Celebrating Zimbabwe’s Heroic Friends and Defence Allies
AS part of the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services’ month-long Heroes and Defence Forces commemorations under the auspices of Zimbabwe’s Heroic Friends and Defence Allies, RICHARD RUNYARARO MAHOMVA (RM) sat down with AMBASSADOR CHRISTOPHER MUTSVANGWA (CM) to discuss how Zimbabwe’s journey to Independence was supported by African liberation movements. Cde Mutsvangwa is a seasoned pioneer Zimbabwean Diplomat, ZANU PF Secretary for Information and Publicity and Chairman of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZLWVA). Below are excerpts of what Cde Mutsvangwa said.
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I am the Secretary of Information and Publicity and spokesperson of the party of the Zimbabwe revolution, ZANU PF. I am also Chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWA) This is an affiliate to the Party anchored in the victorious military and political cadres who are surviving members of victorious ZANLA and ZIPRA military combatants of both ZANU and ZAPU. These are the two consequential national liberation movements of Zimbabwe, who scored the 1979 military victory against the Rhodesian army, a catspaw of the British Imperial Army.
The battlefield victory forced the enemy to an armistice at the Lancaster Houses Conference, paving the way to the first ever universal suffrage elections in 1980. Thereafter, Zimbabwe was reborn as sovereign, democratic and independent Republic with full membership to the United Nations and the comity of nations.
Mining deep and wide from the historical ethos of the armed struggle, as of 2013, ZNLWA spawned and spearheaded the struggle against the Mugabe-G40 dynastic and monarchist oligarchy which posed a mortal challenge to the continuity and success of the Zimbabwe Revolution. This culminated with the 2017 victory of Operation Restore Legacy and the demise of the Mugabe Presidency. The Second Republic ushered in under the aegis of President Mnangagwa.
My role in Government saw me serve at various intervals as a Parliamentarian for Norton Constituency, a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and a fully-fledged Minister of War Veterans Affairs. With the advent of the Second Republic, I was appointed Special Advisor to the President.
The ultimate prize for ZNLWA is its rewarding lobbying for the imminent inaugural launch of the League of the War Veterans as the fourth organ of ZANU PF. This will see the core cadre-ship of the national liberation movement play a prominent and integral role in shaping decision making as the patty discharges its historical role to the expectations of the heroic people of Zimbabwe.
I am lucky to have been blessed by a rich, varied and eclectic life beyond the military and political dimensions.
I am a businessman who has been at the forefront of ground-breaking initiatives that shifted the national economic paradigm. This equally derives from my checkered academic background. In 1975 I abandoned a promising legal career as a merit bursary top national student pursuing law studies at the then University of Rhodesia now University of Zimbabwe.
I crossed into newly-independent Mozambique to join thousands of generational youths’ eager to train militarily, take to arms and be deployed to the battlefront: the goal then being to undo the military capitulation of the 1890s at the hands of the marauding mercenary and private army of arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. This feat was duly accomplished with the alluded 1979 battlefield victories.
I trained at Tembwe Guerrilla Camp in Tete province in Mozambique as I overcame many wartime vicissitudes of hunger, disease and acute welfare deprecation, as refugees in a war-ravaged, fledgling independent nation wallowing at the lowest rung of global economic ranking.
I was deployed at the warfront with my first firefight being a successful attack that overran the Nyamapanda border post of colonial and settler Rhodesia. This attack was a haste and gutty riposte to the 1976 heinous massacre of defenseless refugees of the Nyadzonia Massacre in 1976.
Having drawn first blood, I was redeployed into a reconnaissance unit that infiltrated deep into enemy territory. My commander was Tennison Mari WeMombe Sithole, a seasoned and very alert sector commander. Starting off from Mudzi in Mtoko, we crossed the Rwenya River into Katerere Nyanga, then Chikore, Tanda, Chiendambuya, Mukarakate, Mrewa, Shangure, Broncos, Chihota, Send, Beatrice and ended our march of over 300km all the way to Marirangwe by Norton. All that march on foot.
Our mission was to politicise, conscientise and mobilise the populace in preparation for impending deployment of numerous and larger guerrilla groups. Also we wanted to infiltrate deep into hearty interior ramparts of the enemy so as to promptly stretch out its deployments. Finally, we intended to drown our infiltration by a daring mine attack of a railway bridge across the Manyame River on the Harare-Bulawayo transport artery.
Alas, we had to abandon the last act. A treacherous incident in Seke provoked our salutary punitive reprisal on a compromised supporter who had planted needles in filter of a supplied cigarette packet.
A Rhodesian manhunt ensued against us. We hid in Marirangwe under cover of a protecting populace. We ended upon abandoning the mission. We dodged the enemy by marching back close to New Sarum airbase. We knew the marauding spotter planes would not have readied their menacing binoculars as they scrambled for search and destroy surveillance. We deliberately and tactfully avoided going southwards in the widening enemy radius of search.
We calculated rightly that marching back closer to Salisbury was safer than an anticipated expectation to avoid the feared urban stronghold of the enemy’s capital city.
Yes, we evaded and successfully marched all the 300km return and report route to our relatively safe sanctuaries by the Mozambique frontier.
A third stint of deployment at the battlefront was cut short as units were aggregated for the large scale attacks intended to help our political leadership gain the upper hand at the Geneva Conference talks of 1976.
My fourth deployment, now promoted to detachment commander ended nastily. The enlarged battalion marching to attack Nyanga town fell into a night ambush trying to cross the Nyamombe River. We outgunned the bridge defenders.
By then we had alerted the enemy. Wisened, the Rhodesian Army proceeded to prepare a well-organised and thorough massive counterattack of their fearful combined air and ground assault warfare. We were clearly on the vulnerable defensive in the equation of asymmetrical warfare that favoured mobility and responsive resupply.
Clearly the hurried graduation to large scale attacks turned out to be a costly military blunder of strategic scale. I escaped the total rout meted to our oversized battalion in battle on the banks of the Nyagadzi river. Purple hearts of bomb shrapnel on my knee and thigh in both legs are lifelong reminders of the painful encounter.
Worse on that dark day, my AK 47 assault weapon had its piston cover ripped open by a sharpshooting sniper’s bullet. I never noticed this frightening personal disarmament until when I was safely away at a gathering point, far removed from the ‘killing bag’ of death. The mayhem triggered as we struggled to feed the fatigued battalion from ill prepared local villages.
Fatigue from hauling heavy weaponry in mountain terrain and insufficient rest after the earlier battle all weighed drown our defensive capability. Further aggravation came from lack of central command. I later discovered that the Provincial Commander had surreptitiously broken out ahead of battle in a cowardly self-saving flight to safety back to Mozambique.
Comrade Lucky Chombo is a war survivor from a latter day exploding antipersonnel mine planted by the enemy as it resorted to the reckless and gruesome warfare that haunts us for years after the guns died drown.
Comrade Chombo had to calmly counsel me to throw away the disabled and unusable AK47. Afterwards, I marched under guard, unarmed, back to sanctuary in Mozambique. And this not before another fatal encounter.
I escaped another night enemy ambush. The enemy was laying in wait at a dug-out canoe crossing point on the fast-flowing and treacherous Gairezi River. Losing yet another comrade among others, we had developed long bonds from our initial joint deployment in the Mudzi detachment zone.
Back to my education. I started learning computer programming from a German friend who came to support our struggle in Maputo with the pioneering compugrahic equipment acquired in America for the party’s Department of Information in 1978. After Independence I again returned to law studies on a quest to graduate. This fortuitously came in handy on my return to civilian life as a lucky and chancy survivor.
With Independence achieved in 1980, I dashed back to my old university to resume curricula from five years before.
Public duty called once again. The new Government wanted my service as a tried and tried cadre of ZANU PF.
Minister Mnangagwa, my wartime mentor was in charge of the Office of Prime Minister, Cde Robert Mugabe. I was selected for aptitude tests to qualify for diplomatic cadetship with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That put paid my aspiration of a career in the legal field, much to the new anguish of my father. He had braved all sorts of violence meted out in enemy reprisals for a son in enemy guerrilla ranks.
That as it may, diplomacy ended up my vocation. Brussels, Belgium, the headquarters of the European was my first assignment. The last time the Zimbabwe nation had true diplomats was on the Munhumutapa Kingdom with the budding imperial Portugal and other potentates’ littoral Indian Ocean.
Rhodesia was a colony so our diplomatic deployment in 1980 broke new ground underscoring recovered sovereignty. I later moved to New York in 1985. In that interim I served as the keyboard taximan of the diplomat dispatched to steer Namibia to Independence, along the process masterminding an emphatic electoral victory for the SWAPO sister revolutionary national liberation movement.
This was also the opportunity to resume university studies in earnest even as I discharged marital and parental responsibilities. All the while, I was busy with the demanding chores of global diplomacy.
It is noteworthy that my New York stint at the United Nations had a crescendo with the sharpened fight by Africa and progressive fight against apartheid South Africa. Pretoria was now the remnant outpost of moribund West European imperialist depredations of Atlantic Slavery, colonial partition and unbridled imperial plunder against Africa and beyond.
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