The Sunday Mail
Phyllis Johnson
In January 1980, 35 years ago, Zimbabwe entered the delicate transition to Independence, the ceasefire was beginning to take hold ending the liberation war that brought democratic elections in February and Independence on April 18.
The Zanu-PF leader and now President, Robert Mugabe, returned home from exile on January 27, 1980, flown in from Maputo and accompanied by dozens of excited Zimbabwean returnees.
He was met at the airport by his chief of security, Cde Emerson Mnangagwa, now Vice President, and others in the advance team.
He was driven straight to Highfield where he held a star rally at the Zimbabwe Grounds with crowd estimates ranging upwards from 200 000, certainly a sea of people as far as the eye could see.
Classic photos show Cde Mugabe on a high wooden platform with a railing, walking around the sides with senior party officials and being introduced to the wildly cheering crowd to prove that he was really here. The crowd was orderly but excited, and surged and pushed around the bottom, causing the platform to shake.
He addressed the crowd, campaigned for the election, survived attempts on his life during the transition, won the election, became Prime Minister, and later President.
But one of his entourage was missing.
The Zanla Commander, General Josiah Magama Tongogara, who had written to Cde Mugabe from Mpima Prison in Zambia on January 24, 1976 to ask him “as the number two man in the party” to “take over the leadership until the party congress was convened” (which it was in 1977).
Tongogara and other members of the Dare reChimurenga wrote to congratulate Cde Mugabe on a radio broadcast he had made a few days earlier.
“Actually none could have presented our case better. We fully support everything you said and all our supporters were tremendously inspired.”
Fast forward to 1980, and Cde Mugabe’s historic return to Zimbabwe, but Gen Tongogara was not by his side.
He had returned to Mozambique from the Lancaster House negotiations in London after the ceasefire was signed on December 21, 1979 and, before it took effect one week later, had set off driving north to the Zanla military headquarters at Chimoio in Manica province to inform the commanders personally about the agreement and the way forward.
He did not reach Chimoio, dying in a car accident north of Maxixe along the Indian Ocean coastal highway, when the Land-Rover he was travelling in collided with a Mozambican lorry.
The date was December 26, 1979 and his funeral was held in Maputo in early January 1980, just three weeks before Cde Mugabe returned home from exile.
Many years later, in 2012, President Mugabe conveyed a similar message to that he had delivered at Gen Tongogara’s funeral.
“As our nation remembers the death of Josiah Magama Tongogara, the Chief of Defence of the Zanla Forces, those of us who worked closely with him recall his demise with both a deep and acute sense of pain and loss, and a sense of admiration, tremendous satisfaction and gratitude.
“A deep sense of loss because Josiah’s death did not have to come on the eve of the birth of Zimbabwe, on the eve of the birth of a nation towards whose freedom and independence he dedicated and gave his entire life.
“He deserved to play a continuing direct and active role in the midwifery of this country whose long and elusive coming had caused him untold anguish. We all hoped he would live well into Independence . . . When you look back, you cannot avoid a sinking feeling that providence played reckless with us on that fateful day, 26 December 1979.
“A sense of tremendous satisfaction because we remember and recount his demise with our feet firmly planted on a free soil, a free and liberated Zimbabwe which Tongo longed for, and towards whose realisation he endured all manner of trials and tribulations, quite often literally.
“A tremendous sense of admiration because that bitter and arduous struggle triumphed in the end, setting him apart, nay crowning him, as one of its luminaries, indeed as its commander of commanders, its legendary freedom fighter who looms large in the history of African liberation.
“We feel proud that this land bore him, prouder that we worked so closely with him in the search of the freedom of our people . . .
“Tongo envisioned a Zimbabwe that is free and unshackled by settler colonial racism, a Zimbabwe of equals in all spheres of human effort.”
During the Lancaster House conference in late 1979, Gen Tongogara spoke about negotiations, guerilla war, and his President.
“As I have always said, Lancaster is our second front, brought about by the freedom fighters. And so far, what I see, that has been achieved by the liberation forces of Zimbabwe, is . . . they have brought about the birth of a new Zimbabwe. That is one. Two, they have buried the so-called racial supremacy . . .
“And this is important, that in the near future, the people of Zimbabwe will be proud to have their new Zimbabwe . . . and this will never be reversed anymore.”
Gen Tongogara spoke about his President in an interview with Zimbabwe News in 1978, when he said: “Robert Mugabe, the present leader of Zanu, is a self-confident and principled man. He cannot be moved from principles he holds, or from collective decisions of his organisation.
“His practice is firmly set against tribalism and regionalism; he judges issues on their merits, not on the colour, tribe or region of the person who has brought them up. Zanu is blessed to have such a leader.”
Gen Tongogara went to Zambia in 1960 in pursuit of education, where he joined Zanu at its formation in 1963 and worked in the youth wing before becoming a branch chairman.
He went to China for military training at the Nanking Military Academy (now the Nanjing Army Command College) and, on his return from China in 1966, he started training ZANU cadres in Tanzania.
Cde Tongogara later arranged for the Zanla forces to work with Frelimo in Mozambique before and after their Independence in 1975.
His military prowess and dedication as well as his political clarity led to his appointment as the military commander of zanla and Chairman of the High Command in 1972.
In 1973 he became the Chief of Defence in the Dare reChimurenga, the ZANU executive council charged with responsibility to direct the liberation war.
He was a firm believer in the unity of the liberation movement, and was involved in the formation of various structures to work closely with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) led by Joshua Nkomo, including the Joint Military Command, the Zimbabwe People’s Army, and the Patriotic Front.
When the party was reorganised in 1977, Cde Tongogara was re-elected to the Central Committee as Secretary for Defence, a post he held up to his untimely death.
