adminStanely Mushava Literature Today
Book: The Rebel in Me
Author: Agrippah Mutambara
Publisher: South Publishers (2014)
“The Rebel in Me”, a riveting stroke of hindsight by Agrippah Mutambara, is the latest nugget in the trove of liberation war history.
The articulate, accessible and incisive memoir ushers the reader through the political imperatives and military operations of the Second Chimurenga set to Mutambara’s revolutionary odyssey.
“Through the superiority of arms you can defeat an ill-equipped adversary. But through the superiority of arms you cannot defeat entrenched ideological beliefs,” Mutambara captures the soul of the revolution.
The hardening of a black young man, bottled-necked out of school, into a guerilla commander bent on dismantling the Rhodesian caste pyramid is unpacked in an engaging tenor, jam-packed with drama and intrigue.
Mutambara, currently Zimbabwe’s ambassador to Mozambique, double-underlines sound ideology and effective warfare as the inseparable twin buttresses which won the liberation struggle.
Lest We Forget
The ordeal which claimed back Zimbabwe has inspired a flurry of narratives. However, few of these have been written by participants.
Estimable as these narratives are, they are not ample substitutes for first-hand accounts of the liberation struggle.
What we have in the current inventory represents the letter not the spirit of the struggle.
This missing dimension must be plugged by narratives, first person, raw and untrimmed, from the participants.
Ambassador Mutambara articulated this concern in his graveside eulogy at Major-General Bandama’s burial last week when he lamented that history was being buried with the comrade.
He said liberation fighters are short-changing the struggle and urged every participant to write the country’s history.
Professor Pfukwa concurs in his op-ed for The Patriot: “Do we value the stories carried by the men and women who fought and contributed in the country’s liberation struggle?
“The likes of George Washington, Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck have not died…
“Volumes of literature about them have been produced even films about them have been made . . . These figures that will not die, left behind detailed diaries,” Pfukwa pointed out.
Mutambara walks the talk with his memoir “The Rebel in Me”, chronicling his experiences as a Zanla guerilla commander in the war from 1975 to 1980.
The book, which gives unsettling insight into the atrocities of the Smith regime, is an elaborate follow-up to “The Chimoio Attack”, his first book which has been condensed into a chapter in the latest offering making it a virtual “two-in-one’’.
Mutambara’s memoir is a chronology of rebellion. He recounts the seeds of revolt sown in him from childhood. The rebellion motif permeates the narrative on the back of the chronicler’s justification.
For Mutambara, rebellion is a good thing except and only framed in negative light by those who are the targets of defiance.
The injustices of colonial Rhodesia were miniaturised in many aspects of the country including school.
Mutambara’s defiant pilgrimage against Rhodesia was a point of no return where he could no longer simmer down by rising against and diminishing Rhodesia.
Mutambara hints, with the benefit of hindsight, the contribution of his upbringing to his ultimate fallout with the white supremacist system.
Even though his parents were meek in keeping with their religion, they were never able to process justification for the oppression their people were daily subjected to.
An activity which had special impact on the then school-going Agrippah were readings of selected snippets from The Rhodesia Herald, chiefly framed around the humiliation of blacks at the hands of the racist settler government.
“There were stories about dogs being unleashed against university students peacefully demonstrating for the improvement of the squalid conditions under which they lived.
“There were stories about black Africans who had been arrested for trespassing into a ‘whites only’ restaurant or swimming pool,” Mutambara notes.
More critically, there were stories about new laws which further dispossessed blacks of their land and transferred it to whites.
Blacks would be ejected to Tribal Trust Lands from which they could be still further ejected at the behest of the local administrations.
Although Agrippah was too young to witness the significance of the slanted legislative changes, he was absorbing his parents’ revulsion at the humiliation of their people.
The seeds of rebellion which took root in Agrippah soon began to manifest. He began to question himself, even as a teenager, why there were exclusive schools where black teachers and black students were deemed anathema.
On one occasion, he unwittingly elicited a police slamdown on fellow blacks for rubbing shoulders with whites in a butchery when blacks were supposed to buy meat from a designated window only after all whites had been served.
The powder keg which detonated Agrippah’s rebel instinct, however, was a chance meeting with a captured Zanla guerilla who was subjected to gruesome torture while under treatment and later died in custody while refusing to divulge revolutionary secrets to his captors.
Call of the Wild
The encounter had a significant impression on Agrippah who was on an excursion to Mozambique to be part of the military effort which eventually dismantled the foundations of white supremacism and subjugation of blacks in their native land.
Guerrilla training, which Cde Dragon Patiripakashata (Mutambara’s nom-de-guerre) ultimately administered as a commander, was no walkover.
It included such daring acts as de-bussing from moving trucks amid the blaze of guns, thorough tracking skills and chameleon skills of camouflage and concealment.
Accurate interpretation of the reactions of birds and animals’ different sounds and warnings on sensing danger or just communicating with each other was also key in surviving the bush.
“Mastering such skills turns birds and animals into useful and dependable allies against an enemy,” Mutambara points out.
It was therefore imperative on cadres to be friends with the environment, which could be the bush with its animals, plants, birds and rivers; urban centres with their people, vehicles and infrastructure or the rural terrain with its villages, footpaths, people and domestic animals.
Mutambara notes that the cumulative effect of the rigorous training programmes was to produce a disciplined, hardened and resilient commando fighting force.
The eighth chapter is a heart-rending expose of the Chimoio massacre, also known as the Rhodesia genocide.
By far the longest, 10 sub-sections and almost a hundred pages long, the chapter is a comprehensive, unsettling depiction of Rhodesia’s most callous atrocity against Zimbabwe.
Chapter 8 is made up of Mutambara’s inaugural book, “The Chimoio Attack: Rhodesia Genocide”.
There was an estimated 8 000 casualties – 3 000 dead and 5 000 wounded – in Zanla headquarters at Chimoio. In some instances, up to 100 were shot at close range while trying to escape.
Cde Patiripakashata assumed charge of the search and recovery operation in the aftermath of the three-day attack. Instead of being daunted to surrender by the gruesome massacre, the surviving cadres counted their comrades as “grains of wheat” whose deaths would yield liberty.
“What then is a comrade? Certainly not the stinking flesh that we bury. A comrade and comradeship is the resilient spirit that resides in a body . . . The enemy no matter how strong can destroy the spirit,” Mutambara articulates.
Cde Patirikashata alludes to Nehanda’s famous “Mapfupa angu achamuka” declaration as an informed assertion that in spite the loss of one individual the revolutionary spirit would be perpetuated among other gallant sons and daughters till we claimed back Zimbabwe.`
The pain of loss is all the more pronounced by Cde Patiripakashata’s intimate recollections of archetypal revolutionaries like Cde Tongo, who like Moses died on the threshold of the Promised Land.
Cde Tongo is described as a quick-witted, courageous and humorous strategist who was bent to action and economical with words.
President Mugabe is eulogised at length as an uncompromising adherent to revolutionary principles who, by virtue of his intellect, never feels intellectually challenged or inferior.
Stanely Mushava blogs at afrospection.blogspot.com
Online Reporter