The Story of My He ducked bullets at a tender age Life: Dr Nkomo
THEY had elephants and lions guarding them while the nearest local residents lived two days’ journey away.
As they fought against white minority rule to liberate Zimbabwe from the shackles of colonialism, the country’s nationalists were detained at restriction camps as the oppressors believed that silencing the leaders would quench the people’s thirst for independence.
Among them was Gonakudzingwa Restriction Camp, which was set up in the Gonarezhou National Park, where some of the country’s liberators including Dr Joshua Nkomo, Cde Josiah Chinamano, Cde Ruth Chinamano and Cde Joseph Msika were detained.
In his autobiography, The Story of My Life, the late Vice President Dr Nkomo recounts how he was arrested at an ox-roast party organised by one the supporters of the liberation struggle.
“Suddenly the music died down and there came from the darkness the sound of car doors slamming and the chatter of radios from the police vehicles. The people in the garden were ordered to lie flat on their faces in case shooting started. A senior policeman’s voice shouted: ‘Nkomo where are you? We have come to pick you up,”’ says Dr Nkomo.
He did not fight the arrest and climbed into the police truck with his belongings.
“As the engine started up, I could hear people crying,” says Dr Nkomo.
He narrates how the police pretended not to know where they were taking him until they got to the little police post at Lalapanzi where a senior officer read an order stating that he would be detained at Gonakudzingwa. “But as far as anybody knew, there was no such place. The police were perfectly polite and after a while we worked out that it was part of the Gonarezhou Game Reserve, an area of wild country along the Mozambique border in the far south-east corner of the country – in fact about as remote as it could possibly be. First stop was Thornhill Air Force base near Gweru where there was not a black face to be seen,” says Dr Nkomo. The idea of hiding prisoners in game reserves came from Sir Godfrey Huggins, the long-serving prime minister of Southern Rhodesia who later became Lord Malvern. He once met Dr Salazar, the old Portuguese dictator to whom he tried to explain his country’s native policy but Dr Salazar was not interested as Portugal did not have a native policy. The natives were just there, part of the African fauna like the elephants. British colonies had an elephant policy where they were herded into reserves for their own safety and its policy for natives was much the same. “So here the four of us were the first natives to be hidden away in the elephant reserve. After a while, we were joined by Dan Madzimbamuto, Stanislas Marembo and Willie Musarurwa. The lions and elephants made sure we did not run away. The animals were dangerous but not hostile by intent. They were taking a walk or looking for water just like us. It was their jungle, not ours. But nobody was going to escape while they were around,” says Dr Nkomo. He recounts how the camp had nothing but about a dozen prefabricated huts lined in a sort of plastic material, each with a sitting room, bedroom and a little kitchen with a coal stove. There was running water at a standpipe with someone running the water pump every couple of days. “Those early days of our detention were marked by a series of law-suits against the government, master minded by my wonderful lawyer and good friend Leo Baron of Bulawayo. First we were confined to a mere ten hectares at Gonakudzingwa. Then that form of restriction was declared unlawful. The government’s response was to confine us to what they called the Sengwe tribal trust land consisting of 650 square kilometres. In fact this meant we stayed in the same place – but the railway halt at Vila Salazar was now included in our area and visitors could come and go freely,” he says.
Dr Nkomo’s lawyer lost his appeal against his sentence for subversion and he was sent to serve six weeks’ hard labour in Gweru prison; with remission which meant he served one month.
He says the prison authorities were anxious about him coming into contact with ordinary prisoners, most of whom were supporters of the struggle, as they knew he would get them organised.
“To make my confinement really solitary, they put me by myself in the white prisoner’s section of the jail. The only hard labour I got was cooking for myself and it was real labour stoking up the huge coal stove meant for a whole wing of white criminals. The prison clothes were marked with a broad arrow, in the old British tradition, and the trousers were made of canvas so stiff that they stood up by themselves,” says Dr Nkomo.
The late nationalist says because he was in the white prisoners’ wing, they gave him white people’s rations of a whole loaf of bread a day, a large tin of syrup a week, a little rice, sugar, salt, tea and beans.
“The bean ration was so small that I saved them up for days before it was worth cooking them – one day I counted them and there were just 87 beans. In protest I insisted that I was a black man and must get a black man’s ration, even if I was in a white man’s cell. I said I wanted sadza, the maize porridge that is our diet. So they gave it to me. That is the sort of little victory that keeps you going in solitary confinement,” says Dr Nkomo.
He says the government found it convenient to have him out of the way in Gweru because when the date to have him released came, they kept him there on a detention order. Before long, Cde Chinamano and several others were also sent to join him in prison.
“But once again Leo Baron had been at work and this time he got the courts to declare that detaining us in prison was unlawful. So back we went to Gonakudzingwa, or rather the Sengwe area of 650 square kilometres, with the lions and elephants to guard us. On our return we found that the government had constructed an extra camp alongside our original one,” says Dr Nkomo.
More people were set to join them as the Smith government cracked down hard on all opposition.
Before long, there were four separate camps built within a few hundred metres of each other. The number of detainees fluctuated but rose at one time to over 3 000 people. DUCKING gun shots at the tender age of 16 years was never a stroll in the park, let alone undergoing rigorous training for six months, but perseverance and determination carried the day for Masvingo freedom fighter, Cde Benjamin Mazarire.
Cde Mazarire, whose Chimurenga name was Cde Taguma Hays Hondo joined the liberation struggle in November 1977 together with four other pupils from Hanke Mission and he was the youngest.
This followed the five pupils’ brief incarceration as a result of leading a demonstration at the school where they were doing Form Four. He said they were demonstrating against the ill-treatment of black pupils by the white colonialists who deprived them of privileges, provided by the school, on the basis of their skin colour.
The five pupils were arrested and sent to court, on a Friday yet they were scheduled to write their final GCE O-Level Cambridge examinations the following Monday.
“We went on a rampage as pupils of Hanke Mission and protested against unfair treatment at the hands of white supremacists who were manning the Seventh Day Adventist run school. We were arrested on a Friday when we were scheduled to write an English Language exam the following Monday,” said Cde Mazarire.
He said they were detained at Shurugwi Police Camp for some days before being taken to the Gweru Magistrates’ Court where they were tried.
At the court, they were sentenced to wholly suspended six months in jail. It was such treatment that they suffered, coupled with the failure to sit for final examinations, which motivated them to join the war of liberation struggle
He said himself, Cdes George Matonga, Tendai Mudzimu, Kudzai, and Nhamodzenyika joined other cadres briefly camped in Gezani area in Chiredzi for training in guerilla warfare tactics before crossing into neighbouring Mozambique.
However, as they crossed, two of his colleagues Cdes Kudzai and Nhamodzenyika were shot dead by Rhodesian soldiers who were in a helicopter while Cde Mudzimu who they had met on the way was captured.
Cde Mazarire said he and his two remaining colleagues together with 24 fighters, however, managed to cross into Mozambique where they were posted to Dorori Refugee Camp before being transferred to Mafudze Camp in Tete province and then Samakweza training camp.
At Samakweza camp, the group underwent rigorous guerilla warfare training for six months where they learnt artillery, firearm handling, military intelligence, and drills among other war disciplines. He said this was the second training after they had been trained at Gezani area in Chiredzi before crossing into Mozambique.
The soft spoken freedom fighter who is a senior member in the war veteran’s provincial structure for Masvingo province said attaining independence was never easy. He said he was still pained, up to today, that he did not witness the lowering of the British Union jack and hoisting of our the Zimbabwean national flag, to mark independence on April,18,1980.
He together with others were still holed up in Mozambique, as the freedom fighters wanted to put the white colonialists’ moves under surveillance, thus they did not want to disband at once.
“Some had to wait for any incident of attack by the Rhodesian forces and we had to tread carefully fearing that the enemy could spring a surprise,” said Cde Mazarire.
He said they were not sure of the enemy and did not trust the late Ian Douglas Smith when he signed the ceasefire agreement.
Cde Mazarire said some remained in their bush bases back home, only to disband months after independence in 1980.
He said during the war, a number of cadres were shot dead, some he could not remember but still remembers the painful and heart-wrenching experience at the hands of the enemy. Cde Mazarire said the most touching fact is that some of those who perished during the war did not receive proper burials.
He said he and other cadres were deployed to Mozambique’s Tete province where they were led by commanders that included Cdes Zulu, Tafi, Hondo and Big Five.
Towards the end of 1979, Cde Mazarire was seconded to join the education sector where he started teaching some cadres during the war before returning back home in November 1980. He was then attested into the Zimbabwe National Army in 1981 where he became part of the Zimbabwe Education Corps and immediately wrote his Ordinary Level examinations, which he passed. He was posted to Mbalabala School of Infantry in Bulawayo where he taught at a primary school there. Between 1984 and 1997 he joined the United College of Education where he trained as a teacher while doing his Advanced Level after which he taught at L lewe l lyn Ba r r a c k s , now Lookout Masuku Barracks for one year. He was then promoted to the position of school headmaster in 1989 at Induna Secondary School at 1 Infantry Brigade Headquarters, still in Bulawayo. He assumed the rank of Captain and then Major until he retired in 2004 to venture into business.
Cde Mazarire is a prominent businessman with a number of general dealer shops in his Masvingo rural home of Ngomahuru and in Mushandike Resettlement area and runs a micro finance business with branches across the country. He recently established a $1 million quarry processing plant in the province and is also running a gold mine, investments which he says he was able to make courtesy of independence.
He said independence brought a lot of positive developments in Masvingo but he has the conviction that, on the back of that liberation, a lot was supposed to be done, given that Masvingo is the country’s oldest city.
He said the province remains a cradle for education in the country, as it has many educated people occupying positions of influence in the society, largely due to independence. He, however, bemoaned the lack of zeal to utilise human capital that the province has, into economic development saying more needed to be done to turn the academic acumen into plough shares, so that the region becomes a repository of opportunities and source of employment for many unemployed graduates.
“We have benefitted from our education system as Masvingo as evidenced by a number of our people assuming positions of influence. We also have a number of schools as you find a school within every 3km in most areas in the province, save for Chiredzi and newly resettled areas. This was made possible by independence as prior to independence, we only had a few mission schools and our education system had some bottlenecks,” he said.
Cde Mazarire said the completion of the multimillion dollar Tokwe-Mukosi Dam in Chivi and Masvingo districts, is one of the positive developments which materialised as a result of independence. He said during the war of liberation, there was no room for development; in fact infrastructure was destroyed.
Cde Mazarire added that this year’s independence celebrations were unique as they were coming against the backdrop of the new dispensation led by President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
He urged people in Masvingo province to throng the several centres where the 38th independence celebrations will be held despite their political persuasions.
Cde Mazarire said the new dispensation is non partisan when it comes to national events and independence was meant to be celebrated by all citizens, as part of recognising the sacrifices made by both living and departed heroes. — @walterbmswazie3