To begin on a personal note: the issue in which this article appears is one dedicated to the memory of one of my oldest and dearest friends, the late Lionel Cliffe. During our many years together in Tanzania in the 1960s and early 1970s we were close colleagues in our joint teaching, in our co-authorship and co-editing, and in our activism in support of progressive developments in East Africa. When Lionel left Tanzania he went on to a life of many accomplishments, including a spell at the University of Zambia where he became, as I did myself on different but related fronts, an active protagonist of southern African liberation. Indeed, it was as a short-term ‘guest’ (as part of a general crackdown at the University of Zambia against those critical there of President Kenneth Kaunda’s southern African policies) in one of Kaunda’s Zambian prisons that Lionel talked with various of the ‘50-odd’ Zimbabwean prisoners who had been ‘detained [there] since the murder’ of Chitepo! Lionel wrote little about this experience though he did make a potent comment in ROAPE on just how testimony to the International Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of Herbert Chitepo had been obtained: ‘I know the answer to that,’ he wrote, ‘I have seen the scars!’ In addition, among the fruits of this close-up and imposed exposure to the Zimbabwean struggle were several articles by Lionel in ROAPE at the time (an editorial on the novel neo-colonial moves in the region by Kissinger and Crosland/Callaghan1 [Cliffe and Levine 1976]), and a note on some of the circumstances surrounding Chitepo’s assassination (Cliffe 1976); these articles provide important background to my present essay. More generally, there was, from this jail experience, an even further deepening of Lionel’s commitment to the struggle for genuine liberation in Zimbabwe, southern Africa and elsewhere.
* * * * *
The focus of the present essay is both on the crucial ‘ZIPA moment’ within the broader Zimbabwean liberation struggle in the mid 1970s and, in particular, on the light most recently shed upon that ‘moment’ in Wilfred Mhanda’s important autobiography, Dzino: memories of a freedom fighter (Mhanda 2011). For Mhanda, aka Dzino Machingura (his ‘war-name’), was an important player in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, one who, in the 1970s, helped conceive and establish the Zimbabwean People’s Army (ZIPA) as an organisation that offered, in itself and however briefly, an especially effective military challenge to the Smith regime. And it was an initiative that also promised the prospect of a genuine long-run alternative to the grim fate that has since come to befall Zimbabwe and its people.
In addition, it is helpful to our understanding that Mhanda – while certainly a notable guerrilla activist – could also find time to give careful attention to and to speak and write about both the context within which the Zimbabwean liberation struggle had emerged and the complexity of the task that faced the African population in its mounting of effective resistance both to imperialism (with its fast-shifting neo-colonial calculations) and to the white settler assertions, exemplified by the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), that had come to define much of the oppressive reality that such resistance faced (Machingura 1976, 1978). 2 ‘Find time’ is somewhat of a euphemism, of course. For Mhanda was able to write the second and longer analytical piece (cited in note 2) while he was being held in jail in Mozambique, quite arbitrarily, by the Mozambican government (by that time acting in connivance with Robert Mugabe) for three gruelling years of the late 1970s, a period well described in his Chapter 8, ‘Imprisonment’.
And we are especially fortunate that Mhanda, in his continuing role as writer-activist, survived long enough to see Dzino through to publication before his death in 2014. For this book is, quite simply, one of the essential texts about Zimbabwe, telling from ‘inside’ the important story of the rise and fall of the ZIPA initiative in the 1970s – the ZIPA moment – while also recording Mhanda’s own personal rise, fall and then impressive climb back to political and authorial visibility in Zimbabwe from the depths of his, and ZIPA’s, defeat at the hands of Mugabe, Frelimo and Kissinger (Mhanda 2011). I will recount Mhanda’s story as told in his book in section 2 of this essay and will then conclude, in section 3, by locating that account more firmly within the overall pattern of Zimbabwean history. First, I will begin by providing a background to Mhanda/Dzino’s account and to the ‘ZIPA moment’ itself. Here my initial entry-point will be to sketch my own relatively peripheral, if nonetheless highly instructive, role in publicising, in the 1970s, ZIPA’s place within Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. From there I will then elaborate the ZIPA story.
1. . The story, as told by Frelimo, Kissinger, Ranger, Moore and the present author
For my own marginal involvement in the history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s did, for a moment, have a special salience in the debate within southern African liberation support circles (particularly outside Africa) about that struggle and about the merits of the various claimants to a leadership role within it. Thus, an article I wrote in the mid 1970s in the US-based magazine Southern Africa (Saul 1979), a magazine dedicated to support for the cause of the then southern African freedom movements, made some waves in such circles – flagging as it did ZIPA as a major player to be reckoned with within the region.
I could, of course, make no claims to be a full-fledged on-the-ground scholar of Rhodesian/Zimbabwean affairs but my liberation support activism and my teaching years spent in Tanzania, Mozambique and Canada had made me both a protagonist and a student of the struggle for liberation in Rhodesia, as had my close friendship with the late Giovanni Arrighi, himself at one time a noted underground militant with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) in that struggle. Of course, I had devoted much more of my attention through the 1960s and 1970s to developments in both Tanzania and Mozambique. Although I would go on to write further about Zimbabwe (Saul 1980; Saul and Saunders 2005), and also about Angola, the principal focus of my work was primarily on, first, Namibia and, second, on South Africa (Saul 2016). Still, I was pleased to have my own work on Zimbabwe taken up, in his doctoral work and well beyond, by my former student David Moore – from whom I continue to learn (Moore 1990, 2011, 2012, 2014).
Nonetheless, amongst my most important early teachers about Zimbabwe were comrades from Mozambique’s Frelimo, notably the movement’s and later his country’s president, Samora Machel, and his close colleague Jorge Rebelo, the movement’s secretary for informational work, who continued to play much the same role (under various titles and for many years) within the Mozambican government and within Frelimo, the ruling party after the country obtained independence from Portugal in 1975. They had a tale to tell – and I was also to learn more on the ground about ZIPA, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the other movements in Mozambique when I visited many times in the late 1970s and worked there for a period in the early 1980s. Their view: having witnessed at close hand the shortcomings of both ZAPU and ZANU (and the splits between and within them), they were themselves emboldened by the steps being taken by other Zimbabwean cadres, like Dzino Machingura, to move beyond ZAPU and ZANU and to oversee the formation of a united fighting force (which ZIPA promised to be) of a much more effective character than either of the above-named movements represented. Indeed, Mozambique’s Frelimo government, so recently having achieved liberation itself from Portugal (in 1974–75), encouraged the group around ZIPA – as did President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania – in their efforts, both organisational and military, to push forward in order to fashion just such a new and ever more unified movement and a really effective challenge to the Rhodesian state.
The broader context of these developments was important, of course … as framed, not least, by the seizure of territorial power from the British government in Rhodesia by the white settlers – as led by Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front colleagues under the banner of UDI. Similarly important was the craven response of Harold Wilson and the British state to such white settlers’ bold defiance, Wilson manoeuvring in the cause of Britain’s own pretty unalloyed racism and of its presumptive colonial overlordship. And there was also the mixed record of the African response itself, some would-be ‘leaders’ cosying up to both the settlers and the British for favour (such as Bishop Muzorewa of the African National Congress, ANC).
At the same time, the leadership cadres of other ostensibly much more militant movements (ZANU and ZAPU) were much too busy fighting amongst themselves, both within their own movements and with each other – and also with both such a short-lived and quite opportunist newcomer to their ranks as the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI) (1971–74) and, startlingly enough, with Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambian government – to make any great headway in bringing military pressure to bear on the ‘illegal’ settler state. In such a context any movement from below, uniting to focus the energies of the actual cadres of both ZAPU and ZANU, was to be welcomed by concerned observers. And this was the promise of ZIPA, a promise that, momentarily at least, Frelimo (and, it would seem, Nyerere as well) embraced.
Indeed, as I then wrote with regard to Frelimo,
Frelimo officials with whom I talked in mid-1975 saw the [Zimbabwean] struggle at the time as more or less starting from scratch. Indeed, Mozambique stated at this juncture that it would not cut the vital Beira rail link to Rhodesia nor act to reinforce sanctions until Zimbabweans were ready to take advantage of such moves and present a real challenge to the Smith regime. Significantly, Mozambique did not act until fully nine months later [until, that is, ZIPA had begun to emerge as a real alternative initiative]. (Saul 1979, 115–116)
After the fighters had realized the incompetence of the ANC leadership they took it upon themselves to reconstitute themselves into an army that could fight for the independence of the Zimbabwe people. The combatants from both former ZANU and former ZAPU agreed to form a joint military command that would lead to armed struggle … The joint military command was formed on the understanding that the liberation of Zimbabwe could only be realized through an arduous armed struggle; secondly, on the understanding that the traditional leadership of Zimbabwe has divided the people of Zimbabwe …
ZIPA is an army in the traditional sense of the word. But ZIPA is a unique and revolutionary army in the sense that it has a strategic role in transforming itself into a political movement. The ZIPA structure accommodates the shouldering of both the military and political tasks of the revolution. We have, within the ZIPA structure, a political department exclusively charged with the responsibility of shouldering the political tasks that are normally shouldered by a revolutionary political organization.
… We have to establish a formal political structure in order to give better direction to the armed body that is now fighting inside Zimbabwe. And moves to do this are already underway, moves to transform this organization into a revolutionary vanguard for the people’s struggle. (Machingura 1976, and quoted in Saul 1979, 117)
This formulation, and others like it, from ZIPA’s cadre of guerilla leaders, represents something fresh and promising within Zimbabwean nationalism. Certainly these are not the familiar formulations of ZANU or ZAPU. (Saul 1979, 118)
True, Terence Ranger could seek in his own writing of the time merely to trivialise my own 1976 account, evincing a pretty naked hostility towards my argument, while offering, in contrast, a strong defence of the Old Guard (Ranger 1980). This latter cadre of leaders he identified as being comprised, beyond Mugabe himself, of such prominent figures amongst those who became governmental ministers in the first Zimbabwean government as Edgar Tekere (Manpower, Planning and Development), Enos Nkala (Finance), Edson Zvogbo (Local Government) and Maurice Nyagumbo (Mines), among others. And several of these men are brought to the stand (in Ranger’s interviews which serve as the core of his article) as friendly witnesses in presenting the case for ZANU put forward by both Ranger and ZANU’s ‘Old Guard’.
My own case (for ‘the prosecution’, I suppose) is, in contrast, represented as follows: ‘Essentially, Saul argued a case against choosing ZANU or the leadership of Mugabe’ (Ibid., 72). This is also deemed by Ranger to have been, quite simply, ‘wrong’ (his word) in several of its particulars. As for Ranger’s case, as epitomised in the final sentences of his own article:
Nothing in the careers and statements [of my interviewees] … is a guarantee that Mugabe and his allies will succeed or even persist in revolutionary transformation. But I see no reason either to add a pessimism about the ‘old guard’ to all the other pessimisms which we must necessarily have about the prospects for change in Zimbabwe. The positions they have adopted, the things they have said, done and written since 1975, persuade me that the only course for support groups at this moment is to offer whatever material and moral support is possible to Mugabe and to his ZANU ‘old guard.’ (Ranger 1980, 90)
Note carefully that it is not my intention here to underestimate or to caricature the difficulties of making judgements about the markedly complex politics that faced all of us who were active proponents of southern African liberation during that period. But the present must also be permitted to comment on the past. And the fact remains that, in light of what ZANU’s old guard has permitted a ZANU government to become in the subsequent almost 40 years leading to the present, it is difficult not to think that Ranger was himself just plain ‘wrong’ – a word, as noted, that he once applied quite sharply to my own position – about Mugabe, about ZANU and about Zimbabwe’s prospects under both.
It is also true, and a credit to his integrity and probity, that Ranger, once so much more favourably disposed towards a ZANU/Mugabe ‘line’ in interpreting Zimbabwe’s history, was ultimately to shift his position. Thus, in the introduction to his and Ngwabi Bhebe’s two-volume compilation (Bhebe and Ranger 1995b, 1995c), he would actually cite quite positively an important article therein by David Moore on ZIPA and its role (Moore 1995), with Moore’s findings said by Ranger to constitute ‘a major work of rehabilitation’. Moore, say Bhebe and Ranger, saw
… ZIPA not just as a failed attempt at unity between ZIPRA and ZANLA, not just as an obstacle to the logical development of the mainstream guerilla armies, not merely as an ultra-left deviation, but as an immensely promising innovation. [And] the ‘libels’ against ZIPA he saw as prefiguring much contemporary ideological confrontation …
[For] Moore [continue Bhebe and Ranger] also saw ZIPA as illustrating the potentials of an alternative ideology. ZIPA leaders were trying to base an effective unity which could win the guerilla war on the foundation of a shared ideology, explicitly on ‘Marxist principles.’ This meant a determined effort, first at self-education and then at ideological diffusion through the whole army. Such ideological unity would overcome ethnic differences and the factional legacies of past in-fighting. It would sweep away the sort of pragmatic reservations which had sabotaged the [1967] Mbeya Accord [between ZANU and ZAPU]. (Bhebe and Ranger 1995a, 17–18)
Moreover the positive ZIPA style evoked here by Ranger was felt by Frelimo to parallel closely the innovative and expansive mode of grass-roots struggle that Frelimo’s own military and rural practice had itself exemplified in Mozambique during its years of armed struggle there.4 Small wonder then that it supported ZIPA with such enthusiasm in its early days. But perhaps I should emphasise too that in my adopting Frelimo’s line here I had sufficient misgivings of my own, based on contact with other militants and on other research, concerning the quality of the leaderships (and their flawed practices) of both ZANU and ZAPU … and so was quite ready, in my article, to associate myself with this attempt to rally support for ZIPA.
For ZIPA, in its brief moment of ascendancy, had managed quite dramatically both to advance its military struggle and to ground its activities very firmly in Zimbabwe’s rural society. Still, as Bhebe and Ranger himself lamented of the moment: ‘Alas ZIPA had no time’. ‘The old guard’, they further explain, ‘were able to break it and imprison its leaders’ (Bhebe and Range 1995a, 17). It is true that they made here no parallel mention of the crucial role played by Frelimo in forcing ZIPA to wind down its struggle – not least by helping orchestrate the imprisonment of numerous ZIPA leaders. Nor do they examine the importance of Kissinger’s and Crosland’s shift in tactics – for it was at the 1976 Geneva conference that they first revealed a whole new level of support for Zimbabwe’s ‘old guard’ nationalist leadership. We will explore these shifts more carefully in sections 2 and 3 but the fact remains that history (and the tandem of Kissinger/Crosland and the Zimbabwean ‘old guard’ itself) were moving just too quickly for ZIPA. For, to reiterate Bhebe and Ranger’s statement above, ‘Alas ZIPA had no time.’5
Thus, as I then wrote,
a process of radicalization [in part exemplified by ZIPA] was underway which began to parallel the kind of developments which had led to the emergence of revolutionary projects out of national-liberation struggles in Mozambique and Angola … The result was signs of the emergence of a new kind of Zimbabwean leadership with a new sense of direction and new methods of working with the people inside the country. Not coincidentally, it had also become possible now, for the first time, to pose a serious military threat to Smith. Clearly, the handwriting was on the wall for ‘Rhodesia.’
Kissinger read [this handwriting on the wall], however. Left to run its course, the Zimbabwean struggle would produce not merely ‘independence,’ but a social revolution. Where, then, was Kissinger’s opportunity? It lay in the fact that the process of radicalization had only just begun. Fortunately for the Secretary of State, there were still many of the old-guard leaders left over from earlier phases of Zimbabwean politics. Although some had suffered severe hardship – imprisonment and the like – they had passed the years since Smith’s UDI in 1965 engaged primarily in making demands that Britain pull their chestnuts from the fire (remove Smith, impose majority rule, bring about change in Zimbabwe). There has also been much jockeying for political advantage in a ‘soon-to-be-liberated’ Zimbabwe. Such elements were much more reluctant to embrace the imperatives of guerrilla struggle. [And such] men, perhaps unbeknownst even to themselves, were Kissinger’s secret weapon. (Saul 1979, 108–109)
Though tailoring a ‘false decolonisation’ to fit the situation there would not prove to be quite so straightforward an undertaking as Kissinger and Crosland may have hoped, their intention, in the run-up before Geneva, was clear; as Kissinger spelled out the ploy to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May 1976, ‘we have a stake … in not having the whole continent become radical and [moving] in a direction that is incompatible with Western interests. That is the issue.’ Crosland was equally forthright. Stating, in December 1976, that ‘he had not abandoned the [goals] of the Geneva conference,’ he went on to say:
If the British government gave up hope, there would be no doubt over who would eventually win on the battlefield. But if the issue were settled on the battlefield it would seriously lessen the chance of bringing about a moderate African regime in Rhodesia and open the way to more radical solutions and external interventions on the part of others.
Note in particular the order in which these dangers are presented. It was not the spectre of Soviet aggrandizement which is first and foremost in the minds of such plotters [as Kissinger and Crosland were]. Rather it is social revolution that they fear!7
2. . Dzino’s (and ZIPA’s) story, as told by Wilfred Mhanda
In the first part of his book Wilfred Mhanda gives a very informative outline of his early personal history, and, as he does so, he also sketches the broader context of the emergence of ZIPA, founded as it was to fill a genuine vacuum in terms of African military resistance to the illegal and genuinely racist Smith regime. This vacuum no doubt reflected in part the weaknesses of the existing liberation movements themselves (both ZAPU and ZANU), but the shifting regional context was also crucially important. For Kaunda had rather fecklessly stumbled into anticipating a ‘détente’ between Black and White Africa in Rhodesia and beyond (one never actually on the cards on the white side, it should be noted) and had taken to playing very fast and loose with the interests of established liberation movements, especially in Zimbabwe, in order to make the negotiation of such a ‘détente’ roll out more smoothly.8 In this regard the aftermath of the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, a principled ZANU senior leader and one not seduced by the myth of prospective détente, provided Kaunda with an important opportunity to rein in the bogey of armed struggle.
Chitepo’s assassination is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the regional war for liberation, of course (White 2003). It is true that historians have, by and large, come to identify the Rhodesian state apparatus as the principal mover of the assassination; nonetheless there is some evidence, in addition, that the security apparatus of Kaunda’s Zambia itself had a hand to play in things, as well as there being some possible fall-out of deadly factional manoeuvring against Chitepo within ZANU itself – this possibly even having some intra-Shona sub-tribal resonance (Karanga vs Manyika). Whatever the ultimate truth of this matter, however, the incident did become the perfect excuse for Kaunda to lock up Zimbabwean nationalists in Zambia in the interest, primarily (or so it would seem), of making detente-related negotiations with the ‘White South’ less messy. The result: Josiah Tongogara and many others wound up in Zambian jails. Indeed, as Luise White further specifies this:
… Zambian police officials arrested fifty-seven ZANU members and officials, including Dare [ZANU’s officially constituted war council] members Gumbo, Kangai, Mudzi, and Hamadziripi … Another 1300 ZANU cadres were detained at the camps in Zambia. [Meanwhile] a few members of the high command, notably Tongogara, Nhongo and Dick Moyo … fled the country before they could be arrested … [with] Julius Nyerere of Tanzania offering Nhongo and others sanctuary, [although] Samora Machel was less welcoming of Tongogara … [and ultimately] sent him back to Zambia [where he too was detained]. (White 2003, 50; see also Thompson 1985)
But Kaunda’s posture as regards some presumed ‘détente’ was quite counter-intuitive to many at the time. In fact, Portugal’s recent removal from the camp of white counter-revolution – thanks to the successes in the mid 1970s realised by nationalist insurrections in Mozambique and Angola – had, not surprisingly, caused the spirits and expectations of other freedom fighters throughout the region to rise. And within this latter number were those younger cadres in both the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) and ZANLA who, responding to the positive lessons offered by these examples, were willing, against some externally imposed forestalling of the freedom struggle in their country, to undertake any novel initiatives that could present a more effective challenge to the remaining centres of white power in the region – more effective, in the Zimbabwean case, than anything the aforementioned Zimbabwean ‘old guard’ nationalist leadership had ever brought themselves to make happen. But the ZIPA group was also quite punctilious about not wishing to appear to be playing a narrowly factional role itself, and were certainly loathe to propose any kind of ‘take-over’ role within the broad camp (however stalled it might already be in its purposes) of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. Thus, not only did the ZIPA initiative attempt a genuine merging of both ZAPU and ZANU militants for purposes of effective military action but it also scrupulously refrained from being seen as seeking to outflank the established political structures of pre-existing organisations (ZAPU and ZANU).
To the difficulties that this commitment led to for the ZIPA cadres we will return. More immediately, however, it seems clear that such influential regional actors as both Samora Machel in Mozambique and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania – two men long far more sceptical than Kaunda about the possibility of a meaningful ‘détente’ – liked what they saw of ZIPA; as a result, they strongly encouraged the reactivation of the military campaign against the Smith regime that it now proposed to undertake. And undertaking such a campaign is precisely what ZIPA now did, opening up, as Mhanda details, three different operational fronts along Rhodesia’s southern and eastern flanks – identified as the northeast front (beginning from mid January 1976), the central-eastern front (beginning in March and operating from Manicaland in Mozambique) and the southeastern Rhodesian front, launched in April from the Mozambique province of Gaza (Mhanda 2011, 100 et passim). In fact, Mhanda’s careful analysis of ZIPA’s operational successes and of the solidifying of its Mozambican base-camps (despite the brutal August 1976 massacre inflicted, largely on families of civilians, at the Nyadzonia camp by the Rhodesian military) seems both accurate and historically extremely revealing, leading as it does to his further summary comment:
ZIPA’s successes in the field over the period January–August 1976 were plain for all to see. The Rhodesian regime has responded with futile counter-measures. By August, they had gone from collective punishment to the establishment of the ‘protected villages,’ extended call-ups, curfew, martial law and desperate measures such as the attack on the Nyadzonia refugee camp. To cap it all, Smith has moderated his views from ‘no majority rule in a thousand years’ to ‘no majority in my life-time’ – a humiliating climb-down – and publically accepted the principle of immediate majority rule unconditionally in a broadcast to the nation on 24 September [1976]. All this has occurred in less than eight months of the ZIPA-led war. What more evidence of the impact of our offensive was required? For the record, there were no RENAMO [Mozambican National Resistance] incursions across the border from Rhodesia into Mozambique during the ZIPA period, nor was the subject of RENAMO ever raised in our discussion with President Machel, his Minister of Defence Alberto Chipande, or the FPLM chief of staff, General Mabote. (Mhanda 2011, 142)
Such military success was, in fact, a crucial dimension of the emerging ZIPA story, so much so that Zimbabwe came greatly to concern the likes of Kissinger and Crosland (whose shifting calculations we noted in the preceding section). True, the ZIPA attempt to secure the full commitment to a joint organisational initiative of all the ZAPU colleagues involved in its formation was (as ZAPU colleagues, briefly involved in ZIPA, drifted away9) never quite the success that had been hoped for – the cutting edge of the ZIPA grouping, after its initial formation, remaining for the most part former ZANU fighters and recruits. But ZIPA’s dealing with the remnants of the ZANU hierarchy underscored other kinds of problems as well. True, the ZIPA team had no interest whatsoever in linking its own initiatives to the deeply flawed and discredited leadership of Ndabaningi Sithole. But such a view was common currency within ZANU in any case and the group turned instead to others of the older movement leadership (now, more often than not, by visiting them in the Zambian jails where they were being held) for advice on how to proceed. As it happened, they were encouraged by such leaders to continue with their military plans and this they did, as seen, with striking success.
But they were also encouraged by the incarcerated Dare group to regard Robert Mugabe, whom they otherwise did not know well and whom the Rhodesian government had only recently released from incarceration, as a senior man who might eventually make a particularly good alternative leader – a suggestion that they took seriously, although it would prove to be advice that had especially costly implications for them. This was a suggestion not at all well received by their Mozambican sponsor, Samora Machel, for example. Indeed, Machel had very profound misgivings about any thought of granting Robert Mugabe any importance whatsoever, let alone viewing him as being some kind of central-player-in-the-making. Thus, Mhanda writes, when Tekere and Mugabe were released from custody by the Rhodesians they immediately decamped for Mozambique, but, in response, ‘Machel [merely] banished [them] to the coastal town of Quelimane which was far removed from the refugee camps and the border with Rhodesia because, in his own words, he “did not trust Mugabe”’ (Ibid., 135) – apparently fearing the possible contamination of ZIPA if he (Mugabe) was left free to pursue his own political predilections. And yet, still sensitive to the opinion of the senior ZANU cadres whose advice they had earlier sought out, the ZIPA group did maintain some contact with Mugabe in this period, much to Machel’s displeasure. The upshot was Machel’s forthright response when – according to Mhanda’s account of a crucial meeting between Frelimo and ZIPA command structures in 1976 – the ZIPA leadership group responded to Machel’s questioning as to its long-term plans with regard to Zimbabwe’s prospective leadership by floating the name of Mugabe as a possible key player. In return they got an earful from Machel. As Mhanda describes the moment (Ibid., 111) in Dzino:
Rex Nhongo then submitted our list, with Mugabe at the top. Machel leapt from his chair in disgust. He was clearly not happy that we had included Mugabe, let alone as the leader. He went on to tell us that he had removed Mugabe from the refugee camps for a good reason: ‘He loves the limelight,’ and is opposed to unity. We listened silently, allowing him time to cool down.
Meanwhile, the ZIPA cadres were now to learn some lessons about Mugabe for themselves – and soon realise, as Mugabe’s personality and political predilections revealed themselves more clearly, that the Dare’s advice with respect to Mugabe was mistaken10 and Machel’s reactions much more sound. For they began, in the course of those direct contacts they now had with Mugabe inside Mozambique itself, to see the error they had made, finding – as Mhanda writes of his actual interactions with Mugabe in Mozambique – that the latter’s ‘tight responses and unyielding, nay autocratic, demeanour led me to wonder about his suitability as a leader’. Indeed, after several days of exposure to his ‘reclusive’ and ‘reticent’ manner, most of the ZIPA leadership group had come to a similar negative opinion about Mugabe. In consequence,
On my return to Chimoio, I raised my concerns with the other members of the Military Committee one by one. I did not discuss them with Nhongo who appeared to be very close to Mugabe. It had not taken us long to realize that we had a problem on our hands and that Machel had been right. We regretted our misplaced enthusiasm and the credibility we had given to the directive from the Dare. We decided to wait for their release and take up the matter with them, but when we did this in October, three months later, it was to no avail. We must remember that they found themselves in a Zambian jail under suspicion of having undermined Chitepo’s leadership. After their release, they certainly did not want to jeopardize their futures by challenging the leadership again. It is also possible that they underestimated Mugabe’s ability to manipulate situations to his advantage. (Ibid., 183)11
Kissinger and Crosland read Mugabe’s character clearly however and, as seen above, used this understanding to their own advantage in their stifling of any too dangerous threat (such as that represented by ZIPA) that an ‘outright victory’ by leftist elements might have posed. Their ploy was the Geneva conference planned to begin on 28 October 1976. As Mhanda explains:
just as the ZIPA commanders were considering a qualitative escalation of the war to achieve strategic balance, the Rhodesians and their ‘allies’ – the South Africans, the Americans and the British – were apprehensive about the implications of ZIPA military successes. ZIPA had effectively crushed the 1975 détente machinations that had so dubiously brought the war to a halt, and re-started the war, propelling it to levels never before experienced in Rhodesia’s four-years war with the ZANLA guerillas. Their concerns gave birth to a new initiative to stem the tide of revolution: the Geneva Conference from 26 October to 14 December 1976. For them the consequences of an outright victory would leave South Africa exposed and threaten the West’s strategic interests in the sub-continent. (Ibid., 142)
These new imperial tactics represented a climb-down by Kissinger from the bold assurances of the widely cited National security memorandum #39: Southern Africa (and of the Kissinger team’s further responses to it), which he had sponsored only several years previously (Cohen and El-Khawas 1975), this latter stating that ‘the whites were here to stay’ in southern Africa. True, this was thought by Kissinger still to be true as far as South Africa was concerned. But Smith’s shaky settler-regime had now come to seem a pawn that could merely be sacrificed. True, this would simply mean continued efforts by ‘the West’ to massage the transition to produce a firmly subordinate, if nonetheless black, regime in Zimbabwe. Thus, as Mhanda himself described things (as noted above) at this point in his book, the ‘product of Kissinger’s diplomacy’ was the aforementioned Anglo-American proposal of a Geneva conference ‘pitting the Rhodesians against the Zimbabwean nationalists, Britain’s Sir Ivor Richard [as] its chair’. In sum,
The détente exercise engendered a calculated and deliberate regression of the liberation movement that set the clock back to the era of 1960s’ nationalism. The progressive form of the liberation movement was retained for political expediency, whilst its content was radically exorcised. Two years after the assumption of power by the traditional nationalist, the armed struggle reverted to its prior tactical role of inducing constitutional negotiations. (Mhanda 2011, 144, 241)
Thus Geneva came to mark the beginning of the end for ZIPA – now outflanked by both the ZANU/ZAPU ‘old guard’ and the Kissinger/Crosland duo – with the promise that it (ZIPA) had once briefly held now merely abandoned (Mhanda himself suggests the appropriateness of the word ‘betrayed’ here) by such former supporters as Samora Machel. Of course, Frelimo’s patience had itself begun to run out on Zimbabwe, with all its intra-nationalist machinations and complexities. As a result, Machel did first pressure, even order, ZIPA to go to Geneva, where, at the conference itself, the ZIPA team had, predictably, great difficulty making themselves heard as more than a sub-set of ZANU – as Kissinger and Crosland had fully intended to be the case. For the possibility of keeping ZAPU and ZANU within a ‘peaceful settlement’ framework was very much a part of the game being played there, especially by Kissinger, and, while it would take several more years for all the pieces of feinting, dodging and weaving – and even the dallying with various internal African potential claimants to power – to fall into place, the die, as stated, was now cast, with ZANU, ultimately, scoring a decisive electoral victory.
In short, Machel and his Frelimo team felt inclined to sidestep the morass they saw Zimbabwean politics as having become – and they may even have come to consider ZIPA itself, thanks to the latter’s supposed political dithering, as having become so entrapped. Not that this would seem to be a sufficiently good reason for Machel’s abandoning, even imprisoning, the progressive ZIPA group that Frelimo had once lionised – although one might choose to emphasise Mozambique’s economic weakness and its extreme vulnerability to imperial reprisals (including from South Africa) as the reasons for such wavering, or to underscore Frelimo’s discerning of the frailties of ZIPA itself as another adequate explanation. Thus even Mhanda continues his own analysis by stating that in the increasingly complex circumstances to come,
we could expect no support from Machel, who, after all, had cautioned against Mugabe’s appointment. That we had now changed our minds seemed an ironic indictment of our inconsistency, and our misjudgment would come to haunt us sooner rather than later. We had taken Mugabe on board on the strength of the recommendation of the Dare leaders who knew him as we did not. All we could credit ourselves with was that smuggling Mugabe into our camps [had] enabled us to form an objective opinion of him. (Ibid., 138)
There is thus room for continuing debate on the pros and cons of – and the reasons for – Frelimo’s shifting strategic choices here, although I am myself doubtful as to whether so dramatic a shift away from ZIPA can be easily justified, not least with respect to the harsh manner in which the new policy was implemented. The fact was, it would seem, that Frelimo had now come to much too short-sighted a conclusion regarding ZIPA,12 and was increasingly content to leave it to imperialist players on the one hand and Zimbabwe’s own varied political claimants on the other to work things out amongst themselves. In short, Machel had apparently decided to follow Kissinger’s lead in the hope that this would both remove Rhodesia/Zimbabwe from the map of regional struggle while also removing the Smith regime from its chosen role (as sponsor of RENAMO’s penetration into Mozambique) as a wrecker in Mozambique itself. And yet the endgame in Zimbabwe was to drag on for several years, with Machel’s late gamble on ZANU and on Kissinger proving – as Mhanda points out – to be just too costly a game to have played. Thus, in the years between the Geneva conference and the ultimate electoral settlement in Zimbabwe, Ken Flower and other Rhodesian military men were able to intensify RENAMO’s assault upon Mozambique (Vines 1991), while also clearing the way for South Africa to take over full sponsorship of RENAMO in the longer run – this with incalculable costs to Mozambique that, ultimately, helped lead to the collapse of Frelimo’s radical project and to the eclipse of many of its progressive regional credentials.
To be in Mozambique regularly during this period (as I was) was to see this big-power poison at work … and to become inclined towards the same conclusions as Mhanda had been. For Machel and company the costs of not settling the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe question had seemed just too great to bear, with the backing of the possibility of a long-term radicalisation of a future Zimbabwe that ZIPA exemplified no longer worth the risks involved – this despite Machel’s numerous earlier much more militant pronouncements. As Mhanda summarises things:
ZIPA’s military successes had triggered the Anglo-American initiative in the first place. We, however, had lost the support of Machel who, after releasing Mugabe on our initiative and against his better judgment, was slowly persuaded to support him and renounce us. (Mhanda 2011, 145)
As for ZIPA, Machel and his ‘new best friend’ Mugabe now agreed that it should merely be brutally wound down. As Mhanda continues his story:
My last day of freedom in Mozambique, 21 January 1977 … was the beginning of three years imprisonment for no crime other than standing up for what we believed to be our duty. At the Chimoio barrack cells we met five other ZIPA officers who had been arrested in the camps by Rex Nhongo [and] two days later, we were transferred to Beira where we joined our eighteen colleagues who had been arrested after the meeting in Beira. Within a week, another group of 25 ZIPA officers were arrested in the camps by Rex Nhongo and subsequently transferred from Beira to Pemba [while] subsequent to the [further] arrest of the approximately 50 ZIPA officers, about 600 fighters were arrested and kept imprisoned in the camps for about six months. Those particularly targeted were the leadership graduates at Wampoa College. (Ibid., 175)
The removal of ZIPA paved the way for Mugabe to assert his authority over the army … Mugabe and the ZANU leaders had had no role in ZIPA’s formation but were the beneficiaries of its successes. ZIPA owed Mugabe and the ZANU leadership nothing; on the contrary the latter had ZIPA to thank for their freedom. Without ZIPA, none of them would be where they were the day the ZIPA’s commanders were arrested. They were reaping what they had not sown … ZIPA had paved their way to power and all traces had to be obliterated. (Ibid., 176)
used the [Geneva] conference to his own advantage – and survival – by outmanoeuvring both ZIPA and Machel. By consolidating his leadership, he paved the way to become Zimbabwe’s first prime minister and executive president. Without the suppression of ZIPA, it is doubtful if he would have had such a smooth ride to the top. (Ibid., 178)
As for Machel, Mhanda also correctly asserts that ‘Mugabe and his colleagues … could not have so effectively marginalized ZIPA without Machel’s support.’ And yet, the fact that
… Machel was acutely aware of ZIPA’s significant contribution to Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and chose to facilitate this betrayal defies logic. His folly or his treachery resulted in Mozambique being at the mercy of RENAMO and ten years of destructive civil war, which surely would not have happened had ZIPA survived … Thus there is strong evidence that RENAMO, a credible military phenomenon … , is clearly a post-ZIPA development that, in my view, Machel inflicted on his country by ill-judged decisions, political opportunism and the unlikely combined influences of Kissinger on the one hand and Mugabe on the other. (Ibid., 176–177)
3. . The lessons of ZIPA and its demise continue
Moore in his preface to Mhanda’s book underscores the fact that both our readings of the strength, effectiveness and merit of the political alternative ZIPA offered to mainline African nationalism, and, more specifically, to a Mugabe-headed ZANU, were and remain accurate, a case borne out by the further testimony offered in Mhanda’s book. As Moore writes,
[Saul had taken] a position on ZIPA painting them as the potential socialist saviours of Zimbabwe’s revolution. [ZIPA’s] demise was a result, Saul claimed, of [Kissinger and Crosland’s] conniving to ensure that a moderate (read: capitalist) leadership would steer Zimbabwe’s ship of state. (Moore 2011, xv)
And yet, at the same time, Moore is much less inclined to share my original sense that the ZIPA initiative, however important and promising politically, also held quite radical promise for action in the longer term in the socio-economic sphere. As Moore suggests, ‘Aside from Saul’s accuracy about the effect of the Cold War on Zipa’s fate, his emphasis on the “socialist” potential of the young militants might have been overstated’ (Ibid., xvi). But Moore himself is less than clear in explaining what it is that might have made Kissinger and Crosland so hostile to ZIPA if mere ‘democratisation’ and not democratisation linked to some intended left socio-economic transformation were not part of ZIPA’s perceived agenda. Already, from Machingura’s (1976) interview, I have quoted him to the effect that ‘The target of the freedom fighters’ bullets is the system of exploitation and the capitalist enterprises and armed personnel which serve to perpetuate it.’ Thus, the proposed economic plan for a post-war Zimbabwe that the US government, Mhanda states, had had a hand in drawing up
… is a direct result of the intensification of the armed struggle in Zimbabwe. The United States and other imperialist powers see their interests threatened and they are determined to stamp out the revolutionary flame before it is too late. [Their] so-called economic plan aims at creating a socio-economic climate conducive to the continued exploitation of the Zimbabwe people under ‘majority’ rule.
We are totally opposed to the so-called economic plan. We are not fighting for economic or political reforms. We are fighting for the total transformation of the Zimbabwean society. (Machingura 1976)
To be fair, Moore does, in private correspondence with me, cite not only his numerous discussions with Mhanda, as well as several passages in his recent book (Mhanda 2011, 69–70, 77), that both support his (Moore’s) own case but also suggest the kind of grim realism that shadowed Mhanda’s most progressive hopes. Nor is it possible to determine what kind of socio-economic path ZIPA might actually have followed had it survived as a force capable of continuing to make history for itself. But, it seems to me, the intention to go well beyond a lightly democratised capitalism was certainly present throughout. Indeed, it is here that I would most want to enter a contrary opinion to Moore’s contention that ‘Cold War or not, socialism or capitalism, it is the democratic component of Machingura’s [original] treatise, and ZIPA’s history, that carries weight in Zimbabwe’s contemporary struggles, and those all over the side’ (Moore 2011, xv–xvi). For Mhanda’s means for fulfilling the democratic promise of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle are oft-repeated in his book; thus, on the one hand,
… in 1980, the ZANU-PF nationalists who assumed power were transformed relatively quickly into a new petty bourgeois elite in a radical departure from its originally declared goals of the national liberation struggle, which encompassed democratic convictions and socio economic transformation. The nationalists had become reformists and independent Zimbabwe become almost a caricature of the oppressive system that the liberation struggle had sought to transform, so marking a direct transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism. (Mhanda 2011, 210–211)
Moreover, for his part, Mhanda remained as unequivocal in Dzino (Ibid., 255) as in his much earlier interview (1976) as to the proper antidote to this kind of manifestation of ‘mere nationalism’ and notional democracy. Thus, any
focusing of the struggle for democratic rights at the expense of articulating social-economic demands would be counter-productive. In other words, all struggles for liberation and self-determination have, as their end, a better life for all, founded on social economic justice and equalization of opportunity. (Mhanda 2011, 255)
These noble ideals, for which many sacrificed their lives, have to all intents and purposes been divested of their progressive content. They survive only as a rhetorical and demagogical platform for grandstanding on national occasions, for raising the political temperature and whipping up partisan sentiments prior to elections. It was the abandonment of the norms, ethos and value system that sustained the liberation war that has yielded fertile ground for ethnicity, intolerance, partisanship, unbridled greed, corruption, lack of accountability, mismanagement, patronage and the tolerance of incompetence as a virtue that have all combined to bring this country to its knees. (Ibid., 255)
What Zimbabwe requires is thoroughgoing social and cultural empowerment of its people, not ‘empowerment’ founded on political patronage, corruption and ethnic considerations. (Ibid., 241)
Seek ye, first, the ‘national democratic revolution’, then? It must be admitted that it is a trifle startling to find this latter phrase figuring so prominently here, for it has been a favourite of South Africa’s ANC, a trope most often deployed by it as a formulation that has served to smother any too enthusiastic foreshadowing of a class struggle or of a possible socialist project. And we have seen into just what kind of unsavoury capitalist backwaters such an eschewing of self-conscious radical purpose would lead a post-apartheid South Africa. Nonetheless, for his part, Mhanda does frame this point much more broadly and usefully, while also seeming to suggest that you can actually talk about both goals (those of democracy and socialism, of simultaneously lived and willed ‘national democratic’ and also class-conscious assertions) at the same time, a sign, I choose to think, of his – and that of the ZIPA leadership’s more generally – seriousness of purpose. But in this respect as in some many others (again to echo Bhebe and Ranger), ‘Alas ZIPA had no time’ to further demonstrate just where its brand of across-the-board popular empowerment might ultimately have led.
Nonetheless, the phrase – the ‘political, economic, social and cultural empowerment of its people’ – sounds like a pretty good definition of a meaningful democratic socialism to me. Indeed, Mhanda suggests, this might have well been the brand of nationalism that would have carried the day in a new Zimbabwe: for ‘by the end of the 1960s, the nationalist movement was undergoing a paradigm shift driven by the experiences of successful struggles elsewhere and influence of military cadres gleaned through exposure to armed conflict in Rhodesia’ (Ibid., 240). But of course, in the long run, any such presumed shift did not long survive as Mhanda came to know full well, while the march of history that we have sought to evoke here produced, on Mugabe’s watch, only a Zimbabwe with precisely the shape and texture that Mhanda evokes clearly in the pages of Dzino:
The Zimbabwean state that emerged in 1980 did not become an organ for popular rule. Rather, it continued to serve the interests of those who had succeeded the racist white minority rulers – the ZANU-PF elite. It became an organ for ZANU-PF rule; for the suppression of those perceived to be threats to their political dominance. Examples of this were the suppression of ZAPU in Matabeleland soon after independence, the on-going repression of opposition political parties and civil society activists, and the manipulation of traditional authority structures to serve ZANU-PF interests. In essence, the new state has continued to serve narrow interests, this time those of ZANU-PF, and to entrench its rule. All state institutions and organs comprising the state security apparatus, the law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, local authority structures and the public service authority were progressively transformed into instruments that serve ZANU-PF rule through staffing them with loyalists and dispensing patronage. (Ibid., 253–254)
And yet this is also the Zimbabwe that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has, by and large, embraced enthusiastically over the years, consistently white-washing Mugabe’s stolen elections and his failed economy, and even, most recently, honouring the man himself as the SADC organisation’s Chair! True, SADC has long since become primarily a club of heads of state, many of whom are, like Mugabe, the virtual authoritarian leaders of the ex-liberation movements that now steer most of the independent southern African states; in short, Mugabe’s recent ascension to become the head of such a club need not startle us too much. Rather more surprising to me were the words of Jorge Rebelo, close confidant of Samora Machel during the ZIPA/ZANU moment chronicled above. For, in my own direct experience, Rebelo shared Machel’s initial enthusiasm for ZIPA and his suspicion of Mugabe … and also encouraged me to write as positively about ZIPA as I did in the mid 70s. Now, Rebelo sings a very different tune however: thus, a few years ago he answered a query as to how he understands the front-line states’ almost total silence about what has happened in Zimbabwe as follows:
I personally have, like most Mozambicans who were linked to the liberation struggle, a soft-spot for Mugabe because he was our comrade in arms. He actually fought for the liberation of his country and, for many years, Zimbabwe grew and had a system that was producing development. This meant that Zimbabwe was considered the bread-basket of the region. It was a rich country … [And if things are now completely different] we [still] have this same attitude towards him. (Rebelo in 2008, as interviewed by Salema and Rollette 2008)
Rebelo has every right to have changed his mind about Mugabe of course. But it is difficult to see why he would do so in light of what has happened in Zimbabwe itself in the years since. Moreover, if Mugabe is indeed an ‘old comrade from the struggle’, how much more true is that of the ZIPA comrades who Machel and, no doubt, Rebelo were nonetheless prepared to abandon so cruelly in the 1970s and who have not been alluded to since. True, Rebelo does catalogue, albeit quite sympathetically, some of the ‘mistakes’ Mugabe did make once in power and the often less then salutary outcomes of his policies. So why then this apparent rewriting of liberation struggle history itself and the celebration of a Mugabe whose arrogant dictatorship is exactly what others, like Mhanda, predicted for him long ago?15 Of course, if Rebelo were now to write his own memoirs and thereby cover such matters we might learn more about the nuances of the endgame in Zimbabwe – especially if Rebelo were to read Dzino and respond to it. And we might then come that much closer to being able to reach a fully informed verdict on the ‘ZIPA moment’.
But what, finally, of Wilfred Mhanda, aka Dzino, himself? Dead now, in May 2014, but an important figure, in the larger scheme of things, right up until the very end. In his book, his close account of the ZIPA moment is key. But Mhanda’s shedding of further light both on his own story and on the nature of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in the rest of that book is also important. For he gives there both a close account of his immediate three post-ZIPA years of incarceration in a range of Mozambique’s bleak rural holding pens – and also of his release and return to Zimbabwe at the time of that country’s independence where he was actually re-arrested and jailed for some days in ‘free’ Zimbabwe itself by the new ZANU government! There follows his virtual exile from Zimbabwe (on a scholarship and then working) for seven years in Germany, this stay marked by occasional harassment from both Zimbabwean diplomats there and by some German officials who had been egged on by ZANU-sourced misinformation about him. Then he returned to Zimbabwe to work as a research chemist in such Zimbabwean-based firms as the Delta Corporation, Metal Box and Cairn Foods. But he was also to play a modest but important role within Zimbabwe’s emergent civil society, notably as an activist (Mhanda 2011, 217–232, in a section entitled ‘I become a civil society activist’) seeking to bring more coherence and order, through his Zimbabwe Liberators Platform, to the troubled world of the war veterans, to their legitimate demands for fair compensation and to the manipulative manner in which both government and some very bent leaders of many of their own organisations sought to use and abuse them.
And finally, not very long before Mhanda's death, there was his completion, and his seeing through to publication, of Dzino, which is in so many ways the very best of all books on the struggle to produce a genuinely free, equal and democratic Zimbabwe. It is a book that I have been able to draw on frequently here for it demonstrates clearly that for Mhanda/Machingura, as for many other Zimbabweans, the hope for an end to the Mugabe nightmare and for the building of a genuinely new and fully liberated Zimbabwe is not dead. In fact, as Dzino itself demonstrates, the struggle to realise such goals in Zimbabwe does indeed continue.