The Sunday News
Early life
I was born into the liberation struggle, I was raised by my grandparents as my father died when I was young so to say I know my father well, is not correct. We were raised by our grandparents who had many cattle and I witnessed them being taken away and beaten up on many occasions and I never understood it. As we were attending school, we would interact with Reverends from the Dutch Reformed Church who were from the Makumbe Mssion in Njanja. As we grew, we still witnessed the beatings and their cattle being taken away from them. This didn’t sit well with me as I wondered why that was happening to us.
That is how I started getting interest in politics because I grew up in unhappiness through the mishandling of my parents over property that belonged to them. I asked my grandmother if they had got the cattle from the white men as they were fighting to get those cattle. She said they had grown crops and bought cattle that had been multiplying over the years.
She said the white men didn’t want them to have many cattle because they said they would ruin the land so as long as they thought your cows were many, they would just raid you. My grandmother lost many cattle and I witnessed it. I was very young, about five to seven years then. It was not unique to our home area alone. Even as far as Kwekwe, we would hear people having lost cattle. I wondered what kind of living that was. I am the first born in a family of two.
School years
I learnt at different places and boarding schools were few and expensive. I started school in Gwebu, Buhera under Chief Gwebu. I passed well and could not move to standard two because there was no standard two at Gwebu, so I had to look for other schools on the eastern side of Buhera and we crossed the river to go and learn in a place called Madende. Then after that I had to look for another school to proceed, mission schools were expensive then. My mother then took us to our grandfather Chihota in Kwekwe to find another school and did my standard three in 1946.
When Chief Gwebu was chased away by the whites he settled in Buhera and when we were born, we found them singing songs like Intombi zako Godlwayo heeheee, which showed that he left because he was being oppressed by the white man. Our grandmother would tell us the Ndebele people came to Buhera and were welcomed by the bigger chief, Chief Makumbe who gave him land with his people.
How were relations between the two tribes?
We had no difference in the way we lived as Ndebele and Shona people, there was no chief who enjoyed cordial relations in that land where there was peace and harmony like Chief Gwebu. The people shared traditional beer and married into each other’s clans.
Gogo MaKhumalo, wife to Chief Gwebu was the first to have a clinic. If she heard that a child had been burnt, she would go to that place to see for herself and treat the patients. There were cordial relations and the people spoke Shona in Chief Gwebu’s land and even schools taught in Shona, he never imposed that people speak isiNdebele in their land but he became a person who assimilated into the land of the Shona people. Some even spoke Kalanga and the old women lived well together with their various languages.
I get goosebumps when I’m in Bulawayo and I hear people say, “okungabantu lokhu”. I never wanted to hear that.
Political life
I started active politics when I had come to Bulawayo but I had already started to experience through my parents and grandfather but their struggles were never spoken about much only when there were traditional events, ilima and so on. And those things stuck as I was a child.
One day I was coming from Church at St Patrick’s, I was married then with two children in 1958. I heard someone talking at the top of their voice, talking about how their land had been stolen, how their cattle had been stolen and also being forced to leave the graves of their forefathers behind. So, I passed there after I left church one day, a meeting was being addressed by Benjamin Burombo and I listened to his address, Bible in hand.
I was still young and they asked if I needed help as they assumed that I was lost when I sat in their meeting. I told them I had heard them speak and decided to join in because I liked the topic they were addressing. They felt comfortable but not entirely, the address went on and that is how I started attending those meetings. I would go to church to please the society that we lived in together with my husband because we had been married in the church and also growing up in Church.
The more I heard them talk about issues of losing land and cattle, something would stir up in me and I would go and attend the meetings, that is how it started.
I was working at that time and met up with the likes of Sikhwili Moyo, Lazarus Nkala, Joseph Msika who would talk about this and I became their friend although I was younger. They spoke about wanting to fight oppression, I was curious about finding out how we could fight it. I was not organised by anybody into politics, I went alone.
My husband was not happy with my attending meetings, it got to a stage of ruining my marriage because I was now known and the arrests had also started. Initially Burombo spoke like a mad man, he would just start talking, telling people to act as if they were losing their land right before their eyes. He never gathered people but they just paid a listening ear until a time when the meetings were well organised.
The divorce
I took an active role and around 1959 I started taking part in organizing the meetings and I started getting arrested, back home we would then fight with my husband and the neighbours and other colleagues began to tell him that I was overpowering him by “doing as I pleased” in the marriage. They asked him why he was allowing me to go for meetings with other men because other women never attended those meetings then.
I ended up being divorced but I loved my husband dearly. But when there is no harmony in the home then it’s no longer a home, I needed to put his misery to rest.
He just didn’t want to hear about me attending those political meetings, the Church also made it worse as one would not be a respected gentleman if they were into politics which were called earthly things.
In 1959 we went for a meeting at Stanley Hall with the likes of Chikerema, that’s when I heard of the likes of Cde Joshua Nkomo, I had never seen him or attended the meetings he was addressing.
When you started being arrested, what happened? Did you go to jail? How did your family react?
After I started earthly things (politics), it became tough. There was no joy at home, and we divorced with my husband because he wasn’t supporting me in my political career. In 1959 we had a meeting at Stanley Hall at Makokoba with a Member of Parliament of the Labour Party of London, John Stonehouse and I didn’t know Nkomo though I had heard about him, the meeting was all about how blacks were abused by whites. He was supporting us as Africans.
People in rural areas were deprived of their livestock and in urban areas people worked and were paid low salaries.
He supported us with passion. I was arrested in 1959 and by then I was not yet divorced but we had quarrels with my husband. I stayed behind the cells with my toddler for three weeks and he didn’t visit me. That is the year we divorced because I wanted to free him, I wanted to fight for my liberation, I felt it in my veins that I had to do it. I know no one will understand this but in 1960 I became a full member of politics, those who would fight for the country.
Excerpts from the late National Heroince Cde Jane Ngwenya’s radio interview with the public broadcaster. Cde Ngwenya, who died on 5 August, was buried at the national heroes’ acre on Friday.
-To be continued
