Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army - The rebel in me: a ZANLA guerrilla commander in the Rhodesian Bush War, 1975-1980

Agrippah Mutambara was born in 1951 in the small mining town of Shurugwi in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. Because of the bottleneck system of education, he could not secure a university place; however, after independence he later obtained a degree in Business Administration. In May 1975 he quit his job as Council Secretary for Neshuro Council in the Mwenezi district and left the country to join the armed struggle. After independence in 1980, he joined the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) where he held various appointments, including Commandant of the Zimbabwe Staff College, Commander of 4 Brigade and later 6 Brigade. On retirement from the army, Brigadier General Mutambara was tasked to start a national service programme before joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has held various ambassadorial posts and is currently Zimbabwes ambassador to Mozambique and Swaziland. He is married to Esther (ne Gotora) and has five children.

Co-published in 2014 by:

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Copyright Agrippah Mutambara, 2014

Designed & typeset by Kerrin Cocks
Cover design by Kerrin Cocks
Printed in the UK by Henry Ling Ltd, Dorchester, Dorset and in South Africa by Pinetown
Printers (Pty) Ltd, Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal

ISBN RSA: 978-1-920143-96-1
ISBN UK: 978-1-909982-35-2
DIGITAL ISBN: 978-1-910294-88-8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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To all the comrades who sacrificed their lives for Zimbabwe to be free you who shielded me from the enemys bullets so that I could live to tell my story, your story, nay our story.

To my dear departed parents and all those parents who had to bear and endure the agony of the sudden disappearance of their sons and daughters, some never to be seen alive again.

To my loving wife, Esther, who inspired and encouraged me to share my experiences and those of other comrades.

To Phyllis Johnson, who used her journalistic instincts to improve and enrich my account.

To the wonderful masses of Zimbabwe who, without arms, challenged the might of a callous colonial regime.

To my children and the youths who were too young or unborn to know of the glorious history of our fight for freedom and independence.

This book is dedicated to all of you.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

As I followed her into the living room, Mrs Murerwa called out to her daughters playing in an adjacent room, Mudiwa, Gamu, Tapiwa, come and meet Uncle Dragon. Mudiwa, then 13, was the eldest; Gamu (short for Gamuchirai), aged eleven, was the middle child; and Tapiwa, at seven, was the youngest. The children had been told of the visit to their home by Uncle Dragon that afternoon. As they waited in anticipation for their as yet unknown guest to arrive, their active minds began forming a picture of what Uncle Dragon would look like. For Mudiwa and Gamu, their perceptions almost coincided. He would be a hefty, ugly man, aged between forty and fifty. In their logic, uncle was synonymous with old age. Tapiwa, because she was so young, had a radically different vision of Uncle Dragon. She had heard from her mother stories about the dragon the monster that spits fire. To her, Uncle Dragon was that monster. What she could not understand, and hoped to clarify with her mother in due course, was why they should be related to a monster. Even though they did not communicate their thoughts to each other, all the girls were anxious to confirm the accuracy of their secret predictions.

The children were very excited by my arrival. They all raced towards the door leading to the living room. It seemed they were in competition to see who would be the first to know the identity of the dragon Uncle Dragon. They had subconsciously accepted that winning the race would be determined by whoever went first through the door into the living room. Tapiwa, who was positioned three steps away from the door when the race began, could have easily been the winner. She took two quick steps towards the door, and abruptly stopped; the thought of being the first to confront the dragon and the fear of being consumed by its fire, replacing the desire to win with the instinct for survival. The front-runner had thus collapsed just before crossing the finish line. The race was now hotly contested by Mudiwa and Gamu. Although Gamu was the younger, she had a strong build which compensated for the age advantage the frail looking Mudiwa had. It is difficult to imagine how a race to cover only about ten metres could have been so ferociously fought. The result was a photo finish. Their two bodies merged into one at the finish line, and their combined width filled the doorframe as they wriggled their way into the living room.

Celebration of their victory was short lived as the search for Uncle Dragon began in earnest. There were only two people in the living room, their mother and a smartly dressed, clean shaven, good looking young man, but there was no Uncle Dragon; not the caricature they had built in their fertile imaginations. Tapiwa finally mastered her fear and cautiously peeped through the door to see if the dragon had devoured her two older sisters. She, like them, was puzzled there was no dragon, but just a charming young man. The three exchanged confused glances. Their mother, not understanding why they had hesitated, urged them, Come on girls, greet Uncle Dragon. With a look of incredulity Tapiwa quickly retorted, but he is not a dragon, he is a human being.

I arrived in Addis Ababa, the capital of Socialist Ethiopia, during the second week of July, 1978, about three months after being withdrawn from military operations inside Rhodesia. I had been appointed as the Chief Representative of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) to Socialist Ethiopia by the President of ZANU and Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Apart from forty students training to be pilots or technicians at Ethiopian Airlines, fourteen of them from ZANU and twenty-six from the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), the Zimbabwean community in Ethiopia was only a handful. These included the families of Mr Cephas Mangwana, Mr Herbert Murerwa, Mr Gibson Mandishona, Mr Dube, the late Mrs Ethel Binga wa Mtarika (wife of the late President of Malawi), and the late Mr Joboringo Murisi. I had set as one of my priorities visits to the Zimbabwean community based in Addis Ababa. During the last three weeks I had begun with visits to the working spouses at their respective workplaces and was now winding down the first phase of these visits. The second phase involved visiting the families in their homes to afford myself the opportunity to meet the remainder of the family members. Already, I had been to Mr Mangwanas and Mr Mandishonas homes where I was welcomed with much warmth and affection and treated to dinner on each of the two visits. The aura of being a freedom fighter who had been in operations against the Rhodesian regime not more than three months before my arrival in Socialist Ethiopia, heightened the anticipations of all the family members to meet me. On each of the visits I stayed over five hours and left the homes after midnight. There was so much interest about my time as a guerrilla fighter that I was only excused, in every instance, after promising I would return in the near future to continue recounting my experiences.