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ZIMBABWEANS who were born when their country attained nationhood on 18 April, 1980 are now 37 years old, a period that is longer than a generation by seven years.
They are generally referred to as the “born-frees”, a term that means that they were born in a free Zimbabwe. Not many of them know how their country became independent, but are aware that it was for some time ruled by Britain as a colony, and that during that period black people were most seriously disadvantaged economically, socially, politically and culturally.
This article deals very briefly with the final years of the national liberation struggle that culminated in the historic Lancaster House constitutional conference that agreed on the terms of Zimbabwe’s independence.
When the Rhodesian Front (RF) took over from the United Federal Party (UFP) in 1963, it became clear that the majority of the 250 000 white settlers wanted a regime that was determined to entrench white supremacy in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
It also became clear to the oppressed four and half million (4 500 000) people that nothing but an armed revolution would free them and restore their country to their hands. Earlier negotiations to improve the black people’s political lot had resulted in Britain granting them 15 parliamentary seats out of a 65-member house. The African people were granted only 15 seats because they negotiated with the British government and the Southern Rhodesian settler administration from a position of weakness.
They hoped that the British government would show them goodwill and natural justice by giving them political power as they were then doing in Nyasaland (Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), Basutholand (Lesotho), Swaziland, Kenya and elsewhere.
The fact that all these countries were either in fact protectorates, or were so in effect and that they were all ruled from the Colonial Office in London, but that Southern Rhodesia was ruled by local white settlers, and had been since Cecil John Rhodes conquered it in the early 1890s did not impress us much, if at all, at that time.
That glaring difference between the Southern Rhodesia type of colonial administration and that obtaining in most British colonies at that time was highlighted and emphasised by the Rhodesian Front regime when it seized independence unilaterally on 11 November 1965.
As if to highlight the same difference, the British government publicly refused to intervene militarily because, so stated the then British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, Rhodesians were their “kith and kin”. However, his Labour government pledged that it would not recognise the RF’s illegal seizure of power, or grant the country “independence before African majority rule”, Nibnar for short.
The British government did not say or practically indicate how it would bring about the “African majority rule,” to replace the Rhodesian Front regime and its unilaterally declared independence. All it did with the support of most of its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) allies was to impose selective economic sanctions against the RF regime gradually.
Meanwhile, the RF had as early as April 1964 restricted Joshua Nkomo and his top Zapu lieutenants and hundreds of their supporters to the remote Gonarezhou National Park, with the condemned Gonakudzingwa Camp as their place of abode.
The then Zanu president, Rev Ndabaningi Sithole and his senior aides were also thrown into restriction at Sikombela in the Midlands. Many of these patriots were detained in various prisons as and when it pleased the RF administration off and on during the 10-plus years they were restricted.
The armed struggle was intensified during that historic era and in those political circumstances. The British government held a number of consultations with the RF’s Ian Douglas Smith, in that period, the first being aboard the British frigate, Tiger, followed by another on the Fearless off the coast of the British fort, Gibraltar, in the western Mediterranean Sea.
After Harold Wilson’s Labour Party government was replaced by the Conservative Party in the 1960s, Sir Alex Douglas Home took over as the premier. He tried in vain to appease the RF with constitutional proposals that could have ushered in African majority rule but in a remote, unforeseeable future.
The most known of those proposals were tested by a commission headed by Lord Pearce in 1972. They were roundly and publicly rejected by the majority of the Africans of Zimbabwe. While all this was taking place, and Rhodesia was being discussed emotionally at the United Nations (where it had been introduced by Joshua Nkomo in the early 1960s), at successive Organisations of African Unity (OAU) summits, at Commonwealth heads of state conferences, at Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity. Organisation’s (AAPSO’s) meetings, and at international labour and church organisations, Zimbabwe’s liberation movements, Zapu and Zanu, were intensifying the armed revolution.
They had established military bases in the country as early as the mid-1960s and an armed clash occurred between a Zanu group of seven guerrillas and a Rhodesian ground and air contingent near Chinhoyi (Sinoia) in 1966. In mid-1967, fighting erupted in the Hwange District between a large guerrilla force of Zapu and those of the African National Congress of South Africa under the joint command of Charles Tjakalisa Ngwenya (nom de guerre John Dube, JD) and Chris Hani of the ANC’s Umkhonto Wesizwe (Spear of the Nation).
The following year, another Zapu-ANC contingent commanded by Moffat Hadebe (nom de guerre Mabiya Ngenkomo) mounted a series of armed attacks in the Sipolilo area. Zanu forces engaged Rhodesian troops on several fronts in the country’s north-eastern sector. A series of these military operations resulted in semi-liberated and liberated zones, a development which increased in pace from 1974, when Mozambique’s Frelimo took control of large swathes of that country.
That development created pressure on both the British Government and its allies (especially the United States) and the Rhodesian regime and its South African fellow-fascists to negotiate with the Zimbabwean patriots.
The 1976 Geneva Conference was a result of that military pressure. The British Government and its allies realised and accepted that the Zimbabwean African nationalists were gaining an upper hand, and that the development was irreversible.
For them, it was better to negotiate so that there could be a give-and-take process than to allow a situation whose results would be complete and unconditional surrender by their Rhodesian kith and kin.
An abortive January 1978, Malta Conference convened by the then British Foreign and Commonwealth Minister, David Owen, should be understood in this context. So should be the 1979 formation of the treacherous Zimbabwe-Rhodesia regime featuring, Bishop Abel Muzorewa as the nominal head, Ian Douglas Smith, Chief Jeremiah Chirau, Chief Khayisa Ndiweni, and James Robert Dambaza Chikerema.
The Lancaster House Conference was convened to avert the obviously inevitable, the military defeat of the Rhodesian settler forces which had by that time assumed a new name, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. The Zimbabwe revolutionaries had since 1976 also come together as the Patriotic Front, and were growing stronger militarily literally every day.
Could the Patriotic Front leaders, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, have refused to negotiate through the Lancaster House conference but pursue the armed route till the absolute and unconditional surrender of the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian regime, a mere proxy of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front settler regime?
That would have been a much better option but the Front Line States, namely Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, Angola and Mozambique were under international pressure to “encourage” the Patriotic Front to stop fighting and negotiate.
The economies of those countries were terribly strained by the Zimbabwe liberation war, so if there was an opportunity for the Patriotic Front to cease the armed conflict and get into power, it had to be seized without any hesitation. That was the feeling among the Front Line States, and the Patriotic Front had to take it into positive consideration.
The Patriotic Front was, after all, going to negotiate from a position of strength unlike in 1961 when Joshua Nkomo, heading a National Democratic Party (NDP) delegation went to London and negotiated from a position of weaknesses and got only 15 out of 65 parliamentary seats. If anything, the Zimbabwean armed liberation struggle and its results proved Mao Tse Tung’s historic dictum that a power comes from the barrel of a gun quite correct.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. [email protected]
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