The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
“YOU see when you enter a revolution, when you take up arms, you do so in order to achieve everything you want, but when you do resort to discussing around a table, you cannot envisage to achieve everything. But so far at Lancaster, I am quite convinced myself that the people of . . . by that I mean the liberation forces of Zimbabwe . . . have scored a tremendous victory. They have demonstrated to the whole world that they are a force to reckon with and they have brought about Lancaster.” (The Josiah Magama Legacy Foundation and the African Publishing Group, page 6).
That the words were said during Lancaster House Talks in London in 1979 is pretty clear. What we may fail or choose to fail to appreciate is the depth and patriotic implication underpinning the legendary commander’s words. Perhaps when we add more words that he uttered then, what we mean may begin to dawn in the minds of some people.
“We used to throw stones at each other in Salisbury. We cannot pass this on to our kids. We are going away and we must leave a stable Zimbabwe to the new generation. Let’s have a really united Zimbabwe. I do not want to see my kids throwing stones over these minor divisions. I think they will laugh at me because I did.”
A deeper and more incisive analysis and interpretation of the meaning and significance of what he said lies in the future as Zimbabwe’s liberation history begins to unfold in a manner never seen before. Be that as it may, the emphasis of this article is not on Tongo the man and what he represented, rather it is about what led to Lancaster, declaration of a ceasefire and the end to the armed struggle that commenced in the early 1960s.
Tongo is right in his recognition and acknowledgement of the role played by the liberation forces in bringing about the Lancaster House Talks which sought to resolve the longstanding Rhodesian constitutional impasse.
There are many political, economic and military events that took place towards the close of the war that indicated the timeline when the Rhodesian Front began deconstructing its erstwhile enunciated racist political stance. Ian Smith once said in parliament that he did not foresee black majority rule, never ever, not in a thousand years. As it turned out, it was to be a short thousand years. By 1977 it was no longer the same Rhodesian Front that bragged about ruling Rhodesia to the exclusion of the black majority. The radicalisation of white political opinion and intransigence created the politics that Rhodesia was characterised by. When the rest of Africa was decolonising, Rhodesia, South Africa and Namibia were excluded from the political wind of change as observed by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan while visiting South Africa in 1960.
That left one option for the attainment of majority rule in Southern Rhodesia; recourse to the armed liberation struggle whose genesis is traceable to 1960 when there was transformation from pacific political methods to Zhi-i and the commencement of the Sabotage Campaign also referred to as Zhanda, a word derived from the French word for police. The warfare that was waged in that nascent period was not that effective to shake the colonial regime. Whereas some cadres began receiving military training in friendly countries such as China, Egypt, North Korea, Cuba ad Ghana, the rate of capture was high. The bottom line is that the Rhodesian Security Forces, with support from kith and kin in the West, were able to contain the military, political and economic situation.
There were both administrative and military changes that were innovated to ramp measures to stem the tide against the war of liberation.
One of those measures was the creation of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) in 1964 under the directorship of Ken Flower and later the creation of the Selous Scouts under Colonel Reid Daly. For a while, the situation seemed to hold, but not much longer. The advent of the 1970s witnessed some change to the complexion of the armed struggle. In 1972 Zanla, Zanu-PF’s fighting wing, opened a front in the northeastern part of Rhodesia. The war heightened. Simultaneously, ZPRA (PF Zapu military wing) reorganised and its fighting capability was on the ascendancy under Commander Alfred Nikita Mangena and Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo the Commander-in-Chief.
We have before written on the responses by both the Rhodesians and their allies to the ramping war of liberation in Rhodesia. We need not belabour the point. On the ZPRA side, whose history I am more au fait with, there was heightened recruitment from about 1976.
In 1976 the Commander-in-Chief of ZPRA, J Z Moyo, took a decision to transform the guerrilla warfare that had hitherto been waged from the early 1960s, to a conventional warfare with the capacity to conquer state power. That was a strategy that required a critical mass of recruits coming forward to avail themselves for training. Indeed, that is exactly what took place. With the Southern Front (SF) opened in 1974, it became easier to get larger numbers of recruits going through Botswana.
By 1977 there was a large pool of cadres ready to undertake conventional army training in Angola which had attained independence in 1975. To Luso and Boma they went to train in thousands. By 1977 ZPRA guerrillas operating in Matabeleland South were driving school pupils across the border. Thekwane, Manama and Dombodema (Matabeleland South province) were the schools whose pupils went to Zambia and swelled the numbers of cadres available for training.
Attendees of Elmos Ncube’s wedding at Sankonjana (Matobo district) were also driven across the border.
Even when J Z Moyo was killed in a parcel bomb sent from Francistown in Botswana, Zapu leader Dr Joshua Nkomo, after going to base himself in Lusaka, in the aftermath of the heinous act, continued with the strategy that had already been adopted by Moyo. In fact, that was what he termed the “sharp and short” war. One interviewee referred to it as “woz’ ubone, feyafeya.”
Dr Nkomo met some of the key players during the stage of migration and transformation from a guerrilla warfare to a conventional warfare. He unveiled, by introducing cadres that were behind the new components of the war such as the regular brigade with its battalions, the armoured vehicles division, tanks division, amphibious tanks, Mig jet fighters which, it was envisaged, were going to contain and counter Rhodesia’s conventional war striking capability.
Dr Nkomo was keen to see an end to the war so that young fighters would go back and settle down and establish families. Meanwhile, the fighters at the front acknowledged the superiority of Rhodesian forces when it came to the deployment of conventional forces. There were, at that time, zones that were semi-liberated. Rhodesian foot soldiers could no longer venture into those areas, nor could their vehicles get anywhere closer.
Only the Selous Scouts and helicopters managed to get there. Rhodesians were at that time launching shells that exploded mid-air rather than on impact. The transformation was thus reassuring and morale boosting to the cadres who had, to all intents and purposes, liberated some zones. Rhodesians could only cling to places such as Sipepa in Tsholotsho, Madlambudzi in Bulilima-Mangwe and Plumtree town itself.
ZPRA officers specially trained in intelligence and commissariatship were dispatched to handle the process of transformation by boosting the morale of guerrillas and their commanders in the operational areas. They provided them with the necessary ammunition and together launched morale-boosting attacks on identified targets. After a stint in the front the officers returned to Zambia. Such intelligence and commissariat officers were being availed with higher and specialised training in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
All this was in preparation for the inauguration of the Turning Point Strategy with its component code-named Zero Hour Operation. The existence of the Zero Hour (countdown) Operation was well known to Western intelligence agencies. It is no secret that the Zero Hour Operation was scheduled for launch and implementation in December 1979. As will be patently clear, Lancaster House talks pre-emptied the whole strategy and put paid to the Zero Hour Operation.
Guerrillas, it was envisaged, were going to operate from large swathes of bush areas and, hopefully, stretch the Rhodesian Security Forces so that they would be thin on the ground. For example, the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls road was under surveillance, just like the Bulawayo-Plumtree road. The presence of guerrillas there was going to draw some units of the Rhodesian Security Forces and by so doing have then distracted from the theatre of war where the conventional forces would be advancing towards the urban centres and other strategic points.
Their three entry points were Victoria Falls, Chirundu and Kariba. Mig fighters were going to provide cover to the ground forces.
As to whether the strategy was going to work or not is open to conjecture. What may not be disputed though is that it became an important factor when it came to the convening of the Lancaster House Talks ahead of the timing of the Zero Hour Operation. As Josiah Magama Tongogara said, in the absence of some outright military victory, guerrillas may not hope to achieve all that they set out to achieve at a round table conference.
