The Sunday News
Colonel (Retired) Waitson Tshipa aka Cde John Nyamupingidza
IN the past few weeks, Sunday News has been publishing a series of articles about my former subordinate during the armed struggle, Cde Albert Sumbo Ncube pseudo name Shungu who unfortunately is now late. The narrator of the story is one Matthew Masuku, a former Rhodesian detective who was part of the unit that arrested Sumbo Ncube in Bulawayo.
While Masuku’s narration is revealing especially on the activities of the Rhodesian security forces, something which I urge the Sunday News crew to continue doing, what I found interesting was failure by Masuku to tell it as it was on how Sumbo “slipped” through their hands at the Victoria Falls Police where he was detained. It is not in doubt that Sumbo who trained at Morogoro in Tanzania in the group of 137 in 1975 was a fine soldier, endowed with natural intelligence, bravery and tactical awareness, but he was no James Bond.
Deep down Masuku knows that Sumbo did not break the leg irons and handcuffs as he wants the whole world to believe. That was a ruse used by the Rhodesian intelligence in its bid to pull the wool over the ZPRA’s face, however, we refused to be fooled. Enough on what Masuku said and now I relate what happened and what Sumbo told us as his commanders following his much-hyped prison break.
Sumbo worked under me from the day of his deployment until he chose to transgress from the revolutionary path.
When Sumbo was deployed to the front in 1976 in a section of nine guerillas, all his operations he carried them under my command. When he came back, he told me all about his activities until his so-called dramatic escape. We should learn to be factual when telling history. We need to package history into its correct perspective.
When Sumbo and his section of nine guerillas were deployed in 1976, I was operating in the Victoria Falls, Kazungula, Livingstone and Wankie now Hwange areas a field commander, working under Cde Matshimini (now late Roger Ncube) who was the regional commander for our operational area.
I collected Sumbo’s section across the Zambezi River in Zambia and crossed with them to Rhodesia. We did not waste time as we had targets that needed our immediate attention. Our fist mission was to attack Peters Motel later to change to Spray View Hotel in Victoria Falls. I led that section for the operation, which was successfully carried out. That is when Sumbo won my heart, I was impressed with his conduct, his movement and bravery convinced me that here was a fine soldier. When they were deployed to the front, Sumbo was the section’s Bazooka Man, so he came armed with an RPG (bazooka) and a Seminov weapon.
Before the attack on Peters Motel, I had instructed Sumbo that I wanted him to fire two shells at the bar section of the hotel and when the time came, he did that with aplomb. He followed the instructions to the letter and as a new arrival at the front that was impressive. His ingenuity did not end there, as after doing damage with the bazooka, Sumbo displayed a lot of bravery when he went to the southern side of the hotel and started firing at cars that were leaving the hotel in confusion. He hit three with one of them veering off the road and hitting the tree, that was brilliant.
To me we were sending a strong message to the Rhodesians that the boys were now in town and the whites could not do as they pleased, places like the Victoria Falls were no longer safe. After that I was full of praise of Shungu as we called Sumbo and I patted him on the back for a job well done. A life was lost there during the attack.
About a week or so, we decided to raid the farm of Arthur Ross Cumming, a racist farmer within the vicinity of Victoria Falls who was infamous for harassing blacks. Having been impressed with what Sumbo had done in the previous operation, I wanted him by my side during the raid on Cumming.
Our approach was two pronged and would happen simultaneously. We will raid Cumming’s store for our supplies and that mission I gave to Cde Scot. Myself and Sumbo would go straight to the farm house and deal with Cumming.
Since Sumbo had been armed with a bazooka, I decided that he takes Cde Amin’s AK-47 and give the bazooka to Amin. Myself I was armed with an AK-47 and a pistol.
When we got to the Cumming farm between 8pm and 9pm, which was also populated by vicious dogs, the canines greeted us with their barking, but then went quiet. I and Sumbo took our positions. There was a sudden opening of the door and Cumming’s wife burst out. Then the light from the house shone on me. She shouted “terrorists, terrorists” and ran past us followed by the dogs.
We did not waste time as we quickly moved into the house where we found a drunk Cumming holding a glass of beer.
When he saw us he shouted “bloo sh . . .” He threw the glass at Shungu and missed. He was not done as he quickly got hold of the table in a bid to hit us with. At that point I ordered Shungu to shoot and he did not disappoint as he pumped 16 rounds into the burly body of Cumming. While he was falling down, I noticed that Cumming was wearing an attractive watch and asked Sumbo to take it. We quickly left and looked for Cde Scot and others. They had raided the store without any incident where they took the supplies, which we needed among them mealie-meal and loaves of bread.
That is where the problem with Sumbo started. On our way back to the base, Amin demanded that Sumbo return his AK-47 rifle and the latter delayed. When Amin demanded the weapon again, Sumbo would say ngiyakunika, ngiyakunika (I will give you) until we left them behind. We got to base without them and it was dawn. I had this policy that no one should report to base at daylight, for obvious reasons of course.
When Sumbo and Amin realized that it was no longer possible to report to the base, they decided to wait until dusk.
During that time, they also thought of hiding their kit bags. In ZPRA whenever a guerilla was hiding his kit bag, he did that while alone. So, Amin later told us that he went first to hide his kit bag and, on his return, Sumbo asked him to give him his AK-47 as he moved to hide his kit bag as well. Sumbo took Amin’s weapon with one magazine and disappeared, never to return. Amin then reported to the base that evening.
After splitting with Amin, Sumbo went to Victoria Falls where he sold Cumming’s watch with the intention of raising money to board a train to Bulawayo. However, he started drinking beer and got drunk, resulting in him missing the train. He and other imbibers became a nuisance and they were rounded up by the police. They were locked into the cells and released the following day. It never crossed the minds of the Rhodesian police that among those drunk fellows there was a “terrorist.” From his drinking spree, Sumbo had also blown the money from the sale of Cumming’s watch.
That was not to deter him as that night he boarded the Bulawayo train where on the initial stages of the journey he was playing hide and seek with the train guards because he did not have a travelling ticket. His luck ran out at Mpido Siding where he was finally caught when found dozing and was chucked out.
But to his advantage he was now in familiar territory as that was near the place he grew up. He had attended the Catholic Sacred Heart School where the priests because of his poor background had been very kind to him. Being a Sunday, he knew that Sacred Heart staff would use the nearby road while coming from their missionary activities, so he laid an ambush. He used a tree branch to block the road.
The Catholic missionaries indeed arrived at the ambush and the priest got out of the car to remove the obstacle.
Sumbo sprung from his ambush position, the priest recognized him immediately and called out his name. That was a fatal mistake as Sumbo shot him at point blank as he did not want to have people going around spreading news that he had been spotted armed. He went on to shoot the nuns, one died on the spot while two others were seriously injured.
From there he started moving around, shot a buck which he sold to the railways employees who were camped along the railway line. He also found a company with grinders where he ground the barrel of the AK-47 almost to the gas chamber. He also ground out the butt. Now with money from the sale of the buck he was able to board the train to Bulawayo where he went on an armed robbery spree until his arrest.
Coming to his so-called dramatic escape and that it was not possible that the Rhodesians had recruited Sumbo to be a “turned terrorist” as suggested by Masuku, we in the ZPRA command did not buy Sumbo’s story.
This was because of the events that unfolded following the dramatic escape. Firstly, after his so-called escape, Sumbo went to our crossing point at the Zambezi River at Simonga and as fate would have it, I was on the other side waiting to cross with about 30 guerillas.
We then saw a very light-complexioned person dressed in an underwear, calling on us to assist him. Sumbo had become lighter than he was because of continued stay in the cells. That surprised us and we thought this coloured guy is trying to fool us, so I ordered one comrade to fire a Desheka, which had been deployed at the crossing point.
Our coloured friend who in fact was Sumbo disappeared from the scene. Then 30 minutes later members of the Zambian Defence Forces radioed us to tell us from Kazungula that they were with a ZPRA guerilla who had escaped from the Rhodesian custody. Truly how could that be, from Simonga to Kazungula is 75 kilometres, there is no human being who could have covered that distance on foot in just 30 minutes.
Obviously, the Rhodesians had taken Sumbo there. When we received radio communication from the Zambians, I had gone to report to Commander Matshimini that we had aborted our mission on that day to cross as we suspected the Rhodesians were lying in ambush across as we had encountered a coloured man. I told Matshimini that we will cross the next day. Matshimini then said I should go and check on this guerilla.
When I got there was Shungu or Sumbo dressed in only his underwear with a pair of handcuffs and leg irons. The first thing that came to my mind was that obviously Shungu had been sent by the Rhodesians to spy on us. His story was unbelievable, it was too good to be true.
Also, the fact that the Rhodesians paraded Shungu in the media disturbed us, those with the energy just go to the archives of the Rhodesian newspapers and find out how many captured ZPRA and Zanla guerillas received the attention that he got. In the later stages of our armed struggle, the Smith regime did not waste their time taking guerillas to court, they just dealt with them behind the scenes. His court appearance made us alert; we were not fooled.
Talk that he was going to get a death sentence did not move some of us, the killing of the Catholics to the Rhodesian government did not mean anything. This was because the Rhodesians felt the Catholics were hea vily involved in the agenda of the armed struggle. About the Catholics they cared less despite the fact that they were whites.
Then from us he was picked up by the ZPRA Military Intelligence Department who took him to the rear where he was subjected to interrogation. He maintained his story that he had escaped on his own. I was to be recalled from the front to try and solve this Shungu puzzle, but he did not budge. This time he was at the Freedom Camp (FC).
Then someone from the command element came up with the idea that he be handcuffed and taken to a place where there was a lot of scrap metal, amangwentshengwentshe. Sumbo tried all the tricks in the book to break the cuffs to no avail. The commanders said “don’t worry you have all the time in the world” to do what you did in Victoria Falls, but that came to naught.
After realising that he had been exposed he sought my attention and I gladly obliged. He then revealed that his dramatic escape had been stage-managed by the Rhodesian intelligence as they wanted to use him as their spy in ZPRA.
I asked him why he had wasted everybody’s time and in response he said someone within our ranks in the rear had called him aside and showed him photographs of his mother and step-father. That person had told him that if he ever revealed the truth about his escape then his parents would be killed. Despite all this Sumbo’s life was spared as it was felt that he could be rehabilitated but could be not deployed to the front.
n Col Tshipa (Retired) is the former ZPRA regional commander for the Northern Front One (FN1) that covered Bulilima, Hwange and Tsholotsho districts. After Independence he served in the One PARA Group and later Special Air Services (SAS). He is currently a game rancher in Matabeleland North Province.
