The Sunday News
Feature Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
The effective incorporation of the Southern Rhodesia African National Youth League into the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC) ushered in another era of confrontation between the country’s oppressed black majority and the white settler minority. From 1897, after the white settler forces had been assisted by those from the British colonies of Natal, the Cape and Bechuanaland Protectorate to defeat those of people of this country, the land was ruled by literally force of arms.
Racial discrimination, known then as “colour bar,” was enforced right across the entire country’s social, economic, cultural and political spectrums. Schools, hospitals, residential areas, churches, hotels, bus and passenger train services were all created and dealt with on racial basis.
Employment and wages were handled racially in the country’s commercial, industrial and civil service sectors. In the urban areas, there were, by and large, two racial residential areas, one for the white people and the other for the blacks.
There were, however, also small areas for Asians and Coloureds in large urban centres such as Salisbury (Harare) and Bulawayo.
The black people were barred from owning property in urban areas, their official areas where they could live, build and own whatever were what were called “native reserves”. These were improverished lands lying mostly in the country’s low regions called “low veldt”.
The white settler regime had created those reserves a month or two after invading King Lobengula’s kingdom in 1893. The BSAC army had thereafter parcelled out the healthiest and most fertile part of the whole country among its members, violently pushing out black people to the “native reserves”.
The first of those “reserves” were Gwayi in what had been named Matabeleland by the BSAC administration, and the Chinamhora Reserve in what was referred to as Mashonaland. The naming of each territory after the dominant ethnic community inhabiting the region was a British colonial tradition that had been used earlier elsewhere in Africa to identify territories such as Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Zululand, Swaziland, Barotseland and Gazaland.
That British colonial traditional administrative nomenclature had a divisive effect on the colonised people, making the people of Zululand to regard those of Swaziland as political rivals and vice versa, and those of “whichever-land” did the same. Joshua Nkomo’s most important wish was to engender a feeling of national “oneness” among the black people of Southern Rhodesia.
There had been inter-tribal physical clashes pitting the Ndebele-speaking versus the Shona-speaking people in Bulawayo in the late 1920s but Masotsha Ndlovu of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICWU) and other community leaders intervened and reinstated peace.
Just before Nkomo became the SRANC topmost leader in the very early 1950s, the Bulawayo black community was socially and culturally divided into about four groups: the Matabeleland Home Society whose members were strictly people of Nguni extraction; the Mashonaland Cultural Club led by Joseph Bruno Msika; the Bakalanga Mukani Kwayedza Association headed by Jason “Ziyapapa” Moyo, and small cultural clubs whose members were originally from Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi) and Mozambique.
Joshua Nkomo refused to be aligned to any of those ethno-regional groups and resisted his younger brother Stephen Jeqe Nkomo’s, overtures for him to join the Matabeleland Home Society. In the Rhodesia Railways (RR) for which he was the senior social welfare officer, Nkomo interacted closely with people of a very wide cultural cross-section and his work took him across the length and breadth of Southern Rhodesia as far as the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).
The Southern Rhodesia administration, headed by the then Sir Godfrey Huggins, later called Lord Malvern, noticed Joshua Nkomo’s leadership potential as a result of which he invited him in 1952 to be a part of the Southern Rhodesian delegation to a London conference to discuss the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. There were two black delegates to that conference which opened in the British capital on 23 April and ended on 5 May 1952. The other black delegate was a Salisbury-based journalist, Jasper Zengeza Savanhu who in 1945 tried in vain together with Enock Dumbutshena to inject new ideas into the SRANC. In 1946 Savanhu had been nominated to be the president of what was called the Bulawayo African Workers’ Union (BAWU), an affiliate of the then Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (RICU).
At the London Conference, Nkomo strongly stated that the African majority must be consulted before such a federation was formed. He emphatically dissociated himself from a report issued at the end of the conference. A part of that report said: “. . . We are convinced that a Federation on the lines proposed is the only practicable means by which the three Central African territories can achieve security for the future and ensure the wellbeing and contentment of all their peoples.”
The Southern Rhodesia settler regime was not pleased with Nkomo’s opinion on the proposed federation and, thus, replaced him with Mike Masotsha Hove who was a journalist colleague of Savanhu. When the first federal general elections were held in 1953, the Federal Party of Sir Godfrey Huggins chose the two black journalists to represent Mashonaland and Matabeleland respectively. Joshua Nkomo, who was opposed to the federation, especially the way it was imposed on the black people, stood and lost as an independent.
In 1954, it was clear that the RICU had run its course, and could not be revived, not by even rejuvenating its leadership. So, Nkomo, JZ Moyo and Reuben Jamela formed and launched a workers’ umbrella organisation, the Southern Rhodesia African Trades Union Congress (SRATUC) in Bulawayo.
That organisation played a prominent role in the liberation struggle as Nkomo took the Southern Rhodesian issue to various international fora. First to be seized with the matter was the All-Africa People’s Organisation, the United Nations Organisation, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and towards the end of the armed struggle, the Front Line States (FLD). The Commonwealth heads of State summit also included the issue on its agenda years later.
Before the Zimbabwean liberation struggle was internationalised, adverse developments had occurred within the country, making it inevitable for the black people’s political leadership to look abroad for political refuge, social support, financial aid and succour associated with armed revolutions.
Soon after the Youth League’s incorporation into the SRANC in September 1957, Nkomo and his SRANC national executive colleagues kept in close contact with like-minded African leaders abroad, but particularly in Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) where there were also political parties known as African National Congress.
Consultations were held among those leaders. One such major consultation took place in Nyasaland (Malawi) on 24 and 25 January, 1959. It was really a Nyasaland African National Congress (NANC) Conference to which sister organisations were invited: The SRANC was represented by its secretary-general George Nyandoro, the first black person to qualify as a member of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries, CIS, in Southern Rhodesia.
The last part of that NANC conference was held in the bush, under a big mango tree, quite a distance from Zomba, on 25 January 1959. The country venue was chosen for security reasons. Resolutions were passed, including one to the effect that the ANC throughout the Federation should render the three constituent territories ungovernable.
To achieve their objectives, the Southern Rhodesian, the Northern Rhodesian and the Nyasaland congress were to use passive resistance methods. In case the people involved were attacked by the colonial forces, they were urged to defend themselves in the best way and by whatever means possible.
However, the Federal Prime Minister who was by then Sir Roy Wellensky, Lord Malvern having retired, stated a month later that “the ANC bush conference” had resolved to assassinate a number of people who supported the Federation. Among those people were Wellington Chirwa who was a federal MP and all his colleagues who were referred to as quislings. Sir Roy said that “quislings” meant all federal government officials.
He said a police informer’s report had indicated that “the bush” meeting had resolved that the NANC district chairmen should organise the killing of every government official to be done by the domestic or any other servants of the targeted officials. There was also going to be indiscriminate attacks of all Europeans and their families.
The Nyasaland Governor, Sir Robert Armitage, was to be killed by his own black servants, so said Sir Roy Wellensky’s police informer’s report. So, with that type of information, the three territorial governments were prevailed upon by the Federal government to ban the ANC.
That was done shortly after midnight on 26 February 1959 and hundreds of people were rounded up and detained. Most were released after three months. But Chikerema, Nyandoro, Maurice Nyagumbo, Daniel Madzimbamuto, Henry Hamadziripi and Eddison Sithole were to remain in restriction in the remote Mafungabusi sector of the Gokwe District for almost five years. Joshua Nkomo was at that time in Cairo, Egypt, where he established an office for the SRANC.
The liberation struggle of the modern era had struck roots and could not be reversed or stopped. The black people’s leaders were not asking for reforms any longer but were demanding full political control of their country. They were challenging the very legitimacy of the Southern Rhodesian white administration. They were saying armed force could not create legitimacy, especially in the colonisation of any territory by any power.
Joshua Nkomo decided to lodge the issue before the UN, and Britain’s claim that it was bound by a convention not to intervene in what it called “the internal affairs of Southern Rhodesia because Britain granted Southern Rhodesia internal self-government by means of Letters Patent in 1923” crumbled under the scrutiny of the UN’s international law experts.
To be continued Next Sunday…….
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through e-mail. [email protected]
