The Sunday News
DR Joshua Nkomo challenges Rhodesian minister, a Mr Bloomberg over the latter’s claim that problems in the country were not political, October 9, 1975
“UDI has been a disaster and the country is in this mess because of the political situation. Unless it is straightened out, we are driving to disaster. Give Africans responsibility and they will do the job. ‘African housing’ and ‘African Townships’ must be abolished. Housing estates should be known as merely high density, low density or high budget areas. Workers can be anybody. To talk of African workers is nonsense. We have outlived the division of people into races. That is old colonial thinking. We should be thinking these days of low density or high-density building, not of the type of person who is going to live in them.”
Reflecting on the 10 years he spent in a Rhodesian prison in the 1970s, March 9, 1980
“Without all this suffering, imprisonment and torture, we would not have got where we are. They were profitable years in that the people who detained us believed they could kill the spirit of nationalism. It did not turn out that way. In spite of the spirit being dampened, it was sharpened. These people were too stubborn to listen and so without our detention and liberation struggle, we would not be having our long overdue independence.”
Urging youths to engage in agriculture and desist from always looking for jobs, April 12, 1980
“I want thousands of youths to join in tilling the land so that we can turn this country into a garden. Those who are looking for jobs in factories in town are looking in the wrong places.”
Warning the Ian Smith regime of a war of liberation speaking at Heathrow International Airport, London, en route to Jamaica:
“This is the march of time. Now is the time for a solution to the problem of Rhodesia. If people do not realise this, then inevitably there will be an armed struggle. There can be nothing else. There is no problem that cannot be solved, but what is needed is a recognition of the fact that in Rhodesia, the Africans are in the majority and the Europeans in the minority. If the Europeans accept that all the citizens without discrimination must rule the country and that the Africans are in the majority in the government, we can get the solution. That is the only way.”
Asked about the time limit, he said: “The time is now – right now. I believe the time has come for the Smith regime to resign, because I cannot see us getting anywhere with them.”
No more talks with Smith – May 16, 1975
“We have discovered that there is no settlement with Smith. He is just an impossible person. We cannot make a constitutional arrangement with Mr Smith because he has no power to do so. We have been trying to show Britain (at the Commonwealth conference) that she is responsible for up to six and a half million people of her colony. I repeat, her colony. It can be nothing else. Rhodesia is a colony of Britain, and we are demanding to be freed now from the status of a colonised people.”
He fires an early warning shot at white farmers resisting land reforms on September 18, 1980.
“Farmers must change too and realise that they cannot keep vast areas of unproductive or underutilised land. It is right for the commercial farmer to start thinking of the type of farming you get in Europe. We cannot continue with vast areas of land on which no other development is done than drilling a borehole and piping water, where no effort at intensified ranching is made. Cattle thefts must be stamped out and snaring stopped. But behind these actions was the situation created by many years of land hunger and the belief of tribal people that they were unjustly treated but now there is majority government, we must get our land back. What would you do if you were a man with six acres and cattle starving and on the other side of the fence you saw the farmer’s cattle? They snared because no native is allowed a gun. How else could they get meat”
Unity, unity and more unity, September 29, 1980
“The rulers will go, the parties will go and so will men present and to come, but the independent Zimbabwe will never go … our children will inherit this country and it is our duty to build it in unity and have our children thankful to us for building the country instead of destroying it.”
