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@Jamwanda2 On Saturday
Compensatory narrative
I am reading a 2022 publication by one John Padbury who was a Rhodesian Special Branch operative during our War of Liberation. Its title is, Battle for Hurungwe: A Special Branch Victory in an unwinnable war Rhodesia 1965-1979. Padbury operated in many areas of the then Rhodesia, principally in Manicaland.
Towards the end of the War, about 1978, he was redeployed to Hurungwe Communal area to operate against ZIPRA guerrillas who were active in the area. In the publication, he claimed phenomenal success, brazenly undiminished by his grudging admission that Rhodesia still lost the war to fighters for our freedom.
His revelling in what he claims as operational successes against ZIPRA fighters is understandably compensatory: some solace through reminiscent narrative for defeat suffered in an unwinnable conflict of colonial occupation against rightful indigenous owners of the land.
Outlooks in crossover communities
He picked his area of operation and battles carefully. Hurungwe is predominantly Shona-speaking, a factor which made operations of ZIPRA combatants significantly but understandably difficult. Those old enough to have witnessed the Liberation Struggle will readily admit to the fact that on the ground, there was a false equation of ZIPRA/Ndebele and ZANLA/Shona in most crossover, polyglot communities like Beitbridge, Mberengwa and Filabusi.
Hurungwe was not one of them; except ZIPRA had made early inroads related to both history and geography. ZAPU had a very strong presence there, right through to parts of Guruve and Zvimba, the latter which, ironically enough, was home to the leader of ZANU, late Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
It is noteworthy that the two Viscount planes downed by ZIPRA forces were accounted for in Kariba and in Hurungwe, areas which are predominantly Shona and Tonga.
One fighter called Hudson Kundai
I have dismissed as false the ZIPRA/Ndebele and ZANLA/Shona equation. Among the early fighters who visited Makumbe, my High School in Buhera in late 1976 was one guerrilla who went by the war name of Elmond Wangu. Cde Elmond was always quiet and would never address us as students gathered at pungwes.
He left that burden to guerrillas like late Madhara Chihombe, real name Jonah Chimuka, who led that column of fighters. I remember there was Zvadzudza and Chillus Kadiki. It turned out Cde Elmond Wangu was Ndebele-speaking and could barely speak Shona.
Later, he changed his name to Cde Hudson Kundai. He still lives to this day and is farming somewhere in the Midlands Province. Until the end of the war, he deputised late Perrance Shiri in the Takawira Sector which covered much of Mashonaland East and Central, and marginal parts of Manicaland.
There is Buhera, ZANLA fighters enjoyed strongest support in a predominantly Ndebele-speaking Community called kwaGwebu. I knew that because my late father ran a grinding mill at some small township called Garamwera, which I frequented throughout the war.
Fighters from all speech communities
Cde Hudson Kundai was no aberration; fighters drawn from different speech communities of Zimbabwe fought under banners of both ZANLA and ZIPRA. Operational notebook I got from one senior ZANLA Commander who is now late , who was a relation of mine on the maternal side, showed that in the Gaza Province, which covered Beitbridge, ZANLA had a deliberate policy of recruiting in its ranks Shangani, Venda and Ndebele speaking cadres who were then relied upon to introduce the three languages in the training camps.
Indeed ZANLA’s wartime curriculum had quite an advanced languages policy I still marvel at to this day.
Joint ZIPRA/ZANLA operations
In Guruve and Hurungwe, late Cde Perrance Shiri recalled how he came back to find units of ZANLA and ZIPRA mounting joint operations against Rhodesian units and targets. I regret that I was unsuccessful in persuading one of the ZIPRA commanders involved in such collaborative operations to sit down for an interview before his demise.
Yet such things happened in the war, although without overwriting occasional instances of open conflict between the two sides during our Struggle.
Overweening balderdash
John Padbury lamely claims success in mobilising local Hurungwe peasants against ZIPRA units active there without acknowledging that more was at stake than his self-panegyrised Maoist prowess in fostering a fish-and-water relationship with the Hurungwe peasantry.
His self-vaunting narrative is meant to create an impression Rhodesia could have won the war if it had developed a better fighting doctrine than it did, which is to say if it had adopted a symbiotic relationship with the African populace! And he posits that as a mere yet costly oversight by commanders, forgetting an occupying colonial force could never have developed such a relationship with indigenous communities, and still remain colonial and an occupying force.
It’s a plain contradiction, as indeed he later admits in so far as his operations in Manicaland’s Makoni district went. Equally, if such a thesis is granted, the conclusions are quite far-reaching. They include an averment that some African communities – Hurungwe in this case – were collectively opposed to our Independence! Needless to say this is plain racist and overweening balderdash.
Some units failed to win confidence
As with both ZANLA and ZIPRA, there were units whose relations with locals ranged from poor to bad, thereby undermining the fish-and-water symbiosis. This was quite normal. In fact, the much publicised death in operations of Kid Marongorongo and Solomon Ngoni — both had trained in the front — in 1973/4 was traceable to such poor community relations, according to one of their Commanders who still lives, Cde Chemist.
Much worse where guerrillas were operating in communities with which they did not share the same language and were understandably viewed as outsiders. Which should never be taken to mean such communities welcomes continued settler occupation and presence.
Self-serving misreadings
John Padbury’s self-vaunting narrative may very well owe to such dynamics than to his prowess as an aberrant Maoist Rhodesian Special Branch operative serving an occupying system/army. Indeed one incident he recounts appear to bear this out.
An upset unit of ZIPRA fighters rounded up local villagers for roughening after repeated setbacks they blamed on the presence of sellouts within the same community. Far from pointing to Padbury’s success in “turning” and mobilising locals, the incident showed that a specific ZIPRA unit merely failed to adhere to a normative principle of guerrilla warfare, in the process courting the animus of an alienated community.
But all these are broad points against Rhodesian historiography and our struggle. My purpose is highlighting certain things I found disturbing regarding such narratives by settler white operatives.
Selling Rhodesian war doctrine
The lesser one is how their narratives brag about their success in turning erstwhile guerrillas, mujibhas, chimbwidos and even lovers of wayward guerrillas against the Liberation Struggle. John Padbury justifies his book by stressing how it offers key lessons in counter-revolution wars against comparable insurgencies.
You don’t get a sense of regret; rather, you get a sense of selling the Rhodesian war as a best and admirable practice worth emulating! And when you see how ranks of our current opposition are full of ex-Rhodesian operatives or their sons, it is clear that the same wartime doctrine is still being employed in building opposition to our Independence or, the obverse, in seeking a reversal and a return to settler Rhodesia.
Enlisting African research
The more worrisome dimension is the emerging collaborative scholarship between these Rhodesian soldiers and black Zimbabwean researchers, a number of whom now man our key institutions. It is quite disturbing that a key celebrity in the compilation of the book is a local black Zimbabwean scholar who heads History Department at a local university.
I doubt that the African scholar has any military background to be able to assess what this hard-nosed Special Branch operative now claims, some good forty years after the war. Certainly not from his part-foreword of the book. Or from the way his voice is used in the book to suggest integrity of the research effort, including its conclusions.
This is very dangerous.
Sanitising the Rhodesian war
By far the most insidious subterfuge I found in the book is how John Padbury inverts terms and philosophies against the Liberation Struggle and its ethos. There is either a blatant misappropriation of vocabulary of struggle for redeployment as props to the Rhodesian war narrative, or an unashamed redeployment of atrocity terminology of Rhodesian war conduct to describe actions of freedom fighters! In respect of the latter, Liberation and semi-Liberation zones are termed “martial law” zones by Padbury.
It is no longer Rhodesians who imposed “martial law” in areas of African settlement; rather, it is guerrillas who did so in these areas for purposes “of mobilising the masses and brutally assaulting, maiming and killing “sellouts”‘! Fighting on the side of settler Rhodesia is not betrayal of the Liberation Struggle; rather, it is “counter-revolution and mass-mobilisation operations in Hurungwe Tribal Trust Land”!
Adds Padbury: “The key to this operation was the mobilisation of the masses” which if the Rhodesian army and other “comrades” of Padbury had bothered to adopt as a fighting doctrine, Rhodesia, “commonly known as the ‘jewel of Africa’ and its population” would have not lost the war!”
Abusing Mao Zedong
Padbury copiously uses quotes from Mao Zedong throughout his 498-paged book. He proffers justification: “As our enemy adhered to Zedong’s revolutionary military strategies, I decided the only way to counter the revolution was to adopt, refine and develop Zedong’s methodology in the battle for Hurungwe.
Mao Zedong
In my opinion this was the only way to counter the revolutionary forces we faced.” As one Rhodesian writer of forewords put it, all this was meant to go beyond killing terrorists by developing “a programme designed to secure the safety of the masses for all time….”
Transposition of roles and language
Here is my concern. History about (not of) the Liberation is being re-written by white ex-Rhodesian soldiers. That in itself need not be that worrisome. What is worrisome is how terminology of Struggle is being re-rendered, while terms which censor Rhodesian wartime conduct are either being sanitised or pasted on liberation fighters in a remarkable transposition of wartime roles.
All that literature is meant for the consumption of our children who did not witness the war, and lack counter-narratives to these Rhodesian war mythologies. They are fated to grow on nourishment of this poisoned historiography which we are either not challenging, or even legitimising through collaborative research and authorship.
We are being instrumentalised in the development of Rhodesian mythopoesis.
Need we wonder then that we find Smith-was-better narrative on social media? Or that a wartime term like “Pachedu” is now being used to designate what looks like a pro-democracy organisation we all know to be pro-Rhodesian and anti-Zimbabwe! Something really sinister is brewing; it needs to be countered robustly.
Trevor Ncube’s Conversation
Rarely do I watch Trevor Ncube’s conversations. I did this time around, less out of genuflection to Trevor whose politics and pretences I find odious, and more to listen to his interlocutor, EU’s new man in Harare. Not only did I enjoy how Trevor Ncube was trounced and embarrassed by the new EU Ambassador; I was struck by how much of a polished and clear-headed diplomat this new man whose name is a mouthful, is.
Trevor Ncube
He is here, he repeatedly asserted, to encourage better understanding and relations between Zimbabwe and the European Union. He is not here to hector, lecture or give blueprints to Zimbabwe which is a sovereign State. Trevor looked very disappointed and even upset.
Here was a European representative who spelt our a purpose and mission completely unfriendly to the publisher so wont to make money and name by nourishing an anti-nation line. Not only that. An envoy ready to spell out to Trevor – a national of Zimbabwe – the good things and remarkable progress Zimbabwe had made since Independence.
Good and remarkable things Trevor Ncube and his titles never saw, never see and, I bet my bottom dollar, will never see given another hundred years of publishing at no cost!
Patient on tennis court
But it was the bit on what the new Ambassador thought about Zimbabwe in the six months he has been here, which really “finished” me, to use local parlance. Using some metaphor from aetiology, the lawyer-envoy answered — and I paraphrase: that his preparatory reading on material on Zimbabwe ahead of his deployment left him with a distinct impression of a dying patient quartered in some hospital bed; yet upon arriving in the country, he was surprised to find the “sick” patient spritely playing tennis in a court! Kikikiki! I am only a donkey and humans are my higher masters.
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