The Sunday News
Pearson Sibanda
I should not have been at Manama in 1977 as I had completed my O-levels in 1975, but I was.
I spent the whole of 1976 trying in vain to get a passport to leave Rhodesia to further my studies with my late friend and classmate Ntokozo Nyamambi in the UK.
Unfortunately the authorities must have picked up that my father, perhaps like many men his age, had dabbled in politics as a member of Zapu and consequently denied me a passport.
Ntokozo got his and left. As I had already wasted a full year in 1976, I then found myself with no option but to go back to Manama and join the A-level study group that had been established by the Principal, Mr Ngwenya.
In January 1977, I got back to Manama to start my A-levels through correspondence. As a senior student, I enjoyed a lot more freedom to get out of the school bounds than the normal students in Forms 1 to 4.
That fateful Sunday, when the now famous abduction occurred, I had been to the shops to buy provisions as I did not particularly like the food served in the dining hall.
Unlike the other students who had been at the school in 1976, I was totally out of touch with what was happening and was oblivious of the planned abduction which had apparently been well publicised. On getting back onto the school grounds, I was greeted with signs of commotion with students running all over and towards the space next to the dining hall.
It soon became clear this was under the instruction and supervision of armed men.
I was ordered to join the growing group of students gathered there and was to know the men were Zipra guerillas. Although I had heard of Zapu, Zipra was totally unknown to me.
When I saw one of the armed men hitting one of our teachers, Mr Chizana, with the butt of his AK-47 it became very clear that this was no laughing matter. Mr Chizana was apparently walking too slowly to join the group because perhaps he was not exactly athletic but also due to his resistance to be treated that way.
Soon we were on our way to Botswana but not before going through the hospital where some nurses and some medication were collected. In silence we were ordered to walk in a single file through the thorny bushes around Manama. We were warned that any attempts to escape would be treated very harshly.
One of the men actually said that he would remember the faces of all the people who had gathered at the school and should he, when he comes back into the country on operations, see any of the faces back there, he would “deal” with them.
I had not had supper in the dining hall and had not had the opportunity to eat the provisions I had just bought from the shops.
Being just over 17 and half years old, I was probably one of the oldest students in the group which had some as young as 12 who had come to do their
Form 1. The details of the trip will not be covered here as they have already been told elsewhere. The walk through the bushes took the whole night and our abductors were anxious to get us over the border before sunrise.
Just as the day broke, we reached the Shashe River that forms the border with Botswana. We were then ordered to dash for it across the river as it was feared the Rhodesian forces would have mounted some kind of ambush or rescue. Just as soon as we were all across the river, Rhodesian choppers were seen overhead trying to find the group of students.
That was not a difficult task at all because it cannot be easy to hide 400 odd students among the thorny bushes that populated the area.
To make matters worse, our girls wore bright red school uniforms with white collars which would hardly have served as camouflage. Compounding the situation further was the fact that as we moved a little further into Botswana, there was absolutely no vegetation as there appeared to have been veld fires before we got there.
With the Rhodesian forces overhead, there was soon no place to hide and they could see virtually everyone. Knowing that the students had been abducted, it would have made no sense to open fire on them. Taking on the armed men would probably have resulted in many deaths among the students and the combatants would probably have melted away anyway.
The first settlement we reached was a place called Gobajango. I was fortunate to have had some change from the shopping at the shops back at Manama and I used that to buy bread and other things which I shared with a couple of my friends and some of the really small boys and girls who were starving.
We were told though that we could not put up at this place because the Rhodesians were likely to launch a follow up operation overnight. We walked at night for a distance I estimate to have been possibly 5 kilometres further inland and when we got to some spot were told that one would sleep wherever they were.
Ordinarily, boys would have been separated from the girls to avoid any mischief. There was no need for that because no one would have been in the mood to try that. Unfortunately around midnight, it started raining heavily and we had no choice but to walk back to Gobajango. It was not the kind of rain one could endure.
Back at Gobajango we were accommodated in classrooms under guard by a single man armed with some old rifle that fires a bullet at a time. Had the Rhodesians come for us that night, there would have been very little fighting as our abductors no longer had their AKs.
They would not been allowed to carry them in Botswana anyway. At the break of dawn. Lorries that had been organised with the help of the Botswana government started ferrying us to Selebi Phikwe and then to Francistown. That journey took two days as the roads were impassible and the heavy rains made them even worse.
At some point, Mr Chizana, realising that the abductors were no longer armed, openly told them he was a member of Zanu and therefore would not be going to Zambia. If he had done this while we were still in Rhodesia he would probably not have lived to tell the story. As things were, the law of Botswana protected him and after a lot huffing and puffing, he was allowed to get away while the rest of us went on to Francistown. I was in one of the last truckloads of students to get to Francistown and as we arrived in the camp there, we could see a lot of our fellow students screaming and waving with excitement at a plane flying overhead. It turned out, that was one of the first plane loads to take some of the students to Zambia.
We had been told that the reason we were being taken from our school was so that we could be sent for better education elsewhere. Being a little more mature myself I never believed that.
Why would these guys force us out of our school, where our parents were paying, take the risk of marching us into Botswana, fly us out to Zambia only for them to send us to school at their own expense elsewhere? What was worse for me was that in my home area of Mberengwa, I was quite familiar with Zanu and Zanla, although admittedly I had not seen any of their fighters.
Suddenly we were having to deal with Zipra which I had not even heard of. I tried to convince some of the older boys to refuse to proceed to Zambia so they could join Zanla but they argued that they would change sides on arrival in Zambia.
Looking at it now, the temptation to get onto a plane must have been too much for most of them, coming as they did from deep rural areas.
A couple of days later as the flights to Zambia continued, my late friend Alec Mababiko, Marvellous Dhliwayo and I just got up and “crossed the floor” to join the group of Zanu recruits just next door. We had been told not talk to them as they were “dangerous”. Nevertheless we did join them as we felt more comfortable with what we knew.
The episode almost caused a big fight between the two groups. The Zipra guys had invested so much time, effort and energy and here the Zanla guys were taking us away from them!
The day was saved by the intervention of the Police Mobile Unit of Botswana who were called in into quell the unfolding situation.
The three of us were taken up the hill just outside of the camp and told by these officers of the Botswana government that by refusing to go to Zambia we had shown them that we were agents of the Smith regime. They were thus going to shoot us as that was the way they dealt with such agents.
We were given the option to change our minds and rejoin the group going to Zambia or face death by shooting on the hill. We were given three minutes within which to decide.
When the officers came back and asked for our decision, we told them that we would rather die than go to Zambia. At that point this was not an act of bravado. We reasoned that even if we changed our minds then, our names would be flagged as people to watch and would probably be detained or worse still be shot in Zambia. We frankly thought the officers were serious about shooting us as they carried revolvers. In fact one of them cocked his gun and asked us if that was our final decision before he starts shooting.
We stood our ground after which they took us back to the camp and allowed us to rejoin the Zanla camp. We were soon joined by other three boys and two girls who were related to some of the boys who had crossed the floor. In the meantime the exodus to Zambia by flight continued apace and soon we were the only ones from Manama left in Francistown.
Alec, Marvellous and Chenjerai Munatsi who had joined us soon escaped from the camp in Francistown after about six months and we made our way by train to Gaborone where we applied for political asylum and became refugees.
I enrolled at Maru A Pula School, the only school that offered A-levels in Botswana at the time. Alec was considered over age and could not be accepted. Marvellous had written his A-levels at Manama by the time of abduction and so did not need to do them again.
Chenjerai, who was the oldest among us, still needed to complete Form 3 and thus could not be accepted either. Alec and Chenjerai soon got scholarships to study in West Africa followed by Marvellous who left to study Pharmacy in the US.
At independence in 1980, I was forced to return to Zimbabwe armed with an A-level certificate and although I had secured a place to study engineering in the UK, it was left to the new Zanu government to sponsor its citizens.
As a member of Zanu myself, I thought it would have been easy to get a scholarship. Even the intervention of Dr Tichaendepi Masaya who had been my mentor and guardian could not secure me the coveted scholarship. I guess my surname may have had something to with it. That is a topic for another day though.
-Pearson Sibanda lives in neighbouring South Africa where he has been based since 1992 and runs an engineering consultancy. Sibanda is also a PhD candidate at UCT where he is just about to submit his thesis on immigrant entrepreneurs.
