He saw glints of light and dust being kicked up as cannon shells struck the earth right in front of the house. ‘Perfect,’ he said to himself as he released the trigger and pulled back on the stick, feeling a force five times that of gravity tugging at his body as the Rhodesian warplane pulled out of its deadly dive.
Below, cannon shells slammed through the roof of Robert Mugabe’s
headquarters in Mozambique. The Battle of Chimoio, the first phase of Operation Dingo, had begun.
Modern black political consciousness was fairly slow to develop in Southern Rhodesia compared with other parts of the continent. It was not until 1957 that the first mass political movement came into being there. It was named the African National Congress (ANC) after its counterpart in neighbouring South Africa, formed 45 years earlier. The ANC projected a moderate image and chose a moderate leader, an Ndebele called Joshua Nkomo. It filled a political vacuum and quickly grew into a large organisation.
This was at a time when the independence drum was reverberating across Africa. The self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British protectorates of Northern Rhodesia (to become Zambia) and Nyasaland (later Malawi) were joined in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland under the Crown. The federation, an awkward grouping of countries, was Britain’s counterweight to South Africa, where Britain’s influence had suddenly diminished when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party won the general election in the self-governing territory in 1948.
With the black nationalist tide rising fast both in the federation and in Britain, the Southern Rhodesian government banned Nkomo’s ANC, which responded by forming a new party: the National Democratic Party (NDP). Nkomo was elected party president.
The NDP platform was more radical than the ANC and made no bones about what its mission would be: to establish black majority rule. One of the senior NDP members, Leopold Takawira, a former teacher turned politician, addressed the party’s inaugural meeting, telling the delegates that the issue was no longer asking the white establishment to rule the black majority well; it was about the majority ruling itself.
The agenda was set; the call for majority black rule, one man, one vote, had been made. A clash of some kind was inevitable.
On 19 July 1960, Takawira and other NDP leaders were arrested under the new Unlawful Organisation Act. The arrests sparked a protest march of some 7 000 people from the black township of Highfield to the centre of Salisbury (now Harare), a distance of 12 kilometres, to discuss matters with Prime Minister Sir Edgar Whitehead. Police stopped the march before it could reach the city centre and defused the situation by promising the marchers that Whitehead would meet a delegation the following morning. As the next day broke, the crowd quickly swelled to over 40 000, draining the black labour pool and virtually paralysing Salisbury.
In the crowd was a teacher, on leave in Rhodesia from his teaching job in Ghana, an introvert called Robert Mugabe.
Whitehead reacted angrily. Refusing to meet the NDP delegation, he instead went on state radio to call up army reservists and warn that political meetings in the townships would be banned. On the third day, the police moved decisively to break up the crowd, scattering it and chasing people back to the townships. More than 100 protestors were arrested. The government’s action came as a rude shock to the nationalists.
It was also a watershed in Robert Mugabe’s life. It drew a line under Mugabe the teacher and ushered in Mugabe the politician. He resigned from his job at the Takoradi Teacher Training College in Ghana and joined the NDP as publicity secretary.
Using the political skills that his partner and future wife, Sally Heyfron, had taught him in newly independent Ghana, Mugabe promptly formed a youth wing, modelled on Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana Youth League. He mobilised the youth to knock on every door in the townships the night before an NDP meeting, reminding residents to attend. The youth would again remind – and sometimes coerce – the residents on the day of a meeting, beating drums and singing to get them motivated.
This method of literally drumming up support worked well then, and would serve Mugabe well for decades to come, although it would become a lot more sinister and brutal.
Anxious to withdraw from the federation, the British government called an all-party constitutional conference in 1961, known as the Salisbury Conference. Joshua Nkomo led the NDP delegation and eventually agreed to accept the 1961 Constitution, which included a qualified all-race voting franchise. Duncan Sandys for Britain, Edgar Whitehead for Southern Rhodesia and Joshua Nkomo for the nationalists signed the 1961 Constitutional Agreement.
The more radical members of the NDP, realising that their quest for power might be delayed for decades, challenged Nkomo behind the scenes. Sensing his party was in danger of splitting, Nkomo suddenly made a U-turn and disowned the deal. But it was too late. The 1961 Constitution soon became law, and Nkomo had seriously compromised his political standing on both sides of the fence.
The legislation called for a new voters’ roll and a general election in 1962. The process set in train events that would show the dark side of African politics – intimidation and violence. The nationalists boycotted anything to do with the Constitution and used violence to prevent eligible black people from registering to vote. The intimidation intensified; those siding with the government and failing to carry a party card were dealt with harshly. Gangs roamed the streets, dispensing violent discipline as they saw fit. Mugabe and most of the NDP leadership called for a widening of the conflict to disrupt civil life and force the white people to realise that the Constitution was not viable.
The Whitehead government reacted by banning the NDP, but the nationalists just as quickly formed a new party to replace it, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU).
This time the government moved faster. It banned ZAPU, rounded up the leadership and restricted them to their rural-home areas for three months. The restriction order ended just 10 days before the qualified voters went to the polls in the general election of December 1962. By now the federation was doomed and the three countries were going their own separate ways.
The predominantly white electorate in Southern Rhodesia had already been scared by the mayhem elsewhere in Africa. But it was an event two years earlier, in 1960, that had catalysed the hardening of attitudes among white Rhodesians – the collapse of the former Belgian Congo. There, the murder, rape and chaos became especially frightening because the violence was much closer to home.
Television images of violence and destruction in Elizabethville and other cities in the Congo dominated the news. Soon, thousands of white refugees were fleeing the Congo for their lives in cars, with all their possessions loaded on the vehicles. They poured over the border into Northern Rhodesia, but there were no facilities to cope with the exodus. So the Royal Rhodesian Air Force (RRAF) stepped in, transporting blankets, medicine and emergency food supplies to refugee points at Fort Rosebery, Mufulira, Solwesi and Mwinilunga, and flying refugees out.
Soon, over 1 500 refugees had been flown into Salisbury. The sight of these families who had lost everything and the horror stories they told made a deep and lasting impression on white Rhodesians. They feared the same would happen at home; they feared being put in a similar predicament by Rhodesian politicians.
The memories of the Congo burnt bright in the minds of the Rhodesian electorate. Then, just 10 days before the 1962 general election, the ZAPU leaders were set free. This was too much for many white people and rang like a death knell for the Whitehead government. A new right-wing party, the Rhodesian Front (RF), launched by Ian Smith and ‘Boss’ Lilford, won the election. Winston Field became the new prime minister. Field did not last long. The new government’s lurch to the right and his failure to secure early independence cost him his job. He resigned as prime minister in 1963 to be succeeded by the first Rhodesian-born prime minister, Ian Smith.
Smith, a BCom graduate from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, was a different type of leader. When World War II broke out, he volunteered for service. After his pilot training in Southern Rhodesia, he was seconded to the Royal Air Force (RAF). Smith was badly injured when his Hawker Hurricane fighter plane crashed in Egypt in 1943. As soon as he was fit again, he returned to flying until his Spitfire was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire over Italy in 1944. He bailed out and spent months with partisans before reaching Allied lines. Although he had shown a strong loyalty to the Crown by volunteering to fight for Britain, he would take a much firmer line with Britain over independence.
The RF victory and Field’s demise shocked the ZAPU leadership and put paid to any lingering hopes they may have had that the 1961 Constitution could be amended. The nationalists concluded that as a political party, ZAPU was wasting its time pursuing a negotiated settlement. This is when the majority of the executive decided that an armed insurrection was the only way to bring about change.
However, cracks in the party leadership showed again when Nkomo, opposed to a violent uprising, went against the majority. He strongly believed that diplomatic pressure would win the day. More leadership divisions started appearing, this time of a tribal nature: not all the Shona members of the executive took kindly to being led by an Ndebele. This tribal animosity was deeply ingrained in Rhodesia, and a Shona-dominated party was beginning to take shape.
The Ndebele, a name originating from
maTebele
in Sotho or
ama-Ndebele
in Nguni, meaning ‘nomads’, were an offshoot of King Shaka’s Zulu nation. They had settled in Bulawayo, in the south of present-day Zimbabwe, after being defeated in 1836 by white Dutch-speaking pioneers, the Voortrekkers, in the Transvaal province of neighbouring South Africa.
At the time the Ndebele arrived, the country was a federation of chiefdoms controlled by a
changamire
, a king or general of the Rozwi dynasty. These chiefdoms, which spoke different dialects, were given a collective name by outsiders – the Shona people.
Once Mzilikazi, the Ndebele king, had settled in his new land, he set his sights on the north and soon went on the rampage, killing the ruling
changamire
and forcing most of the Shona, who outnumbered the Ndebele, to flee to the north and east to escape his raiding impis. For protection, the Shona built small stone fortifications in the granite hills, thousands of which are still standing today, especially in Mashonaland and Manicaland.
Nkomo would have to contend with this historical baggage as he grappled to hold together his Ndebele and Shona party.
As disenchantment set in with Nkomo’s leadership, it came as no surprise when a group of rebel nationalists met in Salisbury, at the Highfield home of Enos Nkala. The rebels publicly announced their launch of a new party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). The same day, Nkomo announced the formation of the People’s Caretaker Council, which was essentially a structure formed above ZAPU. In the first demonstration of inter-party political violence, People’s Caretaker Council members marched into Highfield, attacking the houses of the three main rebels, Nkala, Takawira and Mugabe.
These attacks did not deter ZANU’s leaders, who quickly organised the party’s inaugural congress in May 1964 in Gwelo, a town in Rhodesia’s Midlands province. The congress elected Ndabaningi Sithole as president, Leopold Takawira as vice-president, Robert Mugabe as secretary general and Herbert Chitepo as national chairman. In addition to being the party leader, Sithole was appointed military commander of an army that did not yet exist. ZANU resolved at the inaugural congress to take over the government from the white minority by force if necessary.
ZANU soon showed its hand. Less than two months after the Gwelo conference, in July 1964, a ZANU group known as the Crocodile Gang, led by William Ndangana, set up a crude roadblock on the main road near Chimanimani, in eastern Rhodesia. A white farmer of Afrikaner descent, Petrus Oberholzer, his wife and four-year-old daughter were travelling along the main road in their Volkswagen Kombi when they came upon the roadblock near the Skyline Junction.
As Oberholzer stepped out of his vehicle to clear the obstacles, Ndangana and his gang set upon him, stoning him and stabbing him repeatedly. Bleeding profusely, the fatally wounded farmer mustered enough strength to fight off the gang with his bare hands and stagger back into the driver’s seat, start the vehicle and drive past the roadblock. The car did not get far before overturning in a ditch. The dying man and his traumatised wife locked the Kombi’s doors and watched in horror as the gang caught up with them. The ZANU men threw petrol over the Kombi, trying to set the vehicle alight, but in the nick of time, the headlights of an oncoming car scared off Ndangana and his gang.
Oberholzer became the first white Rhodesian to die in a terror attack since the Mashona Uprising, or First Chimurenga, 68 years earlier. Although Ndangana escaped the resulting manhunt, three gang members were apprehended and tried for murder. Two of them were hanged in Salisbury Prison; the third, who was too young for the death sentence, was spared.
Ironically, Oberholzer had bought Curzon Farm from Paul Petter-Bowyer, whose son, Peter, was an air force officer who would play a key role in the first Rhodesian–ZANLA battle and the ensuing war itself.
The amateurish but brutal murder of Petrus Oberholzer under the ZANU banner put the party on a collision course with the Rhodesian government. This murder and the terrible black-on-black political violence provoked the RF government to ban both ZANU and ZAPU and to detain their leaders. Sithole, Nkomo, Mugabe, Takawira, Tekere and the rest of the senior leadership of both parties would spend the next decade in detention.
The one outstanding issue was independence from Britain. That year, 1964, Britain granted independence to Northern Rhodesia, which became Zambia, and to Nyasaland, which became Malawi. However, the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia was having no such luck. Talks about independence became mired and patience was running out. This was vividly expressed by the governor of Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, the queen’s resident representative, in his address at the opening of Parliament in 1964: