The Sunday Mail
Professor Ngwabi Bhebe
As Vice-President of Zanu, Muzenda went to Lancaster as part of the Patriotic Front. This was the first time Mrs Muzenda, who had not seen her husband for four years since he had left for Lusaka in 1975, was able to see him again, but only very briefly. During the Lancaster talks, she took their son, Chikwereti, to London for studies and had the opportunity to spend three days with her husband. She could have stayed longer, but the other children at home had no one to look after them so she had to dash home.
However, at that point, Muzenda had become quite optimistic, and so he told his wife, “Victory is around the corner.”
Indeed, victory for the Patriotic Front was in sight, in that although the negotiations were protracted, running from September 10 to December 21, 1979, when the ceasefire agreement was formally signed, all participants viewed the talks as the moment not to miss to conclude the Rhodesian saga. But before we leave London, we need to observe Muzenda’s magnetism, which drew nearly everybody around him.
During the Lancaster negotiations, Fredrick Shava and Simba Makoni, representatives of the party in the United Kingdom and Europe, made all the board and lodging arrangements for Zanu.
Shava, who worked for the party in London, decided that he should find a house for Robert Mugabe, where he could retire and relax away from the hotel atmosphere, where the delegates had been accommodated by the British.
Once Mugabe saw the house and found that it was actually cheaper to stay in such houses, he asked Shava to get more houses for the Zanu delegates, which he did.
The delegates left the hotel and went to the houses, where Zimbabwean students studying in the UK volunteered to come and do the cooking and all the housekeeping for them. As usual, Muzenda’s house was the most popular meeting place.
As Shava says, “Muzenda had his own house. As usual, his house was a popular meeting place, taking in both informal and formal meetings, including joint formal meetings of the Patriotic Front. Joshua Nkomo would come with his delegation from the hotel to Muzenda’s house.”
The next stage was the holding of the general elections. Things were moving swiftly towards a resolution of the Rhodesian problem, yet Muzenda still had the problem of the Karanga Zanu leaders and Zipa elements imprisoned in Mozambique.
On return from Lancaster to Mozambique, Mugabe was told by Samora Machel to sort out the differences with the detainees, and there was also pressure from Britain to free the detainees so that they could go and participate in the elections.
Mugabe, in turn, requested Muzenda to go and persuade the Karanga clique to go home as part of Zanu. Muzenda flew to Pemba in Mozambique and held talks with them.
As Muzenda says, “I flew there and told them President Mugabe wants us to go back home together. We should talk and go back as one people. They replied, ‘You are now afraid (to lose elections without us)! There is nothing like that (we won’t join you).’
“They thought the British government was behind them. They flatly refused, and the following day I went back and played back the tape-recorded discussion to Mugabe and Samora Machel. But Machel insisted that Mugabe must take them home with him.”
Then Muzenda and Mugabe chose Kumbirai Kangai to go and persuade the Zipa elements to go home and fight the elections as part of Zanu. They too refused, except two, who decided to re-join the party.
In the end, both groups were flown home. Zanu decided that the party would place in each province somebody who was recognised as the most senior member of the party and that such senior people should not be placed according to the provinces of their birth or origins, so that they would be trully national leaders.
The proposal was debated for a long time. In the end, it was noted that Zanu might lose the election to Zapu and Muzorewa’s party, which would distribute their candidates according to their places of birth.
People in the end saw the logic of sticking to their places of birth and the majority did that, except die-hard idealists such as Shava and Makoni. Makoni, originally from Manicaland, decided to have his name in the Midlands list, while Shava got himself on the Manicaland list when he should have been on the Masvingo or Midlands list.
Shava’s name on the Manicaland list was something of an embarrassment to the Manicaland leaders and campaigning team.
Shava says “Morris Nyagumbo went round in Manicaland with the party list of Zanu candidates, but then voters quizzed him, saying they knew everyone on the list, as they came from the area, but then they had no idea as to who Fredrick Shava was.
“Nyagumbo told the Central Committee how awkward and embarrassed he felt in those meetings, failing to offer satisfactory explanation for the presence of a ‘foreign’ candidate in their region… Nyagumbo was candid about his discomfort with the arrangement.”
Muzenda, on the other hand, enjoyed many options. As is now known, he was well-known in Bulawayo, so that he could have stood in Matabeleland.
He had lived and worked in the Midlands and his family still lived in their house in Mvuma. He traced his roots to Nyamondo in Mberengwa, also part of the Midlands; his nationalist leadership blossomed in both the Midlands and Masvingo, so that he could have stood in Masvingo, where his birthplace, Gutu, is situated.
Muzenda was, therefore, truly a national leader, who could have contested the elections anywhere in most of Zimbabwe.
In 1980, however, Zanu just had to win because of all the odds that were being ranged against that party.
According to Muzenda, there were two developments that were potentially destructive to Zanu. During the campaign, they got a tip-off that, if they lost the election, they were going to be totally marginalised even working hard to bring together Nkomo, Muzorewa and Smith. Then, Nkomo apparently tried to persuade Lord Soames, the Governor, to get Zanu banned in some parts of the country, apparently where he thought his party had chances of winning.
The Governor turned down the request as fraught with trouble.
Apparently, both the British and the Rhodesian settlers were afraid of Mugabe and wanted to frustrate him from getting into power. That was confirmed when Muzenda overheard a conversation at an Australian High Commissioner’s cocktail party between the High Commissioner and the Governor. Lord Soames turned to the Australian High Commissioner and asked, “Roy! Roy! What kind of a man is Mugabe?”
“I don’t know him, he must be a terrible man.”
They quickly went silent when one of the aides whispered to them, “There is his deputy standing there (pointing at Muzenda)”.
Although Muzenda remained tight-lipped during the exchanges, he, however, took note of the deep hatred for Mugabe among the white people.
The second thing Muzenda found disturbing about Lord Soames was that he learnt that the Governor wanted to leave Zimbabwe as soon as the elections were over and a government had been formed.
Muzenda immediately rushed to Mugabe to warn him that, if Soames left so prematurely, that would be a recipe to plunge Zimbabwe along the path of the Angolan civil war.
He advised Mugabe to approach four British MPs who were in the country to persuade Soames to stay in Zimbabwe, even for another six months.
The MPs, perhaps pleased to see that their role was welcome and appreciated and anxious to see Britain make its contribution to the birth of a stable Zimbabwe, persuaded the Governor to stay on after the elections for a much longer period than he had intended.
Muzenda was not only anxious about the stability of his country, but was fiercely concerned about the safety of his President.
Until proper arrangements for his security were put in place by the new government, Muzenda saw to it that though Mugabe had been allocated a house on his return from Maputo, at night he did not sleep there.
“He put up where no one knew except me. My driver was the only one who would take him to that place, no one else.”
It was during those anxious days of campaigning, and three days before voting started that the elder Chekesai Murefu Nyamando Muzenda, the father of Simon, died on February 23, 1980.
It was as if he had waited to see his son home from a successful war.
He did not wait to celebrate the lndependence of Zimbabwe.
However, before he died, Mrs Maud Muzenda went to Zvavahera in Gutu North and carefully loaded the aged father of the hero in a wheelbarrow, pushed him to the nearest bus stop and took him to Mvuma.
In Mvuma, Murefu saw his son after six years of separation. The son was taking just a short break from his hectic campaigning schedule and he soon left, promising to be back so that they could have a longer time together once the elections were over.
But no sooner had the son left than the old man begged his daughter-in-law to pack him back home when it was still easy for her to do so. In less than a week, he passed away at his home, at an estimated age of 100 years, leaving behind five children, 21 grand-children and 32 great grand-children. His was a well-deserved rest after bringing up a hero of Zimbabwe’s liberation. In any event, when the election results came out, Mugabe’s Zanu won an overall majority of 57, while Nkomo’s Zapu got only 20 seats, Muzorewa’s ANC managed a mere three seats, while the whites got all the 20 seats set aside for them in the Lancaster Constitution. Zanu could have decided to form a government on its own.
But its leaders decided that, having struggled in the war together and negotiated the Lancaster settlement together under the framework of the Patriotic Front, they should invite their partner, Zapu, and form a government together. (Emmerson) Mnangagwa witnessed the negotiations between Muzenda and Mugabe, on the one hand, and Joshua Nkomo, on the other, and he participated in them as a messenger. The negotiations revealed Muzenda’s conciliatory nature, patience and deep insight into human nature.
Still profoundly upset by the election defeat, Nkomo was reluctant to join his allies, except perhaps on his own terms.
Mugabe was not particularly patient with him either, and it took Muzenda’s skillful diplomacy to draw the two together.
Perhaps that was why the coalition did not last that long. The chief players might not have had their hearts fully into the thing anyway. Mnangagwa says that after the elections, they sat down to decide what to do with their former allies in the war.
Muzenda said to the Prime Minister, “You have pronounced the policy of reconciliation, that surely should extend to Zapu as well.”
Mnangagwa was then sent to go and make the offer of a government of unity to Nkomo at his Highfield house.
“I found him sitting with others such as Josiah Chinamano,” Mnangagwa remembers.
“And Nkomo rose and invited me to his bedroom. When we got into the bedroom, I said I had been sent by Mugabe to invite him to be the President of Zimbabwe. He said, ‘Go and thank him but I decline.’”
Mnangagwa came back and reported to his chiefs. Muzenda’s reaction was that Nkomo was still coming to terms with the election defeat. Muzenda observed that once the shock was over, Nkomo would reconsider his reply and to extend the offer to include other members of Zapu who would be included in the Cabinet.
“I found him sitting on his huge chair brought from Zambia. Its arms were decorated with heads of lions and its back the map of Zimbabwe. It seemed designed for the first President of Zimbabwe. I repeated the offer but he said, ‘Please, go and tell the Prime Minister that I am prepared to join Government, but that I should like a portfolio in charge of security, which gives me some power’.”
To show the distance between the Prime Minister and Nkomo, Mnangagwa says, “The Prime Minister was not amused by the choice of security. His first question was, ‘Who does he want to arrest?”’
Muzenda, however, was there to smooth matters over so that his Prime Minister could see matters differently and in an acceptable way. Mnangagwa remembers Muzenda saying, “Well, Prime Minister, you take Defence and State Security and then give Nkomo Home Affairs with the police.”
The Prime Minister again interjected to say, “Who does he want to arrest with the police?”
Muzenda said, “With Home Affairs, he would go to his lieutenants and say, look, this is a genuine coalition because I have been given one of the powerful ministries.”
Mnangagwa went back again to Nkomo and said, “Since you want security, which of the three would you choose?”
Remembering, of course, that Defence was out of the question, Nkomo chose Home Affairs and that settled it.
