Robert Mugabe died, just as I was readying this extended obituary to remember Dumiso Dabengwa and his place in Zimbabwean political history: an appreciation and consideration that grew from a short memorial piece amidst many others (Malunga 2019; Moore 2019b, 2019e, Tendi 2019). The second death raised a few questions about writing on Dabengwa. Would Mugabe’s controversy-enshrouded departure (Moore 2019c; Fontein forthcoming) overshadow Dabengwa’s life? Perhaps the contrary: handled carefully, writing in inevitably ‘revisionary’ mode (after all, that is what history must be, without the clouds hanging over that Cold War-ish term – Fitzpatrick 2019) should shine through the mists and shadows that have emerged with the various recollections surviving under the umbrella of Zimbabwean ‘patriotic history’.2 Indeed, some memories fog-free of ZANU–PF3 prejudice, if not ZAPU’s liberation fighters, have already cleared some space for alternative views (Muleya 2019; Mapaila 2019): history’s bed is being remade as we speak. All that remains is to save it from hagiography, which in any case is subject to intense scrutiny (Tendi 2020b; cf. Kriger 2020). It will avoid oleaginous traits, even though its subject was a pleasure to interview in his later years; it will engage in neither political praise-singing nor polemical criticism. Such care is imperative given the work in progress delving deeply into the politics of the dead (Fontein 2018 and forthcoming).
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What follows will simply indicate some thinking that can arise when someone just off the centre of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle has abandoned the mortal coil. That Mugabe died soon after Dabengwa makes comparisons inevitable, however. The twists and turns fostered by Mugabe’s furthering of factionalism threatened to ruin his funeral (and jeopardise much more); the huge stadium seemed very empty as the public version of the final rites were rendered. Everybody involved in Dabengwa’s fully attended funeral agreed on his excellent qualities. As Joost Fontein’s chronicle of Mugabe’s almost farcical one attests, Dabengwa’s final farewell ‘turned out to be a ZAPU affair … the ruling party was denied any opportunity to make political mileage out of it’ (Fontein forthcoming). Objective history might play a small part in undoing the Gordian knots left in Mugabe’s wake – without knives. It might also come to terms with the rise and fall of ZAPU, Zimbabwe’s once premier nationalist party, and indicate some thoughts on a role for its shadow of a former self.
The occasion of Dumiso Dabengwa’s death was sadder than Mugabe’s in some ways: ‘DD’ had a lot to contribute as Zimbabwe trudged its way to a post-Mugabe era, not least with his plans to retire gracefully from ZAPU’s leadership. Mugabe’s death was sad given his ruination of a nation, but anticlimactic given his moribund role since his party’s winning faction dumped him in a late 2017 coup (Moore 2018b; Tendi 2020a). To borrow from Kamed Daoud (2015, 31) his passing ‘didn’t make sense anymore’. What could be learned except how not to rule? That, unfortunately, had been decided long ago. What could be gained by his erstwhile comrades who had won everything – but all was in ruin? His last few public words were sadly sanctimonious but nearly comical. First, on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 2018 election, he told a huge array of journalists that he might vote for the opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change and its forty-something leader Nelson Chamisa (Du Plessis 2018).
This was well after the circulation of stories that the MDC – which did not gain funds from the usually munificent international donors until the last moment – had taken money from the ZANU–PF’s pro-Mugabe, bizarrely named but still struggling after losing the coup, ‘Generation 40’ faction (NewZimbabwe.com 2020). ‘Youth’ was their battle-cry: but they planned to prop up Mugabe, at 93 still seven years short of a retirement date he once mooted (Moore 2005). They would keep him on his throne until he and they dealt with their foes in Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ‘Lacoste’ faction; but the Crocodile beat them in the end. In the pre-coup phase they press-ganged youngsters from their schools to ‘youth interface rallies’ where their queen-pin Grace Mugabe denounced their enemy, then Vice-President Mnangagwa. When Mnangagwa got his youngsters to boo Grace at a rally in Bulawayo, Robert decided to fire Mnangagwa. Thus began the fast-paced but carefully constitutionally contoured coup, ending with Mnangagwa’s presidential inauguration on 24 November 2017 and a few quickly penned efforts to excite readers about it (Ndlovu 2018; Nyarota 2018; Rogers 2019). Even while enjoying his last days with a very generous pension, state-paid travel to Singapore’s Gleneagles Hospital, and his Blue Roof house, Mugabe could not resist telling the world that he would not cast his vote for his former side-kick.
Second, and last: in February 2019, on his 95th birthday and just over a month after Mnangagwa’s security forces had killed many January protestors (Moore 2019a), Mugabe whined: ‘we condemn the violence on civilians by soldiers’ and wondered aloud if Mnangagwa could not ‘do without seeing dead bodies? What kind of a person are you? You feed on death?’ (Bulawayo24 News 2019a). If the cap fits …
Dabengwa’s last words were not as pretentiously pious, and he had declared his support for the MDC a long time before July 2018. It is unthinkable that money would have changed hands, because ZAPU was nearly broke. Dabengwa’s last words – discussed in detail below – are more thoughtful than Mugabe’s narcissistic ones. They concern ideological perspectives, the impact of the Cold War, and the relations between the emerging southern African power and its most powerful neighbour during their wars of liberation and after. They also reveal the massive impact of Zimbabwe’s new ruling party’s paranoid and genocidal terror against Dabengwa’s party and people, almost as soon as it gained state power in 1980. Dabengwa’s death means all of this and much more. It carries even more weight in concatenation with Mugabe’s.
Indeed, sometime before the 2018 election, South African Broadcasting Corporation’s foreign news editor Sophie Mokwena interviewed Mugabe and questioned him about Gukurahundi – the ‘spring storms that wash away the chaff’ – when the ZANU–PF party-state killed thousands of Matabeleland and Midland’s peoples soon after it took power’s reins (Doran 2017). He answered that Nyerere had called him with the news that truckloads of Soviet weapons were heading from Zambia to Zimbabwe, so he had better beware. He phoned Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and told him to hold them off (SABC 2019). Mokwena left it at that, but a Bulawayo viewer with ZAPU connections at the time responded with a quick ‘Mugabe is lying. Those arms were intended for the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) army, Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), in South Africa. They were strapped to the lorries’ chassis. Nyerere was up to his usual tricks.’ Many within ZAPU saw those tricks as favouring ZANU.
Jeremy Brickhill (2019), Dabengwa’s deputy during much of the war, stated in his memorial service speech that ZAPU’s leader, Joshua Nkomo, stopped any plans for the ‘Zero Hour’ offensive that such transportation efforts may have signalled. In any case, according to Brickhill it was only to be used if negotiations failed. Other informants suggest that the Rhodesian bombs on ZIPRA camps in Zambia and a few downed bridges may have changed Nkomo’s mind. Furthermore, the ZAPU politicians had reason to believe that they would be entering the new Zimbabwe as part of the ‘Patriotic Front’ that had united ZANU and ZAPU since late 1976, following the path of the short-lived united army, the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA – Moore 2014b; 2016). Dabengwa’s contribution to this discussion will be considered as this article reaches its conclusion.
Besides being known as ‘DD’, Dumiso Dabengwa was also nicknamed ‘Du’, and ‘the Black Russian’. A few might remember him as his long-expired British passport had it: Michael Ncube. That name was revealed in a British ‘who’s who’ prepared in advance of the late 1979 Lancaster House negotiations that led to Zimbabwe’s first round of ‘free elections’ and Robert Mugabe’s almost eternal rule. ‘We were British subjects under an illegal régime: passports weren’t a problem’, DD remembered (Dabengwa 2018). Someone else in the Zimbabwe Peoples’ Revolutionary Army’s (ZPRA) security apparatus had said earlier that ‘the Russians’ had made Dabengwa’s British passport. The reality was not only about Cold War cloak-and-dagger, but included British uncertainty vis-à-vis the annoying reactionaries led by Ian Smith, who refused to let Rhodesia follow the usual decolonisation paths. Not all in and around the British state were hand in glove with the bothersome settler–colonisers. A few would have been more than happy to unleash the soldiers on them (Moore 2016, 173, 176) while others, unconvinced of Smith and company’s ways, were deep inside Rhodesia’s state sharing intelligence, and more, with their imperial colleagues and indeed the nationalists (Ellert and Anderson 2020, 244, 386 ff).
Similarly, the ‘Black Russian’ was neither a puppet nor true believer in Soviet interpretations of Marxism. As Dabengwa wrote much later, he was no ‘Communist’: he and his comrades accepted the USSR’s and other Soviet bloc countries’ assistance ‘because they were willing to help ZAPU to achieve its goal of an independent Zimbabwe’ while capitalist countries were not. ‘We did not believe that the final stage of communism envisaged by the USSR could be realised’ yet ‘found the theory of socialism … in keeping with our traditions and customs’. They felt that some aspects of it would fit in with their new mode of governance (Dabengwa 2017, 216–217).
Aside from Cold War politics, Dabengwa spent much of his adult life negotiating deep-rooted conflict between ZAPU and the party that took the nationalist baton from it in 1963. On winning political power in 1980 the Zimbabwe African National Union (with a simulacrum of the suffix ‘Patriotic Front’ attached) tried to annihilate ZAPU. That was Gukurahundi, the massive blot that remains the greatest impediment to the process of ‘becoming Zimbabwe’ (Raftopoulos and Mlambo 2009). The 1987 ‘Unity Accord’ was as close to one-party statehood as Mugabe could get.
Ten years before his death Dabengwa resuscitated ZAPU and it persisted in peace. Since 2000, the MDC had taken on the mantle of opposition to the ruling party. In 2018 it shared with ZANU–PF the status of being led by a new person at the top: Morgan Tsvangirai had died in February (Moore 2018a) just as Emmerson Mnangagwa, no longer in Mugabe’s immediate shadow, was beginning the presidency for which he had waited so long. As DD died not a few MDC members and civil society activists (Masheko 2019; Rusare-Murava and Guvamatanga 2019) felt the heat of the perpetually paranoid ruling party that had caused such grief for the Black Russian and his people. If he is still passing on advice to his oppositional successors it would be ‘know this enemy, well-versed in oppression and duplicity; do your politics very, very carefully’. He’d probably add: ‘beware the seductions of the capitalists’ for good measure.
Dr – the University of Zimbabwe bestowed the honorary degree in 2005 – Dabengwa’s list of accomplishments only hints at the crucial parts he played in Zimbabwe’s history. At 19 he joined the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress (SRANC); two years later he was a leader in the famed Zhii riots (Nehwati 1970). In 1961 he was arrested at the first National Democratic Party (NDP) meeting (Sunday News 2016: the NDP was formed after the SRANC’s banning; ZAPU would be next in line). By 1963 – after Ndabaningi Sithole and others, with some encouragement from the Chinese at a Cairo conference of the African–Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, split from ZAPU to start ZANU – he was in Zambia transporting and testing grenades. In 1964 he was training in the Soviet Union. He and Chris Hani negotiated ZAPU’s alliance with the South African ANC, soon famous for the August 1967 joint attack on Wankie Colliery. The armed struggle for liberation had begun in earnest – and with it the Cold War layers exacerbating pre-existing contextual ZAPU/ZANU tensions. Generational and ideological friction hit the fan too. South Africa’s struggles intensified them. Dabengwa’s position as the ZPRA chief of intelligence until ‘freedom’ in 1980 meant he was at the vortex’s core. Its swirls and whirls only intensified in the 1980s.
Picturing unity
A picture (Figure 1) taken at the New Sarum airfield outside what was Salisbury (Doran 2019; Grest 2019; Rhodesian Air Force 2019), making the social media rounds following DD’s demise, has DD standing with Rex Nhongo (aka Solomon Mujuru), who would soon be the commander of the merged Zimbabwean armed forces. The two young military and security leaders seemed to symbolise the unity to be forged out of the Rhodesians’ and the two nationalist parties’ armed forces. Indeed, discussions to the side of the Lancaster House negotiations in late 1979 that would see Zimbabwe emerge at the beginning of the next year indicated great cooperation between the military leaders of both the main nationalist parties. Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army General Josiah ‘Magama’ Tongogara’s notable enthusiasm indeed led to hopes that the Patriotic Front might be forged into one party or a strong coalition. A few weeks after that, however, Tongogara was killed in a car accident. Just over a year later – well past the death of the united party dream – Nhongo and Dabengwa would have been on their way to Entumbane, in the Bulawayo environs. They were to calm the two nationalist armies’ battles – ostensibly one force, along with the former Rhodesians, in the newly integrated Zimbabwean military – during which over 300 soldiers were killed (White 2007; Cowell 2019).
Newly installed ZANLA Commander Rex Nhongo and ZPRA intelligence chief Dumiso Dabengwa (right) at New Sarum airfield during the ceasefire before Zimbabwe’s first ‘one person, one vote’ elections of 1980. Source: Photograph appears courtesy of Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, who was Senior Military Liaison Officer to Lord Soames, governor of Rhodesia, from the last weeks of 1979 up to the April 1980 election. Permission to use this photograph is gratefully acknowledged.
Yet well before that – in 1976 – Nhongo is reported to have acted against a mandate for unity. The Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) was one of the most promising efforts to create unity in a long history of failed attempts (Moore 2014a, 2016). Some of its protagonists attest that Nhongo had ordered his soldiers to kill ZPRA fighters. When they encountered the Rhodesian soldiers in Zimbabwe, he commanded that they should shoot the soldiers who had come in from ZAPU’s army first (Alexander and McGregor 2004).
The context? The 1974 coup in Portugal meant Angola and Mozambique would be governed by liberation parties linked with the Eastern bloc and therefore likely to be ‘communist’, or at least within the widening Soviet bloc. Zambia and South Africa worked together to create a détente to bring the white and black nationalists in Rhodesia together to forge a modus vivendi that would not be drawn into the Soviet orbit (Anglin 1975). Nhongo had once been a ZPRA soldier, but left during ZAPU’s devastating internecine disputes in the early 1970s (Tshabangu 1979; Mpofu 2014); some still say the one in which young militants challenged the squabbling ‘old guard’ was a mutiny sponsored by ‘intelligence agencies working against the Soviet Union’ (Nyathi 2019); a few members of the young ginger group considered Dabengwa’s unit to be ‘the Gestapo’. ZANU’s fissures too were exacerbated with the advent of détente (Tendi 2017). With ZANLA’s commander in Zambia’s jails suspected of murdering ZANU National Chairman Herbert Chitepo (White 2004), Nhongo was next in line to head ZANU’s soldiers.
Some of the guerrilla commanders (a few young ones in ZANLA escaped Zambia’s clampdown to Tanzania, while many more were held in huge prison camps), along with Tanzania and Mozambique’s leaders, thought détente was a futile endeavour. They tried to establish a structure that would unite the two nationalist armies and start the war up again (Mhanda 2011). When arrangements were made to establish the united Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA), Nhongo – by then also in Tanzania – became its commander, deputised by ZPRA commander ‘Nikita’ Mangena. Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere and Mozambique’s new leader Samora Machel supported this plan for a while. But Nhongo was not enthusiastic at all. The ‘Young Turks’ in positions below Nhongo and Mangena took on the vashandi moniker (‘the people’, or even the workers) and pushed forward the idea of full-fledged and ideologically coherent unity. However, they were sidelined (more precisely, thrown into Mozambique’s prisons for a few years) when the ‘old guard’ was released from Zambia’s jails to return to full leadership roles. In the meantime, Robert Mugabe, released from Rhodesia’s prisons along with the other nationalist leaders to attend to the détente efforts in Lusaka, tried to patch ZANU together again. But it took some time: he and some of his allies had carried out ‘a coup in prison’ deposing Sithole in 1974, and neither the guerrilla soldiers nor the leaders of the Frontline States (Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, and Botswana) knew what to think of him. Nevertheless, in the process of ridding the party of Sithole, escaping Zambia, and presenting the idea of a united army to Nyerere, the political soldiers cobbled together the Mgagao Declaration stating that Mugabe should be the ZANU leader because he was ‘next in line’. By mid 1975 he was in Mozambique trying to gain his place in ZANU’s sun. Nhongo helped him a lot, informing him of the Young Turks’ nefarious plans.
Nhongo’s sentiments were accentuated in a political education tract published towards the decade's end by ZANU’S Chitepo College (c.1979) set up in the wake of the vashandi’s Wampoa College and after Mugabe, the ‘old guard’ released from Zambian detention, and Machel (who, once so enthusiastic, had changed his mind about the radical youths!) rid the party of its youthful unity enthusiasts (Moore 2014b). The course guide said that the ZPRA forces planned to let ZANLA ‘smash the Racist State Machinery single handed’, thus giving the ‘social imperialist’ (Chinese talk for the USSR) aligned nationalists ‘breething [sic] space so that after victory it will apply the Soviet formulated “USSR Operation 1 Zero Hour” to crash [sic] ZANLA and seize political power’. ZPRA’s tactics to lure ZANLA cadres ranged from beef to ‘pleasures … like cigarettes, matches, radios, beer, drugs’ to educational trips abroad and proposing ‘love to ZANLA female comrades with the hope of extracting Party secrets from them, the “Ndebele cause”’.
These opinions were not just those of Nhongo and a few somewhat Maoist intellectuals in the ruling party-to-be. In mid 1975 Mugabe exposed his disdain for Nkomo and ZAPU to his cousin James Chikerema, who had had been searching for Mugabe in Mozambique to no avail. Mugabe was under house arrest in Quelimane because Frelimo (the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, installed, after a long liberation war, as the ruling party in Mozambique only weeks before) questioned his leadership credentials given ‘the coup in prison’, the uncertainty in the wake of Chitepo’s assassination, and détente’s immanent deflation. Chikerema had formed FROLIZI (Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe) a few years before, after his escape from some of ZAPU’s ‘internal contradictions’ (from which Nhongo had exited earlier). Composed of ex-ZAPU and ZANU leaders and recipient of many British pounds, FROLIZI was an object of ridicule to its Zambian guardians. The officers keeping watch over the many southern African liberation forces gracing their soil called it the Front for the Liaison of Zezuru Intellectuals – Zezuru being a sub-group within the Shona ensemble. Mugabe sent his older relative a typed letter extending appreciation for his efforts. He also chastised him for re-linking with Nkomo’s ZAPU, through the United African National Council (UANC), a loose coalition created to take advantage of the Zambian–South African détente exercise. The ZANU militants considered the UANC a wet squib, and Mugabe had set out to find them. However, Mugabe then thanked Chikerema for sundering the ties with Nkomo again:
[w]hether you and the other Frolizi comrades liked it or not you were teamed up in absentia with ZAPU. … You alone could have corrected this claim and not a ZANU man like me. I am glad you and George [Nyandoro] have finally done it and doneitwith [sic] a sting! Let the chopping and slashing campaign go on and when there is finally a fall, what a big thud there will be? [sic] (in Grundy 2019).
A year after this letter and a few before the Chitepo College curriculum was drawn up, Mugabe was still in Quelimane under Frelimo’s watch. This time the people looking for him were lucky. A fresh American congressman named Stephen Solarz visited the seaside city. Mugabe did not treat Solarz and Johnnie Carson, the deputy mission head in Maputo, as imperialists bent on confusing the ‘glorious oppressed masses of Zimbabwe’ as the Chitepo College course opined. Mugabe impressed on Solarz how he disliked Frelimo’s militarism. He said he welcomed more American involvement on the Zimbabwean question (American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was indeed helping the British prepare for the Geneva conference in late 1976), claimed that ZPRA was doing nothing in the war, and announced that the soldiers were completely under his control (National Security Archives 1976 – note that it took Mugabe another nearly two years to subdue the soldiers: he was a liar). Such discussions would have done little to dispel ZAPU’s early suspicions that ZANU was and always would be a CIA/Israeli/Chinese plant.
These and various other ZANU-related imbroglios would have made life very difficult for a man entrusted with his party’s intelligence.
Freedom: just another word?
Yet with ‘freedom’ – freedom that Soviet assistance to ZPRA did hasten (Shubin 2017) – Zimbabwe became even more central to Cold War and South African intrigue. As Blessing-Miles Tendi (2019) attests correctly, Dabengwa and Tongogara played key roles at the late 1979 Lancaster House negotiations leading to Zimbabwe’s new dispensation. Off-the-centre discussions there between ZANLA and ZPRA leaders about the ceasefire came close to assuming the continuation of the Patriotic Front into the 1980 election. As Dabengwa says in a mid 2018 interview (CITE 2018), he and Tongogara had undertaken preparatory research in the guerrilla camps on the future of a united political formation. According to Dabengwa they found support for the idea of full-on, political, unity, which would have resumed the vashandi unity idea somewhat. Although Tongogara had been crucial in condemning the Young Turks to a long stay in Mozambican prison facilities, he appeared to be more committed to the idea of unity than the negation of the negation: when in 1976 he heard about the latter from the youthful Marxists he retorted that he’d have to negate them.
Edgar Tekere (2004) claimed that a few days after Lancaster had set the template for the new Zimbabwe, Mozambican president Samora Machel asked three of ZANU’s leaders if they would maintain a united front or indeed strengthen that notion into something approaching a political party, throughout the imminent election. Tekere, Mugabe’s de facto second-in-command (perhaps a ‘prime minister in exile’, although current discourse has the current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, always by Mugabe’s side) replied negatively and vociferously – Nkomo was a sell-out who had talked to Ian Smith whilst ZANLA soldiers were at war, etc. Mugabe remained silent. ‘Magama’ (Tongogara) however thought that the idea of unity should be pursued. When Machel asked him who should be the leader of said party or coalition, Tongogara said ‘the senior’, i.e. Joshua Nkomo. On the day after Christmas 1979 the general drove to the guerrilla camps in Mozambique to announce the new dispensation. He died in a car accident about which people are still suspicious.
Thus too the dream of unity was killed. Gukurahundi was just steps away.
Dabengwa’s CITE interview (2018) shows that he had little doubt about Gukurahundi’s roots: ‘at independence the British had already made a decision with Mugabe to carry out this genocide.’ They ‘had already decided to ensure that that no one of the Ndebele nation would be allowed to be leader in this country’. He also claimed that Emmerson Mnangagwa created the ‘dissidents’ who were the excuse for the ZANU–PF regime’s genocidal campaign. Nkomo made similar claims at rallies: for him the ‘dissidents’ were ZANU–PF agents (Malunga 2020). South Africa and the British feared ZAPU’s relations with South Africa’s ANC and MK. For the British, the evil Soviet Union controlled these ‘puppets’, and they had to be stopped from controlling South Africa.
Take those words as they are said: true or not. Dabengwa was often condemned as a conspiracy theorist: do those accusations go too far? He often told the story of the British officer, map at hand, advising the Zimbabwean security contingent in 1980 of the areas in southern Africa in danger of Communist infiltration. One was Matabeleland. DD asked something to the effect of ‘do you mean me?’ (Dabengwa 2018). Evidence other than Dabengwa’s lends some credence to the Cold War collusion conjecture and what Hazel Cameron (2018) calls the British ‘wilful blindness’ towards Gukurahundi but not, as Doran (2017) emphasises, for conspiracy per se. The factors for the ‘West’s’ quietness were many, summarised neatly in Stuart Doran’s recent lecture to the Bulawayo based CITE (Doran 2020). Doran notes as primus inter pares among the five reasons British and American Cold War fears that if they were too nasty to Mugabe he would move closer to the USSR – recognised last as the embassies lined up – and North Korea. The others are: making Zimbabwe appear a ‘successful, capitalist, multi-racial experiment’ thus encouraging a peaceful settlement in South Africa; to maintain good business relations with the new country; to retain Britain’s prestige gained with the Lancaster House settlement; and the British diplomatic corp’s ‘emotional involvement’ with Mugabe and his circles.
Even before the 1980 election there is evidence that Mugabe was seen as the lone leader who could take the cake, and ZAPU would only get a few crumbs. It is commonly asserted that the British and various associated diplomats and policy makers were hoping that some sort of alliance consisting of Nkomo, Muzorewa, and assorted parties would win the 1980 elections to keep Mugabe out, but there are indications toward the end of the campaign that more realism was evolving.4
As Zimbabwe’s first election began, Nkomo appealed to Christopher Soames, who had been appointed the governor for the electoral process, about ZANU–PF violence. Soames wrote London about an early February 1980 meeting between Nkomo and Robin Renwick, then cutting his diplomatic teeth (a decade later Renwick was ambassador to South Africa):
the main burden of his complainet [sic] … was that throughout the Shona-speaking areas Zanla had instituted a reign of terror. A number of Zapu officials and supporters had been abducted. Some of them were believed to have been murdered. They were being threatened by Zanla elements or mujibas [young male ‘messengers’ recruited during the war] still carrying arms. (Soames 1980)
Nkomo was advised to air his concerns publicly, but all were aware that this would be tricky. The Organisation of African Unity would disown him. Seventeen days after Nkomo’s visit, Soames and other Zimbabwe watchers received a summary of United States’ Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Richard Moose’s analysis. Nkomo’s statements were seen as ‘entirely in character … quote vintage Nkomo opportunism unquote’. Nkomo would ‘privately … encourage measures against Zanu from which he would be the principal beneficiary’ but not want to ‘support such measures in public since he doubtless appreciated the danger of being branded in Africa as someone prepared to desert a former ally’ (Henderson 1980).
To be sure, as Henderson continued (1980), all the ‘other parties had legitimate complaints about Zanu’s activities’ but Moose ‘laid equal emphasis on the need to keep Mugabe in play’. Even the ‘South Africans were coming to accept that it would be better to deal with a regime which included Mugabe than to see continued instability in Zimbabwe’. Indeed, there seemed to be evidence that ‘there might already have been a few tentative contacts between Zanu and the South Africans.’ Furthermore, the ‘US liaison office in Salisbury’ had reported ‘that the South African representative had advised his government that it should not rule out the possibility of dealing with Mugabe’. Moreover, the Americans ‘remained committed to the establishment of a stable independence government’ and would send their ambassador ‘soon after independence’ in the hopes that this would have a ‘stabilising effect’ (Henderson 1980). Five days later Soames told Nkomo that he would not ‘disqualify Zanu–PF in any district’. Nkomo asked Soames ‘how we could say that the elections were free and fair when he and his party and other parties had been completely unable to campaign’ in large parts of three provinces and ‘two more of his party workers had been murdered by Zanla yesterday’ (Soames 1980).
The United States opened its Harare embassy just half a day after Zimbabwe’s freedom: the first in the queue. According to Moose, Mugabe’s election was ‘probably the greatest reverse the Russians have suffered in Africa in years’ (Thatcher 1980). As noted above, the Russian embassy was the last to be welcomed.
Dennis Grennan, one of Her Majesty’s more interesting employees, had known and helped Robert Mugabe and his partner Sarah (aka Sally) since the mid 1960s. Sally was his house-guest for more than three years after 1967 in London; he found her a job in Covent Garden's famed Africa Centre (Interview – Grennan 2007; Moore 2008; 2014b, 307–308). He was on hand during the transitional moment in early 1980. He recalled deep debates in the British team about whether to cancel the elections due to violence. Grennan claimed that he convinced team members such as the deputy-governor, Anthony Duff – said to support Bishop Muzorewa, later to head MI5 (Norton-Taylor 2000) – not to cancel them. All the other parties were not averse to violence, said Grennan. Cancelling the elections would serve only to restart the war. ZANU–PF would win anyway – it was popular among the Shona and the ethnic arithmetic would ensure (PF) ZAPU would never win over that group, constituting nearly 80% of the population (cf. White 2015, 277–307).
On 9 May 1980, just weeks after Zimbabwe’s April 17 freedom celebrations, Robert Mugabe visited British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He complained that ‘some’ ZAPU did ‘not accept the new situation’ (UK National Archives 1980). They wanted to continue the fight and had executed ‘very silly acts, some involving deaths’. A ‘strong element’ committed sabotage, hoping the ‘ensuing chaos might lead to new elections and the overthrow of the ZANU Government. … The government might have to act against them soon’ (Ibid.). One can almost sense Thatcher’s glee at this strategic congruence.
Danny Stannard, Rhodesia’s Special Branch director, stayed on during the new era. With Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa he organised the transition of Zimbabwe’s security services – precisely to keep the region Communist-free, Stannard said (2014). He thought Emmerson Mnangagwa was the perfect man for that job, and overall performed admirably during Gukurahundi. Stannard appeared to hold the ‘Black Russian’ in venomous disregard and was dead certain that in February 1981 Dabengwa’s Soviet allies' tanks were rolling in to the Entumbane barracks. In March the ZAPU cabinet ministers (although the two parties did not enter the 1980 elections in a united front, some ZAPU politicians, including Joshua Nkomo, were appointed to the first cabinet), Dabengwa, deputy armed forces commander Lookout Masuku, and four other ZAPU officials were arrested, charged with treason. Just over 35 years later another notorious Rhodesian officer, Peter Stiff, opined during a chance encounter that Stannard was an inveterate liar who sold information in the 1980s to any willing buyer (Stiff 2017).
In December 1982, a Whitehall officer wondered if his employer should reconsider support for a regime seemingly hell-bent on eliminating ZAPU and its potential supporters (UK National Archives 1982). No, he wrote, refusing ‘military sales and aid’ might encourage Mugabe to approach the USSR – albeit reluctantly – following Angola and Mozambique’s receipt of ‘large scale military help from the Soviet Union and Cuba’. The ‘US Government’ was particularly worried about the ‘danger [of] a virtual Soviet world monopoly of certain strategic minerals and Soviet domination of the key sea lanes around the Cape’ (Ibid.). More reasons to keep Mugabe on side included selling arms and jet-fighters, and smoothing the road to Namibian and South African settlements. Thirty-three years later Frank Wisner Jr, then the American ambassador to Zambia but with experience with Zimbabweans since 1976, put it regarding Gukurahundi, ‘oh, you mean when Mugabe went about killing thousands of his own people? We weren’t going to let that get in the way of plans for Namibia’ (Wisner 2013; Moore 2014b, 315).
Treason charges for all but DD were dismissed in early April 1983 – his were based on a letter he sent to the KGB suggesting that it remain on good terms with ZAPU (Lelyveld 1983). However, his comrades remained incarcerated under the Emergency Powers Act, this time for allegedly caching arms on ZAPU farms. By then Five Brigade, tailored and trained by North Koreans especially for the job, had been in Matabeleland for several months: Gukurahundi was under way with its terror, mass starvation, and murder. When the ZAPU comrades were released in 1986, they had to stop the carnage – without Lookout Masuku, who was moved to hospital until he died. After much negotiation they agreed to be absorbed into ZANU–PF. Dabengwa’s reluctant agreement was essential; it took his and Nkomo’s authority to persuade the ZPRA ex-combatants and the PF-ZAPU youth to merge with ZANU–PF.
The Cold War was on its last legs. ZANU–PF had won its war for a one-party state – briefly, until the democracy wave washed over Zimbabwe at millennium’s end (Moore 2015b). During the nineties, with Nkomo as vice-president in the revised ZANU–PF government, after consulting with his constituencies DD took on posts ranging from Home Affairs minister to managing the long-gestating, but never funded, Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project. He left government in 2000, defeated by a leading MDC candidate, Gibson Sibanda. In 2008 he abandoned the ZANU–PF politburo and revived ZAPU. He never contested the presidential post: in the 2008 elections he supported Simba Makoni of the Mavambo party, and in 2018 the MDC candidate.
Three final thoughts
Perhaps three public appearances and speeches in his winter years mark Dumiso Dabengwa’s thoughtful and thought-provoking legacy, beyond his crucial role in Zimbabwe’s long – and unfinished – liberation struggle.
I.
As a keynote speaker at a late 2016 University of the Witwatersrand conference on the history of southern African liberation wars (Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection et al. 2016), the ‘Black Russian’ asked: ‘The armed struggle: was it worth it?’ (Dabengwa 2016). Facing down a group of inebriated and heckling #FeesMustFall students who appeared to know little of DD except what they had learned from the seminar’s chair (they were in the seats behind this writer) he proceeded calmly through Zimbabwe’s history and its post-liberation lessons. Regarding the Cold War, he opined: ‘choices of friends and perceived enemies were made on bi-polar considerations beyond our internal contradictions.’ Thus the Gukurahundi massacres ‘did not excite necessary international outrage’. Enigmatic? As for the nature of the post-1980 regime: ‘universal suffrage has virtually been replaced by universal control by a powerful President and ruling clique’, and the ruling party does not even entertain ‘peaceful change in government through free and fair elections’. Democratic. ZANU–PF’s ‘“winner takes all” culture in which outwitting competitors is given priority over goal-oriented collaboration’ has become so pervasive that it has infected ‘models for collaboration among the opposition parties’. Co-operative. (It should be noted that in the spirit of such collaboration Dabengwa entertained months of discussions with the ‘war vet’ component of the 11/17 coup planners, some of whom hoped to fashion a shared mode of governance in a post-Mugabe era. The winners put paid to any such plans, however – Dabengwa 2018; cf. Brickhill 2019.) Inclusive: in spite of all Zimbabwe’s postcolonial problems, ‘the armed struggle restored dignity to those previously automatically relegated to inferior class and social status in a racially stratified state.’ Finally, ‘an independent people have acquired the inalienable right to determine their course, with ups and downs’: that idea encompasses both international and popular ideas of sovereignty.
It also resonates with a long view of history. This brings one to the notion of the National Democratic Revolution. It is the theoretical compromise with which Marxists must wrestle when their ideology and the Cold War come into contact with the ‘organic’ socio-economic processes in social formations such as Zimbabwe’s: they are hardly capitalist enough to pave the way to socialism (Moore 2015a; 2019d). To be sure, the ideology is often taken as an excuse for new rulers to get rich in the quickest way possible, perhaps with the illusion that crony-capitalism might develop the forces of production (Southall 2004). It allows for mistakes, too, as Dabengwa noted the result of Zimbabwe’s ‘fast-track’ land reform programme (FTLRP). On the list of pros and cons regarding the armed struggles’ worth, he noted that the post-2000 FTLRP had enabled party affiliates to ‘acquire or grab economic assets that had been reserved for people of European origin’. Unfortunately, this ‘necessary land redistribution’ was ‘brutal and poorly implemented from both an economic point of view and reverse racism whose consequences are the decimation of commercial agriculture and resulting food insecurity’. Maybe it created a yeoman class and the roots of an agrarian bourgeoisie with the ‘national question’ resolved – but it is too early to tell, and decades of lost opportunity costs have accrued.
In the relatively clean hands of someone such as Dr Dabengwa, however, patience is the order of the day. Indeed, his speech at the Wits conference harkened back to the words with which he responded to the prosecutor at his 1983 trial. He was asked if he thought it was possible that arms had been cached; he replied that some ex-combatants may have done so in fear of an attack from ZANU–PF. The prosecutor opined that such a response indicated Dabengwa’s insincerity about unity. ‘That sort of unity’, retorted Dabengwa, ‘is not attained at a stroke of a pen, overnight’ (Lelyveld 1983).
The wine-soaked students left, noisily, long before the Black Russian finished his speech. Perhaps they reminded Dabengwa of the Young Turks in 1971 who challenged him and his squabbling political leaders: 20 years later at a University of Zimbabwe conference on the liberation war (Bhebe and Ranger 1995) he remarked in passing that some of the liberation war soldier-politicians were in a bit of a hurry.
II.
The December 2018 launch of the Dr Dumiso Dabengwa Foundation in Bulawayo indicated one of ZAPU’s enduring ideological beliefs. The public inauguration of Dr DD’s second institutional legacy, as he was preparing to retire from ZAPU politics at its 2020 congress, presented many awards to recognise the contributions of struggle stalwarts and human rights activists. The array included one that spoke to ZAPU’s liberal, non-racial, cross-African – and perhaps even Marxist – heritage. As the foundation put it, ‘The Highest Honor [sic] in the Order of Sir Garfield Todd Award’ was offered to
anyone who took the side of the vulnerable, marginalized or oppressed when their plight did not directly affect them. The individual must have confronted and or spoken against injustice regardless of the fact that they themselves are not affected. (Hanana 2018)
Appropriately enough, the award was presented to Judith Todd, Garfield’s daughter, and well known in her own right for her bold interventions locally and globally, pre- and post-1980 (Todd 2007). A Tweet from the foundation director Mthulisi Hanana summed up a key component – and maybe a contradiction that holds within it a true dialectic of thesis and anti-thesis – within ZAPU ideology. When announcing the Todd award, Hanana (2018) wrote that Garfield Todd ‘was accused of being too pro-Blacks. He suffered for and with the Blacks. South Africa had Joe Slovo, we had Garfield Todd.’ No one can deny the long and generally positive relations between people of all races in ZAPU’s history, in spite of the escalation of racial antagonism in Rhodesian society at large after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (and perhaps ZANU) set liberalism back a few generations. Both Susan Woodhouse’s biography of Garfield Todd (2018; Southall 2019) and Joshua Pritchard’s broader doctoral thesis (2018) attest to this.
But in the ideological realm does a Todd equal a Slovo? Todd was liberal to the end, although he moved irrevocably closer to ZAPU and eventually accepted the need for, and assisted, the sort of armed struggle in which Slovo took a more active part. Slovo was a Marxist in the Soviet mould, hardly a liberal. Perhaps it is wise to remember, in discussions such as these, that in South Africa it used to be said that communists were liberals in a hurry – and that in the wake of Zuma/Gupta ‘state capture’ many have become more liberal than statist. It should also be noted that the founders of Marxism assumed capitalism would come first and with it the liberal verities of freedom of speech etc., not to mention a working class with an advanced level of critical consciousness. At one level alone, people need to debate varieties of economic policies and practice: Marxists would join in on the range from state capitalism to Keynesian formulae, but probably not neoliberalism if they are interested in keeping poverty at bay in the short and medium term. This would be the case as much in an ‘underdeveloped’ society as in a late capitalist one – although in both, those of a Marxist bent would be more aware than most of the interested, if not class-bound, nature of debates. If these liberties were dying Marxists would be among the first to defend their obligation to speak the truth to power and should be unwilling to abandon that stance when they gained it. Kept to its premises, there is nothing in the ideology of the National Democratic Revolution idea that makes Stalinism inevitable (Moore 2012) – except that the very reason for considering it at all is that the preliminary process of the usually violent primitive accumulation has not been completed (Moore 2019d). This is not a minor issue: the birth-pangs of capitalism are considerable; so too were those of Russian, Chinese, and other distortions that veered too far from democracy to be considered seriously as models. Perhaps the question should be: does ubuntu fare worse during the first stages of capitalist transformation than the NDR (cf. Metz 2007)?
Two more notions could be advanced presaging a long philosophical discussion or a retreat to magical realism. They come from a resident, activist and philosopher in a very unevenly developed society. First: when ideologies ‘born in a highly developed country [are] disseminated in less developed countries, impinging upon the local interplay of combinations’ they create ‘new, unique, and historically concrete combinations’. Second: if political parties or social movements (or individual polemicists) do not ‘distinguish between historically organic ideologies … necessary to a given structure, and ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”’ (Gramsci 1971, 182, 367–368) then they will be in big trouble. Gramsci’s advice is applicable to missionaries for secular and religious ideologies in Africa alike (Moore 2014c). They had better be prepared for a lot of ‘travelling theory’ (Said 1975) – and reversals of influence from centre to periphery to vice versa (Gopal 2019).
III.
With Dabengwa’s last public event we return to the discussions occasioned by the funeral of the person who may well have caused him more trouble than anyone else. As March 2019 came to a close, the Black Russian revealed to an Umkhonto We Sizwe meeting that ZAPU had indeed cached some arms: for the MK (Bulawayo24 News 2019b). Thus Dabengwa and his comrades faced treason trials. ZAPU also assisted approximately 150 MK cadres to stay in Zimbabwe and/or with safe passage to wage their struggle, rather than force them to leave, as the new government had agreed with South Africa (cf. Simpson 2016, 264–265). Dabengwa appealed to the ANC in South Africa to ‘acknowledge this history’. ‘Sorry for the messed up attempt at “quiet diplomacy”’ could be added while at it (Moore 2010).
Such recognition might help the Black Russian rest in a sleep deeper than otherwise. It might also serve to hasten the emerging discussions about how to restore memory, peace, and justice to Matabeleland. Reg Austin (2019) – a long-time legal advisor and otherwise activist for the ZAPU and Zimbabwean cause – put it this way: ‘Dumiso’s death is a severe and painful loss, but might provide an opportunity to inject (at last?) mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance, rather than perpetual polarisation, as the basis for democratic government.’ A few honest words from south of Zimbabwe – from the party with a long alliance with the first national liberation movement in Zimbabwe, with which DD was engaged from Day One of concerted action – could nudge that perilous process.