The Sunday Mail
Disappointed. Disgusted. Wasted time. Wasted energy.
Those are some of the emotions that came rushing to my mind last Wednesday as I read the last page of Cephas Msipa’s autobiography — “In Pursuit of Freedom and Justice: A Memoir”.
I have only met Cde Msipa once, and it was a chance meeting. We were travelling from Bulawayo to Harare, must have been in 2010.
We had stopped over in Gweru for lunch and incidentally the place where we were to have our lunch was where Cde Msipa was also stepping in for lunch as well. In fact, he was a regular at the spot.
What was supposed to have been an hour’s stop turned into a couple of hours. We talked at length and he offered some insights, very rare indeed, into the liberation struggle.
What was striking was his approachability, his demeanour and his down-to-earth personality. What was similarly striking was the apparent struggles he had with his health, of which he openly complained that he was fighting arthritis and you could see the struggles in his walk.
But what was even more striking was in spite of him having such a rich depository of our liberation struggle, his narrations were somehow incoherent, they were not consistent.
Just like in most of the discussions I have had with liberation figures, I raised the issue of the absence of literature, especially from the pre-independent Zimbabwe, by those involved in the struggle from our bookshelves.
So you may imagine my mixed emotions when I talked to whoever answered my phone call at the front office at Weaver Press in late November. I had been looking for a certain piece of literature pertaining to our war of liberation. I was informed that the book in question was not in stock. In fact, it had been out of print for quite a while.
As an after-thought, the person at the other end of the phone asked if I would be interested in Cephas Msipa’s autobiography, which they were scheduled to be launching that evening. I expressed my interest and said I would look for the published book.
My mind instantly drifted to the two-hour discussion we had with Cde Msipa back in 2010.
At first I was hit with a wave of enthusiasm, glee and excitement, that at last one of our liberation heroes had decided to write something. Then I pondered, if Cde Msipa was struggling with his health back in 2010, could he have recovered such that he has managed to put his history onto paper? What about the incoherence?
When I made the call to Weaver Press, I was on the verge of my annual leave and I had assured myself that I really wanted a break. Therefore, I only laid my hands on the book six weeks later.
I think I must have read the book from cover to cover within four hours. And I was disappointed. Greatly disappointed.
The book, in all honesty, did not add anything new to my existing knowledge on the liberation struggle. Cde Msipa’s “In Pursuit of Freedom and Justice” decided to be economic with the truth and did not dwell on issues that should have been explored deeply.
At best, what Cde Msipa decided to call memoirs could have been an essay by a “mujibha” in the liberation war. Given the proximity he had to the operations, decisions, trials and tribulations of the struggle, I expected a better pack of memoirs. Something deeper, more profound and more riveting.
My first point of disappointment was the pedestrian nature of the storyline and its narration. Here was a school headmaster, from the famed ‘50s and ‘60s, assumedly a scholar and an academic, and now a doctor, writing and you would have expected some kind of authority, either in linguistic flavour or chronological flow, consistent with the many years he spent in front of the class.
Granted, not all writers are artistic with verbs and nouns, and therefore, Cde Msipa should have made up for the artistry that he lacked in writing with the story flow.
But he didn’t.
In the end of the story, he talks to no end of the 53 years that he spent in marriage with the love of his life, his late wife Charlotte, yet in the beginning of the story, he is thrifty with details of the marriage.
Instead he is prepared to tell us how he met and befriended President Robert Mugabe, giving much more detail and space to this, than the meeting with his wife (which he conceded was to be a major factor in his life).
My second disappointment with Cde Msipa is the manner with which he did not get into detail about his relationship with both President Mugabe and the late Joshua Nkomo. Personally, I think memoirs should be sacred only to the truth and not to personalities.
For instance, when President Mugabe was released from Salisbury Prison in 1975, he headed straight to Msipa’s house in Mufakose and asked Msipa to drive him around Kambuzuma. Unless the absence of the details pertaining to the Kambuzuma drive was an error of commission rather than omission, I think Cde Msipa did his readers a great disservice.
Here was Robert Mugabe in a hectic drive around Kambuzuma just after he had been released from prison — and a few days later — the same Robert Mugabe was disappearing from Rhodesia into Mozambique. So isn’t it telling that the people that Mugabe met on that frenetic Kambuzuma drive had some relevance and input into Mugabe’s journey into Mozambique? That could have given the reader of Cde Msipa’s book some insight.
Msipa does nothing but add to the suspicion when he does not tell the reader who Mugabe met on that round-robin Kambuzuma trip. The trip ended with Mugabe ordering Msipa to “leave me here and go back home”.
For those who have been trying to stitch the pieces together as to the many puzzles around the liberation struggle, that Cde Msipa decided to write such memoirs and then decided to leave such details out leaves the reader disgusted and wretched. Why did he bother in the first place if he didn’t want to tell it all?
Memoirs should be about the truth, nothing but the truth.
Here is Cde Msipa, who was staying in Lochnivar and had the unenviable task of welcoming Joshua Nkomo into soon-to-be-independent Zimbabwe. Nkomo was considered a security risk by many, such that none of Salisbury’s hotels could take him in. That left Msipa with the only option of moving out of his three-bedroomed house to accommodate Nkomo and all of his entourage — aides, assistants, drivers, hangers-on, what-not.
From such a vantage point, you would expect to read in riveting detail the days that saw the birth of Zimbabwe. You would expect a nail-biting memoir of an up-close-and-personal account with Nkomo.
And what’s more? Msipa had as much as access to Nkomo as he had with Mugabe, which made him a peculiar liberation icon, someone who was supposed to give an insight into the thinking, behaviour and social interactions of these two.
What is even more disappointing for me is that Cde Msipa does not add or subtract to what I have heard, read and been told about Mugabe and Nkomo. Nor the liberation struggle. Nor Gukurahundi. I would have expected, given the range from which he knew both struggle icons, to give additional anecdotes, something we have not heard from CNN, BBC, Terrence Ranger or Phyllis Johnson.
When you are writing a memoir, especially from the spitting distance that he was to both Mugabe and Nkomo, you would expect nothing but the truth.
For instance, Edgar Tekere, in “Lifetime of A Struggle” mentions a Kambuzuma woman linked to Mugabe.
What also disappoints me is the absence of modesty in Cde Msipa’s memoirs. Granted, a memoir is a form of curriculum vitae, one is basically selling themselves and their achievements. But the manner with which Cde Msipa portrays himself in his memoirs is nothing but a show of vanity. He gives you the picture that everything that he touched turned into gold.
It is quite surprising that for someone who had a rural background, when he checked into Camp Number 6 at Gonakudzingwa detention camp, he could not make a fire nor cook sadza, rather having that done for him. And that for someone in their late 20s?
All this said, this does not diminish the role that Cde Msipa played in the liberation of Zimbabwe, it was an immense and profound contribution, the only problem being the manner with which he handled the story-telling part. It should have been an opportunity to tell the world, from such a vantage point, the intricate details of Zimbabwe’s liberation. From the front row.
After going through the book, with its numerous typographical and spelling errors, one gets a feeling that this was a rushed project, which never got the editing it deserved. Even the chronological flow of events leaves the reader somehow confounded.
This must show that his memoirs were an act of diction, that he must have been narrating to someone, who took down the notes and then composed them into a book without checking the flow of events.
If Cde Msipa is to get a five-star from me, it would be for the brave step in adding, however, un-detailed, to the solving of the liberation of Zimbabwe puzzle.
The puzzle has so many holes missing and if only more of the people who took part in the struggle could come forward and write their stories, we would be more informed and educated about our history.
My second disappointment with Cde Msipa is the manner with which he did not get into detail about his relationship with both President Mugabe and the late Joshua Nkomo. Personally, I think memoirs should be sacred only to the truth and not to personalities.
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