Celebrating Zimbabwe’s Heroic Friends and Defence Allies

AS part of the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services’ month-long Heroes and Defence Forces commemorations under the auspices of Zimbabwe’s Heroic Friends and Defence Allies, Richard Runyararo Mahomva (RM) sat down with Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa (CM) to discuss how Zimbabwe’s journey to Independence was supported by African liberation movements. Cde Mutsvangwa is a seasoned pioneer Zimbabwean Diplomat, ZANU PF Secretary for Information and Publicity and Chairman of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZLWVA). Below are excerpts of what Cde Mutsvangwa said.

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I am the Secretary of Information and Publicity and spokesperson of the party of the Zimbabwe revolution, ZANU PF. I am also Chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWA) This is an affiliate to the Party anchored in the victorious military and political cadres who are surviving members of victorious ZANLA and ZIPRA military combatants of both ZANU and ZAPU. These are the two consequential national liberation movements of Zimbabwe, who scored the 1979 military victory against the Rhodesian army, a catspaw of the British Imperial Army.

The battlefield victory forced the enemy to an armistice at the Lancaster Houses Conference, paving the way to the first ever universal suffrage elections in 1980. Thereafter, Zimbabwe was reborn as sovereign, democratic and independent Republic with full membership to the United Nations and the comity of nations.

Mining deep and wide from the historical ethos of the armed struggle, as of 2013, ZNLWA spawned and spearheaded the struggle against the Mugabe-G40 dynastic and monarchist oligarchy which posed a mortal challenge to the continuity and success of the Zimbabwe Revolution. This culminated with the 2017 victory of Operation Restore Legacy and the demise of the Mugabe Presidency. The Second Republic ushered in under the aegis of President Mnangagwa.

My role in Government saw me serve at various intervals as a Parliamentarian for Norton Constituency, a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and a fully-fledged Minister of War Veterans Affairs. With the advent of the Second Republic, I was appointed Special Advisor to the President.

The ultimate prize for ZNLWA is its rewarding lobbying for the imminent inaugural launch of the League of the War Veterans as the fourth organ of ZANU PF. This will see the core cadre-ship of the national liberation movement play a prominent and integral role in shaping decision making as the party discharges its historical role to the expectations of the heroic people of Zimbabwe.

I am lucky to have been blessed by a rich, varied and eclectic life beyond the military and political dimensions.

I am a businessman who has been at the forefront of ground-breaking initiatives that shifted the national economic paradigm. This equally derives from my checkered academic background. In 1975 I abandoned a promising legal career as a merit bursary top national student pursuing law studies at the then University of Rhodesia, now University of Zimbabwe.

I crossed into newly-independent Mozambique to join thousands of generational youths eager to train militarily, take to arms and be deployed to the battlefront: the goal then being to undo the military capitulation of the 1890s at the hands of the marauding mercenary and private army of arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. This feat was duly accomplished with the alluded 1979 battlefield victories.

I trained at Tembwe Guerrilla Camp in Tete province in Mozambique as I overcame many wartime vicissitudes of hunger, disease and acute welfare deprecation, as refugees in a war-ravaged, fledgling independent nation wallowing at the lowest rung of global economic ranking.

I was deployed at the warfront with my first firefight being a successful attack that overran the Nyamapanda border post of colonial and settler Rhodesia. This attack was a haste and gutty riposte to the 1976 heinous massacre of defenseless refugees of the Nyadzonia Massacre in 1976.

Having drawn first blood, I was redeployed into a reconnaissance unit that infiltrated deep into enemy territory. My commander was Tennison Mari WeMombe Sithole, a seasoned and very alert sector commander. Starting off from Mudzi in Mtoko, we crossed the Rwenya River into Katerere Nyanga, then Chikore, Tanda, Chiendambuya, Mukarakate, Mrewa, Shangure, Bromley-Melfort, Chihota, Seke, Beatrice and ended our march of over 300km all the way to Marirangwe by Norton. All that march on foot.

Our mission was to politicise, conscientise and mobilise the populace in preparation for impending deployment of numerous and larger guerrilla groups. Also we wanted to infiltrate deep into hearty interior ramparts of the enemy so as to promptly stretch out its deployments. Finally, we intended to crown our infiltration by a daring mine attack of a railway bridge across the Manyame River on the Harare-Bulawayo transport artery.

Alas, we had to abandon the last act. A treacherous incident in Seke provoked our salutary punitive reprisal on a compromised supporter who had planted needles in filter of a supplied cigarette packet.

A Rhodesian manhunt ensued against us. We hid in Marirangwe under cover of a protecting populace. We ended upon abandoning the mission. We dodged the enemy by marching back close to New Sarum airbase. We knew the marauding spotter planes would not have readied their menacing binoculars as they scrambled for search and destroy surveillance. We deliberately and tactfully avoided going southwards in the widening enemy radius of search.

We calculated rightly that marching back closer to Salisbury was safer than an anticipated expectation to avoid the feared urban stronghold of the enemy’s capital city.

Yes, we evaded and successfully marched all the 300km return and report route to our relatively safe sanctuaries by the Mozambique frontier.

A third stint of deployment at the battlefront was cut short as units were aggregated for the large scale attacks intended to help our political leadership gain the upper hand at the Geneva Conference talks of 1976.

My fourth deployment, now promoted to detachment commander ended nastily. The enlarged battalion marching to attack Nyanga town fell into a night ambush trying to cross the Nyamombe River. We outgunned the bridge defenders.

By then we had alerted the enemy. Wisened, the Rhodesian Army proceeded to prepare a well-organised and thorough massive counterattack of their fearful combined air and ground assault warfare. We were clearly on the vulnerable defensive in the equation of asymmetrical warfare that favoured mobility and responsive resupply.

Clearly the hurried graduation to large scale attacks turned out to be a costly military blunder of strategic scale. I escaped the total rout meted to our oversized battalion in battle on the banks of the Nyagadzi river. Purple hearts of bomb shrapnel on my knee and thigh in both legs are lifelong reminders of the painful encounter.

Worse on that dark day, my AK 47 assault weapon had its piston cover ripped open by a sharpshooting sniper’s bullet. I never noticed this frightening personal disarmament until when I was safely away at a gathering point, far removed from the ‘killing bag’ of death. The mayhem triggered as we struggled to feed the fatigued battalion from ill prepared local villages.

Fatigue from hauling heavy weaponry in mountain terrain and insufficient rest after the earlier battle all weighed down our defensive capability.  Further aggravation came from lack of central command. I later discovered that the Provincial Commander had surreptitiously broken out ahead of battle in a cowardly self-saving flight to safety back to Mozambique.

Comrade Lucky Chombo is a war survivor from a latter day exploding antipersonnel mine planted by the enemy as it resorted to the reckless and gruesome warfare that haunts us for years after the guns died drown.

Comrade Chombo had to calmly counsel me to throw away the disabled and unusable AK47. Afterwards, I marched under guard, unarmed, back to sanctuary in Mozambique. And this not before another fatal encounter.

I escaped another night enemy ambush. The enemy was laying in wait at a dug-out canoe crossing point on the fast-flowing and treacherous Gairezi River. Losing yet another comrade among others, we had developed long bonds from our initial joint deployment in the Mudzi detachment zone.

Back to my education. I started learning computer programming from a German friend who came to support our struggle in Maputo with the pioneering compugrahic equipment acquired in America for the party’s Department of Information in 1978. After Independence I again returned to law studies on a quest to graduate. This fortuitously came in handy on my return to civilian life as a lucky and chancy survivor.

With Independence achieved in 1980, I dashed back to my old university to resume curricula from five years before.

Public duty called once again. The new Government wanted my service as a tried and tried cadre of ZANU PF.

Minister Mnangagwa, my wartime mentor was in charge of the Office of Prime Minister, Cde Robert Mugabe. I was selected for aptitude tests to qualify for diplomatic cadetship with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That put paid my aspiration of a career in the legal field, much to the new anguish of my father. He had braved all sorts of violence meted out in enemy reprisals for a son in enemy guerrilla ranks.

That as it may, diplomacy ended up my vocation. Brussels, Belgium, the headquarters of the European was my first assignment. The last time the Zimbabwe nation had true diplomats was on the Munhumutapa Kingdom with the budding imperial Portugal and other potentates’ littoral Indian Ocean.

Rhodesia was a colony so our diplomatic deployment in 1980 broke new ground underscoring recovered sovereignty. I later moved to New York in 1985. In that interim I served as the key taskman of the frontline states diplomatic team despatched to steer Namibia to Independence, along the process masterminding an emphatic electoral victory for the SWAPO sister revolutionary national liberation movement.

This was also the opportunity to resume university studies in earnest even as I discharged marital and parental responsibilities. All the while, I was busy with the demanding chores of global diplomacy.

It is noteworthy that my New York stint at the United Nations had a crescendo with the sharpened fight by Africa and progressive fight against apartheid South Africa. Pretoria was now the remnant outpost of moribund West European imperialist depredations of Atlantic Slavery, colonial partition and unbridled imperial plunder against Africa and beyond.

All this did not deter me from university studies in putative digital information and telecommunications, finance and public management all the way to a Master’s Degree.

Looking back, I am awed by this achievement which my wife from our war encounter similarly scored as we brought two Masters Degrees whilst studying and working in a foreign milieu bereft of the safety nets offered by the African extended family.

The rewards of this onerous pursuit of education in defiance of post war stress would come in handy.

I am a luminary among the pioneering lights of the digital economy in Zimbabwe. I worked hard as a consultant for Multi-Choice Africa to push the frontier of the unfolding splurge that is now a multi-channel pay-per-view digital broadcaster. My wartime radio and print broadcast exposure at Voice of Zimbabwe and Radio Mozambique was cemented by my posting to be CEO of Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

Even more rewarding was my drift to digital cellular communications and digital network technology as a consultant for a raft of companies who emerged as leading players. (Some to latter ignominiously fall along the ever evolving digital revolution.

Through working with Vodacom now Vodaphone South Africa right from their continental corporate dawn I wedded into consulting relations with Siemens of Germany and Alcatel of France. Both were trailblazers of the cellular and network technology revolution. They have been since outflanked by Huawei to virtual obliteration as digital cellular players.

By stroke of fateful commercial outcome, I actually gave Huawei its first ever African business contract. I snatched away the project that links Messina to Gweru then Harare from competing Econet to the favor of TelOne back in 1999.

Utande, the broadband digital network much loved by banks, owes its origin to my engagement with Newbridge Networks of Ontario, Canada.

Perhaps most towering and enduring is the early dawn courtship of CISCO to drive the installation of the national internet backbone as far back as 2000.

I whimsically recall how I introduced the first compact disk indexing technology from Chicago’s Encyclopedia Brittanica Film Library. It replaced outdated microfiche. Only to land me in court battles and the subsequent loss of my ZBC post in 1993. This was a presage to the vicious factional fights that led to Gamatox-G40 vicious feuds two decades later.

Earlier on, I had mesmerised global journalists by offering pioneering digital modem transmission away from then epomynous fax machines during the 1991 Commonwealth Heads of State Conference.

The politics of the nascent opposition took a treacherous turn that provoked and promoted an overdue historic land restitution revolution.

The definitive resolution of the festering land question as a vestige of post colonial grievances invited vicious retribution by a jaded West.

In 2002, Washington imposed ZDERA Congressional sanctions on Zimbabwe euphemistically labelling little, landlocked Zimbabwe a threat to the foreign policy of the only global superpower that is the USA.

Public duty knocked again. Rising China, an ardent supporter of our Chimurenga National Liberation War emerged as an escape hatch from the anaconda constriction to sure economic failure and national death once again.

A year-long exhaustive search for the right fit ambassador to China in the face of the menacing geopolitical challenge would end with my unsolicited draft as Zimbabwe’s top diplomat to Beijing in December 2002.

I took upon my post when the China Africa trade toll was a measly US$10 billion in 2002. Enhanced efforts ballooned it to US$80 billion by 2008.

Today Africa China trade is a shopping US$240 billion.

I had to learn hard and fast in the new post so we could achieve such magnificence.

All said, marshaling African ambassadors with SADC as the core, we graduated to diplomacy beyond the capital’s cocktail circuit.

The China Africa Forum acquired new vibrancy and delightful potency. By 2006 we had successfully lobbied the State Council of China for game changing revolution of global development finance.

Newly emergent Chinese commercial and policy banks that had horned their mettle in the frenetic upsurge of China as the second global economy were given a new assignment. Africa had had its economic potential opened in a manner reminiscent of the political and military cooperation of the 1960s epoch of Chairman Mao, Premier Chou En Laid and their African counterparts in Presidents Nyerere and Kaunda.

A bit of retro digression. Our party Chairman Herbert Chitepo had planted the seed that would grow to be a Big baobab tree of the Zimbabwe Revolution.

By the 1960s he had lost no time and opportunity to ride on the coattails of Mwalimu Nyerere and his burgeoning dalliance with New China. A propitious outcome was the military training that gave us General Josiah Magama Tongogara, the military genius of African modern guerrilla warfare.

And the even earlier ground breaking military cadreship that spawned and launched the long enduring politico-military journey of the youthful Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa. So visionary and hardened he became that neither battlefield capture, nor lucky escape from ominous death by hanging, nor long spell in gallons of death row would daunt his spirit.

He would attain the unusual if not singular feat of joining the same twice. Released from jail as a beneficiary of the 1974 Victoria Falls Peace Talks, he lost no time to catch up and close the academic gap.

Soon after donning his law degree cap, he headed back to the Chimurenga War now bigger and brighter, all owed to the military collaboration of Chitepo-Tongogara duo’s fateful alliance with Eduardo Mondhlane-Samora Machel duet back in 1968-9.

The gods of War went on to handsomely reward. The north east war front overcame the natural military barrier that was the Zambezi River. By the same token ZANLA tapped on the military experience of seasoned FRELIMO guerrillas steadily march down to victory from the Rovuma River.

The boon came in 1974. Buckling Portugal witnessed the Carnation Revolution of disenchanted colonels of its costly and painful African military engagements.

Maputo, Luanda and Guinea Bissau-Cape Verde had militarily humbled a modern European imperial army. The FRELIMO victory was potent inspiration to the oppressed victims of Rhodesian settler colonial minority racist rule, Apartheid colonialism in Namibia and heinous apartheid minority hegemony in South Africa.

The ZANLA-ZIPRA took ample opportunity of the smiling heavens of African guerrilla warfare.

This is the war stage Comrade Emmerson D. Mnangagwa came to rejoin in 1977.

This glorious politico military engagement with China would morph into the economic-financial bonanza that has been flourishing under the aegis of the China-Africa Cooperation Forum-FOCAC. Chairman Chitepo and Josiah Tongogara are marveling in their after-life at what their patriotic fervor has begot in relations between Harare and Beijing as the country reaches out to the prospect of an Upper-Middle Income Status in a breathtaking and gigantic economic overhaul.

President Hu Jintao made a huge announcement on global finance at the China Africa Forum Summit of 2006. Soon after, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China doled out a whopping $6 billion to merge and acquire Standard Bank of South Africa, the continent’s largest non-European Bank.

Banker Pindi Nyandoro of Zimbabwe headed the courtship negotiations in Beijing. She was a marvel to national pride as I watched her pry her banking skills to the cream of Chinese banking expertise. Standard Bank today runs Africa’s largest banking network.

In 2006 I opted out of extending my ambassadorial career by foregoing a post to Berlin, Germany. I did not relish the prospect of a less tantalising challenge.

Instead, I chose to come back home to farm, do politics and maybe go back to thrill, that is risk-taking business. I also turned to a new challenge. This was to entice the new crop of Chinese billionaires of globalising capital to invest in Zimbabwe’s world class resource assets. The goal is for Harare to produce world class goods of all types, wholly made in Zimbabwe and destined for the discerning global market place.

To be continued