Zimbabwe:The End of the First Republic

Zimbabwe:

the end of the first republic

Jacob W. Chikuhwa

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© 2013 by Jacob W. Chikuhwa. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 11/21/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7967-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8663-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7968-9 (e)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Acronyms

Prologue

PART ONE: NATION BUILDING

Chapter1.  African Nationalism And The Liberation War

Chapter2.  The Post-Colonial Administration

Chapter3.  Current Judicial And Democratic Dispensation

Chapter4.  Drive For A Home-Grown Constitution

PART TWO: ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

Chapter5.  Planning And Liberalisation Of The Economy

Chapter6.  Foreign-Currency Earners

Chapter7.  The Scourge Of Monopolies

Chapter8.  Economic Empowerment

Bibliography

For those who died for the struggle for democracy

in Zimbabwe.

May their souls rest in peace?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go to book authors and compilers of reports, journal and newspaper articles and friends in both the public and private sectors that were a source of the data and information that helped me write this book. If there are copyright owners, whose permission I have not asked or those I have not acknowledged, I beg their indulgence. I hope they will overlook, on this account, my inadvertent omission.

Pastors Doug and Jodi Fondell have often had to bear the brunt of my frustration and rages against the world and human right abuses with equanimity and friendship.

I wish I could find a way to properly acknowlwdge my wife, son and daughter for all the support and encouragement they offered me during my writing career. To call it mere moral and material support is to diminish the importance of their contribution. Together, they wove a net beneath my tightrope which—quite simply—I would not have been able to write the books in my shelf. I do not know how to repay them.

Last but not least, I want to thank members of staff at AuthorHouse for the sterling effort they have put in making the publication of this book a reality.

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people and organisations in this world that sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it is wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we live on this earth.

I have been very fortunate; much to be grateful for. We all have gratitudes and regrets. But we just ask that in the end, God’s grace shines upon us.

Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in Musikavanhu (God), who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. (1 Timothy 6:17)

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1)

ACRONYMS

PROLOGUE

Historical dates reveal that the present-day Zimbabwe was originally occupied by people of three cultures: Gokomere, Ziwa and Leopard’s Kopje.

The Gokomere Culture

The Gokomere Culture in Zimbabwe flourished from AD 200 to about AD 850. With its centre at Masvingo, the Gokomere Culture had sites throughout Mashonaland and southern Matabeleland. Channelled and stamped Gokomere pottery has also been excavated in Botswana and the northern Gauteng, formerly Transvaal.

The Ziwa Culture

The earliest radiocarbon date for Ziwa shows that it flourished from AD 300 to about AD 1010. The Ziwa Culture was named after a site on the slopes of Mount Ziwa, a 1,745-metre-high mountain in the Nyanga District. Many sites are concentrated by the headwaters of the Mazowe and its tributaries. Ziwa ware has been found as far west as Arcturus and also occurs in northern Mashonaland, as far north as the Zambezi escarpment.

The Leopard’s Kopje Culture

The Leopard’s Kopje Culture flourished between AD 420 and 1050. Based at Khami, the Leopard’s Kopje Culture was identified throughout Matabeleland, in parts of the Midlands, in Botswana and in the Limpopo Valley. The Gokomere, Ziwa and Leopard’s Kopje peoples were broadly contemporary with each other.

The Abyssinian Naval Expeditions

The Abyssinian king of Axum regularly sent naval expeditions to Sasos, the name given to the country now known as the Republic of Zimbabwe. The purpose of these naval expeditions, undertaken about AD 211, was to barter oxen, salt and iron for gold. According to the C14 dating, this trading took place during the period when Great Zimbabwe was being built.

Discoveries from Gokomere, Ziwa and Leopard’s Kopje sites show that construction in stone was a normal feature of the indigenous miners’ culture. Besides stone buildings, field walling for cattle kraals was common. These sites are scattered throughout Zimbabwe (Chibvumani or Hubvumi ruins in the Bikita district, the Gombe Mountain ruin in the Buhera district, Dhlo Dhlo ruins, near Fort Rixon). They extend into Botswana (Domboshaba on the Bulawayo-Mafeking line, Lotsani ruins on the junction of the Lotsani and Limpopo Rivers), and into the northern Gauteng and Mozambique. Every known ruin has positive evidence of Bantu occupation. No stone buildings have been found north of the Zambezi.

Shona Migration

It appears that Iron Age peoples were moving southwards into the highveld of South Africa in the late first millennium, if not earlier. The Shona are recorded to have moved southwards into what is now known as Zimbabwe during the late first millennium about AD 850. Radiocarbon tests show that the Shona occupied Great Zimbabwe in AD 850. Thus, Great Zimbabwe remained into modern times as a major cult-centre for the Shona peoples of modern Zimbabwe, who are the descendants of the people of its imperial greatness, but it was never again a centre of political importance.

Shona is considered part of central, eastern and southern Africa, where we find the Bantu language cluster. Historically, the Shona have tended to identify themselves as members of dialects such as Karanga, Manyika and Zezuru, or smaller groupings such as Shavasha and Korekore.

The new arrivals intermixed and employed their predecessors as cattle herders and ironworkers. Excavations have shown that the material culture and economy of these people featured cultivation, livestock-raising, metal-working and ‘stamped ware’ pottery. The villagers used small furnaces, some with domed tops, to smelt iron ore. Armed with the mining knowledge of their more experienced indigenous Iron Age neighbours, the Shona located copper and gold deposits, producing ornaments for their own use and trade.

The Munhumutapa Empire

The Great Zimbabwe structure had been emulated by a number of competing dynasties. Three of these dynasties seem to have achieved major success, each for a time achieving hegemony over an area of the same sort of size as that dominated by the rulers of Great Zimbabwe. These were the Munhumutapa or Mutapa dynasty of the early 1420s; the Torwa dynasty of the 15th century which occupied the area known as Butwa; and the Rozvi (Changamire) dynasty of the 16th century.

Munhumutapa—master pillager—was a name successors of the dynasty adopted as a dynastic title. This was the creation of a ruling group which, with its followers, moved northwards off the plateau in the early 15th century to conquer and dominate the Tawara peoples of the southern side of the middle Zambezi valley between Tete and Zumbo. The Munhumutapa State was established in the Dande region by Mutota Nyatsimba, the son of a Shona ruler from the southern, Guruhuswa region.

Portuguese Penetration

From an early date (about 1555), the Portuguese saw the advantage in using the power of the Munhumutapa to gain access to the wealth of all the northern Shona, and they were still using their treaties with the Munhumutapa to this end in the 1890s.

While the Munhumutapa Empire disintegrated following active Portuguese penetration between about 1575 and 1666, the Changamire dynasty, possibly in alliance with Muslim traders operating up the Savé Valley, prospered and gained ground, and eventually, at the end of the seventeenth century, expelled the Portuguese from their interior trading fairs in the highlands.

The Ngoni Invations

During the 1820s and 1830s, the Changamire State was at its decline in the wake of political disruption mainly due to Ngoni invasions. Ngoni has been loosely applied to all the various Nguni-speaking migrant bands of the Mfecane era. In its narrower and more proper sense, the name applies only to migrant bands led by Zwangendaba, Nyamazana, Maseko and Nxaba, all of whom passed through present Zimbabwe during the 1830s. Other names by which the Ngoni were known in central Africa during the nineteenth century include Landeen and Madzviti.

These had a big impact on Shona rulers of the Makombe, Mutasa and Makoni dynasties in the east; the Mangwende, Svosve and Chinamora dynasties of north-east and central Zimbabwe; the Korekore and Nanzwa dynasties in the north and the Karanga and Kalanga dynasties of the south and south west of Zimbabwe.

The Concession Hunters

It is during the 1880s that other European empirical powers (especially the British) started to scramble for a stake in the regions above the Limpopo River. At that time, European entrepreneurs and adventurers known as concessionaries beleaguered African rulers throughout southern Africa for concessionary rights to mine, to monopolise trade, to cut timber, and to hunt, especially for the elephant.

Andries Hendrik Potgieter made a treaty with Mzilikazi in 1853 and then this was followed by the Transvaal Boers who signed the Grobler Treaty with Lobengula on the 30th of July 1887. Following this, John Smith Moffat signed a treaty with the Ndebele King on the 11th of February 1888. The document, later to be known as the Moffat Treaty, merely reaffirmed the terms of Mzilikazi’s 1836 treaty of friendship with the British government.

Finally, on the 30th of October 1888, the Rudd Concession was signed by Lobengula and by Charlse Dunell Rudd, F. R. Thompson and J. R. Maguire as agents of Cecil John Rhodes. Acquisition of the Concession by a syndicate comprising Rhodes, Rudd and Thompson led directly to the formation of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and its Royal Charter in 1889. The signing of this document was used to conclusively exclude European imperial competitors from the territory north of the Limpopo River.

The Charter Company Regime

After the BSAC occupied Mashonaland with its Pioneer Column on September 12, 1890, the validity of the Rudd Concession became less important, as British occupation was an accomplished fact. Between 1893 and 1897, a large part of the country’s population rose in violent rebellion against white settlers and the BSAC administration. These wars became known as the Ndebele War and Chindunduma or Chimurenga.

When the dust had finally settled, Britain introduced representative government in Southern Rhodesia on the 20th of October 1898, with the creation of a Legislative Council. For more than three decades, Zimbabwe was ruled by a private company owned by Cecil John Rhodes, from whose name the country derived its name. What this means is that during that period there was no constitution that governed the affairs of the country.

The British Crown Colony

It was not until the 12th of September 1923 that Southern Rhodesia was declared a British Crown Colony and Charles Coghlan was sworn in as first premier on the 1st of October with John Robert Chancellor the first Governor.

From 1924 to 1965, the country’s main government body became known as the Legislative Assembly, modelled after the British House of Commons. An important clause in this Responsible Government Constitution was that the British Government retained the same reserved powers over legislation affecting African rights that it held over the Charter Company (BSAC) regime. In addition, this constitution formalised the African reserves created by the Charter Company and the 1930 Land Apportionment Act enlarged the reserves’ total area slightly, with the result that they accounted for about 22.4 percent of the whole country.

After countless attempts by African nationalists during the 1950s and 1960s to have Africans incorporated in the Legislative Assembly, it was decided to take up arms in 1964 to fight the colonial regime. The Rhodesian regime led by Ian Smith responded by proclaiming Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence on November 11, 1965 against the British Crown.

Ignoring the military advances and success by the guerrilla forces based in Mozambique and Zambia and world opinion, Ian Smith concluded an internal settlement with African moderates. The 1978 internal settlement resulted in a short-lived Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with Bishop Abel Muzorewa as its Prime Minister.

The Republic of Zimbabwe

Ultimately, the bitter civil war, that lasted until 1979 led to the Lancaster House Conference where a constitution was hammered to hand over power to the majority African population. This led to the country’s independence as the Republic of Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980.

For 28 years, Zimbabwe was a de facto one-party State ruled by the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) led by Robert Mugabe. However, with the emergence of the Movement for Democratic Change on September 11, 1999, there was a political crisis. For the first time since independence, ZANU-PF found its monopoly on power challenged.

Within nine months after its formation, the MDC almost won parliamentary elections in June 2000 capturing 57 seats against ZANU-PF’s 62 out of the 120 contested seats with ZANU (Ndonga) collecting one seat. The MDC gave the ruling party a run for its money leaving many veteran politicians fallen by the wayside. The resounding defeat of several ZANU-PF provincial chairmen and senior members of the women’s league in the 2000 general election may have signalled an abrupt end to their political careers and the lifespan of the ruling party.

In the March 29, 2008 elections, Morgan Tsvangirai failed to garner more than 50 percent of the vote needed to take power under the country’s electoral laws. However, independent observers and political analysts believe that Tsvangirai won an outright and convincing victory over Mugabe. Social media reports said Tsvangirai garnered 67 percent of the vote compared to Mugabe’s mere 28.7 percent. The fact that it took the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission five weeks to announce the presidential result, was proof enough that the commission, in collaboration with the ruling party, doctored the final figures to force a re-run.

The Government of National Unity

History has already recorded that Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in a race in which Mugabe controlled everything except the will of the people. At some stage, the will of the people must and should be respected. By signing the Global Political Agreement (GPA) on September 15, 2008, which led to the Government of National Unity (GNU) on February 13, 2009, Robert Mugabe signalled the end of the First Republic. The GPA envisaged that an election in Zimbabwe would only be held following the finalisation of a new home-grown constitution. To that end a constitutional parliamentary committee comprising 25 members was appointed to begin work on a new constitution on 14 April, 2009.

Meanwhile, the felling of Zimbabwe’s famed colonial-era Hanging Tree where Mbuya Nehanda is said to have been hanged at the intersection of Sam Nujoma Street and Josiah Tongogara Avenue in Harare revived legends and superstitions and had many believing it signalled a new era for this troubled southern African nation. The 200-year-old Msasa tree, declared a historic site and national monument, fell on December 7, 2011 after it was hit by a workers’ truck and collapsed in the middle of the street. Its toppling over was believed to signal the dawn of a new era of truth on past injustices, including Nehanda’s execution.

Mbuya Nehanda is widely believed to be the greatest spirit medium of Zimbabwe having led the First Chimurenga and ordered the killing of Native Commissioner Henry Pollard in 1897 known for his brutality towards blacks—a deed which led her to be sentenced to death by hanging. She is upheld by highly superstitious Zimbabweans as the country’s greatest symbol of black resistance to colonial rule. Since independence, Mbuya Nehanda has been revered with statues erected in the House of Assembly and main government buildings, and streets have been named after her in all of Zimbabwe’s cities and towns.

Wrongs of the present and the past have victimized millions and generated deep bitterness. Addressing those wrongs will require truth and accountability. Without them, justice will be impossible—and without justice, peace, even the adoption of a new home-grown constitution will be dominated by a fragile atmosphere.

Zimbabwe: the End of the First Republic examines nation building in Zimbabwe with emphasis on the rise of African nationalism and the liberation war; the post-colonial administration and current judicial and democratic dispensation with emphasis on the effects of the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act. An analysis of Zimbabwean aspiration for a home-grown national constitution concludes part one of the book. Thus, the promulgation of a new home-grown constitution brings to an end the First Republic that has been in existence for 33 years on the baisi of the amended Lancaster House Constitution.

Part two examines economic performance with emphasis on planning and liberalisation of the economy; foreign-currency earners as reflected by agriculture, mining and tourism. There is then an analysis of the scourge of monopolies that has brought about the need for privatisation of State Enterprises and Parastatals (SEPs). This part concludes with the programme of economic empowerment that is directed at the indigenisation of Zimbabwe’s economy.

It is believed that it is going to take at least 15 years to resuscitate Zimbabwe’s battered economy. Twenty-eight years of ZANU-PF de facto one-party rule led to the destruction of the entire socio-economic infrastructure. Hospitals and education institutions have become dysfunctional. Communication networks—telephone and road—are derelict. Sewage and water reticulation systems are so damaged that diseases such as cholera, dysentery and diarrhoea are a common occurrence.

The agro-tourism sector has been disseminated to such an extent that even irrigation systems are no longer functional. Game reserves and wildlife have been disseminated. From a bread basket, Zimbabwe has turned into a begging bowel depending on international hand outs for food. The manufacturing sector which depends on agricultural inputs is operating at 30 percent capacity and many companies have closed, throwing 95 percent of workers out of work.

About four million Zimbabweans have left the country because of the economic collapse and political violence. Having inherited a strong economy, what many Zimbabweans expected was that once the war of liberation was won ordinary people would develop the country to its full potential, namely self-sufficiency in food, availability of jobs, roads, hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, technical colleges, houses, a free press and democracy. Most of these aspirations have not been achieved.

The adoption of a new home-grown constitution has rekindled hope for an equitable redistribution of wealth, especially based on a balanced land reform programme. Zimbabwe has such an abundance of human, mineral and other natural resources that the country is capable of building a strong socio-economic foundation for future generations.

May, 2013.

PART ONE:

NATION BUILDING

CHAPTER 1

AFRICAN NATIONALISM AND THE LIBERATION WAR

The post-conflict nation building efforts in Zimbabwe had a specific dimension dictated by the need to unify different forces that had been involved in civil wars for over nine decades. Although African nationalist forces were defeated during the First Chimurenga in 1897, the quest for an African idendity was never eliminated. The Second Chimurenga that started in 1964 sought to advance the objectives of African nationalism.

The quality of government that emerged once the colonial military occupation had ended in 1980 and the aid received from the international community for the purpose of nation building were tailored by a policy of reconciliation. In a country with three antagonistic armies—the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army and the Rhodesian Army—there was a need for diplomatic balancing.

Nation building in Zimbabwe involved the process of constructing or structuring a national identity using the power of the State. This process was focused on the unification of the different ethnic groups within the new republic so that it became both politically and economically stable and viable in the long run. At a deeper level, national identity needed to be deliberately constructed by molding different groups into a nation, especially since colonialism had used divide and rule tactics to maintain its domination. Colonial territories in Africa had been carved out by colonial powers without regard to ethnic boundaries. These emerging states had to become a viable and coherent national entity.

Nation building also involved major infrastructure development to foster social harmony and economic growth. This included the creation of superficial national paraphernalia such as flags, anthems, national days, national stadiums, national airlines, national languages, and national myths. Zimbabwe is fortunate in having only two major ethnic languages—Shona and Ndebele—as compared to its northern neighbour, Zambia with almost 45 different entnic languages.

Many new African states were plagued by tribalism, rivalry between ethnic groups within the nation. This sometimes resulted in their near-disintegration, such as the attempt by Biafra to secede from Nigeria in 1970, or the continuing demand of the Somali people in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia for complete independence. In Asia, the disintegration of India into Pakistan and Bangladesh is another example where ethnic differences, aided by geographic distance, tore apart a post-colonial state. The Rwandan genocide as well as the recurrent problems experienced by the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sudan can also be related to a lack of ethnic, religious, or racial cohesion within the nation. It has often proved difficult to unite states with similar ethnic but different colonial backgrounds. Whereas successful examples like Cameroon do exist, failures like Senegambia Confederation demonstrate the problems of uniting Francophone and Anglophone territories.

In 1921, when Britain was preparing to take over Southern Rhodesia as a British Crown Colony, there was virtually no organised African opposition to the idea of European settlers assuming power in a Responsible-Government. The Buxton Commission of March 1921 set up by the then British Secretary of State for Colonies, Winston Churchill, recommended a responsible-government constitution. An important recommendation was that the British government retains the same reserved powers over legislation affecting African rights that it held over the BSAC regime. In a referendum on October 27, 1922, responsible government was approved by 8,774 voters, while 5,989 voted for union with South Africa. At the most, about 60 Africans were then eligible to vote.

Nevertheless, African nationalism was emerging among various African elitist circles in southern Africa. The African National Congress had already been established in 1912 in South Africa because of the overt oppression that had been in existence in that country. This had a big influence on Southern Rhodesia’s Africans who were migrant workers in South African cities.

In 1922 the Rhodesian Bantu Voters’ Association (RBVA) was founded by mostly elitist Ndebele, Mfengu and other immigrant African leaders. With Abraham Twala, a Zulu Anglican teacher from South Africa as the initiator, the RBVA rejected violent protest movements, seeking instead to draw Africans into active participation in territorial electoral politics. The association held its inaugural meeting at Gweru (then known as Gwelo) on January 20, 1923.

When Southern Rhodesia was declared a British Crown Colony on September 12, 1923, Africans began to develop aspirations for gradual reforms in colonial institutions. The founding document of the RBVA asserted the organisation’s respectful intention to co-operate with the government in a peaceful effort to uplift the condition of the country’s African peoples. Since fewer than sixty Africans were then registered voters, the RBVA sought a wider membership to demonstrate broader African support. Nevertheless, the government dismissed the organisation as an unrepresentative body dominated by foreigners bent on agitating local Africans.

In 1929, the RBVA participated in a meeting with leaders of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and other African organisations, but efforts to create a unified congress movement failed. The ICU, founded as the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Rhodesia in 1927, was one of the most important forerunners of modern mass nationalism in Zimbabwe. Despite its name, ICU never developed into a true trade union organisation, but instead grew as a quasi-political movement, calling for united African resistance to white oppression and demanding higher wages and better working conditions generally.

In response to Southern Rhodesian African appeals for assistance in organising a trade union movement, Clemens Kadalie, the head of the then enormously powerful South African ICU, sent Robert Sambo and Mansell Mphamba, two fellow Nyasalanders, to Bulawayo to start the movement there. Sambo was soon deported and Mphamba left on his own account, but ICU leadership was quickly taken up by local workers. The first chairman was Thomas Sikaleni Mazula, but S. Masotsha Ndhlovu, Charles Mzingeli and Job Dumbutshena were the most assertive and powerful leaders by 1929.

Efforts to recruit agricultural workers were abandoned in 1930 and ICU achieved no success in reaching workers in the tightly-controlled mining compounds, despite Dumbutshena’s earnest efforts. These activities were regarded unlawful by the colonial authorities.

While these events were taking place, Aaron Rusike Jacha formed the African Farmers’ Union in about 1933 to represent the interests of private farmers in Purchase Areas. In 1934, he founded the Bantu Congress, predecessor of the ‘old’ African National Congress (ANC). Though this organisation had been inspired by the large ANC of South Africa, it attracted a small membership. Its political goals were modest, featuring mainly appeals for exemption of educated Africans from discriminatory laws. Its leaders protested the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1934, but registered approval of the Land Apportionment Act (1930) before the Bledisloe Commission.

Under the leadership of T. D. Samkange, the movement experienced a minor resurgence after the Second World War (1939-45), by which time it was known as the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress. The ANC failed to catch on as a national mass movement, however, and was moribund by the early 1950s. Only the Bulawayo branch of the ANC survived the defection of leaders to multiracial, Federation-oriented parties and societies and that branch operated mainly as a social organisation.

In about July 1947, Benjamin Burombo organised the African Workers’ Voice Association. He had come to Bulawayo during the early 1940s after having worked in Johannesburg, South Africa. In Bulawayo he ran a small store and began assisting farmers to resist government destocking measures. He played an active role in organising and negotiating the general strike of 1948 in Bulawayo. Afterwards he used his organisation to concentrate on rural issues. By this time he had been joined by George Nyandoro. They attained notable success in opposing implementation of the Land Apportionment Act and the Native Land Husbandry Act, but the government merely responded by amending the laws to overcome the loopholes which they found. In 1952 the Voice Association was banned under the terms of the Subversive Activities Act of 1950.

There were reformists in both the African and European societies who aspired for interracial partnership in the socio-economic development of Southern Rhodesia. The aspirations in question were those of liberals and moderates as well as colonial outsiders, often Britons, sympathetic to gradual reforms, not least elite education in secondary schools. The black elites resulting from schooling at such premier institutions as Fourah Bay College (1827), Freetown, Sierra Leone, Makerere College (1911), Kampala, Uganda, Fort Hare (1916), Eastern Cape, South Africa, Goromonzi, Kutama, Old Umtali and St Augustine’s assimilated western mores while shaping their own destiny, something apparent from their later political militancy.

As a result of these liberal and moderate thinking, 1949 saw the founding of the Capricorn Africa Society, a multi-racial organisation, by Col. David Stirling. The Society’s main goal was to foster a sense of non-racial African identity throughout central and east Africa. It proposed a franchise system in which multiple votes would be awarded to citizens on the basis of civic contribution—a system recognising the ideal of universal suffrage, while assuring that whites would retain political dominance.

The Society’s identification with the ‘partnership’ principles of the muted Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland made ‘Capricornist’ a dirty word among Africans north of the Zambezi. Leading African members, such as Leopold Takawira drifted into more militant African organisations. It ceased operations in 1965 after the death of the Federation in 1963.

In 1951, the All-Africa Convention was formed as a political organisation to co-operate with Northern Rhodesian and Nyasalander groups opposing the creation of the Federation. The Convention joined together representatives of other organisations, such as the African National Congress, Reformed Industrial and Commercial Union and trade unions. Charles Mzingeli was made interim president. Other leaders included George Nyandoro (provisional Secretary), Benjamin Burombo, Joshua Nkomo and Stanlake Samkange.

Joshua Nkomo later accompanied Godfrey Huggins to London in order to represent African opinion concerning the Federation. He denounced Federation plans on his return home, but a year later contested the Matabeleland seat in the Federal Assembly, only to lose to Mike M. Hove. The All-Africa Convention, however, quickly faded into obscurity after the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953.

The reformist aspirations, also known as multiracialism advocated by such African nationalists as Joshua Nkomo, led Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister, Edgar Whitehead, in 1961 to promulgate a new constitution, granting blacks 15 of 65 seats in a white Parliament that had controlled Rhodesian affairs since 1923, subject to British reserved clauses. Enfranchised under Whitehead’s constitution in 1962 were 13,019 Africans, whereas the earlier 1923 constitution as late as 1958 had enfranchised just 580 blacks. Possibly 50,000 blacks and 90,000 whites could have voted in 1962, but fewer than 2,600 blacks participated in that year’s elections.

With Roy Welensky becoming the leading advocate of Federation in Northern Rhodesia, African objections were largely ignored and the British Parliament approved a federal constitution in March 1953. On April 9, a Southern Rhodesian referendum ruled in favour of Federation by a vote of 25,580 to 14,929. Only a few hundred Africans were able to vote on the issue. In September, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was inaugurated with Huggins as Federal Prime Minister and Gafield Todd succeeded Huggins as Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister.

In the Federal Legislature, there were 35 members, 29 of who were Europeans representing a few thousand whites. The millions of Africans in the three territories were represented by only six black representatives. As soon as the Federation was created, Africans began to campaign for its dissolution. When Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland gained responsible governments, the Federation was dissolved on December 31, 1963. However, Sir Roy Welensky, then the Federal Prime Minister, desperately tried to save the Federation from collapse, but in vain.

Africans like Mike Hove, Jasper Savanhu, Stanlake Samkange, Lawrence Vambe, and Patrick Rubatika had endorsed what by the 1960s were fast becoming multiracial illusions. Multiracialists of the 1950s, though, enjoyed legitimacy many now find incredible. Multiracial ex-Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins backed Whitehead’s 1961 constitution. The proposals were regarded by the moderate Africans as a step forward and these were the Africans prepared and willing to work with the Europeans in the political sphere to build up the country, so that there may be a representative Parliament preserving the (civilized) standards the whites had created, and leading to that progress which would create the necessary wealth to enable more and more people to advance from their present state.

What civilization meant was British-style democracy, adapted to local conditions, emerging not merely through increased numbers of civilized persons—the literate, moderate and westernized—but also spreading throughout a society where such people came to constitute a critical mass.

Meanwhile, the growing radical African nationalists had other ideas. Just two years after the creation of the Federation, the Youth League (City Youth League) was founded in Salisbury in August 1955. Now regarded as the country’s first truly modern nationalist movement, the YL was founded as a civic organisation; the Harare Youth Club. Under the leadership of James Chikerema, George Nyandoro, Edson Sithole and Dunduza Chisiza (a Nyasaland immigrant who was later deported), the YL quickly developed into a mass political movement active in both towns and rural areas.

Attending the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Chikerema became active in student protest movements. After the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa in 1948, Chikerema returned to Southern Rhodesia. Leading the YL, he successfully contested the political influence of Charles Mzingeli, ignoring purely trade union issues while challenging the very authority of the government to rule over Africans. In August 1956, the YL organised a successful bus boycott in Salisbury (now Harare). A year later the League merged with the Bulawayo branch of the old ANC to launch a revitalised and more aggressive ANC.

On September 12, 1957, the new ANC was founded with Joshua Nkomo as president and James Chikerema, vice president. Other early leaders included Jason Ziyapapa Moyo and George Nyandoro. The new ANC quickly attracted mass support in both urban and rural areas throughout the country. Employing strictly constitutional means of seeking redress, the ANC protested the pass laws, Native Land Husbandry Act and other discriminatory laws and it demanded universal adult suffrage.

Non-racial in orientation, the ANC attracted more than one hundred European members, including Guy Clutton-Brock who later became the only European arrested because of ANC activities. His ashes were scattered at Harare’s National Heroes’ Acre after his death on 28 January, 1995.

Alarmed by civil disturbances north of the Zambezi and by supposed subversive influence of the ANC, particularly in rural areas, Edgar Whitehead’s government declared a state of emergency and arrested nearly five hundred ANC leaders in a sudden morning sweep on February 26, 1959. The government banned the ANC, later passing the Unlawful Organisation Act further to restrict ANC leaders. Joshua Nkomo was out of the country when all these arrests and restrictions were carried out.

Before acculturated elite patience wore thin, multiracial blacks and liberal whites attempted bridge building between cosseted white worlds and those of disadvantaged blacks. Bridge-builders of the 1950s included Garfleld Todd, Robert Tredgold, Roy Welensky and Edgar Whitehead. They disagreed over the value of African elite achievement, and the pace at which civilization was or should spread, but they saw eye-to-eye on the need to be free of outside interference, racial prejudice, and material want.

Multiracialists shared boundless optimism: a conviction that racial harmony was the way to a prosperous future. They offered to the civilized privileges such as qualified voting rights. Multiracialists hoped black voting would expand according to 19th-century British precedents: namely, the reform acts of 1832, 1868, 1884 and 1918 that had enfranchised a self-improving British working class. Such sentiment reflected a belief that however urgent, reform must be gradual, lest anarchy would threaten stability.

In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod denied Rhodesians the support that might have allowed Federal Prime Minister Roy Welensky to defeat Northern Rhodesia’s Zambian nationalist leader Kenneth Kaunda. If beyond 1961 Northern Rhodesia had stayed in the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, federal dominion status, self-government within the British Empire, might have been secured.

An early charge whites laid against the mother country, therefore, was Britain’s failure to repress Zambian nationalism in Northern Rhodesia: a British protectorate, not like Southern Rhodesia a self-governing colony. By rushing after dominion status in 1960, though, Rhodesians—75,000 in Northern, 223,000 in Southern Rhodesia—showed themselves purblind. Their haste frustrated British advocacy of a Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland that was already breaking-up, inflaming black suspicions of white designs to be free of British oversight.

Unlike 1910 when South Africa attained dominion status, 298,000 Rhodesians could not win independence and legitimacy without securing black rights by irreversible steps to majority rule. Lost with growing racial intractability was the hope of Southern Rhodesia, let alone Federation, ever seeing whites and blacks accept compromise as a means of keeping belief in eventual racial equity alive. Where there could be no compromise, there could only be violence.

Leftists within the African nationalist movement were no longer in a mood for compromise. They countered the banning of the reformist ANC by founding the National Democratic Party (NDP) on January1, 1960. With most of the ANC leadership under government arrest, the NDP introduced such new leaders as Josiah Mushore Chinamano, Herbert Chitepo, Michael Mawema, Robert Mugabe, Samuel Tichafa Parirenyatwa, Leopold Takawira, Enos Nkala, Ndabaningi Sithole and Reuben Jamela. Joshua Nkomo was elected president in absentia.

The NDP differed from its predecessor, the ANC, in making a more direct attack on the constitutional basis of minority rule. Although it succeeded in having the Native Land Husbandry Act abolished, it concentrated more on demanding majority rule than on seeking reforms for specific grievances. The NDP is generally regarded as the country’s first effective mass African political movement.

In April, Mawema, the acting president, led an NDP delegation to the London Conference on Federal Constitutional Review and managed to head off Edgar Whitehead’s efforts to secure greater independence for Southern Rhodesia’s white electorate. In July, Mawema and other NDP leaders were arrested under the terms of the Unlawful Organisations Act for their supposed membership in the banned ANC.

The NDP mounted large-scale demonstrations in the main urban centres to protest these arrests and violence erupted when the colonial government responded with police repression. The government then passed the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act.

A leadership dispute in the NDP was resolved later that year in favour of a compromise candidate, Joshua Nkomo, who was recalled from his voluntary exile in November to become president. In February 1961, Nkomo headed an NDP delegation at the Salisbury Constitutional Conference. He initially accepted the United (Federal) Party’s proposals (which included 15 ‘B Roll’ African seats out of 65), but withdrew his endorsement under pressure from fellow NDP leaders. The party later called for an African boycott of the elections. When the NDP was banned on December 9, 1961, Nkomo was again out of the country. This time he was in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

Before NDP militancy, moderate and elite Africans—with missionaries, educationalists, a few colonial politicians, like Garfield Todd and numerous outsiders—held genuinely inclusive non-racial ambitions. However, by this time, political opinion was getting polarised.

On December 18, 1961, just nine days after the government had banned the NDP, Joshua Nkomo formed the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) with the support of Ndabaningi Sithole. With Nkomo as its president, ZAPU adopted virtually the entire organisation, leadership and goals of the NDP. Among the leaders was Dr Samuel Tichafa Parirenyatwa. Parirenyatwa was ZAPU Vice President when he was killed in a car accident, in mysterious circumstances, while driving from Salisbury to Bulawayo to meet Nkomo. The alleged collision with a train at Hin Junction appeared stage-managed. As Dr Pari had become popular with the masses, many party members were calling for him to take over the ZAPU presidency.

In September 1962, the government banned ZAPU and arrested all its officers except Joshua Nkomo, who was out of the country. During the following year, many nationalist leaders regrouped in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where they discussed future strategy. Criticism of Nkomo’s leadership and especially his tendency to spend long periods outside of Southern Rhodesia created a sharp rift in the nationalist leadership, which until then had generally been united.

In a surprise move, Nkomo returned to Salisbury (Harare), where he denounced Ndabaningi Sithole, Leopold Takawira, Robert Mugabe, Enos Nkala and others as dissidents and ‘expelled’ them from the party. The dissidents then returned home and announced formation of a rival party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) on August 8, 1963, under Sithole’s leadership. Nkomo quickly countered by announcing formation of the People’s Caretaker Council (PCC), with himself as head. The PCC was merely a front organisation for the banned ZAPU, whose name resurfaced after the banning of the PCC in August 1964.

After marked patience, younger elites in the early 1960s embraced Pan-Africanist reveries, while most whites hastened into defensive laager. African nationalists pressing for majority rule were unlikely to find Whitehead’s reforms adequate and by boycotting the 1962 elections they encouraged the white backlash that brought the Rhodesian Front into power. The polarisation was now complete with the rise of Ian Smith and the hard-line ZANU leadership.

In May 1964, ZANU held its first general meeting in Gweru where Sithole was elected president, Robert Mugabe general secretary and Herbert Chitepo national chairman. ZANU’s constitution broke with the past by announcing direct confrontation as a method of opposition to European rule. ‘We are our own liberators’ became the party’s slogan.

On 26th August 1964, the government of Ian Smith banned ZANU and ZAPU’s front organisation, the PCC. The government also banned the African Daily News (1956-1964) and declared a state of emergency in Highfield, an African Township in Harare.

The detained ZANU leadership issued instructions to Herbert Chitepo to step up the organisation of armed struggle. ZANU had already started sending young men for guerrilla training in Ghana in the beginning of 1964. With a B.A. degree from Ft. Hare University College in South Africa and having studied law in London to become the first African lawyer in Southern Rhodesia, Herbert Chitepo was Tanganyika’s first African public prosecutor. He resigned the post and moved to Lusaka, Zambia in early 1966. From here he masterminded Chimurenga II and began building ZANU’s military wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA).

Meanwhile, on May 7, 1965, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front (RF) won all fifty seats reserved for whites in the general election. On 31st May the United People’s Party (UPP) was formed by ten African members of parliament who had originally been elected to ‘B Roll’ seats as representatives of the United Federal Party’s successor, the Rhodesia Party. The UPP was recognised as the official opposition by the RF government, becoming the first African body so recognised.

The UPP sought majority rule through constitutional change. Tolerated by the RF because of their ultimate political impotence, the UPP leaders were regarded as government ‘stooges’ by leaders of extra-parliamentary nationalist parties.

Whitehead and his Rhodesia Party could no longer stop Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965. This brought about a political stalemate and a supremacist 1969 constitution. African nationalists and racist Rhodesians were on a collision course nobody could prevent. The attitude displayed by the Rhodesian community, even those in the defeated moderate Rhodesia Party made the probability of collision greater than the possibility of harmony.

In the 1960s, Southern Rhodesia’s black nationalists like their white rivals also felt British betrayal. After Ghanaian independence (1957), the rise of Pan-African sentiment in favour of Africa-wide majority rule convinced militant Zimbabweans that their independence, like that of Zambia and Malawi (Nyasaland), was in Britain’s gift, if only sufficient outside pressure were exerted on Britain to force London to overrule Salisbury.

British Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who had failed in 1965 to discipline his Rhodesian kith and kin over Smith’s UDI, staged thereafter long-running negotiations with Smith, conceding ever more to white intransigence, on board HMS Tiger in 1966 and HMS Fearless in 1968. His actions alienated Frontline Presidents and factionalized Zimbabwean nationalists. Black militants said Wilson ought to have established them as Britain’s heirs. They concluded that he failed to do so, not because of his small parliamentary majority, four (4) seats in 1964, but because of Wilson’s personal and political weakness.

Suffice to say before real reform became effective, multiracial trust broke down because of the Federation’s policy of horse and rider, where the rider was the white man and the black man the horse. It eroded, as faith in reformism diminished and Pan-Africanism spread. African nationalists of the mid-1960s-1970s sought in exile in Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania or London and Scandinavia the support of Zambian, Mozambican or Tanzanian Frontline Presidents and the liberation war’s Russian and Chinese arms suppliers.

International reaction to UDI was both swift and negative and no country, including South Africa, formally recognised Rhodesia’s independence. Britain declared the regime to be ‘illegal’, but she had previously disavowed the use of military force against her ‘kith and kin’. It instead instituted unilateral economic sanctions, which were soon internationalised by the UN.

Whether in or out of Rhodesian prisons, African nationalists also pursued fratricidal rivalries driving some of them, notably ZANU founder Ndabaningi Sithole, Joshua Nkomo and moderates like Abel Muzorewa, Chief Jeremiah Chirau into negotiations with RF supremacists in Salisbury, Rhodesia. Compromise, though, was publicly inconceivable, since both sides were captivated by the simplistic verities their own rhetoric nurtured. Each saw the other’s self-defined interests as threatening their own cherished ideals. Initial disappointment at multiracial failure, then inability to realise majority-rule-now, led African militants to lump together all rivals, irrespective of whether they were racists, reactionaries, moderates or progressives.

In early 1966, ZANU’s Dare reChimurenga (Chimurenga High Command), with Herbert Chitepo at the top, decided to strike the enemy from Zambia. On April 28, 1966, ZANU launched the first guerrilla attacks at Chinhoyi in what has become known as the ‘Chinhoyi Battle’. After almost the entire guerrilla group was wiped out and after other groups such as the ‘Leopards’ were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, ZANU changed its tactics and opted for a ‘people’s war’.

They began infiltrating guerrillas into the north-east of the country to mobilise and educate the local population on the use of fire-arms and land-mines. They recruited what came to be known as ‘mujibas’ (male) and ‘chimbgidos’ (female) messengers who were mainly responsible for reconnaissance and securing of food for the ‘boys’, i.e. the guerrillas.

Meanwhile, ZAPU and the ANC of South Africa formed a military alliance and in August 1967 launched a guerrilla campaign in northwest Zimbabwe. This campaign did not make much headway in the face of the more superior Rhodesian forces. Besides, it triggered a quick reaction from South Africa which sent troops to help the Smith illegal regime.

Despite the ostensibly rigid positions taken by both the Rhodesian and British governments over UDI, they continued to pursue a negotiated settlement which would legitimise Rhodesia’s separation from Britain. The first formal negotiations (of what were to be known as ‘Talks about Talks’) held after UDI were the ‘Tiger Talks’ (2nd-4th December, 1966).

After two years, Ian Smith and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson met again between 9 and 13 October, 1968 off Gibraltar, for the ‘Fearless Talks’ aboard the warship HMS Fearless. Although Britain dropped the demand for a return to ‘legality’, no agreement was reached.

On March 2, 1970, Rhodesia was declared a republic after the 1969 constitution had renounced British sovereignty altogether. Despite what seemed a slap in the face, in early 1971, British officials began holding secret talks with Rhodesian officials in Salisbury. By September, news of these talks was public and Lord Arnold Goodman was openly visiting Rhodesia as a special emissary.

In mid-November, Alec Douglas-Home, the British Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister, met with Ian Smith in Salisbury. On November 24, the two men signed an agreement which came to be known as the Anglo-Rhodesian Settlement Proposals. The proposals called for immediately increased African representation in Parliament and they contained complex formulae which would theoretically bring majority rule to the country. In contrast to earlier British settlement proposals, the 1971 agreement was based upon modification of the 1969 (illegal) Constitution, not that of 1961. Britain held firm on one principle—that the proposals undergo a test of acceptability by the people of Zimbabwe as a whole before they would be implemented.

The British Government commissioned what became known as the Pearce Commission to investigate the acceptability of the Anglo-Rhodesian Settlement Proposals. Creation of the Commission set off a dramatic mobilisation of African political activity. Acting on instructions from the imprisoned political leadership, the African National Council (ANC) was formed on December 16, 1971 in order to organise opposition to the proposals. As a temporary pressure group, the ANC was headed by two Methodist ministers without prior political reputations, Abel Muzorewa and Canaan Banana. Other leaders, mostly veterans of ZANU and ZAPU, included Edson Sithole, Josiah Chinamano and Michael Mawema.

The name of the Council was consciously chosen to recall the ‘ANC’ acronym of the older and highly respected African National Congress. ANC branches arose spontaneously throughout the country. By the time the Pearce Commission arrived, the ANC was well represented in both urban and rural areas and its central executive served mainly to disseminate information.

The Commission arrived in the country in January 1972. Since the Rhodesian regime refused to allow a public referendum on the proposals, the Commission sampled public opinion through public and private meetings and by correspondence. It canvassed the country for two months, completing its work on March 10 and issuing its formal report in late May.

The Commission reported wide acceptance of the proposals among European settlers, mixed reactions among Asians and Coloured and 97 percent negative responses from the more than one hundred thousand Africans polled. Because of the overall numerical preponderance of Africans in the country’s population, the Commission concluded that the people of the country as a whole rejected the proposals, which were then officially abandoned by Britain.

Riding on this success, the ANC then formally reconstituted itself as a permanent political organisation on 10th March and began a membership drive. Bishop Muzorewa was retained as president. The government never moved to proscribe the ANC. The ANC remained officially committed to non-violent change, calling upon the government to participate in a national constitutional conference in order to bring about majority rule. By late 1972, Muzorewa was rumoured to be holding secret negotiations with Ian Smith.

While the leadership of both ZANU and ZAPU languished in prison and restriction, those outside the country continued to intensify preparations for total war. In October 1971, nationalist leaders resident in Lusaka, Zambia announced the formation of the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI) as a merger of ZANU and ZAPU. It appears, however, that FROLIZI was an organisation formed by the will of heads of state in whose countries Zimbabwean guerrilla camps were based. Shilton Siwela and Godfrey Savanhu, the titular leaders of the new organisation, were ousted early in 1972 by James Chikerema, George Nyandoro and Nathan Shamuyarira. FROLIZI never established itself within Zimbabwe, but instead attempted to ally with the African National Council.

Guerrilla warfare had only taken off, despite 1960s militant rhetoric, when ZANLA, ZANU’s armed wing, at Christmas 1972 attacked Altena farm in Rhodesia’s northwest. This insurgency escalated as Portuguese colonialism collapsed in Mozambique in 1974, exposing Rhodesia’s long eastern border to guerrilla incursion. The armed attach at Altena farm in the Centenary area, saw the beginning of a new era in the liberation of Zimbabwe. Since the fierce Chinhoyi Battle, ZANU had quietly masterminded Chimurenga II. Herbert Chitepo was a central figure in the military strategy that caught the Rhodesian regime off guard.

Assisted by such guerrilla leaders and commanders as Noel Mukono, John Mataure, Josiah Tongogara, Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru), Dare reChimurenga successfully turned the whole north-east into a military zone. ZANLA forces