Co-ordinated 5-day strategy to thwart ZPRA at Lancaster House

THE mutiny that Sterlington Shumba recounts in his memoirs that to date have not seen the light of day was, according to his assessment, well timed. It came at a time when the Lancaster House Talks were just about to commence in September 1979. The political leadership together with the military leadership were preparing to go to attend the talks alongside their partners in the Patriotic Front (PF), the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). The mutiny, it was envisaged was going to apply brakes to ZPRA’s war effort at the most critical of times. At the same time it was going to give some excuse to launch airborne cross-border bombings into the northern part of Zambia where Zapu/ ZPRA had concentrated their military and civilian establishments following the October 1978 attacks.

Anti-Zapu/ZPRA political agents had been active from the outset of the liberation struggle and went on both within Rhodesia and also outside. Infiltration took place at all levels of the military and civilian components of the Party. This time it was a question of throwing in a large number of the agents at the most critical stage in the armed struggle. One of the conditions at Lancaster was that the antagonists were to desist from launching cross-border raids during the talks. The Rhodesians were to refrain from using their bombers to attack Zapu/ZPRA installations in Zambia. Similarly, ZPRA was also to cease launching infiltrations across the border into Rhodesia. Of course the stipulations were flagrantly violated. As pointed out in earlier articles, the Rhodesians heightened bombing raids at that very time and the raids were calculated to destroy the transport networks between the north and the south which was the launch pad into Rhodesia as part of the implementation of Zapu’s Turning Point Strategy (TPS).

The mutineers drafted their grievances, took with them a hijacked car belonging to the Zambians together with members of the Zambian security elements who had been dispatched to investigate the matter around the mutiny. However, upon arrival at the Zimbabwe House, Zapu’s headquarters in Lusaka, the men were disarmed, arrested and sent back to Solwezi together with the members of the NSO. During their absence the camp suffered more casualties from both malaria and typhoid. The death rate was about five casualties every day. The camp clinic was not operational at the time as the health personnel had been detained by the mutineers. The mutineers had been ordered to release the health personnel that they had detained — which they did upon arrival in Solwezi.

The detainees at Solwezi learnt from NSO officials that had the mutiny continued the Zambian Air Force had been placed on alert to bomb the camp. The mutiny was calculated to bring about results which were in the interests of the Rhodesians while simultaneously emasculating ZPRA’s striking capabilities. Psychologically the military commanders had been psyched for the talks whose successful conclusion was the laying down of arms essentially intended to thwart outright military victory which some within ZPRA had seen as the only practical solution to the long-standing constitutional impasse in Rhodesia.

With 1 Brigade already prepared to move across the Zambezi River and enter the Rhodesian territory in the company of other military units, measures were afoot to train a second Mechanised Brigade which was to play the role of reserve brigade. While the situation calmed down and there was a return to normalcy, the usual routine at the camp, a dark shadow of doubt and discontent hung over the entire settlement experiment. This was true of many cadres, in particular the guerrilla-trained ZPRA personnel who were endowed with a lot of political orientation. These perceived themselves as primarily armed politicians. Some of them did not proceed to the designated assembly points once a ceasefire had been brokered. As is well known, there were some ZPRA units that refused to report at assembly points, prompting the Party to dispatch a contingent against them under the command of Mike Reynold (Charles Gray) to round them up from Tsholotsho where they were holed. Some of these ended up at Khami Prison. Instead of getting a cue from such an incident, government authorities allowed the situation to degenerate and became the genesis of political dissidence which was later to characterise events in the postindependence era. Sterlington Shumba himself ended up as a refugee at Dukwe in Botswana together with the likes of Makhathini Guduza.

The NSO operatives were tasked with the role of sniffing out the leaders of the mutiny. As part of the facilitation of those investigations the mutineers were relocated away from Solwezi and taken in trucks to a faraway place near the Zambia-Malawi border. Sterlington says he does not know what fate befell of the men who were taken to the remote place but does indicate that he met about three quarters of them after independence in Zimbabwe.

Quite a lot had taken place during the time the mutineers were in control at Solwezi. Party property had been sold to villagers who lived near the camp. “We started to patrol around the village in search of Party property which the soldiers had stolen and sold to the villagers during the mutiny. We were helped by the Zambia National Defence Force and I am happy we retrieved quite a lot of items including rifles.”

By then the Lancaster House Talks were in progress in London. ZPRA personnel in Solwezi engaged themselves in speculative political discussions. They were in the war because they desired a certain political regime to materialize in Rhodesia. A lot of time was spent coming up with various possible scenarios following the talks. “Many of us were of the opinion that the talks were merely a dip-stick to check how deep had been our message into them and therefore concluded that the only solution was to topple the Salisbury regime by seizing political power by military means. Antagonists were engaged in manoeuvres to consolidate their positions and enhance their bargaining power during the negotiations.

Sterlington reckons the Rhodesians had imagined they were going to require a single day to deal and dispatch with each of the five battalions. In their reckoning therefore they required five days to dispose of the five battalions that constituted the 1 Brigade.” The British who were our coloniser, were chairing the talks and as such were supposed to be impartial but to our surprise they were biased and went to the extent of conniving with the Salisbury regime and other Western powers including the USA to destroy ZPRA in Zambia. To prove that point . . . during the envisaged destruction of ZPRA’s Brigade Britain called a five-day period of recess during the talks and gave the Patriotic Front a 5-day ultimatum to agree to the terms set by Britain or face a deadlock. Further, during the recess, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Washington to confer with the US President and was there for a period of five days.”