Dr Nkomo undeterred by Dr Parirenyatwa’s death

Feature Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
THE sadness caused by Dr Parirenyatwa’s tragic death was immeasurably deep, countrywide and but extremely inspiring to every self-respecting Zimbabwean, particularly to the black people and coloureds, Indians and the few white people who supported the liberation struggle. Among the coloureds who supported Joshua Nkomo were the outspoken Herbert Foya Thompson, the flamboyant but highly courageous Frank Berman both of whom lived in Salisbury. In Nkomo’s home district, Matobo, there was Sydney Joseph who was running a sole trader’s shop at Mambale.

In the Indian community, there were staunch supporters who included a very well-known Salisbury-based anti-racial discrimination campaigner, Suhman Mehta, and the Narans and Desais of Bulawayo, Gwanda and Kwekwe. Garfield Todd, his fearless daughter, Judith and TT Dawson were some of the white people who openly supported the black people’s cause.

Joshua Nkomo led the procession with Dr Parirenyatwa’s body from Bulawayo. When the cortege reached Norton a rather strange incident occurred when the ZAPU Salisbury provincial chairman, Leopold Takawira, demanded to lead the procession into the city (Salisbury). He said Nkomo’s vehicle should follow the hearse while his should head the procession into and through the city as that was his area.

Timely intervention by some ZAPU youth leaders saved the situation as they prevailed, and Nkomo in his capacity as the ZAPU national president continued to head the cortege right up to Murewa, the late Dr Parirenyatwa’s home where he was buried.

The ZAPU publicity and information secretary, Robert Mugabe (President), was the master of ceremonies. The body lay in state overnight and interment took place the following day.

Among the traditional leaders was Munhuwepayi Mangwende who had been that area’s chief from 1937 to 1951 when he was deposed by the Southern Rhodesian administration and was replaced by his cousin, a regime’s craven puppet called Enock Mangwende.

Munhuwepayi’s crime, for lack of a better word, was his public and unyielding opposition to the Land Apportionment Act (1930) which forcibly transplanted whole communities of black people to make room for the whites, and also to the Land Husbandry Act (1950) sections of which called for destocking among the black people, leaving each poll-tax payer with only 15 cattle and not more than eight acres of arable land. The number of cattle was later reduced to a maximum of eight per poll-tax payer.

Munhuwepayi supported Joshua Nkomo past the Gonakudzingwa era, throughout post those 10-plus years of detention interspaced with spells of restriction and during the six years when Joshua Nkomo was based in Zambia and was personally in charge of the armed liberation struggle. He was by Joshua Nkomo’s side till he (Mangwende) breathed his last in the mid-1980s.

Let us now go back to the burial scene at Dr Parirenyatwa’s home. The coffin had just been taken out of the house in which it had spent the night. A very large body of sullen, crest-fallen people were standing in the yard awaiting an announcement by the master of ceremonies.

At that time a VW Beetle sedan carrying four people drove into the yard. One of the passengers was Reuben Jamela, president of the Southern Rhodesia Trade Union Congress which opposed a ZAPU call for workers’ organisations to be aligned to liberation movements. As Jamela came out of the vehicle, all hell broke loose as ZAPU youths pounced on him with whatever weapons, which included branches of mulberry trees the assailants broke off from trees dotted all over the yard.

The MC, shaking with obvious rage, was shouting “You’re cowards! I say you’re cowards! You’re cowards!” as the youths swung branches, sticks and rained fists and kicks on Jamela who used his arms to protect his face and head.

When they stopped the assault after intervention by some party leaders and some police officers, Jamela was a shirtless, bloody mess. His tie was hanging around his neck, and his shirt was torn into literally shreds. His red tie hung like a noose around his neck. Order was soon restored and the burial continued.

Joshua Nkomo delivered a highly inspirational eulogy in which he said Dr Parirenyatwa’s death should make every able-bodied son and daughter of Zimbabwe join the liberation struggle, take up the cudgels and free the country.

“We will have betrayed this brave son of Zimbabwe if we fail to free our country from colonialism,” he stated.
In 1964, Nkomo appointed Dr Parirenyatwa’s younger brother, Stephen, the chief ZAPU representative in Zambia. In 1972 Stephen left ZAPU to join James Robert Dambaza Chikerema’s Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (Frolizi), a breakaway from ZAPU. Stephen Parirenyatwa died in a road accident in Zimbabwe in 1978 after he had returned home under the auspices of the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime.

Following Dr Parirenyatwa’s death, ZAPU continued with its sabotage operations which were closely monitored by JZ Moyo and Robert Mugabe who had been appointed by Nkomo to handle ZAPU military matters.

However, on 20 September, 1962, the Southern Rhodesian regime banned ZAPU and restricted its top leaders and prominent members. Nkomo was in Tanzania at that time but he flew back home and was whisked by helicopter on arrival at the then Salisbury Airport and was dumped at his cousin Sihle Nkomo’s home near St Joseph’s Mission (KaKwiyana) in the Matobo District.

He spent 90 days at that place as did every ZAPU national leader in their respective home areas. On their release, the country was about to go for general elections under the 1961 constitution.

The released ZAPU leaders held a national executive meeting in Dr Edward Pswarai’s house at Beatrice Cottages, Harare, where one of the matters under discussion was whether or not they should stand for election. A proposal to that effect was made by Leopold Takawira but was shot down by Willie Dzawanda Musarurwa.

Takawira’s view was that it was better to have a group of sympathetic rather than hostile MPs in the House as they would promote the interests of the liberation struggle. Musaruvwa’s rejoinder was that standing for elections would be, in fact, a de jure recognition and support of the 1961 Constitution which ZAPU had rejected. He urged the entire leadership to appreciate that the majority of the black people of Zimbabwe were in what he described as “a state of war against the white settler minority regime.”

The meeting went with Musarurwa’s observation. It also urged Cdes Mugabe and JZ Moyo to intensify sabotage activities.
On the international scene, much sympathy had been generated by Joshua Nkomo’s campaign. The resignation of the British chief United Nations representative, Sir Patrick Dean, had raised quite a lot of eyebrows. For its part, the British government felt deeply embarrassed by that diplomatic development and they blamed Joshua Nkomo, and so did the American administration which accused Nkomo of being a communist.

It was, by the way, at the height of the cold war, and anyone who strongly opposed colonialism and the exploitation of African or Asian or South American natural resources by the industrialised western European Nations was branded a communist.

That tag was made to stick by the fact that Joshua Nkomo had visited the Soviet Union as early as 1959, and his successive political parties had been offered scholarships by Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Ghana.

Students who studied in some of those countries, having been sent by either the NDP or ZAPU included Dr Sydney Sekeramayi, Job Whabira, the late Dr Enock Bi Malaba, Dr Kasa Vondo Nleya, John Mutasa, Dr Isaac Nyathi, Dr Gordon Bango, Dr Stanley Sakupwanya plus a few more.

That apart, some ZAPU national leaders were of the opinion that a defiance of the party’s ban should be supported abroad by a very strong international diplomatic onslaught one of whose objective was to form a Zimbabwe Government-in-exile. They toyed with this idea which had been inspired by the existence of what was called the Angolan government-in-exile headed by Holdan Roberto.

The Zimbabwean government-in-exile idea did not develop into a serious issue as there was a very strong undercurrent of a feeling that if implemented, it could stifle the armed struggle because of the clear possibility of people feeling that there was no point to risk limb or life since the country had a government.

In any case the nearest country where such a government could be based was Tanganyika whose capital city, Dar es Salaam was already teeming with a number of African liberation movements. That country’s Prime Minister, Julius Nyerere, was said to be very much against that idea, and was calling for a head-on armed struggle against the Southern Rhodesian white settler regime, the South African Boer racists and the Portuguese colonial fascists.

The period immediately after the release of the ZAPU leaders and members from restriction or detention was characterised by uncertainly in the African nationalist circles.
Frustration was very much audible in the African townships of the country’s urban centres. Elections had been held and 14 black people who were members of Sir Edgar Whitehead’s United Federal Party (UFP) had been returned on the “B” roll to which the 1961 granted only 15 out of a national House of Assembly total of 65 seats. The 15 “B” Roll seat was won by an independent white lawyer, Arhn Palley, who represented Salisbury’s Highfield high-density suburb.

The overwhelming majority of the 50 “A” seats were won by the Rhodesia Front (RF) led by Winston Joseph Field, a Marondera-based tobacco farmer.
Two things were clear by then. One was that the federation was doomed sooner than later, and the second was that the RF regime would demand independence from Britain following the dissolution of the federation, or that Southern Rhodesia should become independent simultaneously with the winding up of the federation.

Joshua Nkomo’s leadership was being criticised by some of his ZAPU national executive members. They said he was more for negotiations than for an armed revolution. Most of those officials were in Dar es Salaam and the most senior of them was the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, the ZAPU national chairman.
They eventually returned home and decided to form ZANU whose inaugural congress was held in Gwelo on 8 August 1963.

Meanwhile, Joshua Nkomo and those who supported him organised a massive consultative rally at Cold Comfort Farm, outside Salisbury, where it was decided to constitute the pro-Nkomo group into what was named the People’s Caretaker Council (PCC) with Nkomo as a life president, a proposal made by James Robert Dambaza Chikerema.
Chikerema, Nyandoro, Madzimbamuto, Nyagumbo, Hamadziripi and Edddison Sithole had been released from restriction by Winston Joseph Field’s administration shortly after the RF got into office at the beginning of 1963.

George Nyandoro was unwell at the time of their release, having been attacked by TB of the spine while in restriction. He refused to be treated within the country and was treated in the United Kingdom from where he later went to Northern Rhodesia in 1964.

Shortly after their release from restriction, Chikerema, Madzimbamuto and Nyagumbo accompanied Joshua Nkomo on several tours across the country so that the former restrictees could meet the people.

It was on one such trip that they were involved in a scuffle with the Rhodesian police in Rusape, and fists (zvibhakere) actually flew, causing one white police officer to fall smack-dap on his bums on a plate of sadza. It was not clear as to whether the blow that caused the British South Africa policeman to spoil the group’s supper (it was in the evening by the way) was thrown by Madzimbamuto or by Nyagumbo. But UMdala Wethu would narrate some years later that both men actually threw a number of punches, Nyagumbo threw a couple of uppercuts, and Madzimubamuto some haymakers and jabs.

The group was later charged with either resisting arrest or assaulting law officers but were acquitted for lack of medical report or unquestionable corroborating evidence.
That incident apart, Joshua Nkomo was later banned from the Salisbury magisterial area by the then Minister of Law and Order Walter Clifford Dupont. He was prohibited from being within an 18-mile (about 30km) radius from the Salisbury main post office.

The order was delivered and enforced by a senior white police officer who actually escorted Nkomo from Highfield, through the city, and into the Salisbury-Bulawayo Road, up to a spot immediately after Norton. Nkomo was accompanied by his driver, a bodyguard and Stanslaus Marembo.

The author of this narration, accompanied by photographer Bester Kanyama and driver John Chitima, covered a brief conference held by Nkomo on the roadside shortly after the police escort had returned to Salisbury. Another journalist who attended the conference was Jim Biddulph representing the BBC. That was in the early part of 1964.
Nkomo thereafter returned to Bulawayo from where he was whisked a week or two later and dumped at Gonakudzingwa in the Gonarezhou National Park in the country’s eastern region’s lowveld where he spent most of the 10-plus years.

(To be continued)……..
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. [email protected]