The Sunday Mail
Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa
I EERILY remember waking up to the national cataclysmic news of March 18 1975. I was a student of the University of Rhodesia, Class of 1975.
We received the shockingly bitter news that renowned national lawyer Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo had been assassinated in a car bomb blast in Lusaka Zambia.
I was the top most merit bursary scholarship of the national A Level Class of 1974.
For my exceptional intellectual endeavours, I was selected among a sprinkling seven students to be eligible for the racially exclusivity of Law Faculty of the University of Rhodesia. There was genome derived assertion that the African mind was not created for the complexity of legal disputation, evidence reinforced by the lack of an alphabet and its tow of written records. Statistical models relying on a population of previous batches of a paltry intake of three African students had given credence to this racial bigotry in the domain legalese.
One Abboud Gweshe, a former student had absconded from the pinnacle of privilege. He was my clan cousin from Mhondoro.
He had proceeded to join ZANLA and rose to be senior commander with Golden Shiri as his Chimurenga nomme de guerre.
The ill-fated Kissingerite Detente Exercise would exact a deadly price both at the rear and the front of the fledgling ZANLA forces now firmly implanting in the North East War Zone bordering Mozambique.
Lest it slip by, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had penned National Security Memorandum Number 39 of 1969. Its import being to firmly sustain the longevity of white minority, settler, apartheid and racist of the South African sub-continent.
Washington had clearly wagered its future to kith and kin white colonials of 19th Century imperial marauders who were an issue of the 1884 Berlin Conference that divided up the African Continent. America had committed its redoubtable resources against the African Liberation Movement.
Havoc was to be writ upon the external leadership of ZANLA.
Concurrently, the deployed fighters inside would be cut off from both supplies and reinforcement.
The contagion of defeatist imperial Portugal and its Communist Red Colonels Coup of 1974 in Lisbon could not be allowed to fell Rhodesia, South Africa and South West Africa-Namibia. Pressured President Kaunda pliably succumbed. As Chitepo was eliminated, the ZANLA High Command in host Zambia was arrested and imprisoned on patently false accusations of culpability.
The military genius of Josiah Magama Tongogara was specifically targeted. He would be tortured mercilessly in Zambian jail to ‘confess’ to a Chitepo murder contrived in London and Washington.
Needless to say the pandemonium and confusion of the grisly events in Lusaka rapidly cascaded to the war front which was trying to shake-off the effects of the Badza-Nhari rebellion in ZANLA ranks. The rebellion itself was spawned by pervasive enemy infiltration.
In the event, deployed guerrillas were duly deprived of rear support. At the precise moment the Rhodesian Army was gifted with a respite and a chance to launch a counter offensive ‘search and destroy’ campaign.
Abboud, Gweshe aka Golden Shiri was to become a war casualty, whereupon the gloating Rhodesian soldiery sought Professor Richard ‘Dick’ Christie to go and identify the fallen comrade who had been his Law Faculty student.
Richard Dick Christie apparently doubled as the liaison of British Intelligence to rebellious white Rhodesia. He was said to be behind the de jure and de facto British Privy Council High Court that legitimised Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 1965.
I recall Christie my Dean of Law sauntering into class clad in army fatigues. After all he was a volunteer pilot of the Rhodesian Airforce.
He profusely apologised for his late start to lecturing all because the Rhodesian Army had called him in to identify the grisly corpse of a guerrilla commander who had been one of his law students. His name Abboud Gweshe.
To drive the message home, the gloating Dean of Law warned the lucky seven black students never to entertain the idea of absconding and join guerrilla ranks. There was a reason adduced. The Rhodesian Army was depicted as a ruthless killer machine.
Needless to say his message had exactly the opposite effect on Sobusa Gula Ndebele, George Chiweshe and myself from the Law Faculty. Together with late Willard Duri aka Hapana Zororo, now Dr Masimba Mwasha aka Mamvura, Justin Mupamhanga aka Top Ten, late John Mayowe aka Robert Mandebvu and war hero Neville Dembetembe aka Malcolm X, we lost no time to cross into Mozambique. This was soon after June 25 1975, the day Mozambique declared Independence under Samora Machel of FRELIMO.
The tumultuous and pregnant politico-revolutionary events narrated underscore the centrality of Chairman Herbert Chitepo, the erudite revolutionary of the Chimurenga II successful guerrilla war that turned out to be the nemesis of rebel white Rhodesia.
Here was a law graduate of Fort Hare of South Africa. He returned home to enmesh himself in the nascent Pan African National Liberation Movement. He soon made a name defending African political activism from marauding racist persecution and prosecution.
He flew to London to a Pan-Africanist gathering of the who is who of impending African Independence leadership.
His sharp legal intellect and unabated patriotic zeal caught the attention of Julius Kambarage Nyerere.
The latter ended up as first President of newly independent Tanzania as of 1963.
Rebellious army details of the inherited colonial army staged an abortive coup against the new and radical African leadership.
Thorough minded Nyerere was determined to eradicate the scourge of post-independent coup d’états that would fell Kwame Nkrumah, Milton Obote, Patrice Lumumba and many others.
He turned to Herbert Chitepo and invited him to Tanzania to become his Director of Public Prosecution. This was the beginning of a revolutionary camaraderie that was so fateful to the history of Zimbabwe.
It would spawn the now all-weather friendship with Beijing China. This well before the Asian giant would pupate to its current role as the second largest global economy.
The close relationship would lead to yet another equally fateful alliance.
Chitepo and Tongogara spearheaded the ZANU-ZANLA alliance with FRELIMO of Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel in 1968-9.
The sequel was the successful implantation of a nationalist guerrilla force on Rhodesian soil, the tenets rooted in the Maoist Doctrine of the scientific People’s War, whereupon political mobilisation would be meticulously carried out well ahead of imminent armed confrontation. By then the guerrilla freedom fighters would be fish swimming in the waters of the supportive populace.
The colonial edifice would be turned into a blind and deaf Goliath deprived of crucial military intelligence.
On the other hand, ZANLA would morph into sharp eyed and clear eared David. Nimble, agile and disappearing in asymmetrical warfare, the colonial edifice soon acquired feet of clay.
It would crumble under indomitable and relentless ZANLA-ZIPRA military onslaught by November 1979.
The Mapai and Mavonde battle routs of November 1979 are the ultimate and deserved homage to the erudite revolutionary Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo and his duet with the military genius of Josiah Magama Tongogora.
The concise import is that the 1975 victory of FRELIMO‘s Samora Machel and the cowardly assassination of Herbert Chitepo lit a combustible fire of revolutionary determination among the Zimbabwe youths of 1970‘s Samora Machel-Soweto Generation of Southern Africa.
The fate of the sub-continent was thus cast. It’s also a celebration of the revival of African military virility.
To honour them is to never lower our military vigilance in a world that is not kind to perceived frailty in the art and science of war.
Africa can still do better than face the fate of the Aborigines of Australia and Native Indians of the Americas
Chairman Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, May Your Soul Rest in Eternal Revolutionary Glory.
