Bvuma relives Chimoio massacre

Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore

This is war.

Not a packet of fish and chips. Not watching soccer at a stadium. Not watching a movie at a theatre. It is not romance. War is violence. It is mass murder. War is savage, barbaric. There is nothing civilised about war. There are no ethics in war. Only maximum death and absolute destruction.

This is how Thomas Sukutai Bvuma contextualises war in “The Chosen Generation” (2021). Reflecting on the darkness of man’s heart, which appears to draw excitement from trauma, characteristic of warfare, one is reminded of that sad November incident 46 years ago at Chimoio Camp in Mozambique.

November, therefore, should always be a relentless reminder of the spirit of unity and sacrifice to the people of Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans should be alive to the fact that whatever the concept of democracy constitutes, it essentially excludes selling out one’s birth right to earn a constituency.

The West, with its own forms of democracy, is fraught with problems of its own, among them, the hypocrisy that comes with it.

Ian Douglas Smith slaughtered Zimbabweans, in a genocidal madness that remains etched in the national psyche today with the help of sell-outs, like Morrison Nyathi, yet he believed to be doing it to protect the rights of a minority white Rhodesians.

To him, and his fellow white die-hards across the Western hemisphere, Chimoio was a non-event in terms of loss of life, because, after all, they were only black lives.

It was simply another bad day in the office.

Recreating the zenith of sacrifice, where the fish and the water suffered the same fate on November 23, 1977, when the settler regime led by the racial bigot, Smith, attacked Chimoio Camp, the ZANLA military headquarters in Mozambique, Bvuma lashes out at the cowardice and double standards of the colonial apparatus of brutality.

Of the heinous act, he writes: “For Selous Scouts, it was sweet and proper. It was sweet to slaughter thousands of unarmed boys and girls. It was decorous to massacre black ‘terrorists’. But it was not sweet to be massacred and maimed by the thousand. There is no desecration in massacre and mass and mass graves.”

Located about 20 kilometres to the north-east of the town of Chimoio, the capital city of the Mozambican province of Manica, the camp site accommodated 20 000 people.

It comprised 14 camps; for both guerrillas and refugees, which included Chaminuka, Chindunduma, Chitepo, Nehanda, Parirenyatwa, Pasi Tigere, Percy Ntini, Takawira, Tamba Wakachenjera and Zvido Zvevanhu.

The air raid, which persisted for two days, sought to thwart the liberation movement’s claim, on behalf of Zimbabweans, to their ancestral heritage, the land, and correction of colonial imbalances in Rhodesia.

Devastatingly, the Chimoio massacre claimed thousands of lives, not only of military personnel, but unarmed women and children as well. Chindunduma, for example, was a school camp, while Mbuya Nehanda was a base for pregnant and lactating women, and girls.

The operation, whose intent was to demoralise guerrillas, exploited the concentration of forces during the morning parade. As part of a deception plan to disperse the guerrillas assuming it to be a false air raid signal, a Douglas DC-8 airliner was flown over the camps 10 minutes before the air-strike.

Consequently, when the participating aircraft approached the freedom fighters, their charges were caught unawares.

Bvuma laments that Rhodesian commandos transformed “Chimoio Camp into a theatre of the macabre”, leaving “thousands of grotesque corpses of babies, girls, boys and women,” strewn all over the bases making up the site, which were razed to the ground.

Recapturing the gory scene assaulting global audiences’ conscience following that November day, he exposes humanity’s inclination to brutality.

There is nothing neither glorious nor heroic about war; any kind of war and for whatever purposes, the artist-guerrilla reasons.

There are no victors in war – all are victims – losers.

Drawing from his experiences as a freedom fighter in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle to poke at humanity’s worst foible, the desire to win through losing; euphemistically called war, Bvuma candidly exposes the hollowness of man’s heart, his propensity for sadism and his obsession with deceit.

Departing from the limitations of a memoir, whose major weakness is self-justification, through Nyika Yababa, he goes beyond philosophising about the struggle, to capture the ideological, generational and personal conflicts leading to confrontations in the liberation movement.

It is at Chimoio, where he was training to be a commando, that Yababa loses Ndodini and her baby, whom he later learns was fathered by Killer Mabhunu, the security commander at Chibawawa, and his 15-year-old younger brother, Comrade Watoto (Taurai), who followed him to Mozambique.

The scene between Yababa and the naked girl, Comrade Dadirai, whose belly is slit open, yet she holds on to him in their hideout, reminds one of Kudzai in Alexander Kanengoni’s “Echoing Silences”, who, in pain, yearns for death as Munashe, who is in love with her, wilts inside.

Although Yababa helps Dadirai to limp to Chimoio Town, and carries her on his back when she can no longer walk, he never sees her again. Such is the nature of war and the travesty of social justice.

He wonders why “people have such brief but intimate encounters, never to meet again? What was the purpose? The entertainment of the Creator shuffling minute pawns on a giant chessboard?”

Yababa is finally deployed to the front where he distinguishes himself as an efficient killing machine and commander.

A reading of Bvuma’s historical novel is an engagement with the geo-political, socio-political, and economic spaces in which the struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence are situated. Individual and collective visions confront and elbow out each other as the Rhodesian killing machinery is sharpened, while ideological daggers are drawn in the movement. Without inhibitions, Bvuma, like Kanengoni in “Echoing Silences” (1997), Freedom Nyamubaya in “That Special Place” (2003) and “On the Road Again” (1998), bares his soul, as he does in “Every Stone that Turns” (1999), on his experiences in the liberation war.

He aptly captures the befuddling nature of war.

Using the autobiographical mode, like Kanengoni and Nyamubaya, Bvuma juxtaposes his biography with the national one and its ethos, principally on the struggle and its aftermaths.

The novel begins in medias res, as Nyika Yababa, a war veteran, watches a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, on television at his home in Chitungwiza.

The targets of the attack, led by a young man, Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, include the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi Trident Hotel, Cama Hospital and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus.

It is 2008, Zimbabwe is in turmoil, and the world is under siege from terrorist attacks. At this point, Yababa reflects on what distinguishes a terrorist from a freedom fighter.

Gruesome images on the screen are read in association with the filth surrounding Yababa, whose body is described as “old, arthritis-stricken, spent, worn out and rusty”.

Children are playing unperturbed in the sewage freely flowing in the streets of Zengeza, Chitungwiza, as the local council is “too corrupt and broke to provide services, abandoning ratepayers to wade and lament in their own piss and faeces.”

Through flashback, the reader soon learns that Yababa, born Masara Musamba of Sakubva African Township, Umtali in Rhodesia, belongs to the chosen generation that selflessly sacrificed for the liberation of black Zimbabweans from Ian Smith’s oppressive regime.

Masara, who is waiting to enrol at the University of Rhodesia, is temporarily working at a fruit canning company. He is beaten up by his white boss, John Bulloch for no apparent reason, and the young man retaliates by committing a cardinal sin in colonial Rhodesia—he clobbers him.

Realising the gravity of his transgression, Masara, who has had a romantic and glorious view of freedom fighters, crosses the border to Mozambique to join ZANLA guerrillas. He leaves behind his beautiful girlfriend, Wadiwa, whom he has promised to marry.

Masara’s first contact with guerrillas was in Mutambara when he, along with his brother, Taurai, visited their sick grandmother.

He finds himself at Chibawawa Refugee Camp in September 1976, where his bubble is blown by Comrade Killer Mabhunu, the security commander who interrogates him.

As the plot reels out, Masara, now Comrade Nyika Yababa, is shuffled from camp to camp, which somehow dampens his spirits and puts his patience to test. He soon comes face-to-face with the reality of war, the futility of life and the never-say-die spirit of expectation.

Without glossing over what guerrillas faced at the front and in the rear, Bvuma explores the devastating nature of war. Guerrillas, as human beings, are neither infallible nor impregnable. The struggle was not a stroll in the park, the writer insists.

Yababa impregnates Cde Ndodini, whom he falls in love with, notwithstanding the starvation, betrayal, savagery, disease and death surrounding them.

The historical fiction offers more than a window into the liberation struggle. It also provides gaps for academic interrogation. It is a kind of mirror into both the rear and the front, inside and outside Rhodesia.

“The Chosen Generation” adds to the pool of information on the fall of the Marxist/Leninist ideology favoured by the Vashandi group, the reasons behind the Nhari Rebellion of 1974, the ouster of Ndabaningi Sithole, and the rise of Robert Mugabe.

Insights into ZANU-ZAPU relations before and after ZIPA, and the attempted coup of 1978, led by former Vashandi commanders, finds home as well.

Interestingly, Bvuma, through Yababa, his wife Wadiwa and son, Masara Junior, leaves the reader to ponder on the essence of the chosen generation, not only in bringing freedom to the people of Zimbabwe, but in taking the nation to the Promised Land.

Engagement with the novel answers as many questions as it raises them on what constitutes victory and heroism personified in war.

The reader’s experiences interact and merge with the author’s to create a national fabric of consciousness, which may be the catharsis required for healing the wounds and soothing the deeper scars within.

The must-read book is an authentic recollection of liberation struggle memory, illuminating the major characters around it, and the role the masses played in making Zimbabwe’s Independence in 1980 a reality.