The Sunday Mail
Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa
THOMAS Mandigora joined the ZANLA wing of ZANU PF in 1975. He belongs to the militant youths of the Samora Machel-Soweto Uprising generation that had revolutionary consciousness.
This generation was inspired by the epic victory of the FRELIMO freedom fighting guerrilla army against the fascist and imperial forces of Portugal in 1974.
A new revolutionary mood swept through the southern African sub-region. The long colonised black majorities acquired a new mood of answering the imperial, colonial, racist and apartheid army through armed national liberation movements.
Free Mozambique took the extraordinary and risky decision to offer sanctuary, host military training and use its expansive border to deploy armed freedom fighters.
These were arrayed against the colonial settler army of the racist minority regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.
Mandigora took the risky decision to join 300 other recruits to cross the border in April 1975.
The spirit of freedom had been given an angry and animated impetus by news of the cruel and heinous assassination of Cde Herbert Chitepo — National Chairman of ZANU and founder of its Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) — by a car bomb in March 1975 in Lusaka.
Cde Chitepo had embraced friendship with China through President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Cde Josiah Magama Tongogara would be among early groups to train in the theory and practice of Chinese Maoist People’s War guerrilla warfare.
Between 1969 and 1971, the Chitepo-Tongogara duo had implanted a permanent military presence on Zimbabwean ground. They jointly launched the legendary north-east offensive. This remarkable military achievement worked wonders in restoring a sense of the military virility of majority African populations.
“Varungu vadzvanyiriri vanoroveka” (Colonial forces can be defeated) was the new psychic dictum. It was further emboldened by the Samora Machel victory.
Mandigora left Highfield for the Mozambique border under the leadership of former President Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
They would spend the next three months in the mountainous Nyanga-Katerere border under worsening conditions of hunger, deprivation and no communication to the outside world.
The group of 300 would finally join ever-increasing tens of thousands of other youthful recruits streaming into Mozambique.
The announcement and arrival of the June 25, 1975 Independence Day of Mozambique had literally opened floodgates of gritty, fearless and extremely brave youths ready to defy and scale whatever and whichever odds for the goal of freedom and independence for Zimbabwe.
These youths were being collected and quartered at Zhunda Barracks, outside of Chimoio and Chibavava Camp in Espungabera.
Mandigora was among the early occupants of Nyadzonia Refugee Camp.
He was attested to Company D for elementary military training as the prospect of resumption of the Detente Exercise-stalled armed struggle brightened up.
The united ZANLA-ZIPRA guerrilla armies had signed the Mgagau Declaration to unite and resume prosecution of the anti-colonial war.
By dint of its urban background, Company D had a high visibility as the refugee militants entertained in soccer and sports.
Mandigora exhibited soccer talent akin to that of his now late and legendary younger brother Yogi Mandigora, a repeat national soccer star.
He completed his military training at the Tembwe ZANLA Academy in Tete Province under conditions of extreme hunger and biting hardship.
He was then deployed to the front in the Takawira Military Sector of Mtoko Area D.
The deployment of urbanised, as well as better-educated, youthful militants engendered a quantitative and qualitative leap in the military prowess of ZANLA-ZIPRA combatants.
The battlefront victories soon achieved a diplomatic coup.
They forced imperial Britain and its allies to call for the Geneva peace negotiations of 1976.
Mandigora would earn a purple heart with battlefield wounds in 1977.
He was withdrawn from the front for treatment and recovery.
He was then attested to the second intake of political commissar graduates of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology at Chimoio ZANLA camp.
On graduation, he was deployed to Maputo for radio broadcast work at Voice of Zimbabwe, Radio Mozambique.
Lusaka was his next post as an ardent and enlightened propaganda driver of the cause of freedom, democracy and independence.
The nightly broadcast salvos were listened to by the populace; even as they inspired field guerrilla units at the battlefront.
The broadcasts also served to inform the world public of the steady, impressive and gathering march of the victorious Zimbabwe armed liberation struggle.
This epic journey would serve as the muse of Jamaica’s reggae legend and Pan-African prophet Bob Marley.
His hit song “Zimbabwe” is an exuberant exaltation of ZANLA-ZIPRA armed militants, who were dealing death blows to the once dreaded imperial army of Britain and its genocidal cat’s paw in the form of the racist, colonial settler army of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.
Deeply introspective and intensely patriotic, Ambassador Mandigora was a committed cadre, a courageous guerrilla combatant and a thorough professional in all his peacetime occupations as a broadcaster and diplomat.
Thomas Mandigora’s first major battle was the 1976 attack of the Nyamapanda Border Post in a generalised revenge offensive for the Myadzonia Refugee Camp Massacre.
Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa is the ZANU PF National Secretary for Information and Publicity in the party’s Politburo.
