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Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa
The casket bearing the body of Mike Tichafa Karakadzai, whose Chimurenga name was Hip Level, lay in the middle of the parade square of Manyame Airbase. Looking on in the painful grief of bereavement were the wife and five sons and the sobbing mother of the late General.
I looked at the old lady. It floated into my mind as to why the heavens that had once given her a special joy could now turn to deliver this latest morsel of eternal anguish that is the lot of humankind.
I know the havoc of sweet sour emotions that came with the ceasefire of 1979 and the subsequent freedom day of April 18 1980. Every mother and father, wife and husband indeed all relatives of those that had been absconding from the care of loved ones were all engaged in the fateful reconciliation of the numbers in each family.
The backdrop to this was the avalanche of youths that had as of 1975 melted across the border into Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana to seek the gun as the final arbiter of power against a cruel conquering racist settler minority that was the cat’s paw of imperial Albion.
They were all part of a collective quest of opportunity that foreign rule had denied for several generations. Aping the success of the Mozambican brethren, no one was in a mood to give any additional respite to the foreign racist conquerors.
The whole territory of Zimbabwe had been turned into an expansive battlefield of intense military encounters. A minority that was suffering humiliating defeats in Rhodesia turned to aggression of massacres against the neighbours that gave harbour and succour to their guerilla nemesis.
Thousands upon thousands would thus perish.
But for relatives now in a peacetime breather, all hoped that the missing loved one might be found for that cherished family reunion.
It was a lottery quest of varied odds that intermingled joy with sorrow. My mother, just like Hip Level’s, had the thrill of seeing her son emerge with dear life from the human sausage machine of war.
Now 33 years into independence the heavens have cruelly done her a bad turn. A fiendish accident combining a stray cow and an oncoming heavy truck claimed her dear son in an instalment of grief when she thought seniority may favour her with being buried ahead of Mike Tichafa Karakadzai.
There was the widowed spouse and her three sons watching. I tried to fathom the emotions of these clever boys including two twins, who had been brought to look up to me as a foster father.
After the pursuit of sound education they were starting into life. I had been to the recent family wedding where Monica, my wife, and I conversed in French to the in-laws from DRC much to the delight of our new fellow African relatives.
Like young birds taking off from the nest, this is a time of much needed parental oversight. No more of that now. Rudely they are out on their own as the wisdom of the last words imparted becomes the oracle of permanent consultation.
The military parade was an occasion of state with all the pomp and circumstance that go with it. Present were the military top brass headed by General Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, and his two lieutenants Air Marshall Perrance Shiri and Army Commander Phillip Sibanda.
Because of the composite military career that traversed from the guerilla army of the national liberation movement to the regular national army of independent Zimbabwe, there was the anguish of parting with both a trusted officer and a fellow war time cadre and colleague.
I was caught by the precise match of the three young female officers all well appointed in their blue military attire as they went to pay last respects to the general lying in state. Yes, this was indeed an expression of the pageantry of statehood and nationhood at its best. For nine decades, since 1890, Zimbabwe had had none of that as a foreign imposed carbuncle ran amok wreaking havoc to our identity as a people.
The rampant abuse went unchecked as the British settler racist minority rulers had the monopoly of access to the potent gun against our spear-wielding ancestry. A gun cartel born out of the iniquitous 1885 Berlin Conference on the partition of Africa by a coterie of favoured European powers was meant to perpetuate permanent servitude of other races.
This technology led in the means of war courtesy of the law of the uneven development of society would go on to seal the fate of Red Indians in America and Aborigines in Australia.
I could not help but derive satisfaction on this solemn spectacle. Reminiscing on my long camaraderie with Comrade Hip Level I lapsed into a renewed marvel at what my deceased comrade and those highly motivated of our fated generation went on to wrought in “blood and iron” to the eternal glory of the motherland. It was a sign of the times.
Here was a bold leap of faith. An 18-year-old young man left his O-Level studies and decided to offer his only life for the hope of restoring nationhood to a conquered and tormented people.
Chitepo College of Politics and Ideology was the political school founded by Dzinashe Machingura, the Political Commissar of Zipa Joint Military Command. Zipa has a special place in the history of the freedom of Zimbabwe as it was instrumental in resuming the armed struggle in 1975. Zipa had used the Mgagau Declaration penned by both Zanla and Zipra cadres now marooned in their encampments after completing military training.
The document was a political initiative to convince our hosts in Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique to resume their support of the armed struggle. Its purpose was to offset the Détente Exercise of Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of State whose diplomacy was a geopolitical rearguard move to save the white racist states of southern Africa from inevitable demise.
The Mgagau Declaration saved the day for the thousands of young men and women flooding into Mozambique and Zambia seeking military training. I first met Hip Level Karakadzai at Chitepo College. Ours was the second intake. He had just completed his military training and had clearly made a very good impression as Chitepo College took pride of place in selection ahead of other departments like security, medicine and logistics, among others.
I had just recovered from battlefield wounds suffered in the Guru-Nyanga Military Sector. I also found myself also re-deployed to Chitepo College.
The rationale was to infuse virgin zeal with war front experience in the teaching and research of party ideology so we could produce superior political cadres who would meet the demands of our escalating military engagement with the Rhodesian racists. There was also another salient consideration. Ours was the second intake of the Chitepo College then renamed after starting off as the Whampoa Political Academy.
A nascent tendency leaning towards the intelligentsia as a ruler was already emerging. It went on to afflict most of the cadres of the first intake as it morphed into the Vashandi Rebellion.
The military victories being scored against the Rhodesian army that stretched from the Zambezi to the Limpopo courtesy of the long mountainous border with Mozambique engendered a misplaced sense of imminent national success. Some among the Zanu component of the Zipa High Command leadership developed warlord inclinations that severely underestimated the stamina of the enemy.
Infantile ambition led to jostling for control of the guerilla army outside of the authority of the traditional party and original Dare leadership. Both Robert Mugabe, the Secretary-General of Zanu, and Josiah Tongogara, the Zanla Commander, were now viewed as threats to be marginalised. On the war front, military adventurism took hold with the reckless deployments of recruits with incomplete training and inferior weaponry.
These mistakes were compounded by a premature jump to positional warfare. Yet there was no heavy weaponry and the anti-aircraft batteries needed to hold on to claimed territory.
All these miscalculations led to terrible battle field casualties during the final 1976-7 interlude of Zipa leadership. Needless to say these strategic and tactical blunders offended many of us who had spent time at the war front and had a more sober appreciation of our enemy as he organised counter attacks that clearly relied on the good intelligence of our leadership woes.
At this juncture, the late General Solomon Mujuru, a.k.a Rex Nhongo, emerged as the centre of maturity, wisdom and compromise. He would go on to spend a lot of time, energy and effort trying to handle these contradictions which were threatening to tear Zanla apart.
Therein lies his rationale in trying a new recruitment blend for the Chitepo Party School. The narrative serves to make Zimbabweans understand the crucible that would mould Air Commodore Karakadzai to be the exceptional cadre he turned out to be. On one hand we had to handle the arcane texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin and try to make sense out of them.
On the other we had to grapple with the revolutionary praxis of Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Franz Fanon and other guerilla warfare luminaries.
Then we had to bring all this down to the recent African experiences of our greats from the Portuguese anti-fascist, anti-colonial African brethren of Amilcar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane, Agostinho Neto and the inimitable Samora Moises Machel, as we tapped into the recent successes of the concept of the people’s war.
All this intellectual endeavour would be capped by a thorough grounding in the Zimbabwe experience which Chairman Chitepo had brilliantly captured on the Mwenje booklet which we continued to update under the leadership of ascended Comrade Robert Mugabe.
Chitepo College continued as a hive of political teaching and research work that helped in moulding the thinking of the thousands of Zanla fighters. The success of the work done there would go on to survive the demise of the school as it fell victim to renewed abuse of another attempt at rebellion of Joseph Taderera, Henry Hamadziripi and others in 1978. Hip Level Karakadzai belongs to the brightest of the luminaries from the Chitepo Political College. War meant constant movement and assignment.
I went to Belgrade for specialised training. On return I found myself together with Karakadzai doing what he did best. The political commissar was busy training the hundreds of cadres as we shifted bases on a continuous basis to avoid enemy surveillance and consequent bombing.
Our relationship continued into Independence.
On delivering freedom, he lost no time in going back to school to further his studies. Initially he went to Algeria on a university scholarship. He visited me in Brussels where I was then serving as a diplomat. We shared views on how to make up for the five years of our personal life we had lost.
On my part I was pursuing studies with the Boston University at their faculty in Brussels.
Never to be easily satiated, Hip Level Karakadzai would later cross the Atlantic Ocean in the quest of American offering of university education. He built upon his military management training in that country. He stayed longer in order to pursue a master’s degree. We would meet in New York during my second diplomatic posting where I read at St Johns Catholic University.
In my discussions with Hip Level we always ended up putting top marks to our political and ideological training during the war. We concurred that it gave us a unique dimension of how to deal with a plethora of issues in varied circumstances.
The Chitepo College taught Cde Hip Level to pursue an argument on its merits with no recourse to ideological cant and scholarly verbiage. Great concepts found home in street lingo.
Karakadzai acquired a complete persona that was indeed seamless notwithstanding the nature of opportunities and challenges. To borrow from informatics, he was completely scaleable in both time and space. He was multi-dimensional.
Mike Karakadzai was at ease in party regalia teaching the masses the latest political ideas. From there he would don a suit and face boardroom challenges as a businessman. The next occasion he is in deep discussion with military peers on geopolitical strategy and the role of the military in an ever-changing world. He was truly a man of all seasons in any provided zone.
Karakadzai had the loudest and boisterous laugh of laughs that belied total confidence and complete command in handling any subject matter at hand. As such he just could never get waylaid by anger. With an intellect that devoted so much of its time to the trials and tribulations of the ordinary people from a tender age, he just could never be haughty.
Neither could he be condescending. At the same time he was thorough in dispensing away with warped ideas of political impostors and pretenders of similar ilk. Integrity was his hallmark. Pay short thrift to it then woe betide whoever.
We resumed our close acquaintance in the face of the political challenges of 2008. We did not even look for each other. We just found each other together. He once quipped to me: “Ambassador, the MDC upstarts go about positing as fighters for democracy. I left school at a tender age to go and fight at a time when an African could not vote for a party and its leadership.
Now Biti, Chamisa, Matinenga et al are in Parliament and Government positing as fighters for democracy.
“They mumble to explain what then was my quest when I was laying my life on the line for Zimbabwe. To make it worse they are so green as not to understand the import of human organisation as a motive power of society. Their Achilles heel: Organisation can never be imbibed from a desk while listening to a professor or a foreign mentor.
They overlook the simple fact that TO DO IS ORGANISE.’’ For starters, I wish they could still try to get a plate of sadza each day for long years as they teach ordinary masses to be front-line fighters against a racist colonial army. Yes obtaining food, water and blankets from each new village while convincing the locals not to divulge your military presence to Ian Smith army cohorts.
The moral: no generation can accede to power by pouring scorn at the achievements of those preceding it.
Hip Level Karakadzai missed the Presidential Inauguration that may just be the fulfilment of his prophecy on the ephemerality of the MDC and its pretensions. But he still had his one state occasion that will end with burial at Heroes Acre. I am happy too that his sacrifice led us this far.
He sure has a glorious tale to tell those who passed on the road to victory. Farewell the Political Commissar of Political Commissars, the trainer of the trainers. Love of country rarely ever has such an erudite and practical proponent traversing changing circumstances.
Online Reporter