The Sunday Mail
Tichaona Freedom Nyamubaya
Just over two weeks ago, Tichaona Freedom Nyamubaya was in my ministry’s office with NGO friends from Mozambique and Brazil.
Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa
I had not seen her for years. My itinerant years as a diplomat and my business engagements placed a physical barrier.
In our ways, we ought to make the best of a new Zimbabwe that can be more sympathetic to those who sacrificed so much for it.
I sensed she had remained loyal to the cause even as she remained on the margins of mainstream identification.
Tichaona Freedom embraced a scientific socialist outlook to life in the National Liberation Struggle. It was evident 35 years into Independence she was holding on to her beliefs ever dearly.
She left for Switzerland to raise money for the upcoming provincial elections of my War Veterans’ Association. Zimbabwe has its own history of legendary heroines.
Nehanda Nyakasina of the First Chimurenga (1896/ 7) and her defiance to and beyond the gallows of conquering British colonisers of imperial marauder Cecil John Rhodes stands out on the highest beacon of national identity.
Roll over to National Liberation War of 1966-1979 and you again find a clutch of young female fighters hurling themselves before menacing enemy bullets to drive out a cruel and unyielding racist settler minority.
The bold, the beautiful, the brainy, the brawny in their tender age crossed racist Rhodesian into Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia. They craved a piece of the action alongside their more numerous male counterparts to confront and dispense with an entrenched enemy who had lorded over four generations with impunity. My mind is a collage of so many with formidable valour.
I will never see so much intense youthful energy deployed so fearlessly to a cause so noble. The ferocity of a well-armed, well-supported, highly mobile racist army was finally meeting its match.
We were just so determined to offset the military advantage rendered by Nato weaponry to the Anglo-Saxon racist miscreants desecrating the land of our ancestry. We went on to offset blow for blow with our swelling ranks deeping from our absolute numerical superiority. The guerilla war theory and praxis distilled from Chairman Mao’s People’s War were localised and refined to be jelled into a formidable military machine.
From the mighty Zambezi to the sluggish Limpopo, we made sure defiant racist Rhodesians had sleepless nights as they were hounded by the staccato of a crackling AK 47, that ageless guerilla weapon of choice.
Tichaona Freedom Nyambuya stands out as one among many remarkable female warriors. Yes, I recall many.
Cde Do It, the Albino girl who was ever ready to burst into morale boosting chanting at Nyadzonia Camp. She trained and was deployed to defend Chimoio guerilla headquarters.
Just recently, a white man who opted to remain Zimbabwean after losing in 1980, had mastered the honesty to recount his military sortie as they attacked Chimoio Camp in an aerial and ground assault.
He tore into my heart as he recounted the unremitting bravery of an Albino guerilla woman fighter.
Wounded, she stared right into the face of an advancing column who wanted her as a military trophy. Ever beholden to racial bigotry, they mistakenly thought the plucky resistance they had faced was because of the guerilla unit battlefield inspiration from the courageous white female commander.
Cde Do It lured them into close combat.
When they were near enough, she grabbed the machine gun of a dead comrade and hurled a volley into her adversaries as she went on to perish, writing her page in the annals of Zimbabwe’s military history. It was not that difficult for me to identify the female heroine as Cde Do It, the Albino. Tichaona Freedom survived the Chimoio attack. She went on to distinguish herself as a field operations commander right at the warfront inside the settler racist Rhodesian colony. The horrors of Rhodesian atrocities in their attacks on refugee women, children and the elderly only worked to elicit vengeful anger from our ranks.
There was a rising clamour from our fellow women fighters to be deployed right into the interior. Honourable Irene Zindi, Member of Parliament, aka Jillie “Lumpen” Zvisinei, was among the first clutch of female commandos to be so deployed. There were many others in that category of female valour. Let me just sight the songstress Sekai Muchazotida who composed the eulogy “VaChitepo”. It was later immortalised by the Harare Mambos. I recall the ethereal beauty of Joyce “Murwe Chenyu” Chatima, elder sister to politician Dorothy.
She lived to see military victory, but, alas, not Independence Day. The heinous and cowardly Rhodesian special forces tracked her down upon her ceasefire return to transition Zimbabwe. One morning, they kidnapped her in the streets of Salisbury together with Cde Kerescenzia. We never saw her again.
Here is but a sprinkling of some of our battlefield heroines: Tendai Chitsotso who became a diplomat; Oppah Chamu Zvipange Muchinguri; Cde Dadirai; Sarudzai Barbara Zisengwe; Chido Chimurenga now Monica Mutsvangwa; Victoria “Rufaro’’ Mamvura Gava; Cde Steria, who is on the executive of my National Liberation War Veterans’ Association; and Sarudzai Churucheminzwa. I mention a few so we can properly place wartime Freedom Tichaona in her context.
I first saw her at Tembwe military camp in late 1975 as we trained together.
I recall her easy embrace of the swelling new recruits bussed in from Chimoio. She had advantage of marginally better education. The other cadres from the earlier north-east campaign were quite bemused if not scared that “their” cherished war was enticing an avalanche of recruits.
They could not understand how so many people were joining Chimurenga ranks without the right of passage of being “recruited” by a field guerilla in “body and flesh”.
The record-keeping of the era carried the requirement of a guerilla charge who had matched you to Mozambique.
Clearly, there was no provision for the myriad who simply skipped across the border into newly-freed Frelimo territory.
I caught up again with Tichaona Freedom at Whampoa College, which had just been caught up in, but managed to survive the Vashandi Rebellion.
Both Cdes Robert Mugabe and Josiah Tongogara continued to see value in formal ideological training despite the tendency of abuse by the infantile power-hungry. Coincidentally, I found myself once again in training side by side with Tichaona Freedom.
Only this time, the stuff was more intellectual: dialectical and historical materialism. We had tomes of book donations that spanned Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, VIo Nguyen Ziap, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Regis Debray, Malcolm X.
All in all, we delved into the pantheon of current left wing thought.
Tichaona realised she had gone to war at a level of education that could not easily absorb the demands of years of philosophical thought freed by Hegel.
She knew I had joined the war straight from the Law Faculty of the University of Rhodesia. Undaunted, she would pore her eyes through those tomes of human philosophy.
Along the way, she nagged and pestered me for the explanation of the mystic and the arcane into pedestrian comprehension. I felt obliged to partake into the tutorial of revolutionary ideolgy.
Luckily, I had developed that patience.
Months of a lecture circuit of nightly “pungwes” all the way by foot from Mudzi, Nyanga, Chikore, Tanda, Chiendambuya, Mukarakate, Shangure, Melfort, Landas Seke, Beatrice, Marirangwe had taught me the elements of persuasion in village political lingo. I had to. Indeed, it had to be so.
It’s not a simple task to visit each new village to seek allegiance to the national cause you are a vessel of. You just had to do it over and over to changing daily audience. Otherwise, no food, no water, no blanket, no shoes, no clothes.
Worst of all, no life if they sell you out or even withhold enemy information. I developed a strong intellectual bond with Freedom. But war has no time to entertain such luxury of ensuring academic camarederie.
“On the Move Again”, we abruptly separated.
As I left for Belgrade of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Tichaona Freedom headed for Tete Province, that historic and venerable bastion of the anti-colonial struggle.
She was deployed right into the melee of the guerilla warfront under the aegis of Perrance Shiri, the provincial commander. There, she fought with and eluded the Rhodesians who spiced their racist loathing of the black African with a pointed menial derision of the female species.
Not only did they go so far as to deny her national identity status, they never accepted that she could be an urban dweller in that valued basic building unit of society called a family.
They only had room of the single male African as a migrant labour.
All the way till the ceasefire in 1979, she was among her fellow fighters – male and female – at the warfront. She wrote military glory as a stalwart of gender equality firmly anchored on patriotic fervour.
The legacy of her poetry vividly attests to that. To posterity, this is the human calibre that delivered you to unfettered global citizenship. To all women of Zimbabwe, spare a thought for Tichaona Freedom. Read her poetry, relive her battlefield experiences. That way, you can come to terms with your being as the thoroughly and uniquely modern woman.
Viva Zimbabwe. We shall never be a colony again.
◆ Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa is the Minister of Welfare Services for War Veterans, War Collaborators, Former Political Detainees and Restrictees. He is also the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association Chair, and a member of Zanu-PF’s Politburo.
