Dr Nkomo’s greatest wish

21 Jun, 2015 - 00:06 0 Views
Dr Nkomo’s greatest wish

The Sunday Mail

Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

The effective incorporation of the Southern Rhodesia African National Youth League into the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress ushered in another era of confrontation between the country’s oppressed black majority and the white settler minority.

From 1897, after the white settler forces had been assisted by those from the British colonies of Natal, the Cape and Bechuanaland Protectorate to defeat the people of this country, the land was ruled literally by force of arms.

Racial discrimination, known then as “colour bar”, was enforced right across the country’s social, economic, cultural and political spectrums. Schools, hospitals, residential areas, churches, hotels, bus and passenger train services were all segregated.

Employment and wages were handled racially in the commercial, industrial and civil service sectors.

In urban areas, there were, by and large, two racial residential areas – one for whites and another for blacks.

There were also small areas for Asians and Coloureds in large urban centres such as Salisbury and Bulawayo.

Blacks were barred from owning property in urban areas, and the official areas where they could live, build and own anything were called “native reserves”. These were impoverished lands.

The white settler regime created reserves a month or two after invading King Lobengula’s Kingdom in 1893.

The British South Africa Company army thereafter parcelled out the most fertile parts of the country among its members, violently pushing out black people to the “native reserves”.

The first of those “reserves” were Gwayi in what had been named Matabeleland by the BSAC administration, and the Chinamhora Reserve in what was referred to as Mashonaland.

The naming of each territory after the dominant ethnic community inhabiting the region was a British colonial tradition that had been used earlier elsewhere in Africa to identify territories such as Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Zululand, Swaziland, Barotseland and Gazaland.

That colonial administrative nomenclature had a divisive effect on the colonised people, making the people of Zululand, for example, regard those of Swaziland as rivals and vice versa. Joshua Nkomo’s greatest wish was to engender a feeling of “oneness” among blacks.

There were tribal clashes pitting Ndebele speakers and Shona speakers in Bulawayo in the late 1920s, but Masotsha Ndlovu of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and other community leaders intervened and reinstated peace.

Just before Nkomo became the SRANC leader in the early 1950s, Bulawayo’s black community was socially and culturally divided into about four groups: the Matabeleland Home Society (strictly people of Nguni extraction); the Mashonaland Cultural Club (led by Joseph Bruno Msika); the Bakalanga Mukani Kwaedza Association (headed by Jason Ziyapapa Moyo); and small cultural clubs whose members were originally from Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Mozambique.

Joshua Nkomo refused to be aligned to any of those ethno-regional groups and resisted his younger brother Stephen Jeqe Nkomo’s overtures for him to join the Matabeleland Home Society.

At Rhodesia Railways, where he was a senior social welfare officer, Nkomo interacted closely with people of a very wide cultural cross-section and his work took him as far as the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia’s administration, headed by Sir Godfrey Huggins (Lord Malvern), noticed Joshua Nkomo’s leadership potential and invited him in 1952 to be a part of the delegation to a London conference to discuss formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

There were two black delegates to that conference, which opened in the British capital on April 23 and ended on May 5, 1952. The other was Salisbury-based journalist Jasper Zengeza Savanhu, who in 1945 tried in vain, with Enock Dumbutshena, to inject new ideas into the SRANC.

In 1946, Savanhu had been nominated president of the Bulawayo African Workers’ Union, an affiliate of the then Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union.

In London, Nkomo strongly stated that the African majority must be consulted before a federation was formed and emphatically dissociated himself from a report issued at the end of the conference.

A part of that report said: “ . . . We are convinced that a federation on the lines proposed is the only practicable means by which the three Central African territories can achieve security for the future and ensure the well-being and contentment of all their peoples.”

Southern Rhodesia’s settler regime was displeased with Nkomo’s opinion and, thus, replaced him with Mike Masotsha Hove, Savanhu’s journalist colleague.

When the first federal general election was held in 1953, Sir Godfrey Huggins’ Federal Party chose the two black journalists to represent Mashonaland and Matabeleland.

Dr Nkomo stood and lost as an independent. In 1954, Nkomo, JZ Moyo and Reuben Jamela launched a workers’ umbrella organisation, the Southern Rhodesia African Trade Unions Congress, in Bulawayo.

That organisation played a prominent role in the liberation struggle as Nkomo took Southern Rhodesian issues to international fora.

First to be seized with the matter was the All-Africa People’s Organisation, the United Nations, the Organisation of African Unity and, towards the end of the armed struggle, the Front Line States.

The Commonwealth Heads of State Summit also included the issue on its agenda. Before the struggle was internationalised, adverse developments made it inevitable for the black nationalist leadership to seek political refuge, social support, financial aid and succour associated with armed revolutions abroad.

Soon after the Youth League’s incorporation into the SRANC in September 1957, Nkomo and his national executive kept in close contact with like-minded African leaders abroad, particularly in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. One major consultation took place on January 24 and 25, 1959 at a Nyasaland African National Congress Conference to which sister organisations were invited.

The SRANC was represented by its secretary-general, George Nyandoro, the first black to qualify as a member of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries in Southern Rhodesia.

The last part of that conference was held in the bush, under a big mango tree, quite a distance from Zomba, on January 25, 1959. The venue was chosen for security reasons.

Resolutions were passed, including one to the effect that the ANC throughout the federation should render the three constituent territories ungovernable.

To achieve their objectives, the Southern Rhodesian, the Northern Rhodesian and the Nyasaland ANCs were to use passive resistance. In case of attacks by colonial forces, they were urged to defend themselves by whatever means necessary.

Federal prime minister Sir Roy Wellensky (Lord Malvern having retired) claimed a month later that “the ANC bush conference” had resolved to assassinate several people who supported the federation.

Among those people were Wellington Chirwa, a federal MP, and his quisling colleagues. Sir Roy said “quislings” meant all federal government officials.

He said a police informer’s report indicated that “the bush” meeting had resolved that NANC district chairpersons should organise the killing of every government official by their domestic or other workers.

There would also be indiscriminate attacks on Europeans.

Nyasaland governor Sir Robert Armitage was to be killed by his black servants, so said Sir Roy Wellensky’s police informer’s report.

So, with that type of information, the three territorial governments were prevailed upon by the federal government to ban the ANC in Nyasaland, which was done shortly after midnight on February 26, 1959. Hundreds of people were rounded up and detained for about three months.

Chikerema, Nyandoro, Maurice Nyagumbo, Daniel Madzimbamuto, Henry Hamadziripi and Eddison Sithole were to remain in restriction in the remote Mafungabusi sector of Gokwe district for almost five years.

Joshua Nkomo was at that time in Cairo, Egypt where he established an office for the SRANC.

The liberation struggle of the modern era had struck roots and could not be reversed or stopped.

The black people’s leaders were not asking for reforms any longer, but demanding full political control of their country.

They were challenging the very legitimacy of the Southern Rhodesian white administration.

They were saying armed force cannot create legitimacy, especially in the colonisation of any territory by any power.

Joshua Nkomo decided to lodge the issue before the UN, and Britain’s claim that it was bound by a convention not to intervene in what it called “the internal affairs of Southern Rhodesia because Britain granted Southern Rhodesia internal self-government by means of Letters Patent in 1923” crumbled under the scrutiny of the UN’s international law experts.

◆ Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired Bulawayo-based journalist.

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