General Josh – A man of the people

A fine Thursday morning on 1 July, 1999, turned overcast and gloomy as news of the passing of one of Zimbabwe’s luminaries, Vice President Dr Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, filtered. It was no longer business as usual as a period of mourning was declared to grieve the great giant that had fallen.

At his funeral wake, then president, Cde Robert Mugabe said, “What we see in this great man who has fallen is a leadership, which is national, not tribal, not regional, not of a particular religion. A leadership that unites!”. Dr Nkomo was revered in pre-independent Zimbabwe as he fought for black economic empowerment and the equal distribution of natural resources and in the post-independence era for inculcating peace and unity.

The man we remember today, 25 years on, is one who put the needs of others before his own. We do not call him Father Zimbabwe for no reason. He was a visionary leader, unifier and father figure. Dr Nkomo sacrificed the comfort and safety of his family as he fought for the emancipation of the sons and daughters of Zimbabwe.

He had a heart that felt the pain and struggles of the people he led and laid down his life for them. In his autobiography, The Story of My Life, the late Vice-President says he did not really have a home. “My base was in Lusaka, but I did not really have a home. As the war intensified, I could no longer safely leave my wife either in Zimbabwe or any neighbouring country. Our agents in the Rhodesian police intercepted threats to kidnap her, so she left to take up residence in East Berlin, where the Government of the German Democratic Republic had generously offered her a flat,” says Dr Nkomo.

Although he no longer had to worry about her safety, Dr Nkomo says he missed her company. “The family was scattered. One son and both of my daughters were in the United States. The other boy went first to military academy in Cuba, then moved to Angola to work with our trainers there,” says Dr Nkomo. His political activism had however started much earlier as he worked as a trade unionist.

On a Saturday in July 1952, Dr Nkomo says he addressed a meeting in the township to re-affirm their opposition to federation only to return home to an inconsolable baby. “My wife was upset; our son Temba, who was six months old, would not stop crying, whatever she did. We took him down to the hospital where the doctor examined the boy, gave him some medicine and told us to bring him back on Monday. Monday never came. On Sunday night, Temba died,” says Dr Nkomo.

He says the death of their first son, Temba, was a shattering blow “more to my wife even than to myself”, but he had to continue with his work of developing the rudiments of a welfare organisation for the people. As the struggle to emancipate the country from white minority rule continued, Dr Nkomo narrates how he had to learn to be a military commander.

He was the commander of the Zipra forces during the country’s protracted liberation struggle, although he says he carefully left the day-to-day command of the men to senior soldiers and regularly visited the training camps and bases. “When negotiations broke down, I went to the soldiers and said I had done what I could, it was up to them now. I emphasised that they were not fighting to do me a favour nor I them; we were in it together for our country,” says Dr Nkomo.

He says he did his best to keep the forces supplied with material to fight with and see to it that it was fairly distributed. “It was up to them to put those supplies to good use. Our lads came from poor homes where blankets and clothes were highly prized possessions. I had to make sure such things were for military use, not for giving to girlfriends,” says the late Father Zimbabwe. The boys, he said, had no money and were tempted to sell a blanket or a pair of boots to buy a present for a girl or to get a smoke of marijuana.

“They were all volunteers who had chosen to leave home to fight; they had to be motivated not ordered about. We had more volunteers than we could feed, clothe and arm,” says Dr Nkomo. As a result, there were allegations from Western journalists visiting their transit camps in Botswana, that they were kidnapping young people from the schools to turn them into fighters. Instead, Dr Nkomo says, they tried hard to persuade the lads to stay and finish their studies but they would not.

“Botswana, with its long, open border with South Africa, was terribly vulnerable to attack and President Seretse Khama could not allow guerilla camps there. We had to charter an aircraft to lift our refugees out of Botswana into Zambia – I am afraid we still owe the Zambian government several millions of dollars for the help they gave for that,” says Dr Nkomo. But, at one point towards the end of the war, transport difficulties, caused largely by South African disruption of traffic, led to a genuine shortage of food throughout Zambia.

People were going hungry in the camps and officers in the army continuously reported that morale was suffering badly. “Without a regular ration of the sadza that was their staple diet, the men would get out of control. I went straight to President Kaunda and told him of the danger. He knew his own people were short of food, that discontent was growing and production suffering. But he picked up the telephone and gave an order. For the coming weeks all supplies of food for the civilian market were to be diverted to the Zimbabwean camps, in consultation with my staff,” says Dr Nkomo.

This act of generosity by President Kaunda, who was prepared to put his own popularity at risk for a cause he believed in kept hope in the Zipra camps alive. Aside from ensuring his forces were fed and clothed, Dr Nkomo had other unique challenges to deal with. Thousands of young refugee girls insisted on volunteering to fight but there was no place for them all.

“It was not the girls’ fault, but the presence of young women in a camp of young male soldiers caused tremendous trouble. Fortunately, we had splendid women to face the challenge of organising the girls,” says Dr Nkomo. Through help from international organisations, Victory Camp school was set up for the girls outside Lusaka. There, they got a better education than they would have done at home.

“Some we did train to use weapons and employed as camp guards but they were a tiny minority. The one thing I regret about our volunteers was that their military discipline became almost too strong. Our tactic was to move in small groups against the enemy, so each man had to be ready to take over command as soon as the man above him had been knocked out of the fight; I always emphasised that to the lads when I spoke to them before going out on operations,” says Dr Nkomo.

But the discipline was so strong that individual soldiers would not answer him directly, they always waited for the most senior person to answer and refused to speak on their own initiative even to their commander-in-chief, says Dr Nkomo. He says his only training for the role of commander-in-chief was that of a social worker. “I tried to approach the job dispassionately, realising that everyone in an army has a role to play. Even visiting the wounded, I tried not to appear upset if I saw a fine young man who had lost an arm or a leg; I just said it was a soldier’s job to suffer for his nation.”

Dr Nkomo says he was worried about and worked to solve his soldiers’ individual problems – how to get artificial limbs and how to re-adapt to family life after a wound. “But I never allowed myself to show distress. If the wounded men became demanding, ordering the nurses around and insisting on special treatment, I always told them to respect their colleagues, that everyone had a necessary place in the national struggle; getting wounded did not win any privileges when everyone was doing his best,” says the late nationalist.

Their success against the Rhodesian forces was far greater than they allowed to be known at the time. Also, they could not claim the credit they deserved because they needed to keep secret the fact that they had been given some Soviet surface to air missiles, Sam-7s. “We deployed them first in defence of our camps in Zambia and caught the enemy by surprise. The first time we used them, we knocked down two of their strike aircraft, the second time we got four,” says Dr Nkomo.

He says those who lived through the war were hardened by it and those who died were their close friends. Dr Nkomo succumbed to prostate cancer at the age of 82 and his remains were interred at the National Heroes Acre in the capital.