Online Reporter
Peter Matika, [email protected]
VICE President Kembo Mohadi retraced the steps of his own painful past on Friday as he returned to Khami Prison, the site of his incarceration during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle.
His visit, marked by raw emotion, comes ahead of the country’s Heroes Day commemorations. It served, not only as a return to a physical place, but a deep reconnection with a defining chapter in the nation’s path to independence.
“These walls hold memories of our collective struggle. Each cell represents a chapter in our nation’s fight for freedom and dignity,” said VP Mohadi, standing just meters from the cells where he and other political prisoners were once held.
VP Mohadi was arrested in May 1975, although prison records document his entry in August. At the time, he was only 25 years old, convicted for distributing arms in then-Rhodesia, a sentence that earned him 15 years behind bars. He became inmate number 73/75 at Khami Prison. His ordeal included months of torture and transfers across the region before he arrived at Khami, where he was eventually held in cells 28 and 61, alongside now President Mnangagwa, who was detained in cell 44.
As he walked the prison corridors, VP Mohadi was reunited with former detainees, including Cde John Maluzo Ndlovu, in a reunion that bridged history and legacy.
“This is where we grew up. Not eating your chips and fancy foods. It was a place of pain, but also one where the revolution lived and grew stronger,” said the Vice President.
“Some of us were intercepted when they were going for the liberation struggle. When they were released, they were trained to the extent that they knew how to strip an AK-47 and reassemble it without any hassle.”
VP Mohadi recounted how political detainees continued the struggle from within the prison walls, creating what they called a “High Command” that covertly communicated with external liberation leadership in Lusaka.
“We came up with what we called a High Command in prison, which then communicated with Lusaka from here. I was in charge of intelligence inside,” he revealed.
“Some sympathetic wardens helped us relay messages. That’s how we kept the fight alive, even behind bars.”
VP Mohadi also shared a harrowing twist in his story of how he narrowly escaped a death sentence after a fellow fighter who had been caught with arms in Gweru convinced the Rhodesian authorities that he had defected. The man received a suspended sentence while VP Mohadi was handed down a decade and a half in prison.
“I was meant to be hanged, but I survived,” he said solemnly.
