The Sunday Mail
Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa
I first met Dr Felix Muchemwa at Doeroi United Nations Refugee Camp in 1977.
Muchemwa was the fourth fully trained medical doctor to join the fledgling Zanla medical corps in Mozambique. The team then consisted of Cdes Herbert Ushewokunze, Sydney Sekeramayi and Dr Muvuti.
His arrival in Mozambique soon after he completed his medical training in England was a godsend.
The medical conditions then obtaining in our rear base camps, particularly Doeroi, was just dire. There was a diabolical mix of the varied ravages of warfare as the Chimurenga II pulsated into its final years that presaged victory in 1979.
At Doeroi, I was the Camp Political Commissar, being second-in-command to Cde Tenheka. We had been deployed under the overall direction of Cde Joseph Chimurenga of the High Command, replacing the team of recently departed Alexander Kanengoni aka Cde Gora who had been caught up in the internecine Vashandi Rebellion.
I had just completed training in political ideology with the second intake of Chitepo School of Ideology at Chimoio.
This group of inductees had been recruited so that the evolving political training would incorporate new battlefield realities of the resumed war.
So a number of comrades who had been wounded in battle were thrown into the mix so as to temper some perniciously infantile ideas that had unduly aggravated internal contradictions in the moulding of the fast expanding guerrilla army.
President Mugabe’s steady intellectual hand had not yet taken full political charge of the external wing of Zanu after the assassination of Chairman Chitepo, the rejection and ejection of treacherous Ndabaningi Sithole, as well as rebellious tendency in the Vashandi rump of the ill-fated Zimbabwe People’s Army.
Also still to be fully incorporated was the organisational flair of the military genius of General Magama Tongogara, who had just been freed from Zambian prisons.
At Chitepo Ideological College, I joined Ambassador Thomas Mandigora, now in Botswana, and Ambassador Mark Marongwe, now in Kuwait, among some of the hardened battlefield cadres of the special intake which also included the late national hero Air Commodore Karakadzai.
I was still nursing the shrapnel wound of a painful battlefield encounter with the Rhodesian racist army by the banks of the Nyagadzi River in Chikowore-Nyanga.
I had survived a sniper’s bullet that ripped off the piston cover of my AK-47 but somehow missed both my body and my clutching fingers.
I was not aware how close to death I had been until Titus Hlaba, the Sector Commander of the Guru Front, whose Chimurenga name was Lucky Dube, another survivor of the tough encounter, calmly told me to throw away my now useless weapon at our gathering point.
It was harrowing time tracking back pursued by a harrying enemy.
And there I was, Cde Che Guevara Muchazvirega Mabhunu, a guerrilla of four battlefield despatches into the Zimbabwe war front, walking back to rear base safety completely unarmed.
Here was the ultimate ignominy of tracking back under protection and without any weapon just like a new recruit.
Cde Titus Hlaba had offered to disarm Cde David in my favour as I was a Detachment Commander.
But my sense of comradely fairness precluded me from appropriating the gun of a junior cadre simply because I had the misfortune of losing the functionality of my own weapon in battle.
Military ethics can debate that decision forever.
And just as well. Fate has its own devious ways.
As we crossed the fast flowing and treacherous Gairezi River that marked the border between Mozambique and colonial Rhodesia, our fleeing unit walked into a deadly ambush in the dead of night.
It claimed the life of Cde David, that personal aide who had been tasked to protect me.
I do not know whether he drowned or he was shot. But he never made back to the safety of the Guru Command Base in Mozambique.
Had I taken his gone, I would still be afflicted by a bad conscience.
We had been together all the way from my second deployment in the first half of 1976 which took us to the outskirts of then Salisbury, now Harare, the capital city.
This was under the able command of the plucky Cde Tennyson Sithole aka Mwari WeMombe.
A Rhodesian unit followed us all the way into Mozambique.
Fully-fledged border battles now including our Mozambique Army allies were to ensue while the wounded where hastily despatched to the safety of Tete, the provincial capital.
The Guru military base was soon after attacked by the Rhodesian army in a brazen act of naked aggression against a sovereign nation.
Cde Titus Hlaba was also lucky to survive the whole war — though badly scarred physically and emotionally.
He recounts how an anti-personnel mine planted by the enemy along our guerrilla border mountain trails exploded and ravaged his body with burns and shrapnel.
Today Cde Titus Hlaba is farmer on the outskirts of Bulawayo as a beneficiary of land reforms. He is struggling but his condition is relatively better than the deprivation that is the lot of many of his fellow war veterans from both Zipra and Zanla.
The intense military activity in the Guru Sector of the Tete Province war front was but a microcosm of what was going on elsewhere in Manica and Gaza, the other two Zanla military provinces.
The whole 1 000km border was a huge battlefront as Zanla guerrillas surged into the interior outstretching the manpower, economic and material resources of the depleting Rhodesian military capacity.
This frenetic military activity was the backdrop to the Geneva talks masterminded by Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, as he pursued détente to rescue the disappearing white minority racist regimes of Southern Africa.
Kissinger had a willing ally in John Vorster, the leader of South Africa who was ready to sacrifice Ian Smith if that could buy more time for the survival of apartheid.
Fully cognisant of the increasing potency of the gathering storm of the armed national liberation struggle, they had met earlier in 1976 in Munich, Germany and agreed on supplanting tired and fetid British diplomacy on Rhodesia.
As the protagonists jaw-jawed in Geneva, the war was intensifying against Rhodesia.
Thus Cde Muchemwa arrived in Mozambique at a very crucial stage of the armed struggle.
The military confrontation translated into many sick and wounded who were continuously being evacuated from the front for treatment at the rear base.
Now there was another daunting aspect.
Many Zimbabweans were ever crossing into Mozambique to join the swelling ranks of the guerrilla fighters.
The newly independent country, which happened to be one of the poorest in the world, now had the twin challenge of war and refugees to deal with.
The situation had rapidly taken its own turn well before the new government had installed itself in Maputo.
It was a taxing situation from whatever angle. Food, money, medicines, armaments were all in full demand and competing for limited resources.
The international solidarity to cope with such dire challenges was just unprepared for this tumultuous turn of events that faced President Samora Machel.
Young, ardent and energetic recruits were spending long stretches of time in refugee holding camps because the facilities to train them were just not enough.
There were also insufficient guns to push them to the front.
This necessitated more food and medical requirements well beyond the capacity of Mozambique.
Hunger set in and began to waste many of these youthful refugees. Opportunistic disease piled upon this situation of near famine.
Limited, if non-existent, medical facilities were impossibly stretched.
Add to this the cruelty of the racist Rhodesian regime.
Staring defeat within the country, it resorted to indiscriminate cross border aggression targeting the tens of thousands being housed in makeshift camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
With utter callousness and total disregard of international law, they attacked Nyadzonia Camp in 1976. They followed with many more such raids in both Mozambique and Zambia, killing thousands and maiming many more.
Their evil reached to new heights with the resort to biological and chemical warfare.
Poison was laced into clothes on the basis that unknowing civilian supporters would pass them onto unsuspecting guerrillas.
Explosives and informing transmitters were planted in shortwave radios to help track guerrillas who used them to follow their political direction from Maputo and Lusaka.
Subsequent attacks killed many while maiming others in contested and liberated zones.
This increased the treatment load of the Zanla Medical Corps at both the front and the rear.
The Rhodesian Intelligence Services took heinousness to the stratosphere as they turned to biological warfare.
Drinking wells were poisoned, streams were infested with cholera and cattle infected with tetanus as a genocidal streak gripped the increasingly frightened losers grappling with an ever widening war theatre and more painful losses across the whole war effort.
Cde Muchemwa landed into the midst of this horrendous medical nightmare.
Nowhere was it starker than at Doeroi Camp.
Set up hastily for refugees who had survived the Nyadzonia massacre in 1976, Doeroi was just not prepared to properly house the huge numbers of the wounded and the many others afflicted by famine.
It was set up next to a small stream whose waters flowed sluggishly in the dry season.
Rhodesian biological experts, in utter callousness, took advantage of this water scarcity and infested the surrounding water puddles with pathogens.
Jeremy Brickhill has made an attempt to describe the depths of human depravity that was the hallmark of the Rhodesian programme of chemical and biological warfare.
He and his late young brother Paul Brickhill share that unique patriotic attribute being among the only white citizens who committed race suicide to join the armed ranks of their black nationalist guerrilla compatriots.
Doeroi Camp turned into a cesspit of unmitigated human suffering for Zimbabwean refugees in 1976.
Together with Cde Tenheka, we had to deal with three score deaths per day to the extent that we had deployed up to four companies full time to dig graves on an uninterrupted basis.
In the meantime, a similar number was daily perishing in the referral hospital in Chimoio, which was simply unable to cope because of the paucity of resources in Mozambique.
For future generations, it is important that full attention be given to Doeroi Camp for a holistic appreciation of the tragedy of war that was our route to national salvation.
Doeroi has to be another chapter in the effort at memory closure by a nation of many tormented families who still seek their missing loved ones.
Doerei Camp received the news of the arrival of a second doctor from England with a lot of joy and expectation.
We had just got Dr Muvuti from Zambia. He was doing a fantastic job but was clearly overwhelmed.
Dr Muvuti had originally come on a temporary basis but the sheer gravity of the crisis at Doeroi changed his mind.
Dr Felix Muchemwa was not prepared to cut corners.
He opted to go for full military training at Chimoio Camp. We had no option but to wait for him to complete that programme.
He finally made it to Doeroi. He lost no time in sizing the situation and recommending decisive action even as they resulted in confrontation with the Mozambican administration.
I had long argued that the camp perimeter was too restricted and the over-crowding worsened the health environment.
But both my superiors, Cdes Joseph Chimurenga and Tenheka, would not confront the unreasonable local official who was under the influence of a hostile white neighbour who owned the adjacent farm.
There was suspicion that the unreasonable refusal to give more land even as we faced so many deaths had to do with him being on the side of the Rhodesian regime.
He could also have been an accomplice to the chemical and biological warfare that clearly manifested themselves in deep ulcer wounds that consumed so much flesh right to the ligaments and bones.
The arrival of Cde Muchemwa solved that argument.
He forced through a bold unilateral decision that led us to enlarge the refugee settlement to both sides of the Doeroi stream and further along the stream.
This resulted in less repeat use of the infected stream water by the thousands of refugees.
The price paid was the removal of Cde Joseph Chimurenga at the behest of the local administrator. We sacrificed the commander while protecting the doctor.
In the meantime, Dr Muchemwa made sure there was remedial action through his professional exchanges with both Mozambican peers and the United Nations agencies.
In no time, the mortality rate steeply declined.
Here was a cadre, a soldier and a guerrilla at work in full employment of his patriotic commitment, natural talent, professional flair and international diplomacy.
Everyone can be fighter but only the type of a Cde Felix Muchemwa could marshal such revolutionary firepower to deliver game changing solutions that were life-saving in a dire situation.
He thus thwarted the designs of racist leader Ian Smith, Ken Flower, his intelligence supremo and Bob Symington, their Dr Death, from decimating a whole camp through chemical and biological warfare at Doerei.
Dr Muchemwa went on to discharge many great deeds for the Zimbabwe Revolution.
The Doeroi Camp story stands out as the pinnacle of what intellectual patriotism is all about and the professional dedication that makes all the difference in revolutionary endeavour.
Farewell, good comrade.
