before publishing anything on these allegations. I therefore began to interview many of the guerrillas who had been at Chifombo at the time of the recapture of the camp by Tongogara.
I was perturbed to hear from every one of these witnesses that Tongogara and the high command had indeed executed the Nhari group. John Mataure had also been executed. Some of these executions had taken place publicly, witnessed even by children. Edgar Madekurozwa, a medical technician at the Lusaka Teaching Hospital suspected of having harboured the Nhari group in his house, was killed in front of children, for example.
From this incontrovertible evidence, it was clear that Tongogara and the high command had indeed killed all those suspected of having been involved in the Nhari rebellion. So convinced were Tongogara and the high command that this was the right step, the executions were carried out and justified publicly.
The killing of the Nhari group was a disastrous decision. The success that the military had experienced on the battlefield had already given them the belief that they had the right to execute those who had “betrayed” Zimbabwe. Yet some of those who had been executed by the high command had clearly not been at the front where the Nhari group had perpetrated its own killings, although they may have been sympathetic to the Nhari group. A number of the executed, like Godfrey Guvara, had worked at the Lusaka office of ZANU.
I knew Godfrey quite well, as I sometimes helped with the printing of the Zimbabwean university students’ magazine, Chindunduma.1 Godfrey delighted in annoying people in a rather childish and nasty manner. On one occasion when I was trying to wash the black ink from the printing machine from my hands, he came behind me and said, “We will never accept you even if you paint your hands black.” On another occasion when I was speaking Shona to one of the women visiting freedom fighters at the office, he made the remark, “Your Shona is so poor, that if I were you I would shut up.” These nasty, childish, and racist remarks were typical of Godfrey, a young man who had a chip on his shoulder because he had failed his first year at university.
It is quite likely that he was delighted at the uprising led by Nhari, as any defiance of authority pleased him. He could be heard jeering at military leaders like Tongogara who had never completed high school. However, it was quite a shock to me that someone as immature and as inconsequential as Godfrey should have been considered dangerous enough to merit execution.
It was clear to me that the military high command’s responsibility for the death of the Nhari group should not be allowed to cloud and confuse the need to continue the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe. The ill-advised rebellion by young men and women, some of them fired with the best of ideals, had ended in their tragic deaths. In order to end this sad chapter of ZANU’s history it was necessary that the Zambian government be forced to hold a properly constituted trial, based on real evidence, rather than on hearsay, suspicion, and innuendo.
Confessions were being extorted by extreme torture, and such evidence was necessarily suspect. Some of us therefore decided to set about the task of forcing a properly constituted judicial trial.
(*1.“Chindunduma” was the name of a revolutionary victory in the first Chimurenga or first liberation struggle in Zimbabwe in the 1890s.)
We were determined to ensure that Tongogara’s trial would be as fair as possible, and this meant legal representation. While I was still in Lusaka, some ZANU members headed by Simbi Mubako, Ignatius Chigwendere, Dzingai Mutumbuka, and Rex Chiwara were trying to collect funds for a lawyer.
Simbi Mubako was then teaching at the University of Southampton, Ignatius Chigwendere was in charge of race relations in the Catholic Institute for International Relations, while Dzingai Mutumbuka was working full time with Rex Chiwara at the ZANU London office, after being forced to flee Zambia.
When I arrived in London in February 1976, we decided to form a small committee consisting of both ZANU members and some of those outside ZANU who supported the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe.
The aim was to carry out a concerted campaign for the free and fair trial of the ZANU accused imprisoned in Zambia. The well-known African history specialist, Basil Davidson, and the Roman Catholic papal representative in Britain, Mgr. Bruce Kent, agreed to support the committee as patrons, thus giving the committee international legitimacy. The committee was named the Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee.
The committee included ZANU members such as Simbi Mubako, Dzingai Mutumbuka, Ignatius Chigwendere, and myself. Many well-known people agreed to serve on this committee. The chairman was former Labour councillor, Kees Maxey, an ardent supporter of the Zimbabwe liberation struggle. Judith Todd, a well-known Zimbabwean political activist who was linked to ZAPU rather than ZANU, agreed to work with us for the sake of Zimbabwe.
She was an indefatigable treasurer for our fundraising efforts. Two people connected with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the Rev. Michael Scott, an Anglican priest who had worked in Soweto, and Robert Molteno, a well known South African academic who had taught with us at the University of Zambia and was now a publisher in London, also joined us.
Lionel Cliffe, a specialist in African politics and economics, who had also taught with us at the University of Zambia, was another very active member. Peter Lowenstein, who later worked for the BBC, and his wife Susan, helped on a day-to-day basis. Later Didymus Mutasa, then studying in Birmingham, joined the committee: we managed to convince him that the arrest and detention of more than 1,000 full-time
ZANU workers and guerrillas in Zambia should not be analysed in terms of tribal conflict between Karanga and Manyika, an explanation that was rampant at the time.
It was essential that the liberation struggle should be supported, despite the crimes and mistakes committed by some of its participants. Mutasa’s agreement to support the committee was a triumph against tribalism, as he was one of the first Manyika to reject the tribal explanation of the conflict between Tongogara and the Nhari group.
Amnesty International played a very important role in highlighting the torture of the Zimbabwean prisoners and in emphasising the political nature of their trials. It gave immense publicity to the illegal nature of their detention and trial, and so helped to win international opinion in support of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe.
Our first task was to raise money and find a lawyer of international stature to undertake the defence of Tongogara against the charge of murdering Chitepo. We had managed to raise £30,000, quite a feat for us, but actually insufficient to pay for a top-class lawyer. Moreover, it was difficult to find a lawyer prepared to take on the responsibility, for it was clear that the trial was a highly political one, with the Zambian government accusing the head of a guerrilla army of having murdered the leader of that same movement.
Most lawyers were not prepared to take on such a politically sensitive issue, particularly as it was now well known that Tongogara had led a military-style execution squad that had killed over a dozen of the Nhari rebel group. If Tongogara was able to execute his own followers, it would not be unthinkable for him to have murdered his leader.
Given this situation, we were fortunate enough to find a brilliant lawyer to take on the case, John Platts Mills, a well known socialist. The money we had collected would hardly cover the cost of his travels to and from Zambia, but because he saw that the case involved the liberation of a country, he was prepared to take it on. So it was that John Platts Mills played a critical role in the liberation of Zimbabwe.
It was Platts Mills, a highly experienced politically oriented lawyer, who advised us on the need to lobby for more political support not only in Britain, but from the Commonwealth as a whole. He himself was prepared to use his contacts within the Commonwealth to support us. We were not slow to take his advice, and we began to lobby all political parties in Britain.
We managed to present our case to a number
of members of the Conservative Party, which was then in opposition. This stood us in good stead, as the Conservatives were to win the elections a few years later and, under Margaret Thatcher, to grant independence to Zimbabwe in 1980. Our painstaking work in explaining the details of the liberation struggle contributed importantly to the support we were to receive from within the Conservative Party.
We met with the Labour Party, whose members listened sympathetically, but we received little real support from them. The Labour Party under Harold Wilson had continually failed to support the liberation movements, despite the expectation that as socialists they should have been more sympathetic towards the liberation struggle than the Conservatives.
Instead, Harold Wilson had given the green light to Ian Smith to go ahead with his illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence by assuring Smith that he would never use military force against the Rhodesians. Wilson’s rationale, that the British should stand together with their “kith and kin”, the white Rhodesian settlers and colonialists, made it impossible for them to take the simple and logical steps that would have ended Smith’s illegal regime. We attempted to lobby the Communist Party of Great Britain, but they would have nothing at all to do with us.
As they were dedicated to following the policies laid down by the Soviet Union, they spurned ZANU. We approached Archbishop Trevor Huddlestone, so well known for his support of the anti- apartheid struggle, but he refused to assist in any way as he had heard of the killings within ZANLA.
Platts Mills was able to use his Commonwealth links to reach President Nyerere.
The Commonwealth Secretariat, headed by Sunny Shridath Ramphal, was to play a key role in the resolution of the Zimbabwean crisis, and it was Platts Mills’s political acumen and experience that were instrumental in getting these players on our side. He knew many of these top leaders on a personal basis, and he made it his responsibility to give them the fullest information about what was happening with the liberation struggle and Tongogara’s impending judicial trial.
The Frontline presidents, led by Nyerere and Machel, also played extremely critical and sensitive roles in bringing about the liberation of Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee was able to persuade the international community that the Zambian special commission set up to investigate the murder of Chitepo could not be accepted
as a judicial trial, as the accused were unable to receive proper legal support.
It was essential to have a properly constituted trial following appropriate judicial processes. Evidence elicited through torture could not be accepted. Nor could people who had not given evidence be condemned without appearing in court. Eventually, an open trial was agreed upon. There, Platts Mills’s knowledge of police and court procedure enabled him to demonstrate the occasions when the Zimbabwean prisoners were taken out of prison for interrogation under torture. This rendered the evidence elicited from torture untenable in court.
Thus he demonstrated that there was not a shred of evidence to convict Tongogara and his followers of the murder of Chitepo. Tongogara and the high command were finally released in September 1976. They had spent 18 months in prison, where, in addition to the poor living conditions and sanitation, they had been subjected to continual beatings and torture.
Their release was very much due to the brilliant performance of John Platts Mills, whose defence of Tongogara was to allow the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe to resume. Tongogara and the high command were never tried for the deaths of the Nhari group or of Mataure.
DEATH OF TONGOGARA
Tongogara died in a car crash in Mozambique in December 1979, only four months before the achievement of independence by Zimbabwe. The Land Cruiser in which he was travelling overturned while trying to overtake a lorry that was towing a large trailer. As Tongogara’s car tried to overtake, the lorry swung to the left, but the attached trailer swung to the right, killing Tongogara instantly. He was sitting on the left-hand front seat beside the driver.
The Land Cruiser overturned, but no other passenger was seriously injured. One of the passengers was Oppah Muchinguri, a member of the general staff in charge of funds for the battlefront. A close confidante and follower of Tongogara, she believed his death to be a total but bizarre accident. The followers of traditional religion believed that he was taken away by the ancestral spirits because he had continually transgressed against their rules.
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