the assassination of herbert chitepo
the assassination of herbert chitepo Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe
Luise White
Distributed in Zimbabwe by Weaver Press
Published 2003 in southern Africa by Double Storey Books, a Juta Company, Mercury Crescent, Wetton, Cape Town, South Africa This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail
[email protected] © 2003 by Luise White All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-919930-28-0 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White, Luise. The assassination of Herbert Chitepo : texts and politics in Zimbabwe / Luise White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-253-34257-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21608-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chitepo, H. W.—Assassination. 2. Zimbabwe—Politics and government—1980– I. Title. DT2984.C56 W48 2003 968.9105’1—dc21 2002151586 1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04 03
C O NT E NTS
acknowledgments vii characters in order of appearance a note on place names xv
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six
1 16 41 60 78 93
notes 109 bibliography 131 index 137
xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was sort of an accident. I was researching another project in Zimbabwe—actually, two other projects—but I found myself drawn to many confessions to the Chitepo assassination. As I found out more and more, I wrote a conference paper, and then a draft article, and after another trip to Zimbabwe, the article was withdrawn to become this book. Academics do not have accidents in social or intellectual vacuums, however. I kept finding more and more material because I kept wanting to return to Zimbabwe, and that in large part was due to the warm reception given me by the Department of Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe, especially Alois Mlambo, Evelyn Pangati, and Eira Kramer, and to the myriad kindnesses of the late David Beach, Anthony Chennells, Victoria Chitepo, Mavis Dhlakama, Marc Epprecht, Eileen Haddon, the late Simba Handeseni, Alexander Katz, Murray McCartney, Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi, Jane Parpart, Susan Paul, Carole and Michael Pearce, Brian Raftopoulos, Terence Ranger, Joseph Seda, Masipula Sithole, Irene Staunton, and Peggy Watson. I owe an enormous debt to some terrific archives and libraries in Zimbabwe, England, and the U.S., and to some exceptionally helpful librarians. I first got into some of the material in this book when I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in 1997–98; I found more material in the Zimbabwe National Archives in 1999 and 2001. I am grateful to Zdenek David for his help in Washington, D.C., and to Ian Johnstone and I. Murambirwa for their help in Zimbabwe. In 2001 I was able to use the rich and varied Southern African Collection of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York, and I thank Chris Webb, the acting archivist, for his help. I also used the African and Zimbabwe Collections of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and I’m grateful to Dorothy Woodson for her enthusiasm and encouragement. As they were for two previous books, the staff at Rhodes House, Oxford, and John Pinfold, the head librarian, have been extraordinarily helpful. Gareth Griffiths and Pippa Griffiths, of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, allowed me to use the Rhodesian Army Association Trust’s papers even as their library was being prepared for renovations, and did so with great succor and encouragement. Throughout this project, I have had the
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good fortune to work with two superb librarians at the University of Florida: Peter Malanchuk and Dan Reboussin have been fantastic, answering my dumbest questions, providing references, and ordering the texts I needed. My research trips to Zimbabwe between 1995 and 1999 were funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The College of Letters and Arts Humanities Enhancement Fund of the University of Florida supported my research in England and Zimbabwe in 2001. The Social and Human Sciences Research Foundation of South Africa generously paid my way to South Africa in 1999 so that I could give the keynote address at the South African Historical Association’s meeting. I am grateful to them and the ever-welcoming History Department at the University of the Western Cape for inviting me: the airfare and funds from the Department of History at the University of Florida enabled me to do five weeks’ research in Zimbabwe. The Research Council of Zimbabwe was unfailingly generous in helping me with matters bureaucratic and allowing me to come and go as a North American teaching schedule allowed. This book was written when I had a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities—also for another project—and I am once again grateful to that organization for allowing me the time to do my work. As with past projects, I am grateful to Helen and Robert Irwin in London and to Megan Vaughan in Oxford for years of friendship and accommodation. Because so much of the conduct of black and white nationalism in Zimbabwe’s national history was in fact international, this research has taken place in several sites; I have been well taken care of by Bill Freund in Durban, Isabel Hofmeyr and Jon Hyslop in Johannesburg, Diana Jeater in Wick, Anne Mager in Cape Town, and Irene Staunton and Murray McCartney in Harare. In July 2001 I sat in an Internet cafe in Harare and wrote to Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press that I wanted to write this book. That it is finished now owes much to her support and good will and gracious wit. That it will be published so soon owes much to the multiple efficiencies of Jane Lyle and Shoshanna Green. I wrote this book quickly and with an energy and clarity (or so I hope) that surprised me. As Zimbabwe seems engulfed by a particular version of its own history, it seemed important to write a book that might widen the frame in which Zimbabweans—and many others—see the last thirty years. That this is a short book by design made it exceptionally challenging to write, and provided a discipline that also, at times, surprised me. A short book also had the wonderful advantage that I could shamelessly prevail on several
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friends and colleagues to read it: Jeffrey Adler, Fitzhugh Brundage, James Hevia, Douglas Howland, Norma Kriger, Rene Lemarchand, and Robert McMahon—only two of whom are Africa specialists—all gave careful and critical comments. Timothy Burke and David Moore read the manuscript for Indiana University Press, and Stephen Ellis and Alex de Waal read it for James Currey. All of these readers did exactly what readers should do. They engaged with me, pushed me, criticized me, argued with me, and laughed at me—sometimes when I wasn’t trying to be funny—in ways that have made this a stronger book. The publication of this book in Zimbabwe was made possible by a subvention from various offices at the University of Florida: the College of Letters and Sciences, the Graduate School, the History Department, and the Asian Studies Program. I want to thank Neil Sullivan, Winn Philips, Fitzhugh Brundage, Eldon Turner, and Michael Tsin for their commitment to this project and to the idea that internationalizing American universities is not just a new buzzword but a grounded practice involving books and readers and many foreign places. Writing books is also a grounded practice at one’s own institution, and I owe special thanks to the office staffs of the Department of History and the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida for their help in all manner of technical and moral support. Some of this material was presented at a symposium on war and violence in Africa held at the University of Cologne in 2000. In 2000 and 2002 I subjected my colleagues in the history department to two separate seminars in the Pozetta Colloquium Series, in which I presented earlier versions of some of this material. I am grateful to the many thoughtful comments I received at these meetings. In Harare in the last six years I had a great number of conversations and a few interviews with people about the assassination of Herbert Chitepo and much else. At the time, these seemed like conversations only. It never occurred to me then that I would write this book, so I never told anyone I might use what they said in a book. Because of this, I have done something historians of Africa rarely do, which is to cite my field notes rather than reference specific interviews or conversations. Thus, I want to thank everyone not cited here for the time they were willing to spend talking to me, and for their many insights: you know who you are, and I hope you know how much you helped me understand the events in this book.
CHARACTERS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Herbert Chitepo, chairman of the war council (dare) of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), Lusaka Silas Shamiso, his bodyguard Sadat Kufamadzuba, his bodyguard Victoria Chitepo, wife of Herbert, warden of women’s dormitories at the University of Dar es Salaam Joshua Nkomo, president of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania Godfrey Huggins, prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, 1933–53, and prime minister of the Central African Federation, 1953–56 Ian Smith, leader of the Rhodesian Front and prime minister of Rhodesia Bishop Abel Muzorewa, president of the African National Council (ANC) Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia Robert Mugabe, secretary-general of ZANU Richard Hove, ZANU member in Lusaka, until 1973 minister of internal affairs in ZANU dare Ken Flower, director-general of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organization Josiah Tongogara, minister of defense in ZANU, Lusaka, dare and chairman of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) high command Chuck Hinde, a Rhodesian operative Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, president of ZANU Edgar Tekere, founding member of ZANU, deputy secretary for youth and culture Leopold Takawira, founding member and first vice president of ZANU Aaron Milner, Zambia’s minister of home affairs Rex Nhongo, field commander (northeast), ZANLA Thomas Nhari, recently demoted commander, ZANLA Robson Manyika, chief camp commander, ZANLA
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Jason Moyo, chairman of external executive council, ZAPU Henry Hamadziripi, finance secretary, ZANU dare, Lusaka Rugare Gumbo, publicity secretary, ZANU dare, Lusaka Mukudzei Mudzi, administrative secretary, ZANU dare, Lusaka Henry Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state Samora Machel, president of Mozambique Seretse Khama, president of Botswana Noel Mukono, ZANU member in Lusaka, until 1973 secretary of defense in ZANU dare, Lusaka Kumbirai Kangai, secretary of labor and welfare, ZANU dare, Lusaka Dakarai Badza, recently demoted ZANLA commander Josiah Tungamirai, ZANLA commander, appointed to high command in December 1974 Masipula Sithole, ZANU publicity secretary in the U.S., where he taught political science Enos Chikowore, ZANU representative in London Fay Chung, ZANU member and lecturer at the University of Zambia, Lusaka Dzingai Mutumbuka, ZANU member and lecturer at the University of Zambia, Lusaka Edson Sithole, ANC publicity secretary Cornelius Sanyanga, ZANU branch secretary in Zambia James Bond, ZANLA senior commander in the northeast John Mataure, political commissar, ZANU dare, Lusaka Sekai Holland, ZANU representative to Australia and sister of Richard Hove Tiny Rowland, chairman of Lonrho Corporation, Ltd. Dzinashe Machingura, ZANLA field commander, appointed to high command in December 1974 Cletus Chigowe, ZANU chief of security William Ndangana, ZANLA chief of operations Charles Dauramanzi, ZANLA supply officer Joseph Chimurenga, ZANLA field commander for the Botswana border and member of the high command Nelson Dziruni, Lusaka businessman and ZANU member Edgar Madekurozwa, ZANU branch chairman, Lusaka Michael Edden, British South African Police Special Branch liaison to Rhodesian Army Combined Operations Simbi Mubako, ZANU member and lecturer in law at the University of Zambia Anne Tekere, wife of Edgar and ZANU activist
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Taffy Bryce, Rhodesian operative Simpson Mutambanengwe, ZANU member in Lusaka, until 1973 political affairs officer in ZANU dare Hastings Banda, president of Malawi Alec Dovi, ZANU member who lived in Chitepo’s house, possibly as a bodyguard Vernon Mwaanga, foreign minister of Zambia Dick Moyo, appointed to ZANLA high command in December 1974 Patrick Mpunzarima, appointed to ZANLA high command in December 1974 as provincial security officer Enos Musalapasi (“Short”), ZANU member and mechanic James Chikerema, chairman of the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI) George Nyandoro, founding member of FROLIZI Garfield Todd, prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, 1953–58, and prominent opponent of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) Ian Sutherland, resident of Zambia and sometime Rhodesian operative David Stirling, founder of Capricorn Africa Society and immigrant to Southern Rhodesia Washington Malianga, ZANU member in Lusaka, until 1973 ZANU publicity secretary Leo Solomon Baron, ZAPU lawyer in exile from Rhodesia, serving on the high court in Zambia Sister Janice McLaughlin, Maryknoll nun and ZANU supporter John Platts-Mills, London lawyer Kees Maxey, ZANU supporter in London Basil Davidson, ZANU supporter in London Judith Todd, daughter of Garfield Todd and outspoken opponent of UDI General Peter Walls, Commander, Rhodesian Army Combined Operations Opah Rusheshe, ZANLA guerilla and Tongogara’s personal secretary Chenjerai (“Hitler”) Hunzvi, leader of the war veterans association Lord Carrington (Peter), chief British negotiator at Lancaster House conference Jonathan Moyo, minister of information in Zimbabwe, 1999– Simon Muzenda, vice president in Mugabe’s cabinet Chief Jeremiah Chirau, pro-Rhodesian chief and official in ZimbabweRhodesia
A NOTE ON PLACE NAMES A convention of Zimbabwean historical writing is a list of place names, giving the old Rhodesian names and the new Zimbabwean ones. As this is a book about people, and the many places and spaces they occupied, I will dispense with this convention, since most national changes of names are explained in the text. For the record, however, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe-Rhodesia in 1979 and Zimbabwe in 1980, and the capital city, Salisbury, became Harare in 1982.
the assassination of herbert chitepo
CHAPTER ONE
On 18 March 1975, Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo was killed when a car bomb, planted in his Volkswagen Beetle the night before, went off at 8:05 a.m. outside his home in Lusaka, Zambia. Chitepo was the head of the war council (“war council” is the literal translation of dare ya chimurenga) of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), headquartered in Lusaka, where it and other Zimbabwean nationalist groups sought to free Rhodesia from the rule of its white minority. The blast threw part of the car onto the roof of his house and uprooted a tree next door. Chitepo was killed at once, as was one of his bodyguards, Silas Shamiso. His other bodyguard, Sadat Kufamadzuba, was injured in the blast. Both bodyguards figure prominently in this book. A neighbor’s child, playing in the yard next door, died a few hours later from injuries he received in the blast. Since 1975, there have been many speculations, accusations, and confessions as to who killed Chitepo and why. In the first weeks after his death, it was said that he had been killed by South Africans, by Zambians, by Rhodesians, by his own party, and by other liberation movements determined to free Rhodesia. There were arrests in Lusaka and a commission of inquiry, which published its findings in a report a year later. Neither that report, nor the many published critiques of it, nor any of the subsequently published confessions have quelled the rumors and accusations about who killed Chitepo, however. The assassination of Chitepo is as important now as it was in the weeks following his death. Who killed Chitepo was an issue in the 1980 elections in Zimbabwe1 and twenty years later there were new accusations, new hints, and new demands for Zimbabwe to hold an investigation into his death. The question of who killed Chitepo, and the freight of conflict and collaboration and cover-up that question carries, were important in the liberation struggle and are no less important more than twenty years after liberation was achieved. Why?
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THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
Chitepo’s murder poses a problem not only for Zimbabwe but also for historians: why is the identity of the assassin so important, and why are the many texts that identify—and self-identify—the assassin so ephemeral, so incapable of resolving the crime, or even of seeming credible? Chitepo’s murder was a turning point in the liberation struggle in the 1970s. It precipitated a crisis in ZANU, which was exacerbated by the detention of its leadership in Zambia for nineteen months, but it also sent fragments of ZANU’s army—and after 1976 its military leadership—into Mozambique, where they had support from the newly independent government and access to the 1200-km border between Mozambique and Rhodesia. This of course explains why the Chitepo assassination was important in the 1970s, but it does not explain why the assassination has come back as an explanation of the complexities of politics in Zimbabwe today. To answer these questions, I will not pursue the assassin, or attempt to fix his or her identity once and for all. This book charts a different course of interrogation altogether. I’m in pursuit of history, of how narratives about the past are produced and reproduced and how power is produced and reproduced by these narratives. I’m interested in the many confessions, why some fail and why others surface when they do. My question then is not who did it, but why do so many people insist they did it? Each of these many confessions articulates a world of politics and relationships. Some confessions seek to silence other confessions or make them seem flawed and fabricated. In others, someone or some group that has denied a deed for years confesses to it at a specific moment. I am hardly the first historian to point out that an event takes on different meanings over time—even a very short time—to the different, sometimes opposing, groups who claim the event as part of their history. I argue that this is not a problem to be solved; instead, it is a basis for analysis. The fact that both Rhodesians and Zimbabweans claim Chitepo’s murder as part of their unique histories has produced at least four published confessions and at least as many published accusations over the last two decades, each with an “exclusive” account of events. But history is a messy business; as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in his study of the Haitian revolution, there is no “perfect closure” to any event, and each fact about the event contains “inborn absences specific to its production.” Not everyone is included in historical texts, let alone when those texts are joined together to make a narrative of the past. But the very messiness of the lived past, the very untidiness of the closures, means that all that has been omitted has not been erased. The most powerless actors left traces of themselves in contemporary accounts, just
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as the most powerful actors crafted versions of events that attempted to cover their traces or to leave traces of their reinvented personas. But “traces are inherently uneven,” Trouillot writes, and “lived inequalities yield unequal historical power” in texts. Historians, and political activists, do not give all historical accounts equal weight or equivalent readings. In this, historians and political activists ignore some traces and silence other interpretations of events.2 Traces are not legible in and of themselves, but they assert that no event—and no text—is ever alone. Events have rough and complicated antecedents, and each has an afterlife, often in the form of more texts and more words that render the actual event obscure.3 To look closely at any event requires looking carefully at the texts it generates, both days and years after the event. To this end this book will discuss the Zimbabwean and Rhodesian texts about the Chitepo assassination. In his discussion of Chinese activists’ interpretations of the Boxer Rebellion, Paul Cohen notes that there can be “a real competition” between political and historical texts which claim to represent the past.4 Texts compete by claiming (and proclaiming) their truth. Looking at how texts compete, at what they compete over, and what is at stake in their competition, is a way to articulate the relationships between them. Chitepo was fifty-two when he died. He was born in Manicaland in 1923, in the eastern highlands of Rhodesia. His father died when he was three and he was brought up in a mission, where he received his early education. He attended secondary school in Natal, South Africa, where he met his wife, Victoria, the daughter of migrants from Manicaland. He went to Fort Hare College in South Africa in 1949. Upon graduation he read for the bar in London, where he kept company with many people active in anti-colonial movements. He returned to Rhodesia in 1954 as Rhodesia’s first African barrister. He was active in politics. He gave one of several keynote speeches at the Capricorn Africa Society’s meeting in 1956. He was a member of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and, when it was banned, he joined the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and became a legal advisor to its president, Joshua Nkomo, a man who would become one of several political rivals. Chitepo defended many nationalists in court, but his practice remained small and unprofitable: white attorneys never referred briefs to him. In 1962 he went to Tanzania to serve as the country’s first African director of public prosecutions. When ZANU split from ZAPU in 1963, Chitepo joined ZANU and was instrumental in getting the president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to support the new party. In 1964 Chitepo was elected national chairman at the party congress. In 1966 he left Tanza-
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nia for Lusaka to direct ZANU’s external wing, which was to begin an armed struggle against white-ruled Rhodesia.5 Chitepo was a statesman and a fund-raiser more than anything else, although many people now insist he was destined to rule a free Zimbabwe. In the years between 1966 and his murder, he became increasingly militant, increasingly conversant with the tenets of socialism, and increasingly self-confident in speeches and interviews. He insisted that his party’s Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution would achieve a socialist state in Zimbabwe by including middle-class support in mass mobilization. He argued that the struggle had to include not only workers and peasants but also “the national bourgeoisie and other patriotic and anti-imperialist forces.”6 As Africa became a continent of independent nations, Chitepo’s call to rally all anti-imperialist forces to the struggle had a resonance and urgency throughout Africa and the world. Whatever the anti-colonial discourse of its African nationalists, Southern Rhodesia had never really been a colony. Founded by the British South Africa Company for mineral exploitation and white settlement in 1890, Southern Rhodesia was granted self-governing dominion status by the British in 1923 after its electorate of twenty thousand whites rejected “closer union” with South Africa. The white population increased dramatically after World War II: many older men saw Southern Rhodesia as a place where a pension would go far, while younger men thought it an ideal place to make a life. The white population increased from 82,000 in 1946 to 135,000 in 1951, to 223,000 in 1960, and to about 250,000 in 1965. Virtually all this immigration was English-speaking, overwhelming the Afrikaaner and Greek population of the country. In 1953, Southern Rhodesia became part of the Central African Federation. Some form of amalgamation with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland had been bandied about by white Southern Rhodesian politicians for years, but by 1953 a federation was seen as a hedge against majority rule. Despite a hazy rhetoric of gradual integration and partnership, there was no integration, and partnership between black and white was explained by Southern Rhodesia’s prime minister Godfrey Huggins (who became the first prime minister of the Federation) as “the partnership between the horse and its rider.” When the Federation ended, and the other member states became independent black-ruled countries, Southern Rhodesia remained intransigent and resisted majority rule. But minority rule seemed unimaginable in Africa in the mid-1960s, until November 1965 when Rhodesia rebelled from Britain and issued a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) under the government of the Rhodesian Front (RF), led
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by Ian Smith. To almost everyone’s—including many Rhodesians’—surprise, Rhodesia survived. Britain imposed sanctions almost at once, much to the profit of wealthy farmers (who bought the farms of newly settled white farmers who could not absorb the losses of a year or two) and those who began to evade sanctions. Through import substitution and trading illegally with whoever was willing, by the late 1960s Rhodesia had become one of the economic miracles of Africa. Within the country, whites maintained a certain cynicism about their successes. There was a strong sense that their “cowboy government” brought new wealth to the country at the cost of international censure and a war against black nationalist movements that by 1975 many in Rhodesia doubted they could win. Many liberals saw their government and its policies as part of a growing “culture of mediocrity.” There were not enough talented white people in the country to run Aberdeen, people said, let alone a country. After several failed negotiated settlements, and after Rhodesia had lost thousands of whites through war and emigration, the RF proposed an internal settlement that involved sharing power with some of the African political parties that had been unable to gain a foothold among the nationalist parties in exile. Such a settlement was almost beside the point, as the armies of the nationalist parties were operating within the country, and a military victory seemed well beyond Rhodesia’s capabilities. In 1979 Rhodesia became the short-lived and never fully legal Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Its government, led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa (whom we shall see in the next chapter), was supposed to prove to the world that Rhodesia could be ruled by blacks. No one was convinced, and Zimbabwe-Rhodesia unleashed a bombing campaign of unprecedented violence upon guerilla bases in the neighboring countries. Although the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) was certain it could achieve victory on the field, those neighboring countries—Zambia and Mozambique, both of which have a place in this story—pressured ZAPU and ZANU into negotiating a cease-fire, a constitution, and arrangements for free elections. For this to happen, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was to be governed directly by England for the two months prior to the elections (in February 1980), which brought in the legitimate African-ruled nation of Zimbabwe (1980–), governed by ZANU(PF).7 Despite this history, many politicians and even more scholars have found it convenient to call Zimbabwe’s history colonial and its legal independence decolonization. “Colonial” is a fair enough shorthand that allows for some important generalizations regarding social processes and how rule over Africans was instituted, but as chapters three, four, and
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five argue, the use of the term, and of “decolonization” for the period after 1980, often obscures a complex political history and linkages between many metropolitan centers around the world and at least as many states in Africa. Maintaining that Rhodesia was colonial and Zimbabwe independent has allowed authors many discursive flourishes, given the play of the two countries, one illegitimate and one legitimate, with two names. It has also insinuated an absolute historical break between the two states, without continuities between them or openings and spaces in which they coexist, particularly for the period from 1965 to 1980. The title of one journalist’s history of the transition says it all: The Past Is Another Country.8 This book, however, is not about Herbert Chitepo or Rhodesia’s independence. Chitepo is one of the least important actors in the pages that follow, although I detail many of his actions in the weeks before he was assassinated. Nothing Chitepo did or said can be shown to have led directly to his murder. On the contrary, as the next two chapters show, he did everything he could to forestall attempts on his life. There is no point in the mid-1970s where I can say with certainty that he became a marked man: he feared for his life many times in the mid-1970s, but so did many Zimbabwean nationalists in exile. In the same vein, Rhodesia, with its policies and politics, is not the subject of this book. It is one of several overlapping political backgrounds, rather than a causal agent or a racist force or imperialist presence that by the very oppressiveness of its reaction caused Chitepo’s death. To be sure, without Rhodesian independence in the 1960s and ’70s there would have been no liberation movement, no external wing of ZANU, and no national chairman to assassinate in exile, and it is possible to argue that without Rhodesian racism there would have been no Rhodesian independence, but such facts are not causal. They set the stage for events but do not make them happen. This book is about the many confessions to Chitepo’s murder. If I simply wanted an unsolved murder to write about, chapters three, four and five provide me with several such cases (two by parcel bombs) and one abduction in which the body was never found. What makes the Chitepo assassination unlike any other political assassination in Africa during the 1970s, or ’80s, or ’90s, is the number of confessions and the tenacity with which the confessors cling to them. In those other assassinations, lengthy investigations claimed that the murders could only be attributed to a person or persons unknown, whereas in the months and years following Chitepo’s murder there were almost as many confessions as there were hints and analyses that fixed the blame on politi-
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cal processes or nation-states, if not on specific individual operatives of those states. Moreover, each confession has a different analysis and a different car bomb and different actors. Most of these confessions also contain a clear refutation of another confession, or of an accusation against someone else. Many of the parties who claim responsibility insist that they alone are culpable, and organize evidence and anecdotes to show that they did the deed. A recent book by Peter Stiff, for example, one of the architects of Rhodesian war memory and someone whose writings figure prominently in this book, contains the following index entry: “Chitepo, Herbert (assassinated by Rhodesians).”9 My question, then, is not who did it, but why do so many people insist they did it? What—and for whom—are all these confessions for? They are not different perspectives on the same event, each narrated from a different position. These confessions cannot, I suggest, be read in sequence to reveal a more accurate history, as Terence Ranger has done with the different accounts of the death of the first white man killed in the liberation war.10 Indeed, I’m not concerned with how true, or how false, any of these confessions is. Instead I want to consider the differences between them, and reflect on how those differences were constituted and constructed. The differences in who said what when, and how seriously such statements were taken, function as what David William Cohen has called “a truth”—rather than “the truth”—in which a specific version of events mediates between the complicated concerns of those who confess and those to whom they confess.11 And complicated concerns there are. For over two decades, these concerns have competed to explain the assassination of Chitepo, and they have generated the several texts on which I base this book. An anonymous document, probably one of many, circulated in ZANU circles in and out of Zambia two weeks after Chitepo’s death. The Report of Zambia’s Special International Commission (usually called the Chitepo Commission) was published in April 1976. Many in ZANU (and a few outside the party) wrote back to it: the detained ZANU leadership in Zambian jails wrote two remarkable critiques, one a “Reply” and the other an “Analysis.” A British scholar teaching at the University of Zambia also wrote an attack on the Report. ZANU’s president wrote a glowing endorsement of the published Report, which was reworked, a few years later, by his brother, who was ZANU’s publicity secretary in the U.S. Several years later, the director of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) claimed to have refuted the commission’s findings, personally and privately, shortly after they were published. The two confessions that did not address the Report directly were those of
8
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
two separate Rhodesian agents; both these confessions were published in 1985. And there are said to be more confessions, suppressed or repressed. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson are British and Canadian journalists who began their respective careers in East Africa; later Martin reported on the events described here for the London Observer. Since 1980 they have worked and written in Zimbabwe. They claim that there would have been even more confessions published in the decade after Chitepo’s death had authors not delayed too long or given in to diplomatic pressures. They published a confession that was relayed by a close friend of the deceased assassin. Their book’s “Afterword” lists two other books that extolled the exploits of the Rhodesian operatives who killed Chitepo, as well as a number of Rhodesians who, either in conversation with them or in a newspaper interview with someone else, named a Zimbabwean who didn’t do it, even if they refused to name the Rhodesian who did.12 If the number of confessions was not complicated enough, the patterns of who supports which confession, or which set of confessions, are not as predictable as Africans blaming Rhodesians and Rhodesians blaming Africans. The ruling party in Zimbabwe and several African nationalist parties have insisted that Rhodesian agents carried out the assassination, but so have many former Rhodesian officials and assassins in Rhodesian employ. Many Zimbabweans in exile, including the then president of ZANU, supported the commission’s claim that Chitepo died because of ethnic conflicts within the party. Moreover, these patterns have changed over time. Rhodesians did not always claim to have assassinated Chitepo, and in any number of press releases in 1977 and ’78 quoted the Chitepo Commission’s Report to show who in ZANU killed him. It was only after Rhodesia vanished and Zimbabwe was a sovereign state that Rhodesians remembered, and confessed, that they had killed Chitepo. Yet none of these confessions, or suggestions of more confessions, seems to have taken hold in Zimbabwean political consciousness. In 1997 one Zimbabwean newspaper carried weeks of speculation about who in ZANU killed Chitepo.13 In July 2001 Chitepo’s widow, after years of silence, demanded that the ZANU members accused of killing her husband in Zambia in 1976 be brought to justice in Zimbabwe now. As I corrected the page proofs, Kenneth Kaunda, former president of Zambia and a prominent actor in the next two chapters, assured me that Chitepo’s murder “was an inside job.”14 As I wrote the first chapters of this book, one Zimbabwean newspaper serialized the Report of the Chitepo Commission, which had never before been available in Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER ONE
9
Why are there so many confessions? Fixing blame—with all the meanings historians now attach to fixing—helps to organize a national narrative in which agency and causation are subsumed. If, as the Chitepo Commission argued haphazardly and some scholars argued in greater detail, the assassination was caused by ethnic tensions, then ethnic factionalism becomes one of several founding myths, and one of the problematics, of the new nation.15 If the assassination was the work of Rhodesians, secret agents with technical expertise, then Rhodesian interference becomes one of the founding myths of the new nation and, if not a problematic, certainly an on-going phenomenon with which the new state had to deal. A U.S. counterpart of this is those analyses that blame the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the CIA, the FBI, or the Mafia—the hidden hand that can at any time shape American politics.16 If the assassination is the result of struggles within the leadership and contests over power, authority, and popularity, then those struggles become the founding myth of the new nation. The twentieth century provides some excellent examples of such founding myths—Sergei Kirov in the former Soviet Union, Tom Mboya, J. M. Kariuki, and Robert Ouko in Kenya.17 My point is not that every fixing of blame determines a national narrative, but that each act of fixing becomes a starting point that makes a new and linear national narrative possible. Fixing blame for an assassination does not challenge—and may well underscore—the nationalist character of the deed: it makes it a chapter in the struggle, rather than an episode with its own political valence and history.18 Each of these different confessions tells a story of political treachery and national triumph; each includes some actors and excludes others. All of them have loose ends and contradictions, and many seem unlikely, but I do not think they should be simply dismissed as coerced or contrived: they contain too many traces of the past to be discarded altogether. Instead, I think these confessions should be thought of as exclusionary analyses, each one a way of fixing the assassination that is a frame, an either/or analysis, that both provides a structure for and limits our understanding of the events it describes. A close examination of the various fixings of blame, and the discovery of new and improved confessions, may not tell us who killed Chitepo or how, but they will tell us about the contests over national narratives and histories, and what constitutes the most important elements of those confessions. Each new confession may reveal what is at stake in claiming responsibility for Chitepo’s assassination. Most of these confessions were published between 1976 and 1987 (although one has been revised and republished this year), so the ques-
10
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
tion of why there are so many confessions might be less important than that of why these confessions surface when they do. Is the identity of the assassins disclosed through torture, through boasting, or by accident? What motivated these claims of truth: a desire to set the record straight, careful interrogation, or publishers’ advances? These questions raise another question: how do historians read the evidence produced over a decade, in a variety of circumstances—as a whole or as a sequence? Should historians read evidence as a totality, piecing together the parts of the puzzle as each separate part becomes available, so that each new discovery makes us reevaluate our earlier assumptions? Or should we read evidence as a chronological production, each new item a layer of explanation produced to cover, if not address, earlier explanations, so that the layers of confession and accusation reveal an archeology of the conflicts in which they were produced? To answer these questions I rely heavily on scholars who have studied politics as performance, particularly Allen Feldman’s work on political violence in Northern Ireland, Greg Dening’s reflections on the mutiny on the Bounty, and Diana Taylor’s study of spectacle and performance during Argentina’s “Dirty War.”19 Feldman in particular has looked at how politics was extended to, and carried out from within, prisons; his work adds a level of analysis to the history of Zimbabwe’s exiled freedom fighters that nothing else has. Nevertheless, for scholars trained in materialist and nationalist traditions, terms like “performance” or the observation that events are “staged” and texts are “scripted” can be interpreted to mean I am calling these texts and the events they describe inauthentic. This is not my intention at all: I use these terms to recall the production of these texts and how they were received when they were first made public. Terms like “performance” and “scripting” and “staging” are excellent ways to think about a commission convened in Lusaka to exonerate Zambia from blame for Chitepo’s murder, or about detainees’ confessions which they insisted were written for them by their Zambian jailors. Scripting and staging are ways to think about the letters from Chitepo those same detainees, almost a year later, claimed were forgeries, or “the trial within the trial” that unfolded from testimonies before the Chitepo Commission.20 The detained ZANU members in Zambian jails who wrote back to the commission’s published Report examined the evidence and its interpretation precisely in the language of contrivance and construction. Scripting and staging are useful categories with which to think about the memoirs of political actors, published years later. I do not use these terms to imply that a confession (even a confession by proxy) is made up, but as a way to think
CHAPTER ONE
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critically about what has gone into the construction of all these confessions, about what they stress and what they leave out. Moreover, some of the rarely cited texts I quote in chapters two, three, and four have been silenced in Trouillot’s sense of the term; they have been used by a few (sometimes very few) scholars, but never became part of a national narrative.21 Many Zimbabweans, and most of the detainees in Zambian jails, were keenly aware of the place of silences and omissions in key texts, and read the Report of the Chitepo Commission with the greatest scrutiny to point out whose testimony had been ignored, and which findings were left out of the final report. Unlike many African countries, Zimbabwe had a nationalist narrative produced early on in its history. Martin and Johnson’s The Struggle for Zimbabwe is a monumental, exhaustively researched history of African nationalism and its triumphs from 1960 to 1980. Published in 1981, its influence was immediate and exceptionally widespread: it provided a frame for subsequent research. Like all frames, it may have made the historical relations it depicted more rigid than they were in practice.22 In a history of insurgency and counter-insurgency, for example, not everything is known, so much has to be pieced together from fragments and assertions. In the history of Zimbabwe’s liberation war and the Chitepo assassination, conversations and veiled disclosures and broad assertions are often the key elements that, years later, allow speculations to be written about as if they were possible or even likely. In this way, Martin and Johnson, quoting the Rhodesian security operatives they have interviewed over the years, have provided a frame that has allowed many other authors to make connections and draw conclusions they would not otherwise be able to make. Thus when Martin and Johnson claim that a mutiny in ZANU late in 1974 was inspired by guerillas’ clandestine meetings with Rhodesian agents, Henrik Ellert insists that these meetings must have taken place amid the consistent and amicable border crossings of soldiers on both sides between Mozambique and Rhodesia earlier that year.23 It’s not that these connections and conclusions are unreliable; on the contrary, they are as much a part of Zimbabwe’s historiography and its constitution as any hard and demonstrable fact. Part of the challenge of Zimbabwean historiography is that even the hard evidence does not provide a particularly stable ground on which to write. The literature on which this book is based includes an anonymous document; testimony before a commission of inquiry that, however it gathered its evidence, could not at first afford translators for its Francophone commissioners; memoirs of hit men and the security officials for whom they worked that
12
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
contradict each other; and African nationalists’ memoirs that are interspersed with letters to other activists, one of whom was to become a prominent historian of the region. I also use oral histories collected for Zimbabwe’s National Archives, and various Rhodesian and Zimbabwean archival materials from England and Zimbabwe, including papers of the Capricorn African Society and the Rhodesian Army Association and ZANU publications from England in the 1970s. The challenge of writing with such sources is that of providing a contemporary context for them, rather than finding a way to make every innuendo concrete. The challenge is to examine the veiled disclosures and broad assertions on their own terms, and not make them into statements of fact. In using these sources, I do not claim that a newly found or underutilized document can tell us who killed Chitepo, but I do want to show the range of texts, and the debates specific to them, that argued about that very question. I do not claim that any of these documents are truer than any others, however. Instead, I want to suggest that the tangled genealogies of politics and authorship give all these accounts, when taken together, a particular strength and vitality: using these sources to reconstruct the past, we can see the various contemporary meanings and interpretations of actions. Any one of these sources, read separately, is biased, unreliable, and more than a little eccentric. Reading them together, as a body of writing that addresses both the assassination and other descriptions of it, reveals the tensions and fissures and imaginings of a specific moment, rather than the tensions and the fissures between the sources: in Paul Cohen’s terms, the texts compete to represent the past. Reading these texts as a body of evidence might not disclose who did what to whom and why, but it may tell us how contemporaries put together their own knowledge of current events, what they privileged and what they omitted. The problem of sources is compounded by the problem of the actors in the sources. In a time of war, counter-insurgency, need-to-know intelligence, and struggles within guerilla struggles, it is often difficult to pinpoint who that “who” was, and where he or she was when spoken to. Almost everyone who has a place in this story—black and white—has a place in the liberation struggle, its repression, and the subsequent majority-ruled Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe, who attempted to wrest control of ZANU before Chitepo’s death, was Zimbabwe’s first prime minister and later its first president. Richard Hove, sentenced to death in absentia at the same chimurenga council meeting that cast grave suspicions on Chitepo, served in Mugabe’s first cabinet. Ken Flower was the director of Rhodesia’s CIO and then directed Zimbabwe’s CIO for a few
CHAPTER ONE
13
years. There were many people who changed sides, moving not only between African nationalist parties but between factions within African nationalist parties. Many of the men in this story participated in the repression, and killing, of their old friends; many who survived were to serve beside the men who once wanted them dead. There were many agents and double agents and many more people accused of being one or both; how agents were to be uncovered was a question with which ZANU wrestled in the months before Chitepo’s murder, although, as chapter two argues, many in ZANU did not think informers and agents posed any greater danger than old friends and comrades might. None of this is because old friends were inherently unreliable comrades or because nationalists double-crossed each other regularly. The people in this story (primarily men, but including some women) had deep and longstanding ties to each other; they had shared friends, detentions, and much else. Sometimes they were comrades and sometimes they were enemies. A British diplomat at the Lancaster House meetings in 1979, where the conditions for a cease-fire and majority rule were negotiated, commented on this as well as anyone has done: “There were these people who had been fighting each other for years and at coffee breaks . . . you would find them all talking quite happily together. A lot of them had been at school together, they’d known each other for years.”24 Almost every Zimbabwean in this story held positions in other countries in the 1960s and ’70s, as Chitepo did in Tanzania. There were various ZAPU lawyers in Zambia, and ZANU soldiers in Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania. Thus most of the individuals mentioned have both a place in mid-1970s nationalist politics outside of Zimbabwe and a place in the politics of independence and statecraft in Zimbabwe a decade later. I have tried to identify individuals in all their Rhodesian, Zambian, and Zimbabwean positions, and I fear this effort makes for cumbersome reading. But in this case cumbersome may be the clearest way for me to write. Those individuals who wrote memoirs or gave interviews seem to have spoken from their multiple positions, and so memoirs and interviews invite questions about the author’s location at the time of writing. Did the several letters Chitepo wrote in the weeks before his death show the pressure he was under or did they demonstrate his unfailing political acumen? Was every ZANU confession in Zambian jails coerced, or were some exhortations for party discipline? Did Flower write his book telling all about Rhodesian intelligence as a Rhodesian bureaucrat or as a Zimbabwean one? A number of people, black and white, speak posthumously in the pages that follow: the words of the late Herbert Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara, and Chuck Hinde, re-
14
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
layed from beyond the grave, underscore questions of the authorship of and the audience for the sources I cite. Many dead subjects are described from several locations as well, as stories about the death of Tongogara in chapter five will make clear. And the dead fail to stay put. In 1981 Chitepo’s body was moved from Lusaka to Harare, in a reburial in Heroes Acres that his family contested, much to the dismay of party stalwarts.25 Finally, there is the problem of writing, as I want to make a text that can be read both in and out of Zimbabwe, by specialists and non-specialists alike. Zimbabwe has developed a self-referential historiography in which acronyms do an enormous amount of work. Acronyms appear on both sides of the political spectrum, and a good glossary of African nationalist and Rhodesian military acronyms can take up two pages easily.26 Some acronyms are used, and pronounced, as words: ZANU and ZAPU and their respective armies, ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) and ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army), are the most prominent examples. Political parties changed names and added acronyms: ZANU became ZANU(PF), for Patriotic Front, to contest the 1980 election and has used that name ever since. Other words, however, have come to be treated as acronyms, giving them the status of political organizations while removing them from the realm of ordinary words. For example, the Report of the Chitepo Commission writes “dare”—the Shona word for “council”—as if it were an acronym. “DARE” appears throughout the text, as it does in Martin and Johnson’s Struggle for Zimbabwe. Carol Thompson’s Challenge to Imperialism puts DARE in a list of “Abbreviations” that prefaces the book.27 Such transformations not only increase the number of acronyms but also add to the aura of expertise authors cultivate: they know the code that readers must learn in order to follow the text. I provide no glossary of foreign terms or acronyms and abbreviations in this book. The presentation here is, I hope, as close to that of murder mysteries as it is to history writing; I ask readers to become familiar with a number of actors and a variety of texts so they can engage with the materials herein. As readers move beyond this introduction, they will learn the characters and the complexities of their struggles. This book should be somewhat less demanding than a murder mystery, however. I’m not trying to establish who killed Chitepo, but to find out why so many people claim they did, so I have not buried any clues in the text: instead, I’ve written to accustom readers to the several interpretations of the events described here. And, as in a murder mystery, there are no chapter titles and no sub-sections within the untitled chapters, and
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there are some long digressions that provide background information. This book is about the relationship between texts and politics, about how the texts political actors wrote, or spoke in, depicted some events and shaped others. As the following chapters make clear, texts and politics are entangled; they are literally intertextual. Actions, and what is written about actors, are influenced by each other: actors are aware of texts and texts are constituted by actors. But the question of what I want readers to learn underscores the question of audience. Zimbabwean readers know their history in ways that North Americans would find humbling. No one would explain Lancaster House, Tongogara, or the CIO when writing for Zimbabweans, and perhaps because of this, recent historical scholarship on Zimbabwe has been characterized by a density of names and places in each text. This has worked well in Zimbabwe, where these men and women are located in local and national political agendas, but it can drive non-specialist readers away. But however much I want to write for non-specialists, this book is about Zimbabwe’s complex political history, and it contains an overwhelming number of names and acronyms. I hope non-specialist readers can learn them as they go. All but two or three of those who are named in this book figure in the story at least twice. Nationalist politics were extraordinarily complex, made more so by the many sites of exile men and women were in, and there seems no way to respect this complexity without showing nationalists in the many sites, and sides, in which they found themselves. In the spirit of performance I’ve taken a cue from a history of the Kirov assassination, and provided a cast of characters in order of appearance, noting what position they held at that time.28 No one is fixed by such a list, but they are introduced. This is not a book about who killed Chitepo, or even about victims and villains. It is about the stories told by those who claimed to have done so, and in that sense, the many positions and interests from which those characters speak are as much part of the story as is where and by whom the bomb was placed. This is a book about politics, and how various texts about one assassination strive to define a political realm in which the assassination took place, and which in turn shaped contemporary Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER TWO
ZANU was formed in July 1963, when it split off from the more established ZAPU, itself a successor to the banned NDP. The reasons for the split are still debated, but there had been complaints about Joshua Nkomo’s autocratic leadership for years. When he proposed to move ZAPU out of the country and set up a government in exile—which he would head—so as to negotiate with the British in the event of Rhodesian independence, many in the party objected. Nkomo denounced them, and many of his opponents formed ZANU, under the leadership of Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole and with financial aid from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and Ghana. Years later, many would argue that the split was ethnic, with Ndebele peoples following Nkomo and Shona joining ZANU, but at the time neither ZANU nor ZAPU could be said to have a solid political base among any group. The leadership of ZANU—notably Ndabaningi Sithole, Edgar Tekere, Leopold Takawira, and Robert Mugabe, as well as Chitepo—were all Shona speakers. They were also, as the men who remained in ZAPU never tired of pointing out, the men who had once been connected to liberal political organizations, most notably the Capricorn Africa Society but also the United Federal Party and the Central African Party. ZAPU loved to call these the “settler” parties. Whatever their disagreements, both ZANU and ZAPU became increasingly, and competitively, involved in armed struggle as a way to liberate their country. Throughout the 1960s the conflict between the two parties was not about armed struggle or even the place of exiled parties; it was about issues of leadership and mass mobilization. Both parties were banned in Rhodesia by mid-1964; Nkomo, Sithole, Tekere, and Mugabe spent the next decade in prison, where Takawira died in 1971. ZANU began underground guerilla operations against the government in Rhodesia and ZANU and ZAPU began to send groups of guerillas to China and Eastern Europe in the early and mid-1960s, respectively.1
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Chitepo was elected national chairman of ZANU in 1964, and under his leadership from Tanzania the party became more militant and involved in armed struggle. By then the political map of central Africa had changed dramatically, however. Zambia and Malawi had gained their independence in 1964, following the breakup of the Central African Federation, and Rhodesia had declared UDI in November 1965. The ZANU external wing began a training program for armed infiltration and struggle almost at once. In April 1966, six months after UDI, Chitepo resigned his position in Tanzania and moved ZANU headquarters to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. ZAPU had been active in Lusaka for years, and enjoyed the support of many officials there, including the president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, and the Rhodesian-born minister of home affairs, Aaron Milner. Well before UDI, and when ZAPU was still operating in Rhodesia, Nkomo had begun to receive Soviet aid. Within a few weeks of UDI, ZAPU officials broadcast pleas on Zambian radio to Africans in Rhodesia to rebel against UDI.2 Within a few years of UDI, many Rhodesian lawyers, particularly those who had worked for ZAPU, emigrated to Zambia, where many worked in the Zambian judiciary.3 After ZANU moved its headquarters to Lusaka, the ruptures between the two parties intensified. Almost one-third of ZAPU’s army defected to ZANU’s between 1969 and 1971, most notably the high-ranking Rex Nhongo, Thomas Nhari, and Robson Manyika, all of whom figure in the events leading up to the Chitepo assassination. Manyika had been ZAPU’s chief of staff before his defection; Nhari and Nhongo had undergone military training in Moscow (or Bulgaria, a few said) together, and they had joined ZANU together. Nhongo was said to have given ZAPU’s military plans to ZANU.4 Attempts to unify ZANU and ZAPU failed dismally, but some members of both parties, exasperated both by their parties’ failure to address the common issues of the liberation struggle and by their own declining followings therein, formed a new party, the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI). By all accounts, FROLIZI had very few members and no army other than defectors from ZANU and ZAPU, but it had considerable support among Zimbabweans abroad, and its presence divided ZANU and ZAPU even further: Chitepo used to call it “influenza.”5 Amidst increasing violence in Lusaka between ZANU and ZAPU, a new party caused great confusion and made the need for a unified independence movement for Zimbabwe particularly acute. FROLIZI, for all its weakness, now had a valid claim on funds from the Liberation Committee of the OAU, which channeled Eastern European
18
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
funds to the liberation movement of the OAU’s choice. What fragile fictions of unity existed between ZANU and ZAPU were created to obtain funds from the OAU, or at least to make a claim for funds that was stronger than FROLIZI’s. Early in 1972 Chitepo, the ZANU chairman, and Jason Moyo, the ZAPU chairman, established a joint military command that was to bring the two parties’ armies together. It did no such thing, of course, but several men in both parties firmly believed that this was a first step toward a real military unity, including ZANU’s Henry Hamadziripi, Rugare Gumbo, and Mukudzei Mudzi, all of whom also figure in the events leading up to the Chitepo assassination.6 On the whole, however, ZANU and ZAPU cadres refused overtures by the OAU and everyone else, insisting that unity could only be achieved by their leaders, Nkomo and Sithole, both in prison in Rhodesia. But once again the regional map changed, as Mozambique and Angola moved toward independence in 1975. Rhodesia was pressured by South Africa into accepting detente, a cease-fire that would, in the eyes of South Africans, Henry Kissinger, and possibly several multi-national corporations—including Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Holding Company, Ltd.), which will figure in this and the next chapter—lead to a negotiated settlement and an end to the war. Under pressure from South Africa, Ian Smith released Nkomo and Sithole to attend a meeting in Lusaka on 8 November 1974 with the presidents of the frontline states: Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia—all of whom figure in this story—and Seretse Khama of Botswana. By then, ZANU’s external wing had a large and fractured bureaucracy, one that had begun to privilege armed struggle above all else. The dare—the war council—was elected every two years. The high command was the military leadership; it consisted of appointed political commissars and regional commanders. The election of the chief of the military high command, Josiah Tongogara, to the dare in 1973, replacing Noel Mukono as minister of defense, marked the first real overlap between the high command and the dare, something that was to alarm many in the party, as we shall see. Moreover, two young radicals, graduates of North American universities and avowedly pro-Chinese, had been elected to the dare in 1973—Kumbirai Kangai and Rugare Gumbo. The entire dare, the entire high command, and all ZANU branch officials from Zambia formed the chimurenga general council. One of the party members who had been alarmed by Tongogara’s election was the president, Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, who could not attend the Lusaka meetings because members of ZANU’s central committee, also in prison in Rhodesia, had dismissed him as president and
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replaced him with the party’s secretary-general, Robert Mugabe. When Mugabe arrived in Lusaka, the tensions and antagonisms within the party’s leadership and in ZANU’s relation to neighboring countries became obvious to all, but in a few days the external wing of ZANU reinstated Rev. Sithole. The presidents of the frontline states also wanted Sithole to remain as president, which only increased strains within the party. Many in ZANU’s external wing—including Chitepo—supported Sithole, but did not want the party leadership dictated by foreign presidents, while others in ZANU believed Sithole was ill-equipped to deal with the new radical element in the party and the new prominence of the army in the party.7 All the anger and consternation at the frontline presidents, however, obscured the previous five years of leadership struggles and rumors of leadership struggles within ZANU.8 The unity meetings were tense, but on 3 December 1974 a declaration of unity was signed by the leaders of ZANU, ZAPU, and FROLIZI under the umbrella of an enlarged African National Council (ANC) led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa. The ANC was the only African party legal in Rhodesia; it had no credibility with Zimbabweans in exile but it had gained some grass-roots support in the country in the mobilizations of the early 1970s.9 It took one more declaration of unity for this expanded ANC to get the recognition of the OAU’s Liberation Committee. ZANU’s executive committee—including and perhaps especially Chitepo—opposed the Unity Accord. That committee believed that a liberation movement could only succeed through armed struggle and insisted that ZANU’s military wing was already highly effective in its infiltration. Some said they feared that armed struggle would be diluted by a unified movement, others said they worried that ZANU’s contributions would be compromised. As Mugabe wrote two weeks later, “we thought that without us the rest would be toothless.”10 Before the Unity Accord was signed in Lusaka, however, ZANU cadres fighting in Mozambique mutinied against the military high command. Thomas Nhari and Dakarai Badza led the rebellion. They were young, educated commanders who had recently been demoted to ordinary soldiers, and who had considerable support at the front, among both male and female guerillas, and in Lusaka. The rebellion—it is almost never called a mutiny—was as violent as its repression was, and, as we shall see, the murders on both sides became key elements in the testimonies before the Chitepo Commission. Why Nhari and his fellows rebelled is another question altogether; published texts have offered a variety of motivations. The summary that follows has two goals: to present a chronological summary of what is called the Nhari rebellion and
20
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
to show the number of alliances, affiliations, and betrayals involved in it, many of which may have come into play in the assassination of Herbert Chitepo. The rebels’ grievances, as published in the Report of the Chitepo Commission in 1976, read with dispiriting familiarity in 2001; they may have had less force in 1974 and ’75. The rebels complained that there was a shortage of essential commodities and war material at the front. Cadres sometimes had to obtain food and clothing from the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). The high command had made no provisions for ferrying cadres across the Zambezi River, so they often had to rely on canoes supplied by FRELIMO. The high command was out of touch and did not visit the front, let alone appreciate the difficulties there. The high command was riddled with corruption and tribalism. There were rumors that leaders misappropriated funds intended for the war. Class divisions were emerging: dare members lived very well in Lusaka and their children attended “special schools.” Codes of discipline were violated. ZANU’s chief of defense, Josiah Tongogara, had sent a case of whiskey and cigarettes to his relative, Josiah Tungamirai. Promotions were irregular and not based on seniority; relatives, like Tungamirai, were often favored over experienced cadres. “Freedom fighter girls” were used as “house-maids and concubines.” This was “a burning issue” with young men at the front. Men—including Nhari and Badza—were demoted and sent to the front as a punishment for insubordination, or for writing letters to the high command accusing their superiors of corruption. Finally—and this grievance prefigures some of the issues in this book—guerillas in the operational zones came across people who they were convinced were Rhodesian agents. Although they repeatedly informed the high command about them, no action was taken. Tongogara testified before the Chitepo Commission that some of the grievances were genuine, but believed that the rebels had been unduly impatient in the face of long-term shortages. He insisted that the rebellion was instigated by Rhodesian propaganda, which sought to demoralize soldiers at the front by discrediting leading freedom fighters, himself especially.11 Later authors followed Tongogara’s analysis, reducing the rebels’ grievances to the inevitable problems of equipment in a guerilla war and to ZANU’s internal conflicts over the party’s new orientation toward Mao’s China. Martin and Johnson, and many in ZANU, made much of Nhari’s supposed opposition to Chinese aid and equipment. They noted that before he joined ZANU in 1971, Nhari had been sent to Russia for military training in 1968 or ’69, where he had
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21
learned to use sophisticated Russian arms. At the front in Mozambique, Nhari found the lighter, mainly Chinese weapons to be “inadequate.” Guns, whatever their country of origin, have a particularly important place in ZANLA’s history. Not everyone could train with guns; they used wooden replicas, and guerillas were often sent to the border unarmed, as FRELIMO did not allow them to travel armed through the countryside.12 One woman in ZANLA, quoted in a pamphlet in early 1975—close enough to Nhari’s mutiny to be noteworthy—was dismayed that after she and others walked to Mozambique “our comrades were reluctant to show us how to handle a gun.” A political commissar explained: “A gun is not an object for you to use as an instrument of showing off, neither is it a certificate that you are equal to men comrades.” Guns, she was told, were only to be used for killing “fascist soldiers” and eliminating “racial discrimination, capitalism, and exploitation in Zimbabwe.”13 When soldiers thought their weapons insufficient to that task, they did not mutiny, but found ways to avoid using them or to inscribe them with new meanings. When a Coloured man served, like many others, as a driver for Rhodesian security forces, he drove unarmed: their guns were “really surplus old hardware” and drivers simply put them under their seats. “Because we actually knew that if we were ever fired at we wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance with these silly little guns they gave us.”14 Whatever the meaning of strong or weak weapons, there were objections to Chinese arms from many quarters in ZANU. Even as Robert Mugabe was sent away by the presidents of the frontline states in 1974, he “declined Chinese weapons because they were not modern enough.”15 But how many arms of Chinese manufacture were in use in ZANLA in the early 1970s? Official Rhodesian lists—which might have been expected to exaggerate the number of communist-made weapons—revealed that many of the arms that came from China, especially the AK-47 and the Tokarev self-loading pistol, were of Russian origin and manufactured in both the USSR and China. The Chinese-made model was identical to the original model. The lighter Kalashnikov, the AKM, was manufactured in Russia.16 China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s, during which the manufacture and export of arms was reduced; Chinese arms manufacture began to pick up again after 1978, but failed to dominate export markets. By 1980 Chinese weapons could not compete with cheaper Russian-made ones.17 However strong the pro-Chinese faction in ZANLA was, China could not meet ZANLA’s military needs, and the states that provided ZANU with arms in the 1970s were primarily Soviet client states.18
22
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
Wherever his weapons came from, Nhari found an attentive audience for his complaints among the young cadres, some without military training, at the front in the difficult times of 1974. Nhari and Badza had both been demoted. According to Martin and Johnson, Badza had a well-deserved reputation for cruelty, and had been demoted because he tried to shoot Rex Nhongo.19 Demotions, as the Nhari rebels were not alone in pointing out, had become a common punishment in ZANLA. When Masipula Sithole, ZANU publicity secretary in the U.S., visited Lusaka in November 1974, he met two former commanders from Mukono’s high command who had deserted after having been demoted for writing complaints about their superiors.20 Martin and Johnson, writing in 1981 and 1985, maintained that the Nhari rebellion began with secret meetings between Rhodesian Special Branch operatives and three senior ZANLA commanders, two of whom were Nhari and Badza, held between late September and early November 1974 just over the border in Mozambique. Were these part of other, amiable border crossings? The Special Branch men told the commanders that the war was about to end; “there was no need to be the last to die.” The same operatives explained that Nhari willingly led the rebellion because he scorned the Chinese model of peasant mobilization ZANU now favored, and because he argued, in vain, that Chinese arms were so weak that it was in ZANU’s best interest to seek Russian support.21 Although Martin and Johnson based these statements on interviews with former Rhodesian police and soldiers, they were commonplace explanations of the mutiny that circulated in ZANU circles in the first weeks after the Chitepo assassination. Several texts traveled through the exile community and its armies; one blamed the mutiny on Tongogara.22 A less frequently cited document is “Kaunda’s Role in Detente”: it considered the Nhari rebels puppets, not of Rhodesians but of Zimbabweans.23 This anonymous text, dated 31 March 1975, has no clear genealogy, which may account for why it does not appear in what little is written about the Nhari rebellion, or even about the Chitepo assassination, even though it too argued that the Nhari rebels wanted to return to Russian support and Russian weapons.24 It may have circulated in Lusaka after it was completed, but it first appeared in Rhodesia when it was mailed to Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole from Switzerland. Rev. Sithole released it to the press, saying he thought it was “the work of a white man” in intelligence in a “foreign country. . . . The document is so detailed that I think it is accurate to a great extent.”25 I have found three copies of this text, one in the International Defense and Aid Fund ma-
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terials deposited in the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and two in a file of miscellaneous ZANU papers (deposited by Enos Chikowore) in the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research in York. The text in Zimbabwe contains a poorly typed version of the paper, with words and lines crossed out. A handwritten note is written on scrap paper at the end of the document, stating that it was believed to have been “written (?) and distributed” by a ZANU official who escaped the Zambian police roundups of March 1975.26 The file in York contains two copies of the paper, the badly typed version and one that has been retyped and mimeographed. The mimeographed version suggests that the document had some official connection to the party; why else go through the effort of retyping and duplicating it? Many people in Lusaka at the time believed the document to have been written by Fay Chung and Dzingai Mutumbuka, both ZANU members on the faculty at the University of Zambia.27 Others thought it was written by the ZANU faction in the ANC, most likely by Edson Sithole.28 Whatever its authorship, “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” claims the Nhari rebellion was organized by Rhodesians and Zimbabweans. Starting in April 1974, a faction headed by Cornelius Sanyanga sought to do away with the radical elements in ZANU; this would make the new Zimbabwe a more welcoming home to multi-national corporations like Anglo-American and Lonrho, of which Sanyanga was an employee. Lonrho was headed by Tiny Rowland, a friend and benefactor of Nkomo’s and the owner of at least one Zambian newspaper; he was a man with a suspicious political history even in Federation times.29 To begin to make the party less radical, Sanyanga set up several new ZANU branches in Zambia, making sure moderates, and in some cases former FROLIZI members, dominated each one. He also organized within ZANU’s army, ZANLA, and won the support of fifteen commanders, including Nhari and Badza. These men all believed that the armed struggle would be accelerated if the pro-Chinese ZANLA leaders could be eliminated, so that ZANLA could return to Russian support and the superior weapons the USSR would provide. At the same time, the authors asserted, Nhari and Badza had been meeting with “colonels” from the Rhodesian security forces who assured them that “the Rhodesian army was ready to accept defeat and come to the negotiating table with the guerillas.” The colonels suggested that it would be “better” if the two armies arranged for a transfer of power “from one army to the other,” and did not involve politicians in either Salisbury or Lusaka.30 But within ZANLA, there was another explanation for Nhari’s rebellion—struggles over recruitment. This was not a neutral issue within
24
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
liberation movements. Starting in 1967, the OAU required evidence of new recruits before it funded any army in exile, while Tanzania threatened to close ZANLA camps that did not have any soldiers training in them. This led both ZANU and ZAPU to press-gang recruits, frequently abducting entire secondary schools. According to Josiah Tungamirai— a man the Nhari rebels viewed with considerable disdain—in 1973 Nhari led the botched abduction of the students at St. Albert’s Mission, in the northeast. The operation was a disaster and only a handful of adolescents, led by Nhari and his subordinate, James Bond, reached Chifombo, the ZANLA camp on the border of Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. After that, Nhari was demoted to common soldier and ZANLA forbade the abduction of schoolchildren.31 According to interviews Rex Nhongo gave to several scholars in the late 1990s, however, Nhari was motivated by personal envy, not party loyalty or any particular attachment to Soviet weapons. He had coveted Nhongo’s record of voluntary recruitments, and even though ZANU policy was to leave students alone, Nhari proposed and carried out the abduction of St. Albert’s Mission without party permission. When the operation failed, Nhari was demoted for his adventurism. The problem, Nhongo explained, was that Nhari “wanted a name like Nhongo. . . . this is where the problem of Nhari and his friends wanting to take over the party began.”32 The ZANU(PF) archives, however, reveal that Nhari and Badza had a greater range of concerns. In mid-January 1975, when their revolt had failed and they were in and out of Zambian custody, the dare received a letter written by Nhari and Badza a few weeks earlier complaining once more about the treatment of female comrades by the high command. In particular, they accused Tongogara of forcing a cadre whom he had made pregnant to have an abortion, “to save his reputation.”33 ZANU members who were sympathetic to Nhari and Badza saw this kind of complaint as typical of the young men’s intensity. Nhari and Badza had been part of a wave of educated young men who had joined the struggle as soldiers: Badza had left university to join ZANLA and Nhari had been a mission-educated schoolteacher when he joined the guerillas. When in Lusaka they visited some of the university-educated ZANU members, especially Richard Hove and John Mataure, and talked late into the night about the place of education in the struggle and the excesses of the high command, about which Nhari and Badza seemed unduly suspicious. They believed the high command was taking funds meant for war materials, and were unconvinced when Hove’s sister, Sekai Holland, assured them the high command lived modestly in Lusaka. They complained that the high command never visited the
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front. Nhari and Badza worried about the difficulty of constructing a unified liberation movement, but most of all they worried that people with formal education were not taken seriously in the struggle. They wanted their own views listened to, as their letters and lists of grievances made clear, but they also wanted formal schooling to be provided for the children who crossed the border. Moreover, Nhari and Badza— and Hove and Mataure as well—were wary of cadres at the front who expressed suspicions about other cadres who spoke English or who used English names, or who openly doubted the wisdom of spirit mediums. Such people were increasingly described as “sell outs.”34 Nhari and Badza were at the front, and this, more than their education and their obsession with its importance, distinguished them from other, somewhat younger, better-educated men in the struggle, especially Kangai and Gumbo, who had degrees from North American universities. Kangai and Gumbo were pro-Chinese radicals—“young and free,” said a commander who wanted to remain anonymous—who loved to talk theory and politics with the Zimbabwean students and faculty members who came to the Liberation Center in Lusaka. Gumbo was a nephew of Richard Hove, and an occasional visitor to his home, but never supported the rebels.35 Martin and Johnson have stressed the anti-Chinese sentiments of Nhari and his followers,36 but it seems that the rebellion had its origins in more complicated politics than could be expressed by the labels of international ideological affiliation. Indeed, other ZANU members, some of whom were trained in China and were active in the repression of the rebellion, were not wholly unsympathetic to it. “Most of us thought they had just demands,” said Dzinashe Machingura. Cadres knew very well that demotions from commander to ordinary soldier were routine punishments, and that favoritism was widespread. But few in ZANLA supported the timing of their revolt, which occurred just as party leadership was weakened by quarrels over the conditions of unity. Fewer in ZANU supported the rebels’ enthusiasm for kidnaping and killing: this practice brought widespread condemnation and repression of the rebellion by ZANLA commanders.37 The actual Nhari rebellion has a brief and blurred history, described in the most detail in the Report of the Chitepo Commission and by Martin and Johnson in The Struggle for Zimbabwe. However the rebellion was organized, it seems to have begun at the front in mid-November 1974. Nhari led thirty rebels, including several women, toward Chifombo. On the way, they killed an “enemy agent” who “professed to be a relation of a member of the High Command.” They took over Chi-
26
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
fombo; some sources say they killed a commander, others say they did not, but they did send several soldiers to the front. One of these was Silas Shamiso, who was to become one of Chitepo’s bodyguards. The rebels left Chifombo for Lusaka on 30 November, taking advantage of the travels of key members of the dare and the high command— Nhongo and Machingura were in China, and Chitepo and Tongogara were in Romania. According to Martin and Johnson, there they captured Tungamirai and marched him back to Chifombo.38 According to other sources, the rebels had tried to kidnap Cletus Chigowe, ZANU’s chief of security and said to be first on the rebels’ death list, but he was not home. Nhari and his followers managed to abduct William Ndangana, ZANLA’s chief of operations, Charles Dauramanzi, ZANLA’s supply officer, and Joseph Chimurenga, the ZANLA field commander for the Botswana border. Chimurenga was a member of the high command and one of the three who was to be accused of assassinating Chitepo by the Chitepo Commission. The captives were driven to Chifombo, where Nhari lectured them on the rebels’ grievances, which some sources say he insisted were against the high command, not the dare. This is hardly the only version of events, nor is it the only one that opposed the rebels. According to “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” the rebels had killed forty-seven guerillas by the time they reached Lusaka. Once they were there, however, they were “clearly well-financed and were able to live in hotels and buy two cars, a Fiat and a Kombi bus. Their financial support is known to have come from wealthy Zimbabweans within ZANU,” namely Cornelius Sanyanga and Nelson Dziruni, another businessman in Lusaka. The rebels “also received substantial financial aid from Lonrho,” Sanyanga’s employer.39 When Tongogara returned from Romania to Tanzania and then Lusaka, he was furious that the rebels thought they could “coup the party” and still have an armed struggle. He was told “some big fish in the party had supervised it.” As the unity talks went on, Nhari returned to Lusaka on 6 December, the same day that Smith sent two cabinet ministers to join the negotiations. Nhari’s position had been strengthened by his hostages, and he had planned to ask the dare to approve a new high command chosen by the rebels. The dare, however, was meeting to discuss unity, and they sent Tongogara and John Mataure to meet with them. The rebels recited their complaints—which, Tongogara later told Martin and Johnson, were that the “high command had been turned into a Chinese thing”—and read out their list of new commanders. Over the next two days, Nhari may or may not have returned to Chifombo. On 8 or 9 December—the Unity Accord was signed on the ninth—
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Nhari and a group of rebels made a show of force in Lusaka. They were heavily armed, and traveled in two trucks. Some said they planned to kill Tongogara and perhaps Nhongo; others said they wanted to kill those two and Mudzi, Gumbo, and Kangai as well. The rebels kidnaped seventeen people, including Tongogara’s wife and three young children and two members of the pro-Chinese camp of the dare, Kumbirai Kangai and Mukudzei Mudzi. The Zambian police said they could do nothing. There were meetings and discussions among the dare and what was by then a very divided ZANU leadership. Some wanted “tough action” against the rebels and others wanted to negotiate with them. Some dare members, like John Mataure, could talk to both the rebels and the high command, while others, particularly Rev. Sithole, could not and refused to take a stand. The Zambian police found Tongogara’s wife and children and the other hostages over the next two days. They arrested the rebels, who escaped almost at once, quite possibly with Zambian acquiescence. “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” insists that Sanyanga, a close friend of several of Kaunda’s closest advisors, had convinced the Zambians that the rebels would support unity if they came to power in ZANU. The rebels returned to Chifombo, in such haste that they left their automatic weapons at the home of Edgar Madekurozwa, a ZANU official and laboratory technician at the University of Zambia.40 On 12 December the dare met and Tongogara announced that the high command would retake the camps. Nhongo went to Mozambique to guarantee FRELIMO’s support, while Machingura and Robson Manyika went to Tanzania and returned with 250 “newly trained cadres” who, led by Tongogara, entered Chifombo on Christmas Day, 1974. “The reinforcements were dubbed Gukurahundi, which literally means the first rains of the season that sweep away the rubbish,” Martin and Johnson wrote.41 There were hardly any rebels left to retake Chifombo from, however. The group returning to Chifombo had been arrested by Zambian police, and even though several managed to escape, Nhari and sixteen others remained in custody until 31 December, when he and nine of his followers escaped. They were recaptured a few days later. Again, it seems likely these escapes were facilitated by Zambian actions or inactions. But by then, what Zambians were doing or not doing hardly mattered: there was no rebellion left; many had been killed, including perhaps Badza. After that, there is no clear explanation of what happened. Martin and Johnson claim half of Nhari’s supporters had already deserted and many had reintegrated themselves into the party. The author or authors of “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” claim that the pro-Russian ZANU leaders were defeated once and for all and no longer had any
28
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
influence in ZANLA. The Report of the Chitepo Commission claims that the Zambians tried to mediate, asking Nhari to meet with Chitepo and the pro-Chinese radicals—two of whom he had had kidnaped— Mukudzei Mudzi, Kangai, and Gumbo. At the meeting, Nhari read the document stating his grounds for the revolt. It was “discovered” that he had not followed the proper procedures for presenting grievances. It was clear that the Zambians had no firm idea of how to proceed, so they asked Chitepo what he, as chairman, would do if the rebels were handed over to ZANU; they wanted assurances that they would not be executed. Chitepo said that the party would like the men returned to them. Executions were not permitted in the party’s code of discipline, and experience had shown that wrong-doers could reform. But a few weeks later, ZANU executed the members who had supported the rebellion and sentenced others to death in absentia. According to the testimony of Chigowe, ZANU’s chief of security, before the Chitepo Commission, whoever was found to be “zig-zagging” and becoming a “stumbling block” to the party was to be executed.42 There is considerable dispute about how many cadres had zig-zagged, however. The number of those executed was estimated at 155 by the journalist David Martin, and sixty by him and Johnson a few years later; one ZANU member told David Moore over 250 were executed.43 Martin and Johnson insist that the Nhari rebellion and the Chitepo assassination were “interrelated,” set in motion by the Rhodesian Special Branch, which arranged “low-key secret meetings” in the northeast in September 1974. They first met with Nhari and Badza and then included a few other ZANLA commanders: later, at Chifombo, Nhari was said to have confessed to these meetings. “We had a great deal of luck,” said Michael Edden, Special Branch liaison officer to the Rhodesian Army’s Combined Operations: “if there was friction in the Central Committee we could turn it to our own advantage.”44 But did they? When the Operations Co-ordinating Committee first discussed the aftermath of the mutiny, it seems to have underestimated its importance: “We would be deluding ourselves if we believe that the pro-unity and anti-unity rift in ZANU indicated a real split in ZANU.”45 A few weeks later, Flower told the same group that what was happening in Zambia was an “eye opener,” although later his own memoirs and those of a paid assassin were to claim the CIO knew much about these events.46 Michael Edden was a policeman who became the spokesman for Combined Operations; he gave press conferences.47 There were rumors that he became close to ZANU in 1978 or ’79, but most people discounted them altogether.48 Edden’s press briefings declared that intelli-
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gence about ZANLA had been at an all-time high in early December 1974 and then dropped off to a “complete cessation” by 1 January 1975. Edden—speaking for the army—attributed this to the withdrawal of the South African police. While it is unlikely that military press briefings are wholly truthful, how does this information fit with various accounts of the Nhari rebellion? Does the press report, and the interview Edden gave Martin and Johnson a few years later, suggest that Special Branch was, as several sources suggest, in touch with Nhari and Badza early in December, but not later? Or can it be interpreted to mean that the guerillas killed in Chifombo were those who spoke to Special Branch, and their deaths cost the Rhodesians their intelligence? Among Nhari and Badza’s complaints was that the high command was unwilling to deal with the men they thought were Rhodesian agents. Did Rhodesian intelligence cease because the Nhari rebels had killed a few of their agents? Or were such complaints disinformation on the part of Nhari and Badza, a clever smokescreen for their own traitorous contacts? These particular killings are singled out for interrogation in the remarkable analysis of the Report of the Chitepo Commission written by the ZANU detainees jailed in Zambia after the murder of Chitepo. Published as a pamphlet in London in April 1976, it is divided into three parts, an “Introduction,” a “Reply,” and an “Analysis” of the published Report. It also contains short “Portraits of the Accused”: Tongogara, Chimurenga, Kufamadzuba, and Chigowe. It is a contradictory document. The “Introduction” rehearses many of the arguments and the language of “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” without comment or attribution. The “Reply,” which was given to ZANU lawyers to issue as a statement, was signed by the dare and the high command “on behalf of” the cadres detained in Zambian jails. It is a clearly reasoned condemnation of the Zambian motives behind the Chitepo Commission and its “unbelievably naive” findings. The “Analysis” is factitious and disorganized by comparison; it is also not signed. It literally deconstructs the Report. Using a combination of experience and insider knowledge, common sense, and linguistic analysis, the detainees read through the Report, pointing out problems, errors, and those turns of phrase that cast doubt on the entire enterprise of the investigation. They were sensitive to the choice of words used in the Report, particularly euphemisms and translations, and they were very attentive to what had been left out. They were particularly distressed by “the attitude of the Commission” toward the killings and abductions carried out by the Nhari group. They unpack two paragraphs that describe how the rebels, led by Nhari, marching from the front to Chifombo, confronted a “self-confessed enemy
30
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
agent”—and a relative of someone in the high command—who made an “open confession” and was “eliminated.” Soon after, the rebels came across another “well-known self-confessed enemy agent” whom the rebels had already identified and warned. He too was executed. The detainees were appalled that the commission did not question these summary executions, or the on-the-spot confessions that they assumed were secured through torture. They were indignant at the “tones of approval” of such killings in the Report, “as if it is legally right for one group of guerillas to kill a fellow guerilla they suspect of being a spy.”49 Here detained guerillas sought to assert their legal rights to defend themselves against accusations of being informers. In this sentence I think there is a glimpse of something that is to vanish in later writings, a war zone understanding that accusations of spying and double agency were too commonplace, and too loose, and too understandable to be acted upon without thorough investigation. What does such an on-the-ground sensibility do to the idea of Smith’s agents and Rhodesian colonels fomenting revolt in ZANLA’s ranks? ZANU’s chain of command did not allow for individual cadres to decide who among them was an agent and who was not; that was the job of Cletus Chigowe’s department of intelligence and security. Chigowe and his deputies carefully observed all Zimbabweans in Lusaka who were not party members before they allowed them to attend meetings, and as recruitment expanded, Chigowe and his deputies devised a series of questions with which to trip up those Rhodesian agents posing as guerilla recruits. Simbi Mubako, a lecturer in law at the University of Zambia in 1975, claimed that one out of every ten recruits voluntarily crossing the border was an enemy agent. Many infiltrators were discovered by ZANU’s questions, but some agents slipped through. Nhari and his followers apparently blamed Chigowe for this: according to the detainees, his name was first on the rebels’ supposed death list.50 It is altogether possible that ZANU insisted on the rigidly hierarchical method of identifying agents and informers as a way to maintain discipline. There were those within ZANLA, as in every liberation movement, who thought these men and women should be summarily executed.51 Chigowe—and the detainees—may have seen his job as keeping this tendency in line. For the party leadership, it was important to control informers, but it was more important to control guerilla violence and protect the guerillas’ legitimacy. Executing civilian informers could cost guerillas popular support. In parts of Matabeleland, for example, widespread summary executions of informers or witches were seen as evidence of the weakness of local ZAPU officials; they had not
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been consulted about what procedures to follow after an accusation was made, nor were they able to contain false accusations.52 There is no question that informers caused guerilla deaths, but the question of who could be relied on to identify informers was exceptionally difficult: commanders willing to execute people accused of being Rhodesian agents ran the risk of being dragged into local squabbles or being manipulated by their own rank and file.53 But why would ZANU want to protect well-known agents and informers? It is possible that ZANU intelligence—like that of other liberation movements—may have wanted to keep informers alive, to use them as conduits for disinformation.54 It is possible, perhaps probable, that some “self-confessed” agents were in fact double agents. Rhodesian military commanders, however, believed these executions of late 1974 and early ’75 were of known informers. By mid-1973 Special Branch had been in touch with three cadres at Chifombo about their routes and other ZANU camps.55 For the Operations Co-ordinating Committee, the events of February 1975 in Mozambique and Rhodesia were not “aimless” acts “of brutality and murder” but were “planned acts designed to cut off the flow of information to Security Forces.”56 Why then did the detainees—one of whom was Cletus Chigowe—condemn the executions by Nhari and his followers? These men may have been double agents, of course, but ZANU security and intelligence may have had a tolerant, perhaps even philosophical, attitude about agents. They may have had a hands-on sense of how constrained agents and informers actually were. Philip Frankel’s exemplary study of the Sharpeville massacre details some of the ways black policemen tried to protect themselves while doing their jobs. Knowing full well they could be killed by the crowd, African policemen feigned ignorance of who the leaders were or of how senior white policemen might negotiate with the crowd.57 While I do not mean to suggest that informers and collaborators were harmless, it is probable that many were so fearful of exposure and retribution that they did not provide much information, or that the misinformation they provided was designed to protect themselves rather than to mislead anyone. For chiefs of security in a war zone, identifying informers and executing them might have done more damage—to discipline and morale—than what could have been accomplished by executing fearful informers.58 This may have been an insight specific to the front, however. In Lusaka, as we shall see, Chigowe thought differently about loyalty to ZANU. The questions that seek to establish once and for all who someone really is, to establish a fixed identity within complicated practices of loy-
32
THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
alty and speech, or that seek to locate that identity in who pays the person, may be too simplistic to allow an understanding of the social world of struggle, insurgency, and counter-insurgency. Such questions, whether asked by chiefs of security or by historians, take the either/or historical narrative and apply it to individuals; such questions assume that individuals can be fixed in political positions. The widespread use of terms like “pro-Chinese” or “radical” in ZANU and its historiography is an example of such an assumption. In the language of nationalist literature, it is said that someone is “radicalized” or becomes a nationalist, and this transformation is all but embodied: it is permanent and cannot be dislodged. To waver was to be less than a true nationalist, or to have merely pretended to be radical.59 Take, for example, the descriptions of Joshua Nkomo favored by those outside of his party: he was an “eternal chameleon,” a man who was equally at home in the Kremlin, in the Lonrho boardroom, and in the White House.60 In much of the secondary literature, Nkomo’s ability to negotiate so many spaces is seen as proof of the weakness of his politics, rather than of his political prudence; however, cadres in ZANU and ZAPU saw him as a man who could raise funds for the armed struggle with great skill and intelligence. Such views only differ if we see the political worlds of the 1960s and ’70s in either/or terms. But the worlds in which one was a nationalist, pro- or anti-Chinese, or alternating between Moscow and Washington during the 1970s were complicated and contentious; the practices with which someone negotiated a position that was, for example, radical or pro-Russian changed frequently. As Allen Feldman argues in his splendid study of political violence in Northern Ireland, political actions are constructed from the multiple situations and positions that individuals find themselves in. No subject is stable or unified, as actors shift not only from talk to actions but between very different and often contradictory social spaces.61 Tongogara described this in a 1979 interview. In battle, he said, “you put on your uniform, get your kit bag and your gun. . . . in London you put on your suit and tie and then you go talk.”62 Did Chigowe and his deputies understand this, and believe that not everyone in the pay of Rhodesians worked wholeheartedly for them, and that many paid informers were craven, while others had grave misgivings about their orders, if they followed them at all? Chigowe may have thought that, in a world in which some guerillas had fleeting and partial loyalty to the struggle, there were Rhodesian agents with similarly temporary loyalties to the Rhodesian cause. Did Chigowe think that some Zimbabweans in the struggle would take Rhodesian money as a foolproof way to avoid arrest? Did he think that there were some
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guerillas whose commitment to the struggle was so tentative, or fueled by self-doubt, that it was possible for other guerillas to imagine they were agents? Did he think that many fighting for Zimbabwe were unable to negotiate the diverse spaces that would indicate to their fellows that they believed fully in the cause? If political actors are unstable subjects, occupying many spaces at once, is this enough to explain the widespread accusations and presence of agents and informers? Certainly there were many informers. Racist regimes, intelligence agencies, and counter-insurgency forces were all too eager to buy all the information they could from anyone who might take their money. How successful these purchases were is another question. Rhodesian memoirs, as we shall see in chapters four and five, make many elaborate claims about who was on their payroll. How true they are is yet another question. Just as socialists in the decolonizing world of the 1970s voiced a preference for Chinese over Russian communism, accusations—some true, some false—of who was on the CIA’s payroll were common around that world.63 The list of ZANU leaders accused of taking CIA funds in the 1970s is laughable when read in 2001. Mugabe was accused by some, of course, as were several ZANU activists, including Edgar Tekere’s wife, Anne. She was recruited when she was studying in the U.S., her accusers said, and she asked the CIA to pay her earnings to her father: indeed, his once defunct Salisbury business began to flourish.64 When accusations of being an agent or informer were hurled at those men and women who were not leaders, they tended to highlight the ambiguous and antagonistic spaces guerillas occupied and how instrumental accusations against them could be. The charge that Nhari was led to rebel by Rhodesians is one example; the charges leveled at ZAPU dissidents who refused to rejoin the party after the failed coup of 1971 are another. They were declared Rhodesian agents by Zambia and sent to Salisbury, where most were tried and hung for sedition.65 I do not mean this to minimize the untold sufferings and losses informers caused; I simply mean that in the context of guerilla war, counter-insurgency and counter-counter-insurgency, informers and agents—single, double, or triple—were not alone in causing death and suffering, let alone in betraying old friends and comrades. The question of what guerillas should do to informers, Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger argue, was almost never one of how to limit the harm informers could do, but about how to limit the harm guerillas could do to themselves. Anything other than the judicious execution of proven informers could seem indiscriminately violent; it might under-
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mine the legitimacy of the guerillas’ cause.66 Indeed, it may be that agents, turncoats, and informers did not hinder the struggle, but they could damage its public relations. A press release by Jason Moyo suggests as much. In August 1976 he complained bitterly about reports that a former high-ranking ZAPU officer had led a Rhodesian attack on Mozambique. The problem wasn’t the damage the attack did to Mozambique, but the damage the report did to ZAPU. Such fictions “smear our international standing and prestige” and attempt to “discredit its credibility as an authentic and effective Liberation Movement in Zimbabwe.”67 If political agency can be seen as fractured, as traversing many spaces, how then do we read the words of the Rhodesian authors who wrote the now-it-can-be-told memoirs that I cite so frequently in this book? An example of the complexities of utilizing such texts might be the confessional book of Ken Flower, Serving Secretly. Flower was head of Rhodesia’s CIO before and during UDI. At Mugabe’s request, he stayed on to head Zimbabwe’s CIO for several years. Many Rhodesians thought he was a British agent, or had played both sides since the mid1970s. Certainly he had tried to maintain cordial relations with British intelligence during the war.68 Flower writes as a disinterested civil servant, describing his work for Rhodesia. His job was to protect the interests of the nation he served, no more, no less, and we are asked to believe that no other purpose informs his prose. The question remains, however, of which disinterested civil servant is writing, the Rhodesian or the Zimbabwean? It is impossible to say for sure, of course, but what makes his memoir so useful is the author’s instability as a subject. Reading—and quoting—Flower’s memoirs in order to ascertain when he’s telling the truth and when he’s not oversimplifies the complexities of his world and the history he helped shape; it brings the either/or narrative to a text. The contradictorily complex position from which he writes, and remembers, is what makes his book so revealing—perhaps not in the tell-all way Flower proclaimed, but because each statement leaves a trace, and can be seen to address the predicament of his position, so that he must speak to several audiences at once, about both the past and the present. In the next three chapters, I try to use Flower— and other authors—to learn how his statements reveal what is at stake in his memoirs, and who in the past and in the present he is addressing. In this way, the two seemingly polar identities of Flower are not a problem at all; there is no need to fix him in one political position. Each paragraph, each assertion calls into question the multiple audiences for his words.
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Given this reading of some of the texts I cite, how do we understand Rhodesian claims to have activated the Nhari rebellion? In particular, what did Michael Edden mean when he told Martin and Johnson, “we had a great deal of luck”? Did he mean that Special Branch was lucky in being able to foment revolt, or lucky that a revolt happened at all? Certainly, in his not wholly reliable press briefing, Edden sounded unenlightened, if pleasantly surprised, about the rebellion. “A number of section commanders and detachment commanders,” dismayed by problems of resupply, “went to the provincial base at Chifombo and collected dissidents to rev up the Chimurenga High Command in Lusaka. . . . That did us tremendous favor. It meant that the cream of the terrorist crop had been taken out of Hurricane [the Rhodesian operational area] and been executed by their own side.”69 Later, however, he told Martin and Johnson that Rhodesians were able to manipulate the friction in ZANLA. Even Ken Flower took only the vaguest credit for the rebellion. He wrote that the CIO had been in contact with Nhari and Badza for over a year, listening to their complaints—even though he called them commanders, and did not say that both had been demoted—and once the two heard talk of a negotiated peace, they were “ready tools . . . who became willing conspirators.”70 This passage has led at least one scholar to claim that Nhari was “a paid agent” of Rhodesia.71 Was Nhari paid or encouraged or even known as a dissident by Rhodesians? Flower’s unpublished reports to the Operations Co-ordinating Committee indicate he did not know of the man, and had only learned of the extent of the disruption in ZANU from the affidavits taken from five captured guerillas. Flower described the mutiny as if it were a polite gathering, a matter of a delegation of ZANU section commanders “visiting Lusaka to query orders, protest about corruption, and complain that the hierarchy never visited the operational area.” Most of what Flower thought noteworthy had to do with Tongogara. An attempt was made on his life sometime between 11 and 25 December, and he had sent for 250 supporters, kept fifty as a bodyguard and “set the rest on a disciplinary mission around the camps. Reports claimed that he personally shot three of the ringleaders.” All in all, Flower told his fellow commanders, “It was an eye-opener to see the extent of what had been happening in Zambia.”72 It does not sound as if Rhodesia’s CIO was behind the mutiny in any way. Other sources, however, claim the CIO had knowledge of it. Taffy Bryce’s 1985 memoirs assert that the CIO had informed him of ZANU’s “in house rebellion” in December 1974. He mentioned Nhari and some of those captured at Chifombo by name.73
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But even if Flower did organize the mutiny, or knew about it at the time, and dissembled to his fellow commanders, even if Nhari was a paid agent, how likely is it that a mutiny can be directed from above, or by secret meetings that exploit soldiers’ grievances? Is “friction” so corrosive and unnatural that it could be turned into rebellion by pressure and suggestions by outsiders? The answer, I want to suggest, requires two overlapping lines of inquiry. First, historians of Zimbabwe have to abandon the either/or paradigm in which either the liberation forces or the Smith regime are the causal agents of every deed and action during the war. Some forms of struggle, resistance, and negotiation may originate elsewhere. Second, historians of Zimbabwe—like those of the rest of Africa—need to look outside the frame they’ve set for themselves, and shift the history of war and violence beyond their interrogations of nationalism. If war and violence can be uncoupled from the history of nationalism and its triumphs, it can have its own history, a history of guerillas instead of a history of guerilla struggle. Thus, historians might be able to see the workings of soldiers and their struggles in ways that might, in turn, provide a new lens on the workings of the nation-states for which and against which these men fought. The “new” military history provides a way to look at how armies negotiate their tensions and ambiguities. The study of resistance to authority, or multiple struggles over who should have authority, might be at least as important a way to understand the constitution of warfare as is the assumption of obedience.74 In this literature, ideas about “friction” come from nineteenth-century notions of war, in which disobedience was not unnatural: it was another impediment to victory, like the weather or mechanical failure. Friction and tensions were things skilled generals could overcome; they were not sufficient, however exacerbated, to cause a mutiny. More important, perhaps, is the insight that military discipline is not a matter of loyal cadres, obedient to a cause and to the zeal of their commanders. Military discipline is negotiated between cadres and commanders in their everyday practices and frictions, and in how they address extraordinary situations—peaceful border crossings and fraternization with enemy troops, informal cease-fires on a holiday, or exempting men from duties they or their commanders find horrific.75 Zimbabwean historiography has often suggested that all evidence of enemies fraternizing is in fact evidence of Rhodesian counter-insurgency, that there was nothing negotiated between Zimbabwe’s cadres and Rhodesia’s troops. For example, according to former police officer Henrik Ellert, until 1974 Rhodesian authorities allowed FRELIMO guerillas—who already controlled Tete Province—to cross the border
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to buy groceries; Rhodesian soldiers crossed into Mozambique as well, supposedly to garner information about ZANU. Relations were cordial; the only rule was that both sides crossed the border unarmed. Ellert suggests that in these crossings the seeds of discontent were sown among the Nhari rebels, as Martin and Johnson had heard from a Rhodesian CIO man.76 There are problems in the timing of such an analysis, of course: contact early in 1974 may not have been a direct cause of a mutiny the following November, but that’s not my point. I am arguing that in a discourse framed by Rhodesian secret agents on one side and easily influenced ZANLA guerillas on the other, there’s no room for fraternization or negotiation, and even less room for ordinary soldiers acting independently, even for a day or two, of their commanders.77 And in that discourse, there is no room for chitchat, no room for gossipy pleasantries; there can only be misinformation instead. But how likely is it that misinformation, or even exaggerated information, could breed a mutiny? Even Flower did not claim that the rebels’ grievances were caused by misinformation, or that they were dictated to subalterns less imaginative than security officers. As Greg Dening points out in his superb study of the mutiny on the Bounty, mutinies are born of intimacy, not the intervention of outsiders. It is when the practices that allow small, self-contained groups to mediate the discipline and deference authority requires are disrupted that subalterns think of revolt. Soldiers or sailors were not simply the passive recipients of orders or equipment, whether they were Russian or Chinese; many of their daily practices incorporated forms of protest which their superiors acknowledged and tolerated.78 In ZANLA, guerillas and soldiers saw their commanders, or at least their actions, regularly: they took commands from them, they experienced their flexibility and their ability to shift rules and regulations to accommodate individuals’ anxieties and indecisions. Mutinies, Geoffrey Parker forcibly points out in his work on early modern Europe, are based not on disloyal sentiments, but on the expectation that commanders and governments keep their promises to soldiers.79 More than anything else, the ZANLA practice of demoting commanders would have peopled the war zone with men accustomed to giving, not taking, orders, and this may have disturbed guerillas’ sense of order and discipline more than anything Rhodesian agents could have done. Such demotions also must have made everyday negotiations of discipline and deference ambiguous in the extreme. Given the pages of complaint that Nhari and Badza wrote, what role can be attributed to Special Branch or the CIO in fomenting revolt? It’s hard to imagine that either of these men needed Rhodesian encourage-
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THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
ment to put pen to paper. Special Branch or the CIO or almost anyone could easily have encouraged the disgruntled cadres, if they had the opportunity, but did such encouragement cause the revolt, or even make it more intense? Could Special Branch or CIO operatives have been more than cheerleaders to the young ex-commanders? All the texts that claim that Rhodesian agents were involved in the Nhari mutiny also claim that Rhodesians only exacerbated the tensions at the front.80 It is as if showing a Rhodesian hand in the mutiny, however passive, belated, or inept, is itself significant, as if such a presence can remedy the very real problems and grievances which were behind it. The number of agents, double agents, executioners of agents, ambivalent cadres, fiercely nationalist cadres, and angry young women cadres may have been great enough in late 1974 to promote a mutiny from within. A fiction was held by Tongogara and Sithole, and repeated by Martin and Johnson: that the mutiny should be kept secret, for fear it would weaken ZANU’s position in the unity talks in Lusaka.81 But the mutiny seems to have been well known, the talk of Lusaka’s exile community. It was the mutineers who did not know about the unity talks, or—as it is unlikely that they had not heard something about them—did not realize that members of the dare would refuse to leave the talks to meet with them. The issues of who knew what, and who believed what of what they heard, raise another matter. Misinformation was not just a matter of what Rhodesian agents said to ZANLA commanders or what well-known informers were told: it was a commonplace occurrence in the struggle. This may have been not because of the secrecy of the leadership, but because all negotiations within ZANLA and between ZAPU and ZANU and between Rhodesians and ZANU—secret, wellknown, or whatever—were diffuse. They were not only so between subalterns and commanders—who by late 1974 included subalterns who had been commanders a few months before—but between subalterns and Special Branch, commanders and businessmen, and all the overlapping positions and loyalties Zimbabweans in exile in Zambia had. The sheer number of people talking, and the number of informers within that group—including individuals giving incorrect information so as to protect themselves and their comrades—was great enough that the circulation of information was neither hierarchical or linear. Stories about abductions and detentions circulated through Lusaka to the front and to Salisbury without being started or enhanced by any particular agent. Lusaka, ZANU members who lived there recalled, was “ablaze with rumors.”82 But the very diffuse negotiations and the very broad deployment of rumors make the claims of disinformation hard to
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credit; they also make claims of information and confession just as incredible. Even as the mutiny was in progress, ZANU attempted to deal with its supporters, whom it believed to be Zimbabweans in the party. Much of what is known about these investigations comes from testimony before the Chitepo Commission. However coerced or flawed that testimony is, it is worth elaborating because many of the individuals said to support the rebellion also figure in confessions to and accusations about the Chitepo assassination. At the same 12 December meeting where the dare decided to retake Chifombo, it also found dare member John Mataure guilty of supporting the rebels: he had loaned them a Land Rover on more than one occasion, and had driven them to Tongogara’s house on another. It was decided that Mataure should be isolated, and he was taken to a ZANU camp near Lusaka, where he was interrogated. Once Chifombo was recaptured, Tongogara called for a rescue team to go to the front and recapture Ndangana, Dauramanzi, and Chimurenga, and for the chimurenga general council—which included Madekurozwa, Hove, and Sanyanga—to come and meet in Chifombo. Tongogara, Gumbo, Kangai, and Henry Hamadziripi—all of whom will figure in the events before Chitepo’s murder—were present at the chimurenga general council meeting of 22 January 1975 at Chifombo, as was Chitepo. A committee of three—Chitepo and two of the proChinese dare members, Gumbo and Kangai—was set up to investigate the revolt, although they never really concluded their investigations or produced a report. Nhari and what remained of his followers were there, but only a few ZANU officials showed up. Noel Mukono, who was to be accused of supporting the rebels, had gone to Malawi, and then quickly to England; Mukudzei Mudzi stayed in Lusaka; Mataure was brought to the meeting under guard. Tongogara took the floor and read out charges against those who were involved in the rebellion. He named Mukono and Mataure, of course, and Chitepo as a suspect about whom there was no evidence at the moment. Other general council members and ZANU officers were charged with involvement in the rebellion: Richard Hove, his wife, and his sister, Sekai Holland; former political affairs officer Simpson Mutambanengwe; Cornelius Sanyanga; Nelson Dziruni; and former ZANU branch chairman Edgar Madekurozwa. Only Mataure was reported to have defended himself, saying he was forced at gunpoint to supply transport to the rebels, and that his associations with other supporters of the rebellion were misunderstood; he was simply carrying out his duties as political commissar, talking across divisions and factions to all party members.
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By all accounts, the party executed Nhari and Mataure and several others at once. Hove, Mutambanengwe, Sanyanga, Mukono, and Madekurozwa were sentenced “to death in their absence.”83 Sanyanga and Dziruni went into hiding in Lusaka; others sought police protection. The events that followed, and the accounts of investigations, trials, and executions of the alleged Nhari supporters, are fuzzy in the extreme. Most of what is known emerged in testimony before the Chitepo Commission. What is known is that many ZANU officials who had left Zambia, like Mukono and Mutambanengwe, did not return, and many more, including Chitepo, openly admitted they feared for their lives.
CHAPTER THREE
The events between the Nhari rebellion in December 1974 and Chitepo’s assassination in March 1975 have a muddled history. Many Nhari followers were executed—some said on the grounds of Chifombo as the trials were taking place—but the details of these killings only emerged after Chitepo’s death: Madekurozwa was kidnaped from a meeting at Chitepo’s house in mid-February and Mataure and Nhari were killed at Chifombo. David Martin claimed that Chitepo and his deputy, Mukudzei Mudzi, signed most of the execution orders, while others said he was coerced to do so. There were executions of ordinary ZANU soldiers thought to have been Nhari followers, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence. It was a time of great distrust and suspicion in Lusaka, and certainly everyone in the Zambian government heard “rumblings” of trials and executions.1 The executions of Nhari’s followers did not, however, resolve suspicions about who organized the mutiny; rather, it intensified them. The tense relations between ZANU and its Zambian hosts, already damaged by ZANU’s opposition to unity, deteriorated rapidly amidst these trials and executions. Chitepo complained bitterly about what he saw as Zambian interference. At the OAU meeting in February he accused Zambia of privileging ZAPU and of collaborating with South Africa. Kaunda was furious, and Nyerere made broad, barbed comments about the need for flexibility in the struggle. There were enough angry exchanges in public and in private for ZANU officials to worry about imminent arrests.2 Certainly Chitepo complained to many people that he thought Zambia was trying to thwart ZANU in order to destroy the armed struggle. “‘If only they would let us fight,’” he told a friend the day before he was killed. “And of course he was assassinated the next night. But he was referring to the Zambian authorities,” implying “that he was under heavy constraint by Kaunda.”3
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On 4 March Chitepo, Cletus Chigowe (ZANU’s chief of security and a man some said was most active in the repression of the Nhari rebellion), and Henry Hamadziripi (ZANU’s finance secretary) went to Malawi. Hamadziripi had opposed Chitepo for the chairmanship in 1973; his candidacy was opposed by Mudzi and Tongogara, and for some this was reason enough to think he would want Chitepo dead. Hamadziripi was generally thought to be to the left of Chitepo, and others thought this might be a reason to eliminate him.4 The importance of the trip to Malawi in the events leading up to the assassination is by no means agreed upon. The Report of the Chitepo Commission went into great length about it, in part because of two documents that were written there. Martin and Johnson, however, claim it was “cast as a mystery tour” by the Chitepo Commission; The Struggle for Zimbabwe allots it one paragraph, and The Chitepo Assassination does not mention it at all. The purpose of the trip has a disputed history as well. Some said it was to secure the foodstuffs for the front which Hastings Banda, president of Malawi, had offered ZANU at the last OAU meeting, and to arrange for Tongogara’s mother-in-law to visit Zambia. Others said it was to arrange a visit by Chitepo’s mother-in-law, who lived in Malawi.5 According to the Report, Chitepo and Chigowe were both keen to meet with Simpson Mutambanengwe, who had been sentenced to death in absentia by the chimurenga general council over a month before. It is not inconceivable that one or both of these men wanted to kill him; certainly British intelligence officers in South Africa thought so.6 It is less likely that they wanted to welcome Mutambanengwe back into ZANU and Lusaka, even though by then it was thought that the Nhari rebels had rejected Mutambanengwe’s support.7 In any case, Hamadziripi was detained on arrival at the airport—many sources say he had two guns in his luggage—and Chitepo and Chigowe tried to set up meetings with Mutambanengwe through his brother-in-law, a businessman in Blantyre. Chigowe’s overtures were greeted with suspicion, but when the brotherin-law accompanied Chigowe to a doctor, whom he consulted for a stomach ailment, Chitepo was able to meet with Mutambanengwe. While in the doctor’s waiting room the brother-in-law “got out of Chigowe” a list—written on a piece of paper torn from a magazine—of the party members ZANU wanted to eliminate; Chigowe wrote Chitepo’s name “prominently” at the top of the list. The list, at least as it was handed over to the Malawian police, contained the names of all the civilians who had been accused of supporting the Nhari rebels: Chitepo, Mutambanengwe, Madekurozwa, Mukono, Mataure, Dziruni, Sanyanga, Hove, Sekai Holland, and a few others. It is unlikely that this was a
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death list, since two of those on it—Mataure and Madekurozwa—were already dead. Indeed, Chigowe later confessed to killing one of them, as we shall see. The next day, the police, acting on information that came, in all likelihood, from Mutambanengwe’s brother-in-law, arrested Chigowe and Chitepo. They released Chitepo almost at once, and a policeman told him he was lucky to be alive: the men he was traveling with were in fact his enemies. Close friends of Chitepo were later to say that it was Banda who warned him that Chigowe and Hamadziripi were trying to kill him. Before he left Malawi, Chitepo wrote a letter—“in his own handwriting,” according to the Report—to Malawian authorities advising them not to release Chigowe and Hamadziripi. Chitepo asserted that the two were “engaged in a diabolical scheme which could wreck the struggle,” and that the longer they were in custody in Malawi, the greater the chance of “rectifying so many things” wrong with the party.8 After Chitepo’s death, other stories of failed attempts on his life began to circulate. Some said that Mutambanengwe, granted political asylum in Malawi, had planned to kill Hamadziripi and Chigowe once the Malawians handed them over to him. The arrest of Chitepo made such a plan impossible. Others said the Malawian government had initially detained Hamadziripi because he was armed; they later detained Chigowe because they learned that he and Hamadziripi were plotting to kill Chitepo. They had arrested Chitepo only to protect him from his would-be assassins. Still others maintained that Rugare Gumbo was part of this plot, and when Chitepo was arrested Gumbo decided to wait and kill him when he returned to Lusaka.9 Chitepo returned to Lusaka on 8 March, ten days before his death. It is not clear if other members of the dare knew of his letter to the Malawian authorities, but they apparently suspected that he had a role in the detention of Hamadziripi and Chigowe. From Lusaka Chitepo wrote a letter to President Banda urging that these men be released. Such inconsistent letter writing was held by the Chitepo Commission to prove how much pressure Chitepo was under from the high command. He probably was under great pressure—he had been named as a suspect in the Nhari rebellion—but whether that explains these contradictory letters is another matter. According to the Report, Chitepo and Kaunda met on 16 March. Chitepo seemed fearful and admitted that he thought his life was in danger. When Kaunda asked him who posed the greatest threat, Chitepo replied that it was Chigowe, Tongogara, and Hamadziripi. In the same conversation, Chitepo asked Kaunda to intervene and request that the Malawian government release
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THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
Chigowe and Hamadziripi.10 When they analyzed the Report in April 1976, the detainees argued that such statements were “invented” by Chitepo’s enemies to show him to be weak and irresolute in the weeks before his death. “These contradictions,” the detainees wrote, “were incompatible with the intelligence and strong character of Chitepo. Chitepo could never have written an incriminating letter which would make his colleagues suspicious of him.” The letter was a “forgery.” No one had presented evidence that the Malawian authorities had even received such a letter. If Chitepo had indeed told Kaunda that Hamadziripi and Chigowe were trying to kill him, why did he write to Malawi asking for their release? “This is too illogical,” the detainees argued, “and Chitepo was not usually illogical.”11 The Report of the Chitepo Commission took the Malawi trip very seriously. Most of what the commission learned about it was from the lengthy testimony of Mutambanengwe and his brother-in-law, both of whom had reason to exaggerate the prevalence of ZANU death lists. Lists—like the Nhari rebels’ supposed death list with Chigowe’s name first—have a particular place in African political lore. They were a favorite fantasy of Rhodesians, who seemed to think that ZANU and ZAPU needed a list to remind them that the most likely candidate for a hanging in independent Zimbabwe was Ian Smith.12 In the context of ZANLA and the aftermath of the Nhari rebellion, however, lists may have served another purpose altogether: to show that repression was not random or capricious or personal, that it was agreed upon and contained. Dzinashe Machingura said that the repression of the Nhari rebellion soon got out of hand, and anyone who had crossed his commander could be executed, at least in the first weeks of 1975.13 Lists—and stories of lists—could have assured Nhari supporters and ZANU stalwarts that executions were not random acts of revenge and punishment. However, the lists that circulated around the Chitepo assassination should be located in the broader context of writing, in which the letters to and from Malawi, and the letters found after his death, take on a grave and great—and as yet unexplored—place in the struggle. Many sources describe Chitepo’s growing anxiety and isolation as he signed execution orders for his friends.14 In the aftermath of the Nhari rebellion, however, many ZANU officials and many more in the high command, especially Nhongo and Manyika, found themselves involved in the executions of old comrades. Nevertheless, there were threats on Chitepo’s life even before the Malawi trip, while none has come to light against Nhongo or Manyika. Starting in February 1975, the party had assigned him bodyguards: Sadat Kufamadzuba, who worked in the office
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of ZANU headquarters in Lusaka, and Silas Shamiso, one of the officers at Chifombo the Nhari rebels had sent to the front. Another ZANU member, Alec Dovi, was placed in his house; some said he was a bodyguard, some said he was not. Many people thought his bodyguards were his jailors, and that their real purpose was not to protect him but to keep him from escaping. Indeed, some people said that Chigowe had gone to Malawi not to kill Mutambanengwe, but to make sure Chitepo did not stay there.15 In Lusaka, Sadat and Shamiso accompanied him everywhere, except when he went to State House, where he was always accompanied by Gumbo or Kangai. Many stories—in addition to Kaunda’s testimony before the commission—were later told to show that Chitepo believed the party might kill him. He told several friends that he did not eat or drink when he was at meetings at Chifombo, for fear of being poisoned. After returning from Malawi, Chitepo told several friends, “I don’t know what to sacrifice; my life or the party.”16 Chitepo was under great stress, and some friends would later say he was drinking heavily while others would deny it. In early March there were rumors that some group—the Sanyanga faction of ZANU, the Mukono-Mutambanengwe faction of the Nhari rebels, or Rhodesians—planned to kidnap Chitepo’s daughter. He sent her back to her mother in Tanzania a few days before he was killed.17 Indeed, between 8 March and the morning of his murder, Zimbabweans and Zambians talked about how soon Chitepo would die. There were endless rumors that Chitepo had been arrested by the Zambians and perhaps executed for his role in the executions of Nhari’s supporters. Vernon Mwaanga, Zambia’s foreign minister, told friends that Chitepo would be arrested for murder, sentenced to death, and hung by 17 March 1975. The story of Chitepo’s arrest was widespread enough that the Rhodesia Herald carried a front-page article on 14 March denying it.18 When ANC leaders arrived in Lusaka on 17 March, some had already heard a rumor in Salisbury that Chitepo was dead; others had heard he was in jail or ill. Bishop Abel Muzorewa was later to claim that he knew something was amiss, as he had never seen Chitepo so circumspect in his remarks about the liberation movement. The detainees thought this was yet another attempt by his enemies to discredit him.19 A few days after Chitepo’s death, his wife found a letter in a suit pocket. She did not keep the letter, so the version reproduced in the Report is a reconstruction, although the Report noted, again, that it was in his own handwriting. In the published version of the letter, Chitepo said one police officer in Malawi told him that his friends were planning to kill him, naming Hamadziripi but calling Chigowe only “the other
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THE ASSASSINATION OF HERBERT CHITEPO
man.” He told his wife of the list “of men I suppose the Karangas intended to eliminate,” including himself. “I am not in fear of my life immediately, but all the actions of some of my comrades are suspicious.” The detainees’ analysis of this letter was blunt: it was “an outright forgery.” It contained “unidiomatic English and punctuation mistakes” which “would be extremely surprising” from “a man who had spent 8 years doing undergraduate and postgraduate studies” and who had “such undisputed high intelligence, ability, and meticulousness.” Moreover, the detainees asked, if Chitepo was in such a hurry that he made errors of punctuation, why did he neither date nor post the letter? Why didn’t he mention Chigowe, a man he had known for decades, by name? And why didn’t he inquire about the welfare of his daughter?20 This letter—whether or not it was contrived—introduced ethnicity, and ethnic strife, into the discussion of ZANU internal politics. Terms like “Manyika” and “Karanga” depict regional distinctions between Shona-speaking peoples; they may be the stuff of regionally based competitions and notions of exclusivity, but they did not necessarily amount to ethnic strife. Terence Ranger has argued that distinctions between Manyika, Karanga, and Zezeru were late colonial inventions. In the past, local polities were named after a chief or for a feature of the landscape; such terms came to describe ethnic exclusivity in large part because of how these terms were deployed in missionaries’ translations of hymns and texts. By the 1950s or ’60s, being a Manyika or a Karanga, for example, was a source of pride, and there were many practices of cultural specificity in these areas, but being Manyika or Karanga was not sufficient grounds, in and of itself, to despise an old friend who did not share that identity. Indeed, Ranger argues that terms like “Manyika” and “Karanga” came into everyday use to signify rigid ethnic identities in the various interpretations of the Chitepo assassination, not before.21 As if to prove his point, the Rhodesian Army only began to note the ethnic affiliation of ZANU members in 1977.22 Since Ranger wrote, Eric Worby has argued that ethnic terms are not only adopted: they are avoided and evaded. Sometimes people take on one ethnic name in order to avoid another appellation, or to embrace a specific vision of state power and encroachment.23 Thus, terms like “Manyika” or “Karanga” are not rigid ethnic or regional affiliations, but a set of meanings that people use for specific reasons, many of which change over time. Once the Report of the Chitepo Commission was published, however, the idea that ZANU’s power struggles were based on ethnic factionalism took hold in many circles in and outside the party, as the end of this chapter shows. Indeed, by the time Chitepo’s letter was placed in evidence, the
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commission had heard many versions of ethnic strife in ZANU, so they may have believed the letter to be hard and fast evidence that the Karangas wanted him dead.24 Many people spoke of other letters that Chitepo wrote from Malawi, in which he worried that there were attempts to eliminate his power base in ZANU and he warned several people, including the Hove family, that their lives were in danger.25 Some said that Chitepo never used ethnic terms; others said he did. Obviously the letter in the Report and the ones quoted to me in conversations are reconstructions, and the one quoted in its entirety in the Report was probably reconstituted from various recollections. Why then did some letters use ethnic terms while others did not? Did this show Chitepo’s growing confusion, as the commission argued, or is it proof of his enemies’ attempts to misrepresent him, as the detainees insisted? It is too simple, I think, to argue either for or against the primacy of ethnic affiliation, for Chitepo or anyone else. It is another either/or narrative and as such does not take into account all the things the terms “Manyika” and “Karanga”—or the absence thereof—might have meant to Chitepo or his correspondents. It is also too simple, I think, to argue that the letters and their various scriptings were designed to discredit the radicals in ZANU, whose positions, we have already seen, were fairly fluid in the first months of 1975. I suggest that these letters were written to different audiences for different purposes. It may be useful to see the discrepancies between the letters, and the inconsistencies within the letters, as a reflection of different audiences in and around the party: not everyone Chitepo wrote to agreed on what the problems in ZANU were, or how important categories like “Manyika” or “Karanga” might be in the weeks after the Nhari mutiny. After his death, each of Chitepo’s letters from Malawi, sent to loved ones and friends, was rescripted to present a certain picture of the events that followed: whatever the letters said, they could become a text with which to fix blame for the assassination. But letters that said different things, or were written in impolite haste with unlikely grammar, did not prove forgery or even a momentary lapse of logic: they could well have been an accurate reflection of the situation within the region and in the party in March of 1975. In an environment of rapidly shifting alliances in which betrayal and fear of betrayal were commonplace, contradictory letters made sense. One letter asking Malawians to hold Hamadziripi and Chigowe in prison followed by another asking for their release acknowledged a fractured community, whether it was imagined or functional; writing such letters allowed the author to address oppos-
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ing factions while still maintaining his right to exercise authority. Chitepo did not use ethnic terms like “Manyika” or “Karanga” to members of the well-educated Hove family, for example, but he may well have used the terms when corresponding with others. Such contradictory letters, or statements, did not necessarily show a leader who gave in to pressure or who had become uncharacteristically indecisive; they were contradictory because they were attempts to address opposing factions, factions whose positions changed frequently. We will see more of these contradictions in the pages that follow, in which different interpretations of events are scripted to address the confusion that was the aftermath of the Chitepo assassination. There were many accusations about who killed Chitepo after his death, and a few rumored confessions followed by published confessions—by the same person—and their retraction. In chronological order, these are as follows. Immediately after Chitepo was killed, many in ZANU, including Robert Mugabe, claimed that the Zambians had been directly or indirectly involved in the assassination.26 Within two weeks of Chitepo’s death, Kaunda established the Chitepo Commission. He was clearly well aware of the rumors that blamed him for Chitepo’s death, and furious at the suggestion that the Zambian investigation was a cover-up. In a radio broadcast to the nation on 31 March 1975, Kaunda addressed ZANU more than anyone else: Zambians had suffered greatly because of their “unequivocal support for majority rule in Zimbabwe.” Now they were “very dismayed and justifiably irritated by the statements made by some Zimbabwean nationals” who “virtually demand” that Zambia stop its investigation. Kaunda made it clear that this commission, most of whose members would come from his party and cabinet, would showcase Zambia’s innocence. He invited members of the OAU Liberation Committee to be members, and asked that representatives from the frontline states also attend.27 As a spectacle of truth, the commission had more in common with colonial and postcolonial commissions of inquiry than with the truth commissions that were to follow in southern Africa and elsewhere. The Chitepo Commission did not address any institutional practices and it did not seek any kind of healing through truth, in which all parties could speak without fear of retribution. Rather, it sought to establish who the assassin or assassins were. All testimony was given to the police or to the commission. No one could talk back to their accusers and critics, so, as Diana Taylor points out, the overall impact of the testimony is a catalogue of events, evils, and ills, an exercise in show and tell.28 But however the commission was staged and scripted, it did not always do
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as directed. First, for example, the commission was set up with an unwieldy membership, and many in Lusaka thought the representatives of the frontline states influenced its findings. Second, it was underfunded from the start, and could not at first find enough people to do simultaneous translations.29 Third, Cornelius Sanyanga’s testimony, which was crucial to the commission’s findings, argued that Chitepo was killed because of ethnic strife, and thus presented a picture of a liberation movement that was probably incapable of the unity Zambia wanted it to have. According to “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” Sanyanga’s faction in ZANU had found the term “tribalism” a useful label by which to describe the conflict between the moderates and the radicals in the dare. Ken Flower later claimed that Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, who also owned the Times of Zambia, had demanded that the commission be set up, and had put forward Sanyanga as a key witness.30 But why Rowland would insist on a commission is not at all clear. Rowland had long backed ZAPU, but he was not above giving money to other liberation movements: why did he not rely on his newspaper to harm ZANU or to clear Zambia’s name? If he was eager to see a commission investigate Chitepo’s murder, why didn’t he pay for French translators? The same day that Kaunda announced the Chitepo Commission, “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” was completed. That document provides the most detailed story of Zambian involvement in the assassination, perhaps repeating some of the rumors to which Kaunda was responding. It claimed that an emissary from South Africa, a forty-year-old bearded white man, arrived at State House on 17 March. That very night, Chitepo went there alone, “without his bodyguards,” from 7:30 to 10:30, to confer with Kaunda and Muzorewa, and with Chikerema and Nyandoro of FROLIZI about how to implement the unity agreement. Chitepo refused to hand over ZANLA to a joint military command. After heated exchanges, they adjourned, agreeing to meet again at State House the next morning. Chitepo was on his way there when his car blew up. “Facts show” that the bomb was a plastic bomb, planted in the boot, or trunk, of Chitepo’s Beetle, in the front of the car. Such a bomb “could only have been placed in Chitepo’s car in the State House grounds.” It was probably placed there by the South African “or his agent” with the full knowledge of the Zambian authorities. The author or authors insisted that the bomb was placed in the car; it was not a land mine as the Zambian police maintained: the four wheels of the car were intact after the blast and the bottom of the car was not damaged, and the only person who escaped with minor injuries was the passenger in back, the bodyguard Sadat Kufamadzuba.31
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“Kaunda’s Role in Detente” is dated a week after Zambian police had arrested fifty-seven ZANU members and officials, including dare members Gumbo, Kangai, Mudzi, and Hamadziripi. Hamadziripi had only been released by Malawian authorities the morning of Chitepo’s death. Another 1,300 ZANU cadres were detained at the camps in Zambia. The motives for these detentions had little to do with clearing Zambia’s name. Kaunda was said to have been enraged over the executions on Zambian soil, including that of Chitepo, but he also saw this as an opportunity to debilitate the fractious breakaway party that was ZANU and to punish ZANLA for attacks on Zambian forces.32 Many said the force behind the detentions was Zambia’s minister of home affairs, Aaron Milner, a Rhodesian national, son of an Ndebele mother and a Lithuanian Jewish father, who was a longstanding partisan of ZAPU.33 A few members of the high command, notably Tongogara, Nhongo, and Dick Moyo, who had been appointed only after the Nhari rebellion, fled the country before they could be arrested. Tongogara went to Mozambique, Nhongo to Tanzania, and Moyo to Botswana, where he became the ZANU representative. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania offered Nhongo and others sanctuary. Samora Machel of Mozambique was less welcoming to Tongogara. Shortly after he arrived there, Tongogara was interrogated by Mozambican authorities, one or two of whom were said by some to be Zambian policemen in disguise. Tongogara “explained” to his interlocutors that John Mataure died at the hands of the party, but that Chitepo did not. He was said to have ruled out Rhodesian involvement in Chitepo’s murder. Instead, he thought that there were three possible perpetrators of the assassination: ZANU’s “counter-revolutionaries,” like Sanyanga, Mukono, and Mutambanengwe; Chigowe and Hamadziripi; and the security at Chitepo’s home. It was not possible, Tongogara said, to plant a bomb “without the coordination of Sadat and the other guards.” Machel, thought by many to have believed that Tongogara killed Chitepo, sent him back to Zambia.34 Both the ZANU detainees and Taffy Bryce (a Rhodesian operative we shall learn more about in chapters four and five) thought that Tongogara had been entrapped. Bryce and his amanuensis, Peter Stiff, insisted that the Zambian police had gone to Mozambique to convince Samora Machel, an old friend of Chitepo’s from Tanzania, that Tongogara was behind the assassination. According to the Stiff/Bryce account, Tongogara was returned to Lusaka only after being interrogated by Machel’s secretary and two Zambian police officers disguised as FRELIMO soldiers.35 The detainees, however, did not think there were
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Zambians present; they considered Tongogara’s statement garbled by the “language problem.” Tongogara had spoken in either English or Shona, was translated into Portuguese (“or one of the dozens of Mozambiquan languages”) for FRELIMO, and then retranslated into English when he was handed over to Zambian authorities. Tongogara was usually “eloquent and articulate” in both English and Shona, the detainees wrote, whereas this statement read as a “pastiche” of decontextualized translations. Indeed, by mid-1976 Tongogara was claiming that he had been misquoted.36 The Report of the Chitepo Commission was published in Lusaka in March 1976. It provided the first published confessions to Chitepo’s murder. In those confessions, the role of the bodyguards, especially the survivor Sadat, was critical, perhaps because of Tongogara’s statements in Mozambique. Many, perhaps most, of the confessions that made Sadat central to the assassination were obtained under duress and coercion, although nothing about coercion, the detainees complained, was mentioned in the Report.37 Seven months later, however, as the criminal case against those accused of killing Chitepo floundered, evidence that the Zambians used torture and violence to extract information for the Chitepo Commission came to the fore. The key confession by Sadat Kufamadzuba was pronounced inadmissible, so that those formally accused of assassinating Chitepo were never tried.38 Kufamadzuba’s confession was only pronounced inadmissible in October 1976, however; within a few weeks of his arrest, there were widespread stories that he had been beaten and tortured, and had already signed a “confession” saying that Rugare Gumbo had forced him to place the land mine outside the garage. In that version of his confession, which appears only in “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” it was “believed” that Kufamadzuba knew there was a land mine in the garage, refused to enter the car, and rushed to open the gate and run into the street. The author or authors of “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” scoff at this. Kufamadzuba was the first to enter the two-door car, they insist, and sat in the back seat because he knew nothing of a bomb. Because he was in the back seat he suffered only shock and superficial burns.39 The confession that appeared in the published Report was considerably different, as was the description of Kufamadzuba’s wounds, which are critical to both confessions and to the Rhodesian critique of Zambian police conduct, as we will see in the next chapter. According to the Zambian police bomb expert, Kufamadzuba had been hit in the stomach with flying pieces of metal; these were consistent with his having been in the back seat of the car, shielded from the blast by the two
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bodies in front. Had he been standing outside the car, the expert concluded, he would have been killed in the same way the neighbor’s child was killed. Kufamadzuba’s testimony, supported by that of Robson Manyika, Gumbo, Kangai, Mudzi, and Tongogara—and several unnamed witnesses—was that on 15 March 1975 the dare and the high command voted to kill Chitepo. Two newly appointed members of the high command, Charles Dauramanzi, who had been abducted by the Nhari rebels, and Patrick Mpunzarima, provincial security officer, were then sent to a transit camp to “bring a ‘parcel’ from Rex Nhongo,” which they delivered to the Liberation Center offices on Monday, 17 March. Later that day Joseph Chimurenga gave it to Sadat and told him it was a bomb; he told Sadat that he would be killed if he interfered with the mission in any way. When Sadat and Chitepo returned home that evening, Sadat hid the bomb. He closed but did not lock the gate so that Chimurenga could enter at any time. Later, when Chimurenga knocked on Sadat’s window, Sadat gave him the parcel containing the bomb. Sadat said he saw Chimurenga lying down by the driver’s side of the vehicle with two other men. One was Enos Musalapasi, known as “Short,” a ZANU mechanic, who had signed a police statement in June 1975 saying that he and Chimurenga and two others had planted the bomb. He later told his lawyers that he was beaten for five days before signing a prepared statement in which he said he had planted the bomb at Chitepo’s house. Robson Manyika, who was not represented by counsel when he testified, said that Tongogara had asked him to check on his fellows the night of 17 March: he saw three men “busy on the car,” which he reported to Tongogara and no one else. Chimurenga said he warned Sadat that this was a bomb that would explode after the car went ninety meters, and that Sadat should get out of the car after it went forty-five meters. After the blast, the Zambian bomb squad concluded that the bomb was “improvised”—that is, home-made from the powerful explosive TNT—and “pre-packaged”—that is, made somewhere else and transported to the scene—and was placed inside the fender of the right wheel, probably with magnets; it weighed 1.6 kilograms.40 In their “Analysis” of the Report, the detainees were less concerned about the place of torture in these confessions than they were about the place of common sense in them. Of Kufamadzuba’s confession, the detainees wrote, “The absurdity is too great to believe.” Why did the murderers allow nine people to know about their plans? Why did they arrange for so many witnesses? What, they asked, persuaded Sadat to get into a car in which he knew there was a bomb? Why did he not warn his
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“inseparable friend” Shamiso? The detainees ignored the opinion of the Zambian bomb expert that the bodyguard was safer inside the car than out of it.41 And neither Kufamadzuba nor the detainees try to explain why Kufamadzuba, being treated in hospital for what were said to be minor injuries, fled from his hospital bed when he heard the police were looking for him.42 Despite the beatings and the torture to which they were subjected, neither Tongogara nor Chimurenga confessed to killing Chitepo. Indeed, Chimurenga was furious that some of his comrades blamed him for Chitepo’s assassination. The killing, he insisted, was the work of other ZANU members, those who suspected Chitepo of involvement in the Nhari mutiny, and who had been disturbed by his role in the arrests of Hamadziripi and Chigowe. Chimurenga testified before the commission that he had indeed worked with explosives on 17 March, but those explosives had nothing to do with Chitepo’s death. In separate, lengthy statements to which their lawyers made no objections, both Chimurenga and Tongogara denied their involvement in Chitepo’s murder, but admitted to knowledge of the murder of Edgar Madekurozwa. Madekurozwa, both men claimed, had been abducted from a meeting at Chitepo’s house in February and killed by Cletus Chigowe, who buried him in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Lusaka.43 Such statements by Chimurenga and Tongogara, taken separately or together, do not indicate the absence of physical coercion, but they do suggest that many prisoners’ statements were something other than what men might offer their jailors to protect themselves. They also trouble the idea of Zambian jailors providing the “neatly typed statements” that battered ZANU cadres were forced to sign, as Tungamirai, Mpunzarima, and others maintained.44 Well-prepared jailors would not have scripted unwanted confessions, or at least they would have scripted confessions that made more sense. Some of the implausible aspects of Kufamadzuba’s testimony, such as why, if he knew there was a bomb under the car, he took his usual place in it, were obvious to the detainees and would have been to any well-trained interrogator. If his Zambian jailors were using force to obtain his confession, why didn’t they extract a more believable story? And this raises another question: if confessions were fabricated, however artlessly, who was chosen to confess and why? In other words, how, of all the members of the high command, did Tongogara and Chimurenga come to be accused—out of almost sixty detainees—of a murder they denied? They were, of course, implicated by the testimony of another member of the high command, Robson Manyika, but why were those two made scapegoats, if that was
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indeed what happened? If Zambia was primarily interested in clearing its own name, wouldn’t any confession from within ZANU do the job? To answer these questions it may be useful to look at the politics of these detentions, and these detainees, somewhat differently than other texts have done. The scenario of dissident cadres galvanized to rebellion by Rhodesian agents that we saw in the previous chapter is matched by another either/or, top-down narrative about the detainees’ testimony. In this one, brutal Zambian jailors beat confessions out of this or that member of the high command. It may be that Zambian jailors tried to do this very thing—although not always with success, as the statements by Tongogara and Chimurenga show—but who was chosen to confess and who was chosen to testify, and how and to whom did they speak? The detainees were perturbed that the Report never mentioned that much of the testimony the commissioners heard was in Shona and translated for them by a member of ZAPU. In their “Analysis” the detainees were irate about who was allowed to testify and who was not. Not only were any number of Zambians, including Kaunda, allowed to speak about the internal politics of ZANU, but so was Joshua Nkomo. The ZANU members and ex-members whose testimony “carried substance” included Chitepo’s political opponents and Nhari supporters: Nkomo, Mutambanengwe, Sanyanga, Chikerema, and Nyandoro, as well as several others “whose names occur in the list of witnesses . . . and the list of rebels.” The commission ignored much of the evidence given by the three accused, and instead listened intently to other testimonies that dealt with matters “irrelevant” to the commission. “‘Confessions’” were “extorted by electric torture”45; but again, who was selected to confess is another matter. As the experience of Northern Ireland clearly shows, prisons can become an extension of the struggle, especially when those in jail can speak in a language their jailors do not understand.46 In Lusaka, did any of these politically experienced Shona-speakers, in those first few months of their interrogation, work out a plan that might have been best for the party or a faction thereof in those circumstances? Did they discuss this in Shona as their guards stood watch? Did guerilla cadres and skilled political organizers think of a way to present a set of evidence to the commission that they believed would satisfy both the Zambians and their own political goals? For example, if many in ZANU in March 1975 thought that Gumbo was to be accused of Chitepo’s murder, why wasn’t he? The author or authors of “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” could have gotten it wrong, of course, but it is also possible that Tongogara was chosen—as readers of murder mysteries might say—to take the rap for Gumbo.
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I am not arguing that torture and coercion were not used in Zambian jails. There is ample evidence that they were. My point is that torture and coercion may not have been the only sources of confessions by ZANU members. Many observers—none of them ZANU supporters, however—argued that the sheer amount of testimony the commission heard indicated that torture was not deployed, or at least that it was not the only method of securing information. Many ZANU members were represented by counsel. This does not rule out the use of other forms of coercion, of course, but it may have limited it, although the detainees’ lawyers all complained of harassment by Zambian authorities.47 Nevertheless, the commission tried to acknowledge the intricacies of the testimonies they heard at the end of the Report; but, having raised the issue of ethnic conflict, they were never credited with any other finding. The detainees condemned the commission, stating it was “unbelievably naive to think the only possible motive for Chitepo’s death is tribal difference.” They ridiculed the commission’s inability to make sense of the complexities of Zimbabwean life: Kangai, for example, was of mixed Shona parentage, thought to be Zezeru by the detainees but classified as Karanga by the commission. He always called himself “Zimbabwean” precisely to confound ethnic purists within the party.48 Certainly the commission’s findings were almost ridiculous in their history of ethnic conflict in ZANU. In 1969 the dare consisted of five Manyikas and three Karangas, they wrote; in 1971 it had three Manyikas, one Karanga, and two Zezerus, who soon decamped to form FROLIZI. The most recent election had been in 1973, which brought three Manyikas and five Karangas onto the dare, thus giving Karangas more control over the dare and the high command than they had previously had. The commission knew full well that these numbers could not explain Karangas’ supposed fear of Manyika influence, or a need for a Karanga takeover of the dare they already dominated, and so they argued that Karangas “erroneously” thought that Manyikas had “masterminded” the Nhari rebellion and this had caused a Karanga “backlash” against the Nhari group and Nhari’s Manyika supporters. Such simplifications muffled its more subtle findings, in particular that the dare believed that Chitepo was a threat to them after the murders of Madekurozwa and Mataure, because he might divulge their criminal activities to Zambian authorities, and its subtle one, that Chitepo was killed because he stood in the way of the ruthlessly ambitious Tongogara. Several witnesses had told the commission that Tongogara had boasted that he would be the first president of independent Zimbabwe.49
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It was the ZANU detainees—one of whom was Tongogara—who wrote the most passionate defense of Tongogara. They called the commission “irresponsible” in accepting the words of his political rivals. “Tongogara’s freedom fighters see him as a man wholly without personal ambition,” they wrote. They condemned the Report’s ideas about ethnic strife with great thoroughness: they complained that the figures made no sense. The detainees asked why Karangas, already in a majority, plotted to take over the dare. They asked why the commission, so keen on the idea of ethnicity, had been so indifferent to the place of Zezerus in the party. Indeed, they asked, if ethnic strife shaped ZANU, why did Nhari, a Zezeru, have so much Manyika support?50 Given these obvious problems of proving that ethnic strife dominated ZANU politics, where did the Chitepo Commission get the idea? It argued, more strongly than any testimony had done, that the regional and linguistic distinctions among Shona-speaking people mattered enough in mid-1970s ZANU for men to kill the comrades they had known for years. Many in ZANU thought the Chitepo Commission overestimated the strength of Shona ethnic affiliations. Several ZANU members, for example, assured me that during the Nhari rebellion, when many Manyikas in the Zimbabwean community in Lusaka supported the rebels, political struggles took on an ethnic dimension, but no one thought they were ethnic struggles.51 Within some groups in ZANU’s hierarchy, however, it seems that the idea of ethnic strife preceded Chitepo’s assassination. Before the commission even met, the Tanzanian Sunday News carried an article that assured its readers that the detentions in Zambia were not a counter-revolutionary measure; they made perfect revolutionary sense. There was a “tribal power struggle . . . between the Manyika and Karanga factions, each vying to take full control of the organization.”52 How Tanzanians came to promote what many in ZANU called “the myth of the Karangas and the Manyikas” is part of a larger question, first posed by Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole shortly after the Report was published. Writing from Dar es Salaam, Sithole argued that it was the myriad displacements of exile that had given ethnicity and the exclusions attached to ethnicity a more significant place in the liberation struggle than they had ever had at home.53 Tanzania had taken an active role in ZANU politics in the 1970s (and we will see more of this in chapter five). ZANU had had training camps there since the mid-1960s, and Nhongo and Machingura organized the repression of the Nhari rebels from Tanzania; after Chitepo’s assassination, Julius Nyerere, unlike Samora Machel, refused to return Nhongo to Zambia. While many in the
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ZANLA high command were in jail in Zambia, Nyerere and Machel authorized and supported the Zimbabwe People’s Army (written and pronounced ZIPA in the manner of Zimbabwean acronyms), an army formed entirely of cadres who achieved a degree of unity that Zimbabwean political leaders had not even envisioned.54 In ZIPA the idea of ethnic conflict became an explanation for personalities and policies that had long troubled the nationalist struggle; ethnicity had been a strategy on the part of the ambitious rather than a belief in exclusivity. “The basis for disunity among the former leaders,” Dzinashe Machingura said in an interview in September 1976, “might manifest itself as tribal differences . . . in the sense that in creating a power base they seek to place people belonging to their own ethnic group in key positions” so as to make that base secure.55 Was Nyerere’s support for ZIPA in part based on these ideas, which were held by many Zimbabwean exiles, including Sithole and Nhongo? What may have been most important about ethnic terms in mid1970s ZANU politics is that not everyone agreed about their importance, however, or how accurately ethnicity could account for political actions. Some Zimbabweans in exile used ethnic terms while dismissing them: the author or authors of “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” could talk about tribalism as a label of convenience in the same paragraph that counted Karangas on the dare as well as the Chitepo Commission had done.56 Others in ZANU did not think that the entire party was riddled with ethnic factionalism. When Cornelius Sanyanga testified before the Chitepo Commission, he claimed that there were “a lot of misunderstandings” between Manyikas and Karangas, “and these misunderstandings filtered down to the ordinary members of the party,” which many took to mean that the ZANU rank and file were not overly concerned with such ethnic terms.57 Once the Report was published it seemed that these terms became concrete. In his letter to all Zimbabweans, Rev. Sithole wrote that the conclusions of the Chitepo Commission confirmed his own findings about the events around the assassination, which he had kept to himself so as not to prejudice the work of the commission. Sithole not only supported the Report but gave his own statistics to show how the dare had become “nearly completely tribalized or regionalized” by January 1975 and “100 per cent tribalized or regionalized” after Chitepo’s death. Sithole’s numerous tables showed that since 1969, the percentage of Karangas on the dare had gone from twenty-five to eighty-three, causing many in the party to make a bitter play on its acronym, calling it ZATU (Zimbabwe African Tribal Union) or ZARU (Zimbabwe African Regional Union). But for all Sithole’s
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charts about how many Karangas on the dare made ZANU ZARU, his figures were no more convincing than were those of the Chitepo Commission. Sithole’s real objection was to “a new orientation” in ZANU, signaled by the election of a member of the high command to the dare: “the gun commands the party, and not the party the gun.” This problem, like tribalism, was not part of ZANU’s history: it was “the people outside Zimbabwe” who fell into tribalism and regionalism.58 It was in the many contradictory social spaces of exile in which ZANU members found themselves that ethnicity became an issue in the party. This is not to say that ethnicity was a constant source of conflict; on the contrary, it was an idea that was subject to intense debate. In the years after the Chitepo Commission and Rev. Sithole’s letter, men and women in ZANU struggled over the use of ethnic and regional terms. A letter written to President Nyerere from the front in 1978 is a case in point. The anonymous authors, ZANLA cadres, complained about the state the party was in. Josiah Tongogara and Edgar Tekere had organized the detentions of Gumbo, Hamadziripi, Chigowe, and Mudzi, among others, for plotting against Mugabe. Such repressions, the authors argued, were based on ignorance. They accused Tekere’s wife, Anne, of being a CIA agent and of being so misinformed about her own country that she made up ethnic groups where none existed before. In a speech at a ZANU meeting in London the month before, she had led the crowd in anti-tribalism slogans: down with Manyika-ism, down with Zezeruism, and down with Gutu-ism. “Please note,” the authors wrote, “that there is no language known as Gutu. She failed to realise that Gutu is a town in Southern Province and people from Gutu are Karangas.”59 By 1978, however, there were many layers, and meanings, of a term like “Gutu.” The jailed plotters were sometimes called the “Gutu-clique,” so it is possible to hear in Mrs. Tekere’s sloganeering a growing overlap between political and ethnic terminologies.60 Rev. Sithole had another motive for promoting the notion of ethnic strife. He wrote his letter from Dar es Salaam, where he was already under attack by the ZANLA cadres for creating a new organization with Mukono—the last civilian chief of defense on the dare—and Mutambanengwe at its head. Whatever political future he might be able to wrest from ZANU’s disarray would depend on his ability to make these men seem like victims rather than perpetrators of dissension and violence. Another exile who supported the idea of ethnic strife was Masipula Sithole, the Reverend’s brother and a professor of political science in the U.S., where he was ZANU’s publicity secretary when he first wrote
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in 1979. The essays of both Sitholes play off each other in significant ways. Where Rev. Sithole is subtle and saw the high command as dominating the party through regionalism, Masipula Sithole is not and does not. Using flow charts and systems frameworks, he argues that before the Nhari rebellion, party leadership was split three ways, between Karangas, Manyikas, and Zezerus. No one group could rely on exclusive ethnic support to get elected to office; anyone who sought a position of authority in ZANU had to rely on merit, rather than ethnicity or regionalism. But once the Zezerus defected to FROLIZI in 1971, the party was bipolarized and competition between Karangas and Manyikas intensified, so that by the time of the Nhari rebellion, late 1974, ZANU was ripe for rebellion, assassination, and personal ambition. In no uncertain terms, Professor Sithole describes the inordinate ambition and cunning of Josiah Tongogara. Not only does he script an imaginary dialogue in which Tongogara drills camp commanders in calling him “the Liberator,” but he accuses Tongogara of ordering Chitepo’s assassination. Basing his analysis on the Report, he sees the real shift not in Tongogara’s election to the dare but in his consolidation of power through the repression of the Nhari mutiny. It was then that “the nervous party” rallied around him, and when the victorious high command called a meeting at Chifombo—and not at party headquarters in Lusaka—the stage was set to eliminate Chitepo. At the Chifombo meeting, chaired by Chitepo, Tongogara read a list of those involved in the Nhari rebellion. Chitepo’s name was read as “only a suspect, no evidence at the moment.”61
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If the Chitepo Commission had been charged with establishing Zambia’s innocence, then the notion of Zimbabwean ethnic conflict should have absolved it of all responsibility. It did not, and many in and out of ZANU disputed the Report as soon as it appeared, including individuals and groups normally opposed to each other. These critics were the detainees in Zambia’s jails, of course, and Ken Flower, the director of Rhodesia’s CIO, who published his memoirs in 1987. Even as the commission was meeting, Flower said he had taken extraordinary measures with Zambia’s Special Branch to assure them that Tongogara had nothing to do with the crime. They did not seem to care, he wrote, and it now seemed to him that Mugabe “could not be blamed” for blaming Chitepo’s death on Zambian actions or inactions. When the Report was first published in 1976, however, Flower told a meeting of the Operations Co-ordinating Committee that he thought the CIO should publicize Tongogara’s upcoming trial in Zambia, as a way to exacerbate the fissures in ZANU. Years later, in print, he claimed to have told Kaunda’s lawyer that “your precious findings are not worth the paper they are printed on” when he was visiting Lusaka. He had the authority to judge the Report, he explained, because he was an “expert” on the matter.1 ZANU cadres still in detention in Zambia agreed with Flower, but for different reasons. From prison, they condemned the Report and claimed that there were many more likely “culprits” that the commission had not considered: Mukono, Mutambanengwe, and others from the Nhari group; agents from Rhodesia, South Africa, or the CIA; FROLIZI, ZAPU, or the ANC.2 If the detainees’ response to the Chitepo Commission was to cast suspicion so broadly, why has the Chitepo assassination been reduced to an either/or in which the assassin was either Rhodesian or Zimbabwean? Even after the detainees published their responses to the Report, there were imputations that the deed had to have been done by one or the
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other. Lionel Cliffe had been one of four University of Zambia lecturers arrested in April 1976 for participating in a student demonstration; in Lusaka’s jail he made contact with ZANU prisoners, many of whom he already knew. Upon his release a few months later he published an article titled “Some Questions about the Chitepo Report and the Zimbabwe Movement.” These questions reinserted Rhodesians into the murder case by focusing careful attention on the importance of the bomb to the Zambian case against the ZANU high command. First, Cliffe noted that there had been some initial dispute about whether Chitepo was killed by a bomb at all. For over a week after the assassination, Zambian police stated that Chitepo was killed by a land mine—a “guerilla weapon”—buried in his driveway. Second, once the police decided it was a bomb, they made no attempt to find any evidence that the bomb could have been planted elsewhere, that is, placed in the car by people with no legitimate access to Chitepo’s home—people such as Rhodesian agents. Third, all the evidence for how the bomb was planted came from the accused, but how was that evidence obtained? “I know the answer to that,” Cliffe wrote. “I have seen the scars.”3 Cliffe’s short article sought to ascertain what the Zambian police had omitted. If a confession of Zimbabwean guilt was obtained through torture, then the absent line of inquiry, and the unsought-after confession from those who were never arrested, could provide an alternate, perhaps more accurate version of events. A bomb placed elsewhere could reveal un-interrogated Rhodesian agents. Cliffe’s questions, however to the point they may be, form a discursive bridge between the Zimbabwean confessions and the Rhodesian ones. Given that all the confessions agree that Chitepo was killed by a powerful car bomb, then the differences between the confessions must hinge on where the car was, how the bomb was placed, and who placed it there under whose orders and whose surveillance. If the bomb was placed in Chitepo’s car when it was not at his home, who did it and where? If the bomb was placed in Chitepo’s car while it was parked at his home, who had access to the gated yard? In this line of reasoning, there should be no mystery at all: if the fence around Chitepo’s house was intact, and not cut or broken in any way, that was proof of Zimbabwean assassins, allowed inside by an accomplice. A hole in the fence—cut with wire cutters rather than torn by a bomb blast—would reveal that Rhodesian assassins had unlawfully entered the premises. Sadly, nothing in the Report of the Chitepo Commission describes the condition of the fence after the blast; the first Zambian news reports noted that the bomb “ripped up” the fence that
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surrounded Chitepo’s house, but said nothing about the condition of the fence.4 Given this—and assuming accuracy in the newspaper accounts of whatever testimony the Chitepo Commission heard—the two Rhodesian confessions published in the 1980s that describe the holes in the fence and how they were made are especially important. Whether such descriptions indicate guilt or a serious attempt to establish guilt is another question, however. The holes in the fence, and the wire cutters that made them, are such a major part of one of these confessions that it’s not unreasonable to ask who the guilty parties are confessing to. In 1985, two books were published that revealed the assassin’s true identity, or, to be precise, the two assassins’ two true identities. Both were paid Rhodesian agents, under orders, and both provided careful descriptions of reconnaissance, entering the premises, car bombs, and getaways. The circumstances of revelation and publication are noteworthy: one account is published as an as-told-to memoir, and the other is a confession relayed by a close friend of the late assassin. The stories told by these confessions had seemed possible for years. Since 1979 Martin and Johnson had heard numerous suggestions that this or that Rhodesian operative had killed Chitepo; in 1981 they wrote of a British journalist who was writing a book about the man who admitted to being the Rhodesian agent who assassinated Chitepo and several others; and finally, in 1984, someone told them which one it was.5 Their own book, and one not unlike the one promised by the British journalist, were published the next year. Thus the assassin’s identity, shrouded in secrecy for almost a decade, was revealed twice in the same year—but the revealed identities were different. In one text the assassin is Taffy Bryce, and in the other he is Chuck Hinde. Still, the texts are linked in fascinating ways. Hinde is a minor figure in the account of Bryce, for example, while Bryce does not appear at all in Hinde’s proxy confession. The second book was written as an as-told-to memoir by Peter Stiff. It describes the assassinations of Chitepo and Jason Moyo, as well as the aborted attempts to assassinate Garfield Todd and Mugabe, by one Taffy Bryce, a former Special Air Services (SAS) man who worked for Rhodesian intelligence. A close reading of this book, and a comparison of it with the other Rhodesian confession, may reveal more about conflicts within the Rhodesian intelligence community than anything else, as I argue in chapter five. The Stiff/Bryce account is obsessed, on a larger scale than other books of this period, with its credentials and the authority thereof. Barbie Zelizer has argued that one way journalists established the credibility of their version of the assassination of John F.
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Kennedy—another assassination reported on by a frequently criticized commission—was through their credentials: being in Dallas, being part of the presidential motorcade, having spoken to a key witness, or having access to key papers. Thus, a specific version has authority through the author’s proximity to the events or to records of them.6 Stiff’s See You in November begins with the CIO’s affable Colonel Joe assuring Taffy that no record of his deeds will survive; as ZANU was getting ready to take the reins of government in Zimbabwe after the 1980 elections, Rhodesian intelligence burned its records. “To speed things up they’ve requisitioned the hospital furnaces and even crematoria. . . . Convoys of trucks loaded with files are already on their way.” All traces of Bryce in Rhodesia were to be destroyed: not just the files pertaining to his work, but his driver’s license and bank records. Even so, Colonel Joe mused, it was a pity Taffy’s story would never be told.7 Having established the authority of this version of events, or at least the difficulty of disputing it, Stiff/Bryce tell how Colonel Joe asked Bryce and Chuck Hinde, an operative who had trained Kaunda’s bodyguards in Zambia, to kill Chitepo. The reasons were not very specific. Rhodesian intelligence believed that his death “would create just the right climate at the moment. Besides that, he is a dangerous and important member of ZANU.” This was to be an exceptionally difficult task for Bryce and Hinde, involving greater risks than normal, because it was critical that no one be able to “connect the kill to whites,” as it was “vital that they believe that blacks killed him.”8 Bryce and Hinde were unable to find Chitepo in Lusaka in late January and early February, however. They returned to Salisbury for a new briefing that included a photograph of Chitepo and the license number of his VW Beetle and, once back in Lusaka, they found his car almost at once. They then began serious reconnaissance, which Bryce explained with the terminology of the SAS texts on assassination. In the direct positive method of assassination—i.e., shooting someone—the assailant risked capture, and so the assassins decided to employ a direct non-positive method, in this case a car bomb placed in Chitepo’s car as he slept. Since Ian Sutherland, a sometime Rhodesian agent on whose Zambian farm the assassins stayed, also drove a VW Beetle, Bryce had ample opportunity to rehearse the construction and planting of such a bomb. Bryce explained the details of bomb-making and the various ways a bomb can be affixed to an automobile. Among the materials the SAS had smuggled into Zambia was a rectangular metal container which was already filled with pentolite, an explosive. The box weighed about four kilograms, and was not, Bryce was sure, of communist manufacture.
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This had nothing to do with the ideological baggage of such items or the clues they might leave, but was important because boxes and explosives made by communists were “unreliable.” Bryce wanted the best, and used South African plastic to make the detonator of the bomb. Scooping out some of the pentolite, Bryce added the plastic and inserted the two nails that were his usual method of detonating a bomb. The bomb was lodged just behind the car’s right front wheel, as it was too heavy to be affixed with magnets. The matchbox-sized detonator, also placed behind a front wheel, would be crushed when the car moved, and the two crossed nails, powered by tiny batteries, would create an electrical current that would activate the detonator and the bomb. The only problem was planting the bomb. The assassins had done reconnaissance of Chitepo’s home and learned that his was the only car parked there. The gates were open during the day but closed and locked once Chitepo returned home; he always parked facing the house. They observed Chitepo’s house for two nights in a row; both nights the lights went out at 10:30, so on 18 March they placed the bomb in the early hours of the morning. They claimed Chitepo always returned home alone at night. They never saw any bodyguards, so the assassins assumed that the “two ZANU thugs” had arrived at the house in the early morning after they planted the bomb. The Stiff/Bryce account describes what the assassins wore and the extent to which they disguised themselves. They dressed in leisure suits or track suits over the shirt and trousers they had worn to dinner, and they decided not to use blackface: “Those who have done so will be aware how difficult it is to get the stuff off.” Besides, operations in the city were risky: “Blackening up would have caused us greater danger at road blocks than we faced by remaining white.” Instead, they wore “big fancy Afro wigs” to “break up our Caucasian shapes” so that “at first glance” they appeared to be “coloureds.” He and Hinde carried communist-made AK-47s in the car. Had they been stopped while carrying explosives, “we would have had no option or compunction but to shoot our way out of the situation.” Once at Chitepo’s house, Bryce used Ian Sutherland’s wire cutters, “the most efficient ones I had ever used,” to get inside the fenced yard, and while Chuck Hinde, armed with his AK-47, stood guard in the shrubs, Bryce “leopard crawled” to the Volkswagen. He lay on his side, as he had rehearsed many times before, to place the bomb. But after the bomb was planted and the trio were driving away, Hinde realized he had left the wire cutters behind. “It doesn’t matter,” said Bryce; “by the time somebody finds them it will be all over.” Ian
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Sutherland stopped the car: “They’re my best wire cutters. I’m not leaving them behind. I can’t get another pair like them.” “Don’t be daft,” Bryce said. “We’ve already left them behind.” But Sutherland turned the car around, saying, “I’ll never get another pair of cutters like that pair.” Bryce grabbed the wheel. “Don’t be ridiculous . . . I’ll buy you some more when I’m next in Jo’burg.” Sutherland was obstinate: “I want those cutters.” And so the three assassins went back and “scooped up the errant cutters which lay just inside Chitepo’s fence” and “drove home, ridiculously pleased with ourselves.”9 One could hardly ask for more evidence. This account of the wire cutters not only establishes that the assassination was done by Rhodesians with no access to the house, but explains why no wire cutters were found on the premises. And the wire cutters also comment on the efficiency of well-made tools, the lack of imports in Zambia, and the schoolboy antics of paid assassins. It would be possible to think this is too much evidence. At the same time, however, there are some obvious problems with this description of events: why, if they wanted the assassination to look like the work of Africans, did they shun communistmade explosives? How was it that these professional operatives did not notice the bodyguards who lived on the premises and closed the gate each night? As if to make up for these lapses, the Stiff/Bryce version complained about the treatment of the surviving bodyguard after the bomb blast. They claim Kufamadzuba was arrested “while still a hospital patient.” Once jailed, all treatment for what they called “his grievous injuries” was halted even though he was beaten so badly his stitches came out.10 The same year that the Stiff/Bryce confession was published, Martin and Johnson published another one. Interviewing a Rhodesian operative in 1984, “It occurred to us that the person we were interviewing just might know who killed Chitepo and when we posed the question his immediate and spontaneous reply was, ‘Yes, a great friend of mine.’” He then commenced what may be the most remarkable confession I discuss, in which a man confesses on behalf of his late colleague.11 The dead man was Chuck Hinde, the man who stood guard in Bryce’s confession. In Martin and Johnson’s account, Hinde worked with Sutherland, cut through the wire fence without fanfare, and planted the bomb; Bryce was not there at all. The circumstances of the publication of the Martin and Johnson confession are worth noting. Many people in Zimbabwe say, in the most general terms, that it was written hastily to forestall a Karanga takeover in the higher circles of the ruling party. Others insist that ZANU(PF)’s
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politburo debated about whether or not the book should be published at all, and suggest that the politburo approved the book precisely because it ignored the issue of ethnicity, and thus effectively left Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean politics out of the picture.12 The Chitepo Assassination was serialized in the Herald, starting 19 March 1985.13 Its publication occasioned renewed talk about the assassination, but many people who had been close to Chitepo called it a “whitewash” and insisted that it was never taken seriously.14 A critical review by “The Scrutator” was published in the Herald, suggesting that the revelations of a Rhodesian CIO man might be especially suspect, particularly since Martin and Johnson did not interview the surviving operative, Ian Sutherland, then resident in South Africa. The Scrutator suggested that Martin and Johnson might be compromised by their privileged access to CIO files and to Robert Mugabe, who might want to see a book that shifted the blame for the assassination away from ZANU’s politics in the 1970s, of which his struggle for leadership was an example.15 Another review, by the editor of the weekly Sunday Mail, expressed dismay that “such a lofty claim of finality” was made by “foreigners among us” rather than Zimbabweans.16 Because Hinde’s confession is both posthumous and by proxy, it contains a certain amount of guesswork. The anonymous speaker estimates; phrases like “I should say that” and “as far as I know” introduce most of what he asserts; his knowledge is based on impersonal experience, because he knows that things “would have been done” in this way or that. This material is presented with greater certainty in the text.17 The late assassin’s “great friend” reported that Sutherland did reconnaissance of Chitepo’s house for about three weeks; when Hinde arrived he did another week or ten days of surveillance, as “the operator.” Hinde’s friend was “almost certain” the bomb was PE4, one of the most potent plastic explosives, detonated by a pressel switch, a common switch in the Rhodesian Army—it was used for radio communication—in which two separate pieces of metal come together to complete an electrical circuit. The CIO man thought Hinde affixed the bomb, which weighed four kilograms, to the front wheel of the car with a magnet, but allowed that there were many ways to do that. It would, he estimated, take about ten minutes to plant the bomb, a task that was probably done between one and two in the morning, because that was when people were in their deepest sleep. For this, Hinde was paid R$10,000, and Martin and Johnson reproduce bank records to prove it.18 After planting the bomb, Hinde and Sutherland drove back to Sutherland’s farm, apparently without thinking about the wire cutters at all.
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Why are the bombs so different in all these confessions and accusations? Is it because, as Cliffe argues, the bomb, together with how it was planted where it was, provides the key to the assassin’s national identity? Or is it because, as Paul Cohen argues, when texts compete to represent the past, the competition occurs over specific details? Certainly Zambian descriptions of the bomb, in newspapers and the Report, are vague when compared to those found in the Rhodesian confessions. For example, the Zambian bomb experts who arrived at Chitepo’s house the morning of 18 March thought the bomb was a TNT land mine buried in the driveway; ten days later they concluded that it was a bomb placed in the car.19 Later, the Report concluded that Chitepo was killed with a bomb, not a land mine, and that the bomb was made from TNT, weighed just over one and a half kilograms, and was fixed to the car with magnets. “The charge was constructed in a brass metallic container which provided the fragmentation effect.” The Zambian bomb disposal expert thought the bomb was detonated by a pull-release device fitted with a safety fuse so it did not go off right away. The commission relied on as much speculation as Martin and Johnson did in 1985. Because this bomb seemed similar to the one set off at the ZAPU residence in Lusaka, it was believed “that this could have been an inside job within the ZANU circles, considering that these people have basic knowledge in such matters.” Stiff/Bryce attributed the descriptions of both explosives to the poor scientific expertise of the Zambian police.20 In this way their description of the assassination reproduced older ideas about the technological superiority of whites, which baffled and confused unsophisticated Africans. The question remains, however: what do all these bombs mean? Are the Martin and Johnson/Hinde bomb and the Stiff/Bryce bomb, the newspaper bombs, and the Chitepo Commission bomb really so different that a historian must worry about them? How much of the differences between these bombs can be explained by ordinary lapses of memory and the inevitable deformations of hearsay? Were the Zambian police and army experts out of their depths, as Stiff/Bryce claim, or did they rely on confessions by men who had no idea what was in the bomb they planted? Did professional assassins really remember each and every explosive charge they used? I am less concerned here with finding out which bomb was the murder weapon than I am with finding out why some bombs are described in great detail and others are not, however. To return to Paul Cohen’s point once more, I am concerned with what is at stake in these differences between the bombs, and how the competing details of these confessions articulate
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the relationship between the seemingly opposing audiences of Rhodesians and Zimbabweans. Indeed, I suspect that the bombs are only an example of a broader issue in this literature. Bombs are not the only thing described with great care and expertise, as Sutherland’s wire cutters suggest. One of the many things that makes these accounts so different is the varying level of detail in them. The white assassins in this story are described in loving detail, either by themselves or by those who seek to expose them. Bryce is portrayed as a well-trained innocent, who left the SAS first for the dubious Watchguard International and then to work for a civil engineering firm in Zambia. Its corruption and mismanagement depressed him, but one weekend he crossed the border to visit Rhodesia. He was transfixed, exhilarated by the oasis of peace and security he found there, and moved there two months later.21 Martin and Johnson describe Hinde with a certain amount of awe. Like many in paid service to Rhodesia, Hinde came to his various talents through the SAS: in 1960, when he was with the First Battalion of Paratroopers Regiment, “Hinde was put forward by his regiment for the army’s toughest selection test— enlistment into the SAS. Only a handful of the well over 100 soldiers put forward by their regiments pass each SAS selection test.” Hinde succeeded on his second attempt. Without a war, however, there was no place where Hinde could practice “the considerable and advanced military skills he had learned” in the SAS, so he soon joined the privatized SAS, Watchguard International. Watchguard International had been started by Colonel David Stirling, who had founded the SAS and, later, the Capricorn Africa Society (CAS), from Southern Rhodesia. Watchguard International undertook military surveys, trained counter-insurgency forces and bodyguards, and prepared them for action in the event of a coup; sometimes it helped British intelligence with coups and surveillance. Most of its personnel had been in the SAS and much of its work was in Africa and the Middle East, where Stirling’s political contacts were most extensive.22 The Capricorn Africa Society occupies a larger place in this history than most authors have allowed. Founded by Stirling in 1949 as a multiracial, liberal movement that he hoped would have the credibility the Colonial Office and settler politicians had already lost, it advocated an end to segregation in public places and a wide variety of limited franchises for Africans. The Capricorn philosophy of inclusion was unequivocal in its motivation: Stirling wanted a multi-racial party that could thwart the emergence of an “effective African nationalist movement whose purpose would be to push the European out of Africa.”23
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Nevertheless, CAS had great support among African nationalists in the 1950s: Julius Nyerere was an early supporter, and Leopold Takawira was the Capricorn membership secretary in Southern Rhodesia.24 According to their own literature, the great Capricorn successes were their conferences. At the one in Salima, Nyasaland, in 1956, Chitepo was one of several keynote speakers. Chitepo is usually described in liberals’ accounts as cautious about his participation in such meetings, evidenced, some say, by having his speech read by someone else.25 But terms like “cautious” do not allow for the eclectic ways Africans like Chitepo could engage with the broader Capricorn project. Chitepo had already seen the Central African Federation established; he may well have known the limits of liberalism as a vehicle for African self-determination. Yet his keynote speech clearly proposed liberal inclusion as a strategy, the best hope for the future in a racially polarized Central Africa. Chitepo’s speech maintained that throughout the history of Africa’s contact with the west, Africans “Never entertained a desire to rid themselves of Europeans,” but now, in the mid-1950s, some African organizations were “rising” with the vague goal “to get rid of the European.” This, he made clear, was a justifiable reaction “to the continual refusal to accord Africans . . . dignity, freedom and security.” But it was not too late “to build a common patriotism, seeking to create the conditions for the highest development of the human being.”26 Whoever gave speeches at their conferences, the Capricorns had damaged themselves in the 1950s by being pro-Federation when few Africans were, and in many places, particularly Northern Rhodesia, they had been seen as enemies of African nationalism.27 A decade later, the Federation was gone, Northern Rhodesia was Zambia, and President Kenneth Kaunda invited Watchguard International to train his bodyguards and a counter-coup force. This brought several former SAS men into the region, including Hinde, who, according to Martin and Johnson, was “an acquaintance of Stirling from CAS days.”28 But Chitepo was a much closer acquaintance of Stirling’s than Hinde ever was, if Stirling knew of him at all. Chitepo and Stirling probably first met in London, and after Stirling resigned the presidency of the Capricorns in 1956, he maintained close contact with Chitepo. Stirling concerned himself with raising funds for CAS, including adult education programs endorsed by both Chitepo and his wife; he seemed to know little of new members.29 Hinde and Stirling were of some interest to Rhodesian intelligence officers, and their names appear in some of the same files, but there is no evidence that they knew each other.30 My earlier point, about either/or narratives that include some
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actors and exclude others, is key here: the straight line that links Stirling to Hinde may or may not be accurate, but its articulation excludes Chitepo from all political organizations other than ZANU and it excludes ZANU from its own history. The straight line that links Stirling to Hinde excludes Chitepo from his own past: the whole tangled history of African nationalism and liberalism, of a politics of gradual inclusion, a politics that ZAPU openly scorned, is submerged here, and it is replaced by an imaginary history in which David Stirling, raising money from the Rothschilds and visiting British embassies in the U.S., France, and Belgium, knew of the young, talented working-class soldiers who joined his organization. Again, my point is that as some narratives are submerged and others invented, linkages and histories are lost. In this way, any connection between the Capricorns and Chitepo vanishes from accounts of Zimbabwe’s history. As Hinde replaces Chitepo as a Capricorn in Martin and Johnson’s account, we lose a way to look at the broader political contexts of African and white politics in the 1960s and ’70s. The straight line Martin and Johnson construct between the SAS, the Capricorns, and the assassination of Chitepo was in fact frayed and fissured twenty years earlier. More to the point, that straight line provides an either/or, ironclad analysis of political connections where in fact there is great complexity and contradiction. The historiography that stresses the struggles within ZANU over whether to seek Chinese or Russian support, for example, serves to obscure the Capricorns even more; it locates African politics in the political imaginary of the 1960s and ’70s and not the political ideas of a decade earlier. Liberalism in particular, which dominated so many multi-racial organizations in the 1950s and ’60s, needs to be reinserted into the historiography of Zimbabwean nationalism and nationalists. The Capricorn Africa Society occupies a very specific place in what John Gray has called “the two faces of liberalism.” The Capricorns, whatever else they did or did not do, argued passionately for liberal principles of tolerance as a strategy, a way to guarantee peace and prosperity in the midst of decolonization; they did not seem to think that tolerance, in and of itself, was an ideal way of life.31 Indeed, as Uday Mehta has pointed out, this strategy of tolerance is based on the premise that some people have “natural” rights of inclusion while the rights of others are only tolerated, and the “thicker set of social credentials” that form the real basis of political inclusion is obvious to all.32 In contexts in which imperial projects were under reconstruction—nineteenth-century India, for example, or Central Africa in the 1950s—the practice of liberalism became unequal, with groups allowing those less equal than
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themselves to pretend that they had the same rights. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Capricorns’ own writing about their conference in Salima. Several whites remarked on how odd it would be for them when the conference was over and they would be once again forbidden by law to drink with Africans.33 In those first years of Federation, as new colonial forms were being contemplated in Central Africa, the Capricorns began to appear like another form of tutelage, a fancy version of Huggins’s partnership between horse and rider. None of the above seeks to establish some mechanistic relationship between Capricorn liberalism and ZANU’s nationalism; instead I want to show that locating liberalism, with all its flaws, in the nationalist narrative provides a lens into the ideals and motivations that were in play during the 1970s. Some of the issues of the Nhari rebellion and its repression, and the Chitepo assassination and its repression, need to be looked at anew in terms of liberal strategies of inclusion. Ethnic conflict was probably something many nationalists—Chitepo, but also Kangai and any number of ZANU detainees—struggled against. Many of the men who were early participants in multi-racial politics, however unequal those politics were, probably saw a strategic value in talking across divisions—as Mataure claimed he was doing—and such people seem to have been ill-equipped to deal with the political factionalism that emerged after the Nhari rebellion. The subsequent writings on the Chitepo assassination, including the commission’s Report and the detainees’ analysis thereof, have characterized these inclusive practices—such as different letters written to different audiences—as an indecisive nationalism, or as proof of weakness or even of capitulation. Such a characterization shows a waning engagement with what the Capricornist project meant to its African members. Indeed, the detainees’ “Reply” and “Analysis” suggest an impatience with such practices; some in ZANU were clearly breaking with their liberal roots. Chitepo’s contradictory letters written to and from Malawi, his inclusion of the petitebourgeoisie in the struggle for a free, socialist Zimbabwe, were ways of addressing ZANU’s complex factions: they were also traces of the Capricorn project. Another trace was the use of the term “Capricorn” to mean “sell-out” by some guerillas in the countryside. Rhodesia’s Special Branch knew that the word had its origins in the “now defunct Capricorn Africa Society,” but it was used to mean anyone who sided with the government in Salisbury.34 The historiography that has provided overpowering and over-determining political connections, the kind that make Stirling and Hinde old chums, conceals the kind of political venue the Capricorn Africa
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Society offered African politicians in the 1950s and beyond. This kind of analysis, like the detailed descriptions of knowledge of explosives or antics over wire cutters, simply amplifies confessions with anecdotes about white men; it leaves Africans almost completely out of the picture. Moreover, it fails to explain why Chitepo—and not Tongogara or even Nhongo—was the chosen target of Rhodesian expertise. On a purely discursive level, this analysis highlights the weaknesses of the confessions obtained, or the questions asked to obtain the confessions, by the Chitepo Commission. Did the ZANLA assassins ever think to disguise themselves or their acts so it would look like someone else did it? Who drove Chimurenga to the transit camp to get the parcel that contained the bomb? How did Chimurenga and Short get to Chitepo’s house late at night? How did Robson Manyika get to Chitepo’s house to make sure Chimurenga was following orders? Taken together, all these confessions show white assassins with cars and wire cutters and Africans all but naturalized—they had no transport worth mentioning and no tools to speak of. It is not just that each of these confessions has different details—which they do—but that each of these confessions has different degrees of detail. These questions raise two other questions, which are not mutually exclusive. The either/or narrative of Rhodesians vs. African nationalists may not always provide the space for reflection, and so it easily devolves—as do these two 1985 confessions—into getting the identity of an operative, and his explosive of choice, just right. First, does this mean that, in a historiography in which all causation leads to the Rhodesian state, evidence is constituted through white men’s deeds and tools? Second, and equally important, who is the intended audience of these confessions: who is confessing to whom, and why? The confession relayed by Martin and Johnson, for example, was presumably intended for an African audience; it was not published outside Zimbabwe. Does this mean, as the Scrutator suggested, that Zimbabweans were being told that ZANU had nothing to do with Chitepo’s death? Does this mean as well that Zimbabweans were being given another version of ZANU’s history, one in which flawed attempts at multi-racial liberalism in the 1950s and ’60s led directly to assassination? If white men, Rhodesians of varying degrees of nostalgia and military experience, are the intended audience for the Bryce/Stiff and some of the Martin and Johnson confessions, then are they assumed to be appreciative of a good military record or an amusing story about hit men and wire cutters? The descriptions of the rigors of SAS training and of what the assassins wore, and the observation about the tedious difficulty of removing blackface, suggest as much.
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In June 2002 Peter Stiff published a revised edition of Taffy Bryce’s memoirs, with a new subtitle—The Story of an SAS Assassin—and more photographs than the 1985 edition.35 There are only a few changes to the earlier text, although all ellipses and sense of its having once been a dictated memoir have been removed: the new material consists of several sentences about Robert Mugabe’s role in Zimbabwe’s decline, and a few words or sentences added here and there that any author might add in going over his or her prose. The text of the chapter on the assassination of Chitepo remains very much the same; Stiff does not attempt to answer or attack Flower’s 1987 confession, which I discuss in the next chapter, or the confession published by Martin and Johnson. (The 2002 bibliography recommends readers to The Struggle for Zimbabwe, but not The Chitepo Assassination.) Some conspicuous errors and omissions in the 1985 text remain uncorrected; the 2002 edition still says the assassins never saw bodyguards at Chitepo’s home, it still says the Chitepo Commission published a ten-volume report (translated into French and Arabic), and it still calls Mrs. Chitepo “Violet.” In the new edition, Chuck Hinde still assists Bryce as well; Stiff makes no effort to address, or counter, the Martin and Johnson confession in which only Hinde and Sutherland planted the bomb. Courtly as the continued inclusion of Hinde might be, it also implies that the Bryce/Stiff account is not intended for an African audience, or even an audience familiar with the Martin and Johnson version of events, or any other published confession. Indeed, the near-reproduction of the 1985 text suggests that this is a memoir for an imagined Rhodesian audience, one in which the exploits of a white man—trained in the SAS, no less—are the subject, not history or politics or even the context of those exploits. Here is a specific version of the past written without reference to other histories published in Zambia or Zimbabwe. The Stiff/Bryce account is not about Chitepo, but about hard-headed and capable assassins, men who knew the art of killing and did not hesitate to practice it to preserve a white-ruled country in Africa in the 1970s. One of Stiff’s additions to the 2002 edition is telling in this regard. In 1985 Bryce explained why he and Hinde carried AK-47s—because they would have to shoot any policeman who found them with explosives in the car. In 2002 he added a short sentence. “Both Chuck and I were armed with AKs. We were not playing games. If the police stopped us . . .”36 Who is such a statement for? Who needed to be told that paid assassins were willing to kill? There’s a performance here, a rewriting to show how seriously Bryce took his assigned task: the dedicated, professional assassin whose version of events we must believe be-
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cause of his skills, not because of his willingness to compete with other versions. In Trouillot’s terms, this is a “formula of erasure,” a way of denying that the murder of Chitepo had meaning beyond that scripted by the three operatives who took such pride in their work.37 Indeed, both the 1985 and the 2002 chapters end claiming that “the setbacks” in ZANU and ZANLA that followed in the wake of Chitepo’s assassination were “the greatest military achievement of the Rhodesian war . . . cleverly engineered by three men, Taffy, Chuck Hinde, and Ian Sutherland.”38 Who is the audience for such a triumphant history? Certainly not all Rhodesian memoirists, as we will see in the next chapter. To return to Paul Cohen’s point that texts compete with each other to represent the past, I suggest that by not engaging with the other confessions that were published after 1985—confessions that the first edition of See You in November helped generate—Stiff/Bryce really do not attempt to represent the past. Instead, I think they seek to represent a place, a Rhodesia that had military success even though it lost the war, a place of unfailing intelligence and skillful assassins where, as we shall see in the next chapter, a nation could be imagined as it had never been lived. The question of audience allows for a more critical reading of the Report of the Chitepo Commission than I have yet done. There is no question that the Report was written to exonerate Zambia: several commissioners objected to much of what was in the Report, and much of what was left out, but, as one said, “the main objective was to clear Zambia’s name.”39 But within that narrow frame, how confessions were obtained, and written, and withdrawn, raises the question of how and why detainees shaped their own account of the assassination. And in this, the lack of detail—at least detail equivalent to that in the Rhodesian confessions—is significant. To whom were the detainees speaking when they confessed, or denied the confessions they said they were forced to sign? For example, were borrowed cars or willing drivers such a normal feature of daily life in the Zimbabwean community in Lusaka that no one mentioned them, or were the genealogies of vehicles and drivers among the things omitted from the testimony published in the Report? In those ZANU documents written, presumably, for audiences within ZANU, references to cars, and who provided them for whom, are a key way of establishing indissoluble loyalties—Sanyanga and the Nhari rebels, for example. Are the naturalized automobiles of even the most coerced and scripted confessions of the detainees not so accidental or naturalized; were these absences to protect drivers and friends and comrades in and out of Lusaka’s jails? If we do away with the either/or
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narrative of ruthless Zambian jailors forcing passive politicians to talk, we can ask why the detainees say what they do. The detainees’ “Reply” to and “Analysis” of the Report probably had many audiences within the party. The first and most obvious was an international ZANU, with its detainees’ defense committees in Lusaka, England, and the U.S. These were the groups who heard, and articulated, the stories of torture and torment, and these were the groups who made them public; it was these committees through whom the detainees spoke in the international arena. The Price of Detente, for example, was a pamphlet produced only in England. Another, critically important audience was one another; the other men detained in Zambia’s jails. This includes the men with whom Chimurenga was furious when he was blamed for Chitepo’s death; it also includes Tongogara, and his and Chimurenga’s accusations that Chigowe murdered Madekurozwa. In what the press called the “trial within the trial”—which many thought was staged—Chigowe had confessed, saying that he killed Madekurozwa “in the name and interests of ZANU and Zimbabwe.” Charges against Chigowe were to be dismissed in 1977 because he had been beaten a month before he confessed, but it is worth asking who it was that he was reminding of what had been in the best interests of the party? Who was being told that confession might facilitate the struggle?40 And the kinds of words that would best facilitate the struggle changed while the detainees were in Zambian jails. In their “Analysis” of the Report the detainees—one of whom was Chigowe—demanded to know why the commission never thought Madekurozwa’s death was “accidental” or that he had been killed by someone who did not have the party’s sanction to do so.41 Another likely audience for the detainees’ words and writings was the Zimbabwean exile community in Lusaka, which included not only ZAPU and FROLIZI, but the ZANU members who had not been detained, men like Sanyanga and Dziruni. These individuals were not only addressed by the detainees, but they seem to have responded, as Sanyanga did in testifying to prepare the case for the criminal trial against Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba. Here Sanyanga presented his ideas about ethnic conflict. Describing how “misunderstandings” caused many Karangas to “fight for” party offices that were held by Manyikas, he announced, “there was one person within the ZANU leadership who was aspiring to take over Mr Chitepo’s post but I won’t mention his name.”42 Was the name so obvious that everyone in and out of jail knew it, or was Sanyanga casting a wider net, in which any three or four detainees might think they were next to be accused by someone
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they firmly believed had the ear of the commission? However problematic ZANU members found the Report, it seems to have created a dialogue between ZANU members in jail and those who were free in Zambia. Washington Malianga, for example, had been defeated by Rugare Gumbo in his bid to be reelected party publicity secretary in 1973. The Report claimed he had been close to Dakarai Badza and that the two had written a paper critical of the party together. Malianga wrote a letter to the editor of the Zambia Daily Mail at once, explaining that while he did not want to criticize the Report in any way, he could not have written a document with Badza in 1973 or at any other time: he had never met the man.43 A fourth audience, and one I suspect was uppermost in the minds of the detainees, was those members of ZANLA and the high command who now formed the leadership of ZIPA in Tanzania and Mozambique. These men included Rex Nhongo and Dzinashe Machingura, and old ZAPU comrades who had trained in Russia with Nhongo and Nhari. These were men who had publicly said that their goal was a liberation army free of the squabbles of the established leadership of both parties. By November 1975, while the Chitepo Commission was hearing testimony, Nhongo commanded ZIPA; its political commissar was a ZIPRA commander. How some jailed members of the high command spoke to other members of the high command who had formed an army without their guidance or discipline is an important part of this history, and one that may have accounted for how many of the statements made to the multiple audiences of the detainees were scripted. Although ZIPA had devolved into ZAPU-ZANU battles in its own camps, its unique identity and its claims to a purity of guerilla struggle had been cultivated by both Nyerere in Tanzania and Machel in Mozambique. Between April and July 1976—between the publication of the Report and the various testimonies and machinations about bringing Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba to trial—Machel encouraged ZIPA to begin to meet with officials of Eastern European embassies and to establish its own media: in short, to become a liberation movement in its own right. Mozambique helped ZIPA gain diplomatic representation in Sweden and London, and it received overtures from East Germany and the Soviet Union.44 There were presumably many ZIPA cadres in Tanzania and Mozambique in those months to whom the detainees would have wanted to speak. A few weeks before Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba were released, Jason Moyo of ZAPU joined Robert Mugabe in negotiations that led to the creation of the Patriotic Front, an umbrella body
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that would negotiate for ZANU and ZAPU at peace conferences. Such a front would hinder British and Rhodesian attempts to divide the freedom fighters, it was thought, and it would also effectively marginalize ZIPA. After the successful negotiations at Lancaster House in late 1979, ZANU appropriated the acronym PF to contest the 1980 election. It has kept the name ever since.45
CHAPTER FIVE
When Victoria Chitepo returned to Lusaka to bury her husband, she stayed with an old family friend, Cornelius Sanyanga. The detainees later wrote that she was a prisoner in his home, but others said she tried to talk to all factions in ZANU. Stiff/Bryce claim that she (“Violet”) was taken to meet with Kaunda and Muzorewa as soon as she arrived: Muzorewa tried to convince her that her husband had been killed on the orders of the high command. Several people close to the Chitepo family said that by the time she arrived in Lusaka, the Liberation Center had been emptied of all its papers, and some friends of the family said she had seen a list of the people the Karangas wanted to eliminate. Nevertheless, detainees claimed that she wanted ZANU to arrange the funeral, but Kaunda refused. Kaunda was relieved when Smith refused to allow Chitepo’s body to be returned to Rhodesia, however: according to Martin and Johnson and the detainees, his refusal gave Zambians the opportunity to pay their respects to a man many accused them of killing. Kaunda also hoped that a Zambian state funeral would obscure how popular ZANU was in Lusaka.1 Several people said that Sanyanga, rather than Zambian bureaucrats, made the actual funeral arrangements. He made sure that a cousin of Chitepo, working in Zambia, was one of the pallbearers; he, Kangai, and Tongogara were the other three. No freedom fighters were allowed to speak at the funeral, but Mrs. Chitepo—some said during the ceremony—asked that a woman guerilla speak in her place, perhaps to defy Kaunda, perhaps to address some of the issues concerning women cadres raised in the Nhari rebellion. The woman spoke in Shona and Kangai translated.2 Some family members—and some comrades from Manicaland—were distressed by Mrs. Chitepo’s silence, and by the choice of pallbearers. They were even more distressed by the number of members of the high command who left immediately after the service. Their leaving made many Zimbabweans and Zambians, including Kenneth
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Kaunda, think they were responsible for Chitepo’s death. Indeed, the ZANLA high command had left to hold a meeting, and they did not talk about why Chitepo had been killed. They were still concerned with the aftermath of the Nhari rebellion, and talked of how to retake all the camps. Tongogara chaired the meeting, and, according to one participant, it might have looked as if they were running away.3 What would the high command have been thought to be running away from, and which murders would they have feared being accused of? Between the assassination of Chitepo and his funeral, Zambian authorities learned of the disappearances of two other ZANU members. A few days after the funeral, Aaron Milner, Zambia’s Rhodesian-born minister of home affairs and a long-time ZAPU supporter, reported that there were “quite a nice number” of ZANLA cadres in Zambian jails. He did not know who killed Chitepo, he said, but until the investigation was complete, “One cannot say it wasn’t Smith’s agents. One cannot say it wasn’t ZANU.” “The laws of Zambia are for all—and freedom fighters are no exception.”4 In all, fifty-seven ZANU members were arrested immediately after the funeral, and another 1,300 were detained in ZANU camps in Zambia. Tongogara was detained in Mozambique and sent back to Zambia, but Rex Nhongo was allowed to stay in Tanzania, and Dick Moyo in Botswana. During the first few weeks of interrogations, which many in and out of ZANU considered unduly brutal, Zambian police were told where Edgar Madekurozwa’s body was buried. A week later they were led to the shallow graves of fourteen “freedom fighters,” only two of whom could be identified: John Mataure and Thomas Nhari.5 In early May, Kaunda announced that there were probably many more Zimbabwean bodies buried on Zambian soil, given ZANU’s history of coups and counter-coups and the “confusion” that had followed Mugabe’s attempt to depose Sithole a few months before.6 As if to underscore his point, Dick Moyo was killed by a parcel bomb in Botswana in June.7 Mugabe blamed the Zambian government for Chitepo’s murder; Nkomo, after discussions with Muzorewa, blamed ZANU and its ethnic and political factions.8 Others in the ANC blamed both: in early April James Chikerema—the FROLIZI chairman who called himself ANC after the Unity Accord—told a Guardian correspondent that it was time for the Zambians to “ruthlessly crush” “the Karanga mafia” in ZANU.9 A month later, he told a Zambian newspaper that ethnicity was not to blame for these deaths. “This was the work of only a handful of selfseeking maniacs” and there is “no justification” for blaming any ethnic group. “Let us isolate the criminals and deal with them accordingly and
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not as a single tribe.”10 Like Chitepo’s letters to the Malawian authorities, these two statements are only contradictory if one insists on a single narrative about the struggle. There are other ways to read these two statements, taking Chikerema’s audience into account. He may have been backing down, attempting to reconcile with those parties put off by his first statement, or he may have been speaking to his own party, and the Zimbabwean community in exile. Zimbabweans in exile seem to have refined their ideas about ethnicity in new and violent ways, as Nkomo believed and as Rev. Sithole was to argue a year later, and Chikerema’s statement to the Zambian press might have been a refutation of such ideas, offered in the hope that political violence not be naturalized. Like Chitepo’s letters, Chikerema’s statements might have been an attempt to bridge the antagonistic elements in the struggle. Despite what appeared in the press, many people, particularly those in Rhodesia, were surprised by Zambia’s apparent eagerness to hold ZANU responsible for Chitepo’s murder. Rhodesia’s CIO, wrote Ken Flower years later, was “astounded” by the Zambian response. Writing in 1987, Flower claimed more responsibility than may be plausible for the deterioration of ZANU’s relations with Zambia, although he acknowledged that little about the Nhari rebellion or ZANU’s disdain for unity was new or noteworthy, let alone the stuff of counter-intelligence and misinformation. According to Flower, Rhodesia’s CIO had regarded Chitepo as the “brains” behind ZANU’s military strategy and the “biggest obstacle to ending the war.” It provided enough “disinformation to the Zambian Special Branch” that, early in 1975, Chitepo “became the prime target” of Rhodesia’s CIO “and many other interested parties.” Given the misinformation and the circumstances in Zambia, if Chitepo was eliminated, “the blame could be laid at any number of doors.”11 After the assassination, however, several others—closer to Chitepo than Flower had been—disputed Chitepo’s importance to the war effort. Masipula Sithole, writing first in 1979, could not understand why Rhodesians singled out Chitepo for assassination. Yes, Chitepo insisted on the primacy of the guerilla struggle, but so did everyone in ZANU’s leadership. Mugabe and Tongogara were more logical targets, he argued, as they were as vocal as Chitepo was about armed struggle and Tongogara, after all, commanded the army. Moreover, Sithole quoted Flower, repeating that Chitepo believed he had lost control of the party. How did this make him a “prime target”?12 In a 1983 interview Leo Solomon Baron, a ZAPU lawyer working in Zambia, could not see any reason why Rhodesia would have benefited from eliminating Chitepo at that
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time—which, he was quick to point out, was not to say that Rhodesians could not have imagined a reason.13 Although Flower claimed to have been shocked that Zambia singled out ZANU for blame, he did not think this had much to do with ZANU, even reeling as it was from the effects of the Nhari rebellion. He focused instead on the influences to which Kaunda was subject, noting that genealogies of power and wealth may have had more influence on Zambian policies than Rhodesia’s best-hewn circuits of information or misinformation, as we have seen. Kaunda and Milner had been ZAPU supporters for years, and Tiny Rowland, the director of the multinational corporation Lonrho, was a long-time ZAPU supporter who had financed Nkomo for years. He also owned the Times of Zambia, which pressed for the Special International Commission.14 However much credit he claimed for Chitepo’s death, or for the circumstances leading up to it, Flower did not seem to command an attentive audience in Zambia for anything he said about the assassination. According to his published memoirs, in late 1975 and ’76 Flower became distressed at the brutal treatment of Tongogara. When he received what turned out to be a false report that Tongogara’s back had been broken during interrogation, he took “the unusual step” of contacting the head of Zambia’s Special Branch, informing him that Rhodesia’s “disinformation had gone far enough.” Nevertheless, the published Report of the Chitepo Commission accused Tongogara of the murder. Shortly after the Report appeared in 1976, Flower visited Lusaka and learned that the commission would recommend criminal prosecution against Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba. He began to wonder if he should tell what he knew. “Suddenly, I got the hell in me—Chitepo was dead and Tongogara had suffered enough.” Flower told Kaunda’s lawyer, “your precious findings are not worth the paper they are printed on. Tongogara had nothing to do with Chitepo’s death.” Although he suggested that the lawyer check with Zambia’s Special Branch, he later learned that his “‘confession’” had gone unheeded, adding to “the general derangement in Lusaka” where “no one there wished to be further confused by facts.”15 Flower’s “confession,” as he himself called it, raises two related questions: one of the accuracy of his published memoirs, and the other of how important—however accurately reported they might be—his actions were. I argue that Flower’s published memoirs reflect the complicated and contradictory position of his writing about the Rhodesian CIO after heading the Zimbabwean CIO for several years. There can be little doubt that Flower was speaking to multiple audiences, some past
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and some present, some in Zimbabwe and some in exile. Often his published words contradict, or complicate, what he said at the time. In his unpublished words to the Rhodesian Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Flower said his sources of information about the Chitepo assassination and its aftermath were his conversations with the British ambassador to South Africa, with whom he was in close contact, and the transcripts of interviews with five captured ZANLA guerillas. British intelligence clearly thought that ZANU was responsible for Chitepo’s murder. The captured guerillas indicated that Chitepo’s murder was due to the dissension in the party. According to Flower’s summary of the captured guerillas’ testimony, “Chitepo had been missing for three weeks during which time he was in Malawi organizing an assassination. He was detained and sent back to Lusaka where his enemies got in first, and he was murdered.” All this disarray in the party, however, was “a real eye-opener” to Flower; he did not seem to have insider knowledge about ZANU or Zambian police protocols. By 9 April, he could tell his fellow commanders only that it was impossible to gauge the impact of the detentions on the war; all he could say for sure was that John Mataure had been killed and Tongogara had been arrested.16 A year later, after the publication of the Report, he suggested that Rhodesia publicize Tongogara’s forthcoming trial in Zambia so as to encourage dissension in ZANU.17 What is a historian to make of these contradictory statements? Do the unpublished words trump the published ones, or do we assume that the published record consists of what Flower could not say at the time? There is no way to know for sure, of course, but then, what would such certainty do? Flower’s published account is of his own ineptitude: he tried but failed to clear Tongogara’s name. Flower’s complaints about Zambians raise still another question altogether: if the objects of a campaign of misinformation and disinformation did not respond to accurate information, how can we be sure they responded to disinformation and misinformation? If state-sponsored intelligence fails so dismally that a confession by a high-ranking intelligence officer does not enter any contemporary written record other than his own, can it be said to have an appreciable impact on the affairs of another country or of a liberation movement? Flower’s own contradictory situation of authorship complicates these questions enormously. Was the misinformation, however successful or unsuccessful it may have been, directed at Zambians, Zimbabweans in exile, or Rhodesians at home? Other Rhodesian texts, written by men who did not have Flower’s access to Zambian authorities, de-
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scribed the Zambians’ lack of interest in truth, even when such an interest would have landed the authors in jail. Stiff/Bryce insisted that the Zambians wanted to crush ZANU; their account is greatly invested in the Zambian jailors’ brutality and their violent interrogations of the detainees, most especially Kufamadzuba and Tungamirai. The former, they claimed, was arrested in his hospital bed, imprisoned, and denied all medical treatment. Their account of Tungamirai’s ordeal is similar to that given by Martin and Johnson, in which he was brutally beaten into a confession that was never made public in the Report of the Chitepo Commission.18 Why was Flower’s account of the Chitepo assassination so vague, and why do so many details in the Martin and Johnson and Stiff/Bryce accounts overlap? What audience did Stiff/Bryce have in mind when they wrote about the violent treatment of ZANU detainees in Zambian jails? Both Stiff/Bryce and Martin and Johnson could have known the same set of facts, of course, but that does not explain why Rhodesian authors and ZANU(PF) authors tell the same story. It is possible that they may have been writing to address a wider audience than either Zimbabweans or Rhodesians, or an audience within both these groups that shared concerns and a vision of history specific to those concerns. Stiff/Bryce and Martin and Johnson may have imagined their audience to be one in which Rhodesian intelligence was believed to be sophisticated beyond the standards of those elsewhere in the region, an audience for whom ZANU was a noble foe temporarily suppressed by Zambian misconduct. It is possible that the texts by Martin and Johnson and Stiff/Bryce share many details because they share a specific kind of nationalist narrative, one in which Rhodesia became Zimbabwe despite the clever covert actions of Rhodesia and the obstructions of Zambian authorities. Whatever Flower claimed to tell Zambians, Rhodesians at home— and their admirers around the world—were fed another kind of disinformation entirely. Rhodesia’s foreign affairs ministry reprinted and distributed to journalists Chikerema’s various statements about ethnic strife in ZANU.19 After 1977, Rhodesians were told that Zambians got it just right. In two separate fact sheets issued for the press in 1977 and ’78, the ministry not only endorsed the findings of the Chitepo Commission but quoted from the Report extensively, once to verify ethnic strife within ZANU and once to show the inordinate ambition of Tongogara.20 Obviously, Rhodesia would not be so foolhardy as to admit a role in the assassination of Chitepo, and there would be no reason for Rhodesia’s CIO to correct press releases. But none of the Rhodesian
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confessions revealed after 1980 corrected Rhodesian statements from a few years before. They do not compete over facts or their interpretation; they simply cover them, and replace them with a layer of confession that makes the earlier statements all the more legible. And why not? The entire point of Flower’s book is his claim to be telling a truth he denied at the time. My question isn’t why did he do this, but how do we read such revelations? I want to suggest that his belated truth-telling, and revelations of those confidences Zambians disregarded, is not intended to set the record straight. It has another purpose altogether: to dramatize the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. The publication of Flower’s confessions, even the ones no one believed at the time, articulates the end of a government of secrets, and its demise suggests a new, open society, informed by public opinion and free discussion, not disinformation and phone calls between intelligence chiefs. In this way, secrets are seen to be the stuff of the bad old days, of totalitarian regimes and minority-ruled governments. Diana Taylor’s study of Argentina’s “Dirty War” makes another point about belated revelations and what she calls “the ‘show’ of atonement”: such revelations are spectacles, of telling the truth, to be sure, but spectacles nonetheless. These confessions set up an implicit audience, someone being confessed to, while the confession itself is unidirectional: no one—including victims and survivors—can talk back to it. Those who confess in this way frequently evade legal responsibility, and they may do little more than “sell newspapers and boost ratings.”21 Taylor’s analysis provides a way to problematize both the confessions of truth commissions, which are supposed to facilitate a transitional system of justice, and Michel Foucault’s ideas about confession. Foucault sees confession and the telling of secrets as tools of increased surveillance, the very techniques by which states extend their control over individual lives. Secrets charge information and give it a greater import than what is known has. Making something a belatedly revealed secret serves to charge information even more.22 How does this work when the fact of confession, as in the texts I cite here, tells a truth after it has had a bearing on state practice? These are not confessions made so the state can know all; these confessions are made so that we—their audience— can know all about the state. The confessions I’ve cited, with their disclosure of double agents and informers and their correction of erroneous texts, all describe and reinscribe a state with bureaucratic power and knowledge. Why is Rhodesia presented thus, and to whom is it being presented? I’ve already argued that the various reworkings of Chitepo’s assassination strengthen some of Zimbabwe’s founding myths and dis-
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empower others, but what do these stories and confessions do to Rhodesian mythologies, and the locus of memories with no state? Do Rhodesian confessions invent a Rhodesia of successful secret agents, foolproof assassinations, and military expertise, as both editions of See You in November might indicate? Do they make Rhodesia more powerful in memory than it ever was in practice? My question, in short, is who is confessing to whom in this literature produced in the mid-1980s, and what is being scripted in these texts? Do confessions discipline new states or old ones, former agents in new states or former agents in former states? If Flower was writing to Rhodesians, or even if Rhodesians were part of his intended audience, why did he ignore other Rhodesian confessions? Why did he make his own so vague, so easily construed as that of an assassin of any nationality, galvanized by the disinformation supplied by the organization he headed? It would have been almost impossible for Flower not to have known the Stiff/Bryce and Martin and Johnson confessions well. Both were published two years before his own book was, and, even if he did not read Peter Stiff’s work, the Martin and Johnson text was serialized in the Herald. What then accounts for the vague statements in his own memoirs in which he left the identity of the assassin or assassins unknown but exonerated Tongogara? In print, Flower reported Chitepo’s meeting with Kaunda on 13 March, in which he said the situation in ZANU was out of control and that he feared for his own life. Although Flower made no mention of this at the time, he could have learned about it later from his intelligence sources, or he could have read about it in the Report of the Chitepo Commission. “Five days later,” Flower wrote in 1987, “in the early hours of the morning, a bomb placed in Chitepo’s car detonated as he started the engine. He was killed outright.”23 Who was Flower speaking to with his passive voice? Two answers, or readings, are possible, and it is plausible that both are correct. First, he may have been speaking to Zimbabweans, and wanted only to make clear that whoever killed Chitepo, it wasn’t Tongogara. Second, his vagueness may have been a discursive warning, a way of discouraging other Rhodesian operatives from providing yet another confession to Chitepo’s assassination. Indeed, the 2002 reproduction of the Stiff/Bryce confession of 1985 seems to have understood this, and did not offer a new confession or even new details of the assassination. In his published memoirs Flower provided a confession that may have been a boast about the efficacy of the top-down, desk-bound intelligence that many in service to Rhodesia loathed.24 Nevertheless, one Rhodesian soldier took Flower at his word and described the assassina-
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tion of Chitepo as one of the colossal mistakes of Rhodesian counterinsurgency. Ron Reid-Daly, founder of the Selous Scouts, published two nearly identical memoirs. The first was an as-told-to book, written with Peter Stiff and published in 1982. It mentions Chitepo only in passing: when his car “detonated a landmine on his Lusaka drive” it triggered coups and counter-coups in the party’s camps in Mozambique.25 In 1999 he published a barely revised version from which all evidence that the memoirs were dictated had been excised; it had a new title, a new chapter, a single author, and a few new passages inserted into the text. One such passage explained how the CIO’s decision to assassinate Chitepo showed how badly Flower had misread the situation in ZANU. Chitepo’s murder “purged ZANU of its many dissenting factions and a new and highly successful leader emerged. Robert Mugabe.” What made Flower’s decision even “worse for Rhodesia” was that ZANU and ZANLA were expelled from Zambia, which allowed them to position themselves in Mozambique, giving them “an immense advantage, militarily, logistically, and politically.”26 Reid-Daly does not even mention the Stiff/Bryce or the Martin and Johnson confessions, although it seems likely that he knew of at least one of them. In silencing those texts, Reid-Daly constructs a history, empowering one version of events so as to condemn Rhodesia’s CIO for its lack of intelligence and forethought. Such debates between former operatives, taking place in the pages—and the revised pages—of their published memoirs, are not uncommon in the Rhodesian now-it-can-be-told literature. Flower himself was a master of the subtle attack. When Stiff/Bryce take credit for a death, Flower muddies the waters with ambiguity. The assassination of Jason Moyo of ZAPU early in 1977 provides another example. In identical accounts published by Stiff in 1985 and 2002, Bryce claimed to have been ordered to kill Moyo by Colonel Joe, since Moyo was the greatest proponent of unity in the liberation struggle. Trying to make the crime look like the work of ZANU, Bryce placed a bomb in a box that was supposed to hold a Reader’s Digest condensed book, and mailed it to Moyo from Francistown, Botswana, where there were a few ZANU representatives. Moyo was killed when he opened it, but not everyone in Rhodesia was pleased. “Intelligence warfare never has clear cut boundaries,” Stiff/Bryce mused, and some men pursued “the dangerous practice of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds.” The CIO had not known that Moyo had been a Special Branch informer since 1959.27 Few attributed the assassination to ZANU or even Rhodesians, however. Within a few months there were widespread reports that Moyo had been killed by South Africa’s Bureau of State Security
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(BOSS) in retaliation for the deaths of South African soldiers captured and killed by ZIPRA soldiers who had crossed into Rhodesia.28 Martin and Johnson ignore both of these claims, but do wonder if Chuck Hinde had anything to do with Moyo’s death; Hinde was killed in an automobile accident in Zambia six days later.29 Publishing two years later, Flower was equivocal, and made no definite claim for Rhodesian involvement. Quoting from his diary, he reported that there were “the usual allegations” that Rhodesians had assassinated Moyo. “But so much is underway in so many theaters that I just couldn’t be sure what might or might not be the degree of our involvement.”30 Reading Stiff/Bryce and Flower together is troubling; they almost cancel each other out. Such negations underscore the question of who is writing to whom: it seems, in fact, that Flower is nullifying the Stiff/Bryce boast with his diary entry for the day after Moyo died. Is this, and his cautious depiction of how Chitepo died, because Flower is writing to undermine the Stiff/Bryce and Martin and Johnson version of Rhodesian intelligence? Are these confessions in fact debates among and cautions to former Rhodesian operatives, an attempt to set limits on what can be told, and on what can be invented, about the capabilities of Rhodesia? Indeed, are these publications simply memoirs, personal accounts of what happened? Or are they debates about a defunct state, and what caused its demise, conducted in exile and in Zimbabwe? Whatever these texts were saying to each other, they were saying one thing to Zambians: Flower, Stiff/Bryce, and all the Rhodesian operatives who spoke to Martin and Johnson over the years provided a great deal of evidence clearing Tongogara. Indeed, more evidence could scarcely be imagined. But for all the leaks, the honest outbursts by CIO directors, and the assurances, no one in the next four years of information and disinformation seems to have conveyed any of these confessions and absolutions to Tongogara, who was to go to his own unexplained death in 1979 still denying his involvement in Chitepo’s assassination. When Sister Janice McLaughlin met Tongogara, the first thing he said was “‘You know, the Rhodesians accused me of killing Chitepo and so did the Zambians. . . . If it’s the last thing I do . . . I’m going to clear my name. . . . I could never have killed Chitepo. . . . He was like a father to me.’”31 When Martin and Johnson interviewed Tongogara at the front in Mozambique in mid-1978 he told them, “‘Kaunda almost blackened my revolutionary name. I want it cleared after independence.’ Although acquitted by the court, he felt the charge left a blemish against him.” He wanted his innocence known, and raised the issue in ZANU central committee meetings.32
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But if some Rhodesians, at least, had cleared Tongogara’s name, no one in Rhodesia or Zambia had mentioned that fact anywhere else, least of all to the presidents of the frontline states. Many of the stories about how the detainees were released from Zambia’s jails involve those presidents and their respective ideas about Tongogara’s guilt or innocence. Machel, for example, was a close friend of Chitepo. Many say he held Tongogara responsible for his death. He refused to involve himself in the many attempts to release Tongogara from detention in Zambia in the six months after the publication of the Report, when criminal charges were being prepared. When ZIPA commanders asked Machel to secure Tongogara’s release, he said he had no authority in Zambia, and added that Tongogara was imprisoned for a murder he committed. Nyerere was, by all accounts, a different matter. When ZIPA commanders asked Nyerere to pressure Kaunda to release the detainees in September 1976, he said, “your wish is granted” and agreed to talk to Kaunda.33 Why did Machel, unlike Nyerere, refuse to help the detainees? Mozambique had sent a representative to hear the testimony before the Chitepo Commission, and many in ZIPA assumed Machel had information beyond that which was published in the Report.34 But whatever testimony the commission heard—and whatever appeared in the Report—may not have had much to do with the detainees’ eventual release in October 1976. Leo Solomon Baron, Nkomo’s lawyer and then a Zambian high court judge, made it clear that two separate issues were at play in the Zambian investigation, and that the identity of the assassins and the final outcome of the case were different issues. He presented a different and possibly more aggressive picture of Nyerere’s involvement in the release of the detainees in a 1983 interview. Once the criminal case was joined in Zambia, he said, there were “powerful political forces at work.” Many people, inside and outside Zambia, urged that the detainees be released. One such person was Julius Nyerere, who went so far as to involve himself in the criminal trial. A lawyer called Platts-Mills came from England “to hold a watching brief in the Tongogara trial.” He went to see Baron. “I thought he was coming to pay a courtesy call . . . but he actually came to see me enquiring as to . . . how this thing could be, shall we say, withdrawn, and so on.” Baron found this “a terrible experience for me, a senior counsel from London approaching me on this sort of basis,” and asked him to leave his office at once. Before he left, Platts-Mills told him “he was engaged by the Tanzanian government, which means President Nyerere.” Baron took pains to explain that he did not think Nyerere was corrupt, and meant only to illustrate “the political background to this sort of thing.”35
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John Platts-Mills wasn’t retained by Nyerere, however. He was hired by the London Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee—the same committee that published the detainees’ “Reply” and “Analysis” of the Report—which included Kees Maxey, Basil Davidson, several ZANU members, and Judith Todd, who had been recruited by Fay Chung. Todd later claimed she wasn’t familiar with the case, but was opposed to torture: “I did not concern myself about whether I felt or knew (because I didn’t have the information) that Comrade Tongogara and the others were or were not implicated in the Chitepo murder. It was simply that we knew that at least some of them were being tortured very badly. So the point of getting a lawyer was not only to provide a defense, but to stop the torture that we believed was going on. We were told was going on.” This was the only detainee committee she was ever involved with, she said, and this committee had been set up “simply to try and raise funds to get a lawyer [“John Platts-Mills” is written in the margin of the transcript of Todd’s interview] to go and defend them. But we hadn’t been working very long when an agreement was reached under which they were released to come to the Geneva Talks.”36 But why Nyerere? Why was that particular name dropped by PlattsMills in his fabrication, if that is indeed what it was? Nyerere had been, as we have seen, heavily involved in Zimbabwe’s nationalist movement from the 1960s, and had been a staunch ZANU supporter for almost as long.37 His name may have been a better one to drop to a ZAPU lawyer than that of a ZANU committee. Nyerere’s place in this history is great, but in terms of the release of the detainees, his name could have been folded into what lawyers in Zambia, according to Baron, saw as the intense public and international efforts at unity in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle of which the release of the detainees was a part.38 Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba were never tried; Kufamadzuba’s confession was deemed inadmissible because of police misconduct and the charges against all three were dismissed.39 Under Zambian law, however, when one of two or more accused withdrew a confession, the case could still stand. But legal issues were only part of the case, Baron insisted. Whether the case against Chimurenga and Tongogara was strong or weak didn’t matter. What mattered were “the political realities. It had nothing to do with the strength or weakness of the case. It was a political thing.”40 The public and international pressures, the “political thing” that released the detainees, were anything but secret. On 18 October Aaron Milner confirmed that Mudzi, Hamadziripi, Kangai, and Gumbo—none of whom had been formally accused of any crime in Zambia—had been released to attend the Geneva
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talks.41 Two days later, when those accused of Chitepo’s murder were set free, ZANU’s Mugabe and ZIPA’s Nhongo were in the courtroom.42 But was this “political thing” international or national, ZANU or ZAPU, ZIPA, or ZANLA? These are more diffuse questions, as the alliances and betrayals that ground one analysis trouble another one. Many in ZANU and in ZAPU claimed that Nkomo exerted the pressure required to release Tongogara and the other dare members, including Gumbo, Kangai, and Hamadziripi.43 Nkomo’s own account insists that he did this so as to guarantee that Mugabe had sufficient support as the new leader of ZANU. Others claim that he had made a deal with Tongogara: if Tongogara supported Nkomo for president, he would be the first commander of independent Zimbabwe’s army. Masipula Sithole noted that some of the ZANU members whose release had been negotiated by Nkomo were those who, within two years, were accused of plotting to oust Mugabe and rejoin ZAPU, the so-called “Gutu clique.” Tongogara stayed loyal to Mugabe, and organized the counter-coup and the arrest of the plotters.44 Late in 1979, Tongogara was killed when the car in which he was being driven ran into a FRELIMO truck. He was on his way to tell ZANLA commanders the conditions of the cease-fire that would end the war and provide for elections. Many guerillas and their commanders regarded the cease-fire as a sell-out: they believed they were close to a military victory.45 Few could separate his death from Chitepo’s. Many authors wrote of Tongogara’s last meeting with Samora Machel of Mozambique, in which he was reported to have said, “I want to tell you I know nothing about the death of Chitepo.” He died two days later.46 Not every author believed this indicated his innocence, however. In both the 1985 and 2002 editions, Stiff/Bryce report the same conversation with Machel that Martin and Johnson do, but argue that Machel may have thought that the man who killed Chitepo should not live to hold high office in the newly independent Zimbabwe. This would explain why Tongogara’s car drove into the back of a FRELIMO truck and not another vehicle. Both Stiff/Bryce and another Rhodesian author, Pat Scully, claim that Tongogara was murdered before his body was put in the car. They tell of a letter written to the British high commissioner in Maputo by a ZANLA guerilla who had witnessed Tongogara’s murder. Tongogara was killed on 26 December, the letter maintained, because he alone insisted that ZANLA unite with ZIPRA. For such an opinion, Tongogara was shot in the stomach and hit with an axe as he slept. His stomach was then cut open and the bullets removed, so that it would look as if he had been in a car accident.47 In both editions,
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Stiff/Bryce insist Tongogara was the logical successor to Chitepo, and that was another reason for his timely demise. To prove Tongogara’s death was accidental, ZANU requested that a white undertaker from Salisbury determine the cause of death; he found injuries consistent with those of automobile accidents, and no bullets. Stiff/Bryce were outraged at such sloppiness. It is possible, they wrote, that bullet and axe wounds could look like “injuries sustained when driving into the back of a lorry,” but only an autopsy could reveal how Tongogara had been killed, by showing whether injuries from the automobile accident had been sustained earlier.48 Henrik Ellert, however, suggests that this letter from the ZANLA guerilla was a forgery. The Selous Scouts often infiltrated ZANU by copying the handwriting of detachment commanders and “concocting” letters to bring other commanders to meetings, at which the commanders were then compromised. These same “poison pen ‘spoilers’” forged the letter about Tongogara’s murder in a last-minute attempt to discredit ZANU.49 Only Ken Flower seemed unwilling to connect Chitepo’s death and that of Tongogara. Instead he worried that this particular untimely death put ZANLA under more direct control of the ZANU(PF) leaders who opposed the cease-fire and wanted a field victory. Flower stated no concerns about how Tongogara was killed nor did he try to contradict other authors’ theories, noting only that the Mozambicans had invited him and General Peter Walls of Combined Operations “to check the facts surrounding his death and we were satisfied that there had been no foul play.”50 ZANU, numbed with grief over Tongogara’s death, held its own inquiry and came to the same conclusions.51 There was an eyewitness to Tongogara’s death, a woman who does not appear in any of the Rhodesian texts, but does in the Zimbabwean ones. Tongogara’s personal secretary, Opah Rusheshe, has insisted, in any number of interviews and conversations over the years, that the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Most of the freedom fighters disapproved of the cease-fire agreement, she said, and Tongogara wanted to go to each camp immediately to convince his soldiers to accept the Lancaster House agreement. His driver had already driven two days to Maputo to meet him, and begged for a day’s rest. Tongogara demanded that they leave Maputo at once, and the driver’s exhaustion, Rusheshe maintained, caused the accident.52 Even so, within ZANU there was a persistent belief that there was something unnatural about Tongogara’s death. As the news that he was killed spread through the camps, several women guerillas ruefully joked that Tongogara had been killed by the
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spirits of the children he had had them abort.53 A year later the ZANU representative in Swaziland told Masipula Sithole that perhaps Chitepo’s ancestors had killed Tongogara: they did not want him to return home after having left Chitepo in Zambia.54 Less than six months after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, the government began the task of bringing back the men and women who had died outside the country in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. Built by North Koreans with Zimbabwean assistance, Heroes Acres was to be the burial place for those whose “actions were guided by love and comradeship” in “unwavering support” for freedom and justice. Its construction was supposed to commemorate the end of violence and the end of exile for so many freedom fighters. In August 1980, Jason Moyo’s remains were brought from Zambia and Tongogara’s remains from Mozambique, and they were buried there.55 A year later, Chitepo’s remains were brought from Lusaka and buried there as well.56 Several friends of the family say that Victoria Chitepo, who had been elected to parliament from Manicaland and was appointed deputy minister of education and culture by Mugabe, was opposed to this. Some said she did not want her husband buried next to his murderers, but few friends and comrades sided with her. Only Cornelius Sanyanga tried to convince party officials to leave Chitepo’s remains in Zambia.57
CHAPTER SIX
Why is Chitepo’s assassination important now? Why does his widow demand that his killers be tried, and why does a Harare weekly serialize the Report of the Chitepo Commission twenty-six years after its publication? Why does this murder come back to trouble Zimbabweans in this third decade of their independence? Chitepo is not alone. Tongogara’s ghost has occasionally been seen in and around Heroes Acres since he was reburied there in 1980. In August 2001, as a pro-government song called “Tongogara” was played on state radio, stories circulated that Tongogara’s ghost had been visiting the presidential residence for months, driving Robert Mugabe to antidepressants.1 A few days after the ghost story was published in London and refuted in Zimbabwe, an “eyewitness” gave a radio interview in which he stated that Tongogara had died in an automobile accident; there was no cause for suspicion, he said. Almost everyone scoffed at the story. Newspapers did not report it and one outraged letter to the editor wondered why the eyewitness had waited twenty-two years to tell his story.2 Why indeed? If there is renewed talk of Chitepo and Tongogara in Harare, there are renewed discussions, as we have seen, of these assassinations in Rhodesian publications in South Africa. Why are these dead men coming back now, and in so many forms? This concluding chapter argues that these dead come back for the same reason the confessions are recycled into news or published critiques: because they revive, and rehearse, the political world of the 1970s. The many layers of denial and subsequent confession (and of confession and subsequent denial) in the previous chapters show how texts construct historical narratives, and how historical narratives are constructed and construct themselves through texts. But all texts, and all actors in texts, Trouillot reminds us, are not created equal: some are privileged, some are aggressively promoted, and some are silenced, some fall by the wayside and others ap-
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pear in unlikely combinations, but how they are used and recycled creates new histories of political power. In Zimbabwe today, the political world of the 1970s is now contested as the founding moment of the nation. Independent Zimbabwe bases much of its moral legitimacy on the liberation war, but that legitimacy has been questioned in recent years, both in and out of the ruling party, because of the deteriorating economy and because of how the war was recalled and rehearsed. Massive foreign debt and de-industrialization brought about a crisis in ZANU(PF) that has intensified since 1997, when there were first calls for Mugabe’s resignation. Since then Zimbabwe’s participation in the war in the Congo and payments to veterans of the liberation war have compounded the already chronic shortage of foreign exchange, even before the disruption of commercial agriculture of 2001 and the drought of 2002.3 An opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), founded in September 1999, provided the first real electoral challenge to ZANU(PF) since independence, and managed to win one-third of the elected seats in the parliamentary elections of June 2000 that few thought were free and fair. Zimbabwe’s decline had been accelerated by a renewed attention to the liberation struggle, and by the actions of war veterans. War veterans had long complained about their pensions; not only was the amount lower than that paid to former Rhodesian enlisted soldiers, but the support available to them seemed to devalue their contribution to the liberation struggle.4 The left of ZANU(PF) said the party leadership had abandoned the principles of the struggle for freedom; former freedom fighters said the party had abandoned them.5 Indeed, by early 1997 there was no money left with which to compensate war veterans: it had been looted by senior politicians, many of whom were also veterans of the liberation struggle. The awards they received, and the ailments that entitled them to such amounts, caused a scandal. A commission of inquiry revealed that members of parliament, commanders of the defense forces, and Mugabe’s in-laws, among others, received hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwe dollars in compensation for “poly arthritis” and “mental stress disorder.” This did not outrage war veterans as much as it empowered them. Less well-off war veterans had long sought compensation for “invisible injuries,” Norma Kriger noted: now they could demand compensation for their participation in the war, not just for war injuries.6 With new and aggressive leadership, war veterans demanded a lump sum payment, monthly allowances, and resettlement on farmland; otherwise, they threatened to go to war. Mugabe gave in quickly: his
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shaky legitimacy could not withstand repudiation by former guerillas. But the funds needed to pay the war veterans were more than Zimbabwe’s frail economy could manage. When Mugabe promised to resettle war veterans on white-owned farms—“and not pay a cent to a soul”—even as he was about to send Zimbabwean troops to their disastrous involvement in the war in the Congo, the Zimbabwe dollar began its downward slide and western donors withheld several loans.7 Issues of land and of the continued dominance of commercial agriculture by white farmers became part of Zimbabwean political life as they had not for years. In February 1999 voters rejected a new constitution that would have consolidated Mugabe’s power, and war veterans, with state sanction, began to invade commercial farms so they might capture through force that land which had not been made available to them through reform.8 The new entitlements of war veterans and farm invasions scripted two new histories of the making of Zimbabwe. In one, the foundation of Zimbabwe was based entirely on the war, now recast as a unified and unflinching struggle for the land white farmers had stolen from Africans in the 1890s. In such a history, the place of the party, like that of refugees in Mozambique, was submerged and collapsed into the history of a single liberation army. In the other, the founding moment has been reduced to the agreement reached in the negotiations at Lancaster House in 1979. Those negotiations, which brought about a cease-fire and an electoral victory for ZANU(PF), have been revived in political talk in Zimbabwe as an example of how British perfidy subverted the struggle. This particular history, like many accounts of Tongogara’s death (including the occasional demands it be investigated), claims that the cease-fire sold out guerillas, denying them the land they were about to seize in battle. More important, perhaps, is that this particular history made Britain central to Zimbabwe’s history as it had never been before. The two versions of Zimbabwe’s history have competed to be true and official, but no version has managed to dominate the other for very long. War veterans have become a broad and inclusive category, losing some—but not all—of the specificity that gave them their entitlements. Some war veterans had never seen combat: 20,000 more people received veterans’ pensions than had been demobilized in 1980, for example. Chenjerai (“Hitler”) Hunzvi, the vociferous leader of the war veterans association until his death in 2001, had joined ZIPRA in 1977 and was sent to Poland to study medicine almost at once.9 A new, inclusive war narrative took hold in Zimbabwean political lore, as several observers reconstructed Zimbabwe’s history in order to make every
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1970s politician a guerilla. David Blair reinscribed Mugabe as a military man. Mugabe had sent troops to the Congo, Blair wrote, to remind Zimbabweans that he could do “what he once did best—commanding soldiers in a war.”10 Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya suggested that land invasions carried a trace, “a memory of an anti-colonial struggle that only ZANU can invoke,” when it was a Maoist party amongst the rural masses.11 The history in which the founding moment was Lancaster House, of negotiations with dishonorable imperialists, was blamed for the failure of land reform. According to many in Zimbabwe the British had promised to subsidize the purchase of white-owned farms for landless Zimbabweans after 1980, but they reneged on their promise. Although no compensation for land was written into the Lancaster House agreement, stories of promises made and broken have taken hold in Zimbabwe today: the silences and what Trouillot calls the inborn absences of the agreement thus become the foundation of the new nation. Indeed, all contemporary accounts of the deals made and unmade at Lancaster House vanished from public debate.12 According to Nkomo, throughout the conference no one could decide whose responsibility land was or how it should be compensated; Americans offered to help the British pay compensation and then hastily turned their offer into one for the development of unused land.13 The chief British negotiator, Lord Carrington, made several timid offers of compensation, hoping to pressure both Mugabe and Nkomo into various positions, or to appease the Salisbury regime. Compensation remained a bargaining chip; no amount or method of compensation was ever accepted by any party.14 Certainly the presidents of the frontline states did not want the conference stalled or broken up over the issue of compensation, and demanded that Mugabe give it up.15 During a BBC interview in 1990, however, Mugabe took responsibility for “having to compromise on certain fundamental issues,” especially land. He regretted giving up his party’s demands for land, he said, but he “got the concession . . . on democratic elections” and the cease-fire.16 Bond and Manyanya put it succinctly: the liberation movements had struck a “bad deal” on land at Lancaster House.17 The history that made Lancaster House the founding moment of the nation forced new attention on political leadership. Amid accusations of who had broken which 1979 promise, there was renewed interest in the chronology of leadership in ZANU and ZANLA. The traces of that history were everywhere, including in idealizations of Chitepo and Tongogara. As topics of conversation and press conferences, and as
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ghosts, both men were portrayed as more heroic, more charismatic, and more judicious figures than they had ever been considered in their lifetimes. Chitepo and Tongogara have been reinvented as men who would have been president of independent Zimbabwe had they lived.18 The persistence of talk about Chitepo and of talk about and visions of Tongogara literally left a trace of the idea of Mugabe’s illegitimacy. This is not to say that Mugabe was accused of orchestrating the deaths of Chitepo and Tongogara, although such accusations were not uncommon.19 Chitepo and Tongogara come back, as it were, to show that the president is unlawfully in his office. At the same time, Chitepo and Tongogara return because their deaths and the importance attached to them rehearse many of the issues that are talked about daily in Zimbabwe. Whatever the specifics of Zimbabwe’s decline—land, failed promises, war veterans—it is not so different from that of other African countries over the past decade. Part of what makes Zimbabwe’s decline noteworthy, and a large part of what differentiates Zimbabwe’s strained political economy from that of Zambia or Malawi, is that so much of the problem is attributed to specifically Zimbabwean ideas about race, citizenship, loyalty, and politics. Nevertheless, there has been a discursive desire to make Zimbabwe’s decline identical to that of Zambia or Malawi. Zimbabwe has been given a new history in which it was a British colony until 1980; moreover, the British still meddled, still broke promises, and still tried to control the country. This rhetoric was constant in ZANU(PF), perfected by the often-used slogan “Zimbabwe will never be a colony AGAIN.”20 This new colonial history sits awkwardly beside the history of settlers, dominion status, and the Rhodesian Front’s renegade independence. That history, far more than any imaginary colonial past, is constituted by questions about who rightfully belongs in a country, and how that country can protect its national sovereignty. These questions have revolved around the place of whites in the country, and the place of political parties in protecting the country from foreign encroachments, since UDI in 1965. That these ideas arouse Zimbabwe twenty-two years after majority rule suggests the extent to which the issues of the war, or those of Rhodesian minority rule, have never been fully resolved, and the ways that citizenship was not restructured after the war which was, after all, fought from exile. Whites were the touchstone for ideas about Zimbabwean citizenship, loyalty, and sovereignty, as the “reconciliation” and favored position of white farmers in the 1980s gave way to what Bond and Manyanya call “Mugabe’s staged tirades against white people” of the late 1990s.21 Whites’ “vestigial attitudes from the Rhodesian yesteryear”
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undermined the country, Mugabe said. “Ian Smith and the whites who participated in the genocide and the massacres of our people will be brought to trial.” Whites were “the crooks we inherited as part of our independence . . . people we would rather do without.”22 Thus Zimbabwe’s minister of information, Jonathan Moyo, could insist that “Rhodesians, neo-colonialists, and other retrogressive forces” voted against the government’s proposed constitution. “Some of them came . . . all the way from South Africa, to vote in this referendum.”23 Even without alleged border crossings, the various confessions and accusations generated by the Chitepo assassination address these issues, sometimes to challenge them and sometimes to show how, and through which texts, they became commonplace assertions about Zimbabwe. How is it that the silences and omissions in the Lancaster House agreement can found a nation? How do other texts from the 1970s speak so articulately about their own time and about a time more than twenty years later? It is not that these texts are so elastic that their meanings stretch across time. As Carolyn Hamilton points out in her study of Shaka, texts are not blank slates, documents open to any interpretation at all. They do not contain words that serve as empty vessels into which any contemporary debate can be inserted. Texts, and the genealogies of authorship and rumor and innuendo that shape them, are constrained by what happened and by participants’ knowledge of what happened. Each assertion and each detail reflects the complex and contradictory world in which the text was created; they are bounded by the time of their construction. For this reason, even—indeed, especially— the most contrived text cannot present only one point of view, one set of possibilities: the final version of any text is shaped by specific circumstances of time and place, as the agreement at Lancaster House makes clear. The details and assertions that constitute any text come from a world that contained too many contradictions to be described in a linear, one-sided way; they leave too many traces of past messiness to be one-dimensional. Besides, participants may still be alive, and they might denounce wholesale inventions.24 Edgar Tekere’s 1997 attempt to accuse old enemies of Chitepo’s murder is a case in point. Tekere had been a close associate of Mugabe; they were in jail together and in Mozambique together. He was expelled from ZANU(PF) in 1988; he then founded an opposition party, the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM). In 1977 and ’78 he had been, along with Josiah Tongogara, in charge of the repression of the so-called antiMugabe “Gutu clique”—Gumbo, Mudzi, Chigowe, and Hamadziripi— in Mozambique. In 1997 he told a Zimbabwean newspaper, “Chitepo’s
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assassination was an inside job.” When Chitepo was killed, he said, it was expedient to blame Rhodesians; now “it’s time the truth was told.” Tekere claimed to have known the killers’ identity for some time—in fact, he had tried to deal with them in Mozambique: “I know who killed Chitepo. . . . Some of them we rounded up, tried them and sentenced them to death.” Tekere’s truth included Mukudzei Mudzi, who had only the week before revealed that he had received many thousands of Zimbabwe dollars in compensation for injuries he had sustained when he was tortured in Mozambique on Tekere’s instructions. Tekere’s truth also confused Joseph Chimurenga with Cletus Chigowe, unlikely as that seems: he described Chimurenga as the deceased head of ZANU security, “a notorious killer.” And Tekere’s truth, like that of many before him, exonerated Tongogara: “Definitely he was not part of the group. I am emphatic about it. What happened is that he was framed as they wanted the troops to hate Tongogara.” He hinted that Rugare Gumbo could confirm this and much else: “He was there.”25 But the fact of who was there and who was not was the undoing of Tekere’s revelations. Joseph Chimurenga was alive, and destitute; he had never received compensation for the “tremendous and inhuman torture” he received after Chitepo’s death, both in Zambia and at Tekere’s hands in Mozambique, although he had filed for an award over ten times that of Mudzi’s award. Chimurenga repeated his testimony before the Chitepo Commission, and claimed that he, Tongogara, and Chigowe were all acquitted by the Zambian high court. Chimurenga was indignant at Tekere’s accusations: “He is the one who is the killer. He must tell us what happened to Tongogara.” As for Chitepo’s murder, Tekere “doesn’t know what he is talking about,” as he was not in Zambia at the time: “I think he is doing this because he is desperate to be accepted back into ZANU.”26 A week later, Gumbo and Hamadziripi said the same. The voice of expertise in all this turned out to be Ian Smith, who not only involved himself in the debate, but added his own experience to his brief summary of the Report. More than a decade after Stiff/Bryce, Martin and Johnson, and Flower had published their confessions to Chitepo’s assassination, Smith said, “I was prime minister then and I tell you it was not my Special Branch. It was people in ZANU.”27 Of course, the Report of the Chitepo Commission is not accurate because Ian Smith said it was, nor is it true because the men who testified before it stand by their words today. The Report of the Chitepo Commission does not matter today because it is true or because it is false. It matters today because it can be quoted and summarized to speak to the
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emotions and concerns of a nation struggling with, and struggling against, history reduced to guerilla struggle or the high politics of negotiating with the British. The very constructed-ness of these confessions, both those in the Report and those published later, makes them accurate constructions that repeat the ideas and viewpoints of the time and place in which they were written, even if those ideas and viewpoints don’t add up to a watertight confession. Hence the Stiff/Bryce account of Chitepo’s assassination does not subvert itself by the assassins’ disdain for communist-made explosives or their undue attachment to their wire cutters. These details do not prove that this confession is true or false, but suggest that it was constructed far more broadly, to be a story about assassins and their worldly knowledge of explosives, methods, and tools. It is these stories of time and place, even when contrived, or when obtained under torture, or secretly negotiated by prisoners speaking in a language their jailors could not understand, that allow texts about the Chitepo assassination to comment on, and provide a history of, politics in Zimbabwe today. All these confessions, and all the denials that surround them, allow for an interrogation of a constructed national past. Thus, as many in ZANU(PF) and elsewhere attempt to make Zimbabwe a nation founded in negotiation at Lancaster House, Chitepo’s murder and the various confessions to it bring the early years of the liberation struggle to the fore; they recall a time when national liberation was not the discipline of sovereign states, but of international cooperation on behalf of a shifting array of political parties. The conventional wisdom about the Report of the Chitepo Commission is that it was never made public in Zimbabwe, which is true: it was never published there. There are copies in several libraries and many more in private collections in Zimbabwe, however. Most Zimbabweans who were active in politics in Zambia, whatever their political affiliation, had read the Report very carefully, ZANU members most especially. Nevertheless, the imagined silencing of the Report allowed those who made it public in 2001 to do so with great fanfare, much in the manner of Rhodesian now-it-can-be-told confessions, and to take some liberty with interpretation. The purposes for which these reinterpretations were staged could not, of course, undo how the texts had been scripted. The Report was serialized in Harare in the anxious space between the 2000 parliamentary elections and the 2002 presidential elections. ZANU(PF) forgot its origins in ZAPU; it now claimed to represent all Africans. ZANU(PF), according to Jonathan Moyo, could never share power with the MDC because “They are British backed racists whose
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existence is provocative.” Mugabe’s words were stronger: the MDC is “implacably moored in the colonial yesteryear and embraces . . . the repulsive ideology of return to white settler rule.”28 Calls for party unity became particularly shrill. The most famous statement came from just before the 2000 elections, when Simon Muzenda, one of Mugabe’s vice presidents and once a member of the Lusaka detainees’ defense committee, said, “Even if we put a baboon in Chivi, if you are ZANU-PF, you vote for that baboon.”29 Early in 2001 two government ministers died in automobile accidents and Hunzvi succumbed to AIDS (amidst reports that he was hospitalized with cerebral malaria); many in the party openly worried that the party was “haunted.”30 In such a setting, how was the Report presented? Certainly it was introduced as if it were a textual version of Tongogara’s ghost, returning to Zimbabwe to accuse the party of heinous crimes. Without any discussion of how the confessions might have been obtained, without even mentioning how the Report was received when it was first published or whether there had ever been a shred of disagreement about it over the years, the Standard framed the Report to be read as a document about the excesses of ZANU. The newspaper announced that the ZANU’s entire dare and high command “killed” Chitepo. In its list of those responsible, Kufamadzuba and Chimurenga had disappeared; the Standard said Tongogara, Chigowe, Mudzi, Gumbo, Kangai, and Hamadziripi were to blame. It was as if all the testimony and all the history of multiple parties and fissures and fractures within them had been voided, and the Report of 1976 was a document about ZANU(PF) in 2001.31 But the Report of course described a very different ZANU, one that was the breakaway party itself, fractious, polarized, and distrusted by much of its leadership. It is the tension between the staging and the actual scripted text, the tension between these two interpretations, that makes the Report powerful reading in 2001, and good for newspaper sales. Framed by the newspaper as a way to think about ZANU(PF), the text itself depicts a time when ZANU was fragmented and weak, a party with at least one account of its own history that problematizes its ability to claim the blind obedience of voters. The Report not only describes a fractured party, but it depicts a fissured war effort, with unarmed cadres, possible informers, and mutinous guerillas. The version of the Chitepo assassination that appears in the Report is in large part the story of the Nhari rebellion. The commission’s version does not contain Rhodesian agents, but refers to the excesses of the high command and the difficulty of procuring weapons and of maintaining discipline while rewarding relatives. According to the Report of
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the Chitepo Commission, ZANLA guerillas mutinied because of inequality, indiscipline in the higher ranks, and punishment meted out without justice or regard for the struggle. According to various Rhodesian confessions, Nhari and his men rebelled because Rhodesian operatives fanned the fires of disaffection among loyal but grumpy cadres, talking them into acting on their grievances. Both sets of confessions depict a nationalist army sutured together in exile, but in the Report we see how far cadres would go to maintain their vision of equality and fairness in the guerilla struggle. In the Rhodesian confessions, even those authorized by ZANU(PF), cadres were easily manipulated, their struggles orchestrated from outside the party and its promises. Many descriptions of the Nhari mutiny, especially those of Martin and Johnson and Flower, depict cadres lured into mutiny by Rhodesian agents who promised an end to the war: such descriptions speak to the degree of dissension in the guerilla army and offer traces of a peace movement within ZANLA. However flawed or unreliable these particular confessions are, they stand in sharp contrast to war veterans’ claims of uniform sacrifice and uniform entitlement, claims that have, as Richard Werbner argues, provided a new foundation for citizenship based on participation in the war.32 Of course, those claims had been undermined by the very rhetoric of compensation that had failed so many former guerillas. As Norma Kriger points out, the idea of sacrifice, so key to claims for compensation, could also be applied to an older generation of politicians, many of whom were now in government, who had spent years in Rhodesian prisons.33 The fractures within ZANU, and between ZANU and ZANLA, were present in Zimbabwean newspaper accounts throughout the late 1990s for all to read. The conflict represented by Tekere’s taunt at Gumbo, “he was there,” could be and was hurled back at those who were not there, but had endured great hardships. In the same way, claims that foreign governments, or their laws, undermine Zimbabwe’s sovereignty, heard so frequently in Zimbabwe today, sound hollow after reading the Report or the various Rhodesian confessions. The presence of ZANU and ZAPU and ZIPA in Tanzania, or in Mozambique, or in London, being advised, if that is the right euphemism, by Samora Machel or Julius Nyerere, suggests another kind of history of national liberation, in which national liberation was a transnational phenomenon.34 The role of the OAU, the place of Mozambique and Zambia in hosting guerilla armies, the detainees’ defense committees in Europe and Africa and the U.S., the role of England and China and Russia and the U.S.—all of these subvert the notion of a single, territorial sovereign nation-state that has an equally singular his-
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tory.35 The world of the Report, like that of Taffy Bryce’s and Chuck Hinde’s migrations from England to Zambia to Rhodesia, was international as well. Citizenship was situational rather than a matter of parentage, birthplace, or race, as the careers of Victoria Chitepo, Aaron Milner, and Leo Solomon Baron demonstrate. Zimbabweans in the struggle—and Zimbabweans in the struggle while in Zambian or Tanzanian government service—were not firmly rooted to a notion of territorial nationality. There were party officials whose mothers-in-law lived in Malawi or South Africa, there were Zimbabwean men married to Zambian women. In their “Analysis” of the Report the detainees insisted that Mukudzei Mudzi could not have been at the alleged meeting in which the dare and the high command voted to eliminate Chitepo because he was not in Lusaka that day, but in the countryside, marrying a Zambian wom-an.36 The nation-state envisioned in the rhetoric of ZANU—and of ZAPU and FROLIZI—was that forged in almost a century of migrant labor, and many black people and many white people did not live in the countries in which their parents had been born. How does this history, of movement in and out of the country and region, so crucial to all the confessions, circumscribe current talk about citizenship in Zimbabwe? The idea that national origin is the same as a national citizenship that contains one singular history is fairly recent. In Rhodesia, citizenship for whites was fairly easy to get and as easy to lose.37 Even before it was a sovereign nation, Zimbabwe tried to change this: at Lancaster House, ZANU(PF) had wanted whites who immigrated to Rhodesia during UDI to reapply for citizenship in the new, black-ruled country.38 White farmers with longer histories in the country were by all accounts acceptable to the new regime. Indeed, many in the guerilla struggle had grown up on these whites’ farms; such personal histories were part of their sense of belonging to the land. Among the famous anecdotes from Lancaster House was Tongogara’s warm greeting of Ian Smith. Tongogara had once worked on Smith’s mother’s farm when he was a youth, and he wanted to know how she was.39 When land invasions began twenty years later, however, citizenship did not guarantee rights to property the same way that participation in the liberation war now did. This was not simply an issue of race. A war veteran occupying a white-owned farm told a reporter that it was his by right of the guerilla struggle: “I fought so I could make my life better. Now I am back and I have nothing.” Whites had taken all the land, he said: “We are only taking some back.” The African foreman on the same farm claimed his entitlement to land through residence and use rights: “We have worked here. We will die here.”40
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As farm invasions began, the vulnerability of white Zimbabwean farmers was dwarfed by the vulnerability of African farm workers, men and women who were displaced when invaders set up small holdings. Although most were Zimbabwean-born, they were the children of migrants from Mozambique or Malawi and they neither possessed the paperwork of citizenship nor the same claim on the state’s resources as did people who were unquestionably Zimbabwean, or who claimed to be war veterans. As Blair Rutherford argues, farm workers have been slotted neatly into the new either/or paradigms of race and loyalty in Zimbabwe. African farm workers should naturally support the land claims of Zimbabweans because of racial or political identification, it was said, but they were defenseless against the pressure of their white employers. Thus, if farm workers opposed the invaders who were displacing them, the reasons were simple enough: their employers threatened to dismiss them and send them back to Mozambique or Malawi. Whatever their country of origin, farm workers should have known “that working conditions during colonialism were much worse” and that they should thank ZANU(PF) for any improvements in their lot.41 Again, the overlapping of veterans’ and citizens’ rights and the exclusionary language of race and citizenship simply did not fit in the region’s history. Indeed, this language fails to describe what one reads in the Report of the Chitepo Commission, in which veterans—even in one party—were not a unified group, citizenship hardly mattered at all, and race was no guarantee of loyalty, and in which the politics of inclusion had the support of many in ZANU. At the same time, the Report was written in terms that have since become commonplace in Zimbabwean politics. Whatever meaning the categories of Karanga, Manyika, and Zezeru had in 1975 and ’76 in exile, and whatever meaning they had within the country in those years, they were fully freighted in Zimbabwe in 2001. Many in ZANU believed that these categories were reified by the publication of the Report in 1976; the reprinting of the Report in 2001 threw them into high relief. If citizenship in Zimbabwe was now described in literally black and white terms, some of that literalism has been bolstered by years of talk about Shona ethnic categories. Those who theorized endlessly about who Mugabe would designate as his successor did so in terms of whether he would choose a Zezeru, a Karanga, or a Manyika.42 Still, why is there this new and intense attention on Chitepo? Why is his death so much more a matter of writing and reading than is the elusive ghost of Tongogara? The answer, I argue, has to do with the place of texts in the construction of a national history. Chitepo is important because any reexamination of his death forces a discussion of
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Rhodesia and Zimbabwe; any reiteration of how he died both presents and undermines the either/or narrative in which cause and culpability can have only one source. In his article on Heroes Acres, Richard Werbner writes of the trace of the violence of the liberation struggle, smoke from the barrel of the anti-colonial gun from which political power flowed.43 Renewed attention to Chitepo’s death, and renewed readings of the texts about who caused it and how, outline the trace: they make it stand out amid the fury of Zimbabwe today and imply that the smoke from the barrel of the gun can be seen on a trajectory to present-day politics. This, however, does not explain why there are so many Rhodesian confessions to Chitepo’s murder, and why Zimbabweans and Rhodesians return to them again and again. Are these also a trace, smoke from the imagined colonial gun? I think the Rhodesian confessions function as a sort of mirror image of the trace of the violence of the liberation movement. This is smoke that does not inscribe a future, but a past; it is the trace of violence that remakes Rhodesia, and its intelligence, its assassins, and its power, into more than it could take credit for at the time. It is this estimation of white rule, white power, and the reach of white intelligence that characterizes the Rhodesian confessions to Chitepo’s assassination, as the importance of the SAS in them suggests. Fifteen years later, and twenty years after independence, an overestimation of white power and white motivations characterizes much of the rhetoric of ZANU(PF) today. “The British,” said Robert Mugabe in 2000, “are guilty of vicious and iniquitous acts of economic sabotage.”44 The MDC is “a political party with its roots in the donor purse run by Rhodesians who tortured and killed Zimbabweans during our liberation struggle,” said Jonathan Moyo the same year.45 Where do these political genealogies come from? What is the origin of the straight line that connects the power of a now defunct Rhodesia to that of an opposition party that made a good showing in a troubled election? I suggest that many of these ideas come from the Rhodesian and Zimbabwean texts— and the social worlds from which they came—about 1970s politics. Many of these texts made fairly modest political claims, such as those of a Rhodesian policeman who admitted “we had a great deal of luck” in the Nhari rebellion or Flower’s passive voice asserting he was behind Chitepo’s murder. Even a cursory reading of Stiff/Bryce, or even Martin and Johnson, does not suggest British responsibility: these texts are instead about Rhodesian cleverness, and they offer proof—bank receipts, personal experience—of white Rhodesian secret agents, capitalizing on every nationalist misstep and exacerbating every problem in the strug-
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gle. If the Report of the Chitepo Commission is about Africans’ alliances fissuring and being remade, Stiff’s See You in November (1985 and 2002), Martin and Johnson’s The Chitepo Assassination, and, to a lesser extent, Flower’s Serving Secretly suggest that Africans did less than they were credited with in the 1970s. All these texts see the hidden hand of white secret agents directing the feuds and fractures of the liberation struggle. At the same time, however, these texts suggest that there was no disunity in the liberation movement that was not directed by whites: African unity was natural and unproblematic; there was a natural fit between racial and political identity. There is a tendency in Rhodesian memoirs to see African politics as unified; it was white factiousness— and bureaucratic vacillation—that lost the war. Ian Smith wrote that the “object lesson” of Rhodesia was just that: “When the crunch comes blacks will stand together, but with white people, dog starts eating dog.”46 The idea of a natural African unity that could only be undermined by secret white agents did not originate with Rhodesian confessions to the Chitepo assassination, of course, but these texts helped legitimate the idea that Africans would, as Smith put it, “stand together.” These texts developed a discourse in which African actions and reactions were not so complex and layered that a white secret agent could not reshape them for a few Rhodesian dollars or in a secret meeting or two. These are ideas that are much more powerful today than they were in 1975; they seem to have been given much of their strength and vitality by the various Rhodesian confessions to Chitepo’s assassination. African politicians loyal to Rhodesia, such as Chief Chirau, were thought to be buffoons, but no one called them mercenary or deceitful. The complicated relations with informers, for example, stated so clearly by the detainees’ response to the Report, were prescribed and simplified, in varying degrees, by the revelations of Stiff/Bryce, Martin and Johnson, and Flower. Thus, in the Rhodesian now-it-can-be-told memoirs, agents and double agents were said to be “running with the hounds and hunting with the hares,” and were everywhere.47 Years later, the nineteen Nigerian members of a European Union election monitoring team were not allowed into the country in June 2000, “because of the British link.” Following suit, the Herald called the Nigerians “disgraceful Africans willing to be used as tools by the British in return for a few pieces of silver.”48 The idea that no African would doubt the legitimate authority of ZANU(PF) unless paid to do so did not begin in the liberation movement and its several parties, of course. Whether it originated in the several Rhodesian
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confessions to the Chitepo assassination is hard to say, but certainly it was honed to a new precision by those texts. These assertions, of an uncritical African unity, of powerful whites eager to undermine African politics, are not born of the terrible history of racial oppression in Rhodesia, nor are they born of the desperate politics of Zimbabwe; these ideas may have a text-based history that begins in the tell-all accounts of the war written years after, most especially accounts of the Chitepo assassination. These texts, taken together or in various combinations, have constructed a national history in which Africans were the victims of white subterfuge, of a white power that can undermine the most complicated of African commitments. In these texts, constructed within a history in which causation was only attributed to Africans or Rhodesians, we see a diminution of African actions and deeds as a new history of the nation, a history that can only be questioned by a critical examination of those same texts.
NOTES Chapter One 1. Jonathan N. Moyo, Voting for Democracy: Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 1992), p. 37. 2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), pp. 46–58. 3. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, pp. 70–107; see also Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 3–12. 4. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 284–97. 5. This summary is from Robert Cary and Diana Mitchell, African Nationalist Leaders in Rhodesia: Who’s Who (Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, 1977), pp. 158–59; Maurice Nyagumbo, With the People: An Autobiography from the Zimbabwe Struggle (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), pp. 133–34, 239; David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), pp. 158–59; Isie Maisels, A Life at Law: The Memoirs of I. A. Maisels, QC (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1998), p. 226; Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 70, 220, 237. 6. Address to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, Dar es Salaam, 19–27 June 1974, in Zimbabwe Independence Movements: Selected Documents, ed. Christopher Nyangoni and Gideon Nyandoro (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 289. 7. Author’s field notes, 12 July 1995; Larry W. Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia: White Power in an African State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 16–17, 25–26; Peter L. Moorcraft, A Short Thousand Years: The End of Rhodesia’s Rebellion (Salisbury: Galaxie, 1979), pp. 8–12, 128–45; Martin Meredith, The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe (London: Pan, 1980), pp. 325–32, 375–83; David Caute, Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 361, 369–76. 8. Meredith, Another Country. 9. Peter Stiff, Cry Zimbabwe: Independence—Twenty Years On (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 2000), p. 487. On the inside cover Stiff’s books are divided into “fact” and “fiction.” His work (in both categories) includes The Rain Goddess (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1973), Taming the Land Mine (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1980), See You in November: Rhodesia’s No-Holds-Barred Intelligence War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), See You in November: The Story of an SAS Assassin (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 2002), A Pictorial History of the Selous Scouts (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1992), and Selous Scouts: Top Secret War, by Lt. Col. Ron Reid-Daly as told to Peter Stiff (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1982). 10. Terence Ranger, “Violence Variously Remembered: The Killing of Pieter Oberholzer in July 1964,” History in Africa 24 (1997), pp. 273–83.
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11. David William Cohen, “In a Nation of White Cars . . . One White Car, or ‘A White Car,’ Becomes a Truth,” in African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, ed. Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 264–80. 12. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Chitepo Assassination (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), pp. 99–103. 13. “Chitepo Murdered by ZANU PF: Tekere,” Financial Gazette, 28 August 1997, p. 1; “Alleged Assassin Chimurenga Hits Back at Tekere,” Financial Gazette, 4 September 1997, p. 2; “Smith Joins Chitepo Assassination Debate,” Financial Gazette, 11 September 1997, p. 1. 14. “Colleagues Killed My Husband—Chitepo,” Standard, 15–21 July 2001, pp. 1, 4; Kenneth Kaunda, conversation with author, Gainesville, 11 November 2002. 15. See Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles-within-the-Struggle (1957–1980), 2nd ed. (Harare: Rujeko, 1999), pp. 87–115. This was first published by Rujeko in Salisbury in 1979. In the second edition the text of the chapter “Who Killed Chitepo?” contains material from confessions published after 1980 inserted between the penultimate and last paragraphs. Otherwise the text of the chapter is the same in both editions, although the paragraphing is somewhat different. All references here are to the 1999 edition unless otherwise noted. 16. There is a vast literature here, capably summarized by Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Doubleday, 1993). Such theories are not limited to the U.S. See Richard Drake, “Why the Moro Trials Have Not Settled the Moro Murder Case: A Problem in Political and Intellectual History,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (2001), pp. 359–78; Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, trans. Ann Wright and Renée Fenby (London: Verso, 2001). 17. See, for example, Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999); David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Honorable Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, February 1990 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, forthcoming). 18. I draw both these points from South Asian history, most especially David Gilmartin, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 4 (1998), pp. 1068–95, and Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 51. 19. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and idem, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 168–90; Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 20. The term comes from the Zambian press: “Death Verdict Quashed,” Times of Zambia, 3 March 1977, p. 1. 21. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, esp. pp. 22–30. 22. Diana Jeater’s review of Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger’s Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War begins, “Once upon a time, it was all so easy. If you wanted to know the history of Zimbabwe’s Liberation War . . . you read David Martin and Phyllis Johnson.” Diana Jeater, “Histories of a War,” Journal of African History 38, no. 2 (1997), pp. 334–35.
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23. Henrik Ellert, The Rhodesian Front War: Counter-insurgency and Guerrilla War in Rhodesia, 1962–1980 (Gweru: Mambo, 1993), pp. 61–62; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 159. 24. Lord Carrington, quoted in Michael Charlton, The Last Colony in Africa: Diplomacy and the Independence of Rhodesia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 78. 25. “Thousands Pay Last Respects to Chitepo,” Herald, 12 August 1981, p. 1; author’s field notes, 8, 18, 23 July 2001. (The Herald began publication in 1892 as the Rhodesia Herald, and became the Herald in March 1979. For simplicity, I cite it as the Herald throughout.) 26. See, for example, “List of Abbreviations and Acronyms” in Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger, eds., Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 1995), vol. 1, pp. viii–x. 27. Carol B. Thompson, Challenge to Imperialism: The Frontline States and the Liberation of Zimbabwe (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), unpaginated preface. 28. Conquest, Kirov Murder, pp. xi–xiv.
Chapter Two 1. Liberation Support Movement, George Nyandoro, General Secretary, ZAPU (Richmond, B.C.: Liberation Support Movement Press, 1970), p. 7; Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 216–23; Joshua Nkomo, The Story of My Life (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 110–19; Larry W. Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia: White Power in an African State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 53–56; Maurice Nyagumbo, With the People: An Autobiography from the Zimbabwe Struggle (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), pp. 162–94; David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), p. 10. 2. Daniel R. Kempton, Soviet Strategy toward Southern Africa: The National Liberation Movement Connection (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 97–99. The speeches were made by James Chikerema, Jason Moyo, and George Nyandoro, and began on 26 November 1965. Zambia Broadcasts re UDI, National Archives of Zimbabwe (hereafter indicated by “NAZ/”) S3279/62/16. 3. “Reflections of a Political Prisoner,” typescript, n.d., Leo Solomon Baron Papers, NAZ/MS651/5; see also Baron’s interview with Ian Johnstone, Harare, 5, 16 August 1983, in NAZ/ORAL/239. 4. Dumiso Dabengwa, “ZIPRA in Zimbabwe’s War of National Liberation,” in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger, vol. 1 (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 1995), pp. 24–35; Special Branch, BSA Police, Security Report, 27 January 1972, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/ 009/Box 143, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum; author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. 5. Author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. 6. David B. Moore, “The Contradictory Construction of Hegemony in Zimbabwe: Politics, Ideology, and Class in the Formation of a New African State,” Ph.D. dissertation, York University, 1989, p. 227. 7. Report by Robert Mugabe to the Justice and Peace Foundation, Salisbury, 17 December 1974, CAT/CH, Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York (hereafter Borthwick Institute);
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Nyagumbo, With the People, pp. 218–20; Nkomo, Story, pp. 150–51; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 32–33, 147–49; Andre Astrow, Zimbabwe: A Revolution That Lost Its Way? (London: Zed, 1983), pp. 76–79. 8. Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles-within-the-Struggle (1957–1980), 2nd ed. (Harare: Rujeko, 1999 [1979]), pp. 59–86; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” p. 303; Herbert Chitepo, Lusaka, to Richard Gibson, London, n.d., but probably February 1971, Herbert Chitepo correspondence, 1971, NAZ/3165/MS 356. 9. Norma Kriger’s interviews suggest that unity eventually undermined the ANC’s position in rural Rhodesia. In the early 1970s, guerillas identified themselves simply as freedom fighters. After 1976, guerillas made it clear that they were with ZANU and not the United African National Council (UANC). Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Harare: Baobab, 1995), p. 158. 10. Report by Robert Mugabe to the Justice and Peace Executive, 17 December 1974, CAT/CH/3, Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice, Borthwick Institute; see also Special International Commission on the Assassination of Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Report (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1976), pp. 10–14; Nkomo, Story, pp. 155–58; Martin Meredith, The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe (London: Pan, 1980), pp. 150–60; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 147–57. 11. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 15–17. 12. Briefing by Asst. Commander Mike Edden O/C SB, Operation Hurricane, 3 November 1976, material from Michael Holman, correspondent for the South African newspaper The Financial Mail, RSF 1, Borthwick Institute. 13. African Freedom Fighters Speak for Themselves: ZANLA Cadre’s Experience, ZANLA Women’s Detachment (Tougaloo, Miss.: Freedom Information Service, 1975), p. 11, African Collection, 605/23/426, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 14. Charles Maviyane Davies, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 29 November 1986, NAZ/ORAL/acc. 325. He was referring to the FNG submachine gun. White Rhodesian soldiers recalled their Belgian-made FN rifles with awe and irony: “professional, lean as a cheetah . . . constructed for real men.” See Dan Wylie, Dead Leaves: Two Years in the Rhodesian War (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002), p. 10. 15. Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice, “Information Received from a Reliable Source on 16.12.74 Re ZANU and the New ANC,” CAT/CH/3, Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice, Borthwick Institute. Mugabe took ground-to-air missiles directly from the Russians, however. 16. The only weaponry that was exclusively Chinese was an optically sighted mortar and two free-flight rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons. “Communist Support for Patriotic Front,” Fact Paper 2/78, Rhodesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, African Collection, 605/63/1183, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; “Rhodesian Terrorists Armed by Communists: Many Weapons Same as Those Used by Vietcong to Kill Americans,” Rhodesian Information Office, Washington D.C., 1968, Zimbabwe Collection, 1551/3/44, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Paresh Pandya, Mao Tsetung and Chimurenga: An Investigation into ZANU’s Strategies (Braamfontein, South Africa: Skotaville, 1988), p. 204. 17. James C. Mulvenon, Soldiers of Fortune: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese MilitaryBusiness Complex, 1978–1998 (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), pp. 47–49, 118–19. A few people have suggested that Chinese support was “a bit of a fiction” and that ZANU occasionally received arms from the U.S. because factions within the CIA thought this was a way to oppose the Soviet-backed ZAPU. Anthony N. S. Eastwood, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 20 February 1987, NAZ/ORAL/260.
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18. China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Tanzania, and Romania all provided arms and training for ZANLA. This diversity of suppliers meant that ZANU, however much it admired the Chinese, was never dependent on them for arms or material support. See Kempton, Soviet Strategy, pp. 128–29. 19. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 159–60. 20. Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, pp. 104–105; author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. 21. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Chitepo Assassination (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), pp. 28–30. 22. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 166–67. 23. “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” typescript and mimeograph, 31 March 1975, in Enos Chikowore Papers, ZANU/1, Borthwick Institute. The typed version is eleven pages long, and the mimeographed one nine; because of the discrepancy I do not give page numbers in my references to it. 24. “Kaunda’s Role.” Two otherwise thorough discussions that do not cite this document are the afterword to Martin and Johnson’s Chitepo Assassination, pp. 60–84, and Sithole’s Struggles-within-the-Struggle, pp. 87–115. 25. “Mystery Document Hits at Kaunda,” Herald, 15 May 1975, p. 3. 26. Miscellaneous ZANU papers, NAZ/IDAF/MS 589/11. 27. Author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. The occasional reference in the document to Samir Amin’s Accumulation on a World Scale makes me support this view. 28. “Mystery Circular Attacks Zambia,” Zambia Daily Mail, 19 September 1975, p. 6. A month later, Sithole and his personal secretary were bundled into a car in downtown Salisbury and never seen again. Many people insisted that they were taken by Special Branch. See Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1987), p. 150; Henrik Ellert, The Rhodesian Front War: Counterinsurgency and Guerrilla War in Rhodesia, 1962–1980 (Gweru: Mambo, 1993), pp. 136–38. 29. For Rowland’s support of Nkomo, see Nkomo, Story, pp. 182–84, 241–42; for his Federation (or anti-Federation) politics, see Sir Roy Welensky to Federal High Commissioner, London, 20 January 1963, Roy Welensky Papers, 664/3, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University. 30. “Kaunda’s Role.” 31. Josiah Tungamirai, “Recruitment to ZANLA: Building Up the War Machine,” in Bhebe and Ranger, Soldiers, pp. 36–45. Rex Nhongo, Thomas Nhari, and James Bond are chimurenga names. Soldiers took such names to protect their real identities and to insure that their kinfolk at home would not be victimized. Nhari was Raphael Chinyanganya; Bond was Paul Muriwa. Many chimurenga names reflected cadres’ political awareness and demonstrated their contribution to the armed struggle—“James Bond,” for example, or “Teurai Ropa” (Spill Blood), the name taken by a twenty-year-old detachment commander who later married Rex Nhongo. Many people, including Nhongo and his wife, have resumed their “real” names (in their case, Solomon and Joyce Mujuru), but I use chimurenga names in this essay as much as possible so that actors appear both here and in the historiography under one name. For chimurenga names see Pandya, Mao Tse-tung and Chimurenga, pp. 81–84; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 160, 170. Peter Stiff’s war novel, The Rain Goddess (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1973), is centered around this particual school abduction. See A.J. Chennells, “Settler Myths and the Southern Rhodesian Novel.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zimbabwe, 1982, p. 452. 32. Janice McLaughlin, On the Frontline: Catholic Missions in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (Harare: Baobab, 1996), pp. 87–100; Ngwabi Bhebe, The ZAPU and ZANU Guer-
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rilla Warfare and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe (Gweru: Mambo, 1999), pp. 43–44. 33. Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi, For Better or Worse? Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle (Harare: Weaver, 2000), pp. 57–58. 34. Nhongo-Simbanegavi, For Better or Worse, p. 102; author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. Nhari’s education was misrepresented by a few journalists, who called him “a law graduate from Salisbury University.” See Meredith, Another Country, p. 160; David Smith and Colin Simpson, with Ian Davis, Mugabe (London: Sphere, 1981), p. 76. There was a University College of Rhodesia, but no Salisbury University. The two descriptions of the Nhari mutiny that appear in fiction make much of the guerillas’ animosity to welleducated young cadres in the camps; see Charles Samupindi, Pawns (Harare: Baobab, 1992) and Alexander Kanengoni, Echoing Silences (Harare: Baobab, 1997). 35. Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” pp. 265–66, 301–302; author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. 36. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 160–66. 37. Conversation with author, 16 July 2001. 38. The Report of the Chitepo Commission did not mention Tungamirai’s abduction, although he was later to claim that his Zambian jailors did not listen to his version of events, but only demanded that he write an account of what happened. They then tore it up, he said, saying, “This is not what we want.” See Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 180–81. 39. “Kaunda’s Role”; Meredith, Another Country, 161. 40. This summary is from “Kaunda’s Role”; Special International Commission, Report, pp. 14–23, esp. p. 21; Meredith, Another Country, pp. 161–66; Smith, Simpson, and Davis, Mugabe, pp. 76–78; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” pp. 284–98; Astrow, Lost Its Way, pp. 82–87; and Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 161–65, 181. Much of Martin and Johnson’s material came from their conversation with Tongogara at the hallowed site of Lancaster House in London in 1979, where the ceasefire agreement and new constitution were being hammered out. Much of Tongogara’s contempt for Sithole in his statement may have derived from contemporary politics, in which Rev. Sithole had set up a splinter ZANU, joined the transitional government, and participated in the constitutional conference in opposition to Mugabe’s ZANU. Several people in ZANU attributed Sithole’s disorientation and dismay to the attempts to oust him. Author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. 41. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 166; author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. This was a term ZANU was to use again, most famously in describing the operations of the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland. 42. “Kaunda’s Role”; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 166; Special International Commission, Report, pp. 21–23, 27; Smith, Simpson, and Davis, Mugabe, p. 79; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” p. 287. 43. David Martin, “Rhodesian Guerillas Executed in Zambia,” Observer, 28 April 1975, p. 7; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 166; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” p. 306n. The number 155 seems to have stuck in the imagination of many people who were in Lusaka at the time; author’s field notes, 20 June 1999. Which numbers stuck and which did not may have little to do with how many were killed, however. Rhodesians, for example, receiving fragments of information about the mutiny, doubled their estimate of those killed from forty-five to ninety with no discussion of why this was an appropriate figure. See Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Minutes, 10 February and 20 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/123/Box 145 and 2001/086/026(A)/Box 125, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Recent research, however, suggests that soldiers
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do not kill their foes or each other easily: they fire over the heads of their enemies, whatever their orders. Given the training of ZANLA guerillas, and the various mystifications around the place of guns therein, it seems likely that some of these numbers are exaggerations, especially since Rhodesians and ZANLA had good reason to inflate the extent of the mutiny’s repression. See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), pp. 71–77, and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 107–10, 249–61. 44. Among those who heard Nhari’s confession were Nhongo, Tungamirai, and Teurai Ropa. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 159, 166, 349n; idem, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 28–29. 45. General Loxton, Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee Meeting Minutes, 10 February 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/123/Box 145, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 46. CIO report, Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee Minutes, 27 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/026 (A)/Box 175, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum; Flower, Serving Secretly, pp. 146–47; Peter Stiff, See You in November: Rhodesia’s No-Holds-Barred Intelligence War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), pp. 124–25. As chapters four and five point out, there are two editions of this book, one published in 1985 and one in 2002; to distinguish them, references will be given as either See You (1985) or See You (2002). 47. Edden is only mentioned once in a recent history of the British South African Police. For his role in a fiberglass canoe journey from Kariba Dam to the Indian Ocean, see Peter Gibb and Hugh Phillips, The History of the British South African Police, 1889–1980 (North Ringwood, Australia: Something of Value, 2000), p. 304. 48. Author’s field notes, Durban, 1 August 2001. 49. The Price of Detente—Kaunda Prepares to Execute More ZANU Freedom Fighters for Smith (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976). The section “Reply” is reprinted in Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 120–27. 50. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 167; idem, Chitepo Assassination, p. 31; Price of Detente, pp. 15, 16; African Freedom Fighters Speak, p. 10; author’s field notes, 17 July 2001. The Selous Scouts claimed these questions were easy enough to answer; see Ron Reid-Daly, as told to Peter Stiff, Selous Scouts: Top Secret War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1982), p. 210. 51. After 1977, there was evidence of occasional executions of reluctant supporters of ZANLA in the Zimbabwean countryside, as well as of government informers and witches. For opposing views on this, see David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 160–68; and Kriger, Guerrilla War, pp. 152–57. 52. Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the “Dark Forests” of Matabeleland (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), pp. 173–75. 53. Kriger, Guerrilla War, pp. 153–66; Nhongo-Simbanegavi, For Better or Worse, pp. 100–103. 54. When Pan African Congress activists in Sharpeville, in 1960, advocated violence against police informers in the township, PAC headquarters in Johannesburg advised them not to eliminate them, but to use them as a channel for disinformation. As a result, the police did not think anything of importance was being planned by the PAC. See Philip Frankel, An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and Its Massacre (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2001), p. 64.
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55. O/C SB, Centenary, to P. M. Stanton, Operation Hurricane, Terrorist Camps and Routes within Mozambique, 9 May 1973, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/144/Box 1003, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 56. Joint Planning Staff, Brief on the effect of South African police inaction in Rhodesia on detente, Operations Co-ordinating Committee Meeting, Minutes, 28 February 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/123/Box 145, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 57. Frankel, Ordinary Atrocity, p. 125. 58. According to Rhodesian authorities, such executions damaged FROLIZI more than the fragile organization could bear. James Chikerema unseated Shelton Siwela as party chairman after he openly charged Siwela with executing three party members who were accused of being Rhodesian agents. Joint Planning Staff, record of discussion in Cabinet Rooms, Salisbury, 28 November 1973, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/047/Box 141, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 59. See the title of Sam Nujuma’s autobiography, Where Others Wavered: My Life in SWAPO and My Participation in the Liberation Struggle of Namibia (London: Panaf, 2001). 60. Peter L. Moorcraft, in A Short Thousand Years: The End of Rhodesia’s Rebellion (Salisbury: Galaxie, 1979), p. 168, called him a chameleon, and Martin and Johnson quote a Rhodesian intelligence officer who found Nkomo’s range of contacts more typical of a capitalist than of a socialist. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 287; author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. 61. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 4. 62. Quoted in Carol B. Thompson, Challenge to Imperialism: The Frontline States and the Liberation of Zimbabwe (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), p. 67. 63. Two high-ranking ZAPU officials worked for the U.S. Embassy in Salisbury until their arrests in 1964 and, according to ZAPU’s accountant, took CIA funds. Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” pp. 177–78, 192n; author’s field notes, 8 August 1995. 64. Many of these accusations can be found in Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 331–32n. 65. Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 110; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” p. 215. 66. Alexander, McGregor, and Ranger, Violence and Memory, pp. 172–79. 67. J. Z. Moyo, ZAPU external mission, press release, Lusaka, 19 August 1976, African Collection, 605/78/1452, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 68. Harvey Grenville Ward, interviewed in London by Ian Johnstone, 4 July and 17 October 1984, NAZ/ORAL/246; William Hostes Herault Nicolle, written response to questions, August 1988, NAZ/OH/308; Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Coordinating Committee, Minutes, 27 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/172(A)/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 69. Briefing by Asst. Commander Mike Edden O/C SB, Operation Hurricane, 3 November 1975, Rhodesian Security Forces material donated by Michael Holman, correspondent for the Financial Mail, RSF 1, Borthwick Institute. 70. Flower, Serving Secretly, pp. 146–47. 71. Stephen John Stedman, Peacemaking in Civil War: International Mediation in Zimbabwe, 1974–1980 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988), p. 55. 72. Flower’s report, Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Minutes, 27 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/ 172(A)/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
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73. Stiff, See You (1985), p. 124. 74. See, for example, Browning, Ordinary Men, and Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 75. Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 58–65; Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience, pp. 11–20. Zimbabwean guerillas and Rhodesian soldiers all reported instances where they refused to kill women, or children, or women with children, always with the consent of their immediate superiors. See Andrew Nyathi with John Hoffman, Tomorrow Is Built Today: Experiences of War, Colonialism, and the Struggle for Collective Co-operatives in Zimbabwe (Harare: Anvil, 1990), pp. 33–34; Thomas Albert Holloway, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 24 October 1986, NZA/ORAL/255. For the Battle of Sinoia, see Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 12; Anthony N. H. Eastwood, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 20 February 1986, NAZ/ORAL/260. 76. Ellert, The Rhodesian Front War, pp. 61–62; for secret meetings, see Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 29. 77. Oral materials, even those from the Rhodesian side, have situated the conduct of war in soldiers’ everyday experiences. As the war escalated and contacts between ZANLA and Rhodesian forces increased, many police reservists “refused to just kill people. . . . This was never . . . made straight to the big shots, but once we were out in the bush, planning an ambush, then the guys would say . . . ‘Look, don’t expect me to kill a woman with a child on her back.’” Thomas Albert Holloway, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 24 October 1986, NAZ/ORAL/255. 78. Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 61–88; idem, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 168–90. 79. Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies (Short Hills, N.J.: Enslow, 1979), pp. 106–21. 80. David Moore provides an example: “The point must be reiterated that the Rhodesian security forces did not start the fires—but fanned them.” “Contradictory Construction,” p. 305. 81. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 163. 82. Author’s field notes, 16 June 1999, 17, 24 July 2001. 83. “Kaunda’s Role”; Special International Commission, Report, pp. 23–27; Smith, Simpson, and Davis, Mugabe, p. 77; Astrow, Lost Its Way, pp. 82–84; author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. One member of the dare claimed he did not know he was sentenced to death in absentia until he read the Report. Washington Malianga, letter to the editor, Zambia Daily Mail, 20 April 1976, p. 8. Chapter Three 1. Leo Solomon Baron, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 5, 16 August 1983, NAZ/ORAL/239; “‘Many Zimbabwe Fighters Have Died in Internal Feuds,’” Times of Zambia, 16 April 1975, p. 1; David Martin, “Rhodesian Guerillas Executed in Zambia,” Observer, 28 April 1975, p. 7; David Smith and Colin Simpson, with Ian Davis, Mugabe (London: Sphere, 1981), p. 77; author’s field notes, 16, 24 July 2001. 2. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), pp. 177–78. 3. Simon Ber Zukas, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Harare, 24 December 1986, NAZ/ORAL/252.
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4. “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” typescript and mimeograph, 31 March 1975, in Enos Chikowore Papers, ZANU/1, Borthwick Institute; Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles-within-the-Struggle (1957–1980), 2nd ed. (Harare: Rujeko, 1999 [1979]), pp. 70–71. 5. Special International Commission on the Assassination of Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Report (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1976), p. 32; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 176–77. 6. Flower’s report to Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Minutes, 27 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/ 172(A)/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 7. The Price of Detente—Kaunda Prepares to Execute More ZANU Freedom Fighters for Smith (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976), p. 8. 8. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 32–34; Martin Meredith, The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe (London: Pan, 1980), pp. 177–78; author’s field notes, 8, 17, 24 July 2001. 9. “Kaunda’s Role.” 10. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 34–35. 11. Price of Detente, pp. 9, 12. 12. One broadcaster of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation claimed that in about 1973 he had seen “the hit list of ZANU and ZAPU here. And Ian Douglas Smith and P K van der Byl were number 1 and number 2. And they were going to put them on trial in Cecil Square and hang them as traitors to the people of Zimbabwe, oppressors.” He made this known to various politicians, which caused them to begin to negotiate with the guerillas. Harvey Grenville Ward, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, London, 4 July 1984, NAZ/ORAL/246. ZANU did publish a death list in November 1978, mainly for the edification of those who would serve in the government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. See Miles Hudson, Triumph or Tragedy? Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981), pp. 226–33 for the complete list; Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1987), p. 252. Many Kenyans attributed the murder of Robert Ouko to his possession of a list of “the fifty most corrupt Kenyans.” Author’s field notes, Nairobi, 29 July 1990. 13. Conversation with author, 16 July 2001. 14. Special International Commission, Report, p. 31, quoting Sanyanga, Mutambanengwe, and Richard Hove; Meredith, Another Country, p. 177. 15. I heard this easily half a dozen times in Harare in 1999 and 2001. Author’s field notes, 12, 20 June 1999; 8, 11, 17, 24 July 2001. 16. Either Chitepo said this to a great number of people or it was widely repeated after his death. See “Kaunda’s Role”; Special International Commission, Report, pp. 29, 32; Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, p. 74. 17. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Chitepo Assassination (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), p. 45; “Kaunda’s Role”; Price of Detente, p. 13; author’s field notes, 11 July 2001. 18. “Chitepo Is ‘Not Held in Zambia,’” Herald, 14 March 1975, p. 1; author’s field notes, 24 July 2001; Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 35. 19. Bishop Abel Tendekai Muzorewa, Rise Up and Walk: An Autobiography (Johannesburg: Jonathan Bell, 1978), pp. 150–51; Special International Commission, Report, p. 36; Price of Detente, p. 9. 20. Special International Commission, Report, p. 40; Price of Detente, pp. 12–13; author’s field notes, 8, 24 July 2001.
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21. Terence Ranger, “Missionaries, Migrants, and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe,” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 118–50. 22. ZANU hierarchy as of March/April 1977 with “tribal affiliation,” Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, ZANLA, 2001/086/I44 Box 1003, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. One of the most interesting things about this list is the number of people whose “tribal affiliation” is given as “unknown.” 23. This is a late colonial and postcolonial phenomenon. See Eric Worby, “Maps, Names, and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 3 (1994), pp. 371–92, and idem, “Tyranny, Parody, and Ethnic Polarity: Ritual Engagement with the State in Northwestern Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 3 (1998), pp. 561–78. 24. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 31, 34; “Court Told of Tribal Conflicts in ZANU,” Zambia Daily Mail, 7 September 1976, p. 7. 25. Author’s field notes, 8, 21, 24 July 2001. 26. Meredith, Another Country, pp. 179–80. 27. President Kaunda’s broadcast message to Zambia, 31 March 1975, in Zimbabwe Independence Movements: Selected Documents, ed. Christopher Nyangoni and Gideon Nyandoro (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), pp. 305–306; “KK Orders Inquiry into Chitepo Killing,” Times of Zambia, 1 April 1975, p. 1. 28. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 140–41. See Priscilla B. Hayner, “Fifteen Truth Commissions—1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study,” Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1994), pp. 597–655; David Dyzenhaus, Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Apartheid Legal Order (Oxford: Hart, 1998), pp. 1–10. 29. Special International Commission, Report, pp. xiv–xv; author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. 30. “Kaunda’s Role”; Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 148. 31. “Kaunda’s Role”; “ZANU Men Discuss Arrests,” Zambia Daily Mail, 2 April 1975, p. 2. Much of this was repeated five weeks later in a press release from T. A. Mawere, the ZANU representative to the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. See “Kaunda’s Coverup,” New York, 5 May 1975, ZANU/a, Borthwick Institute. 32. “ZANU Men Arrested,” Times of Zambia, 29 March 1975, p. 1; David Martin, “Rhodesian Guerillas Executed in Zambia,” Observer, 28 April 1975, p. 7, reported that a Zambian Air Force helicopter on a reconnaissance flight was shot down over the Chifombo camp by guerillas in early March and that this was the last straw for Kaunda. Cadres denied this but agreed that Kaunda wanted to weaken ZANU. Author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. 33. Hugh Macmillan and Frank Shapiro, Zion in Africa: The Jews of Zambia (London: I. B. Tauris in association with the Council for Zambia Jewry, 1999), pp. 246– 48. 34. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 174, 180; Special International Commission, Report, p. 43; Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Minutes, 16 April 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/ 172/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum; author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. A few years later FRELIMO officials told Carol Thompson that they would not have sent Tongogara back had they known how unfair the hearings would be. Carol B.
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Thompson, Challenge to Imperialism: The Frontline States and the Liberation of Zimbabwe (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), p. 48. 35. Stiff, See You (1985), p. 139. 36. Price of Detente, p. 10. 37. Price of Detente, p. 9. 38. “Chitepo Murder Accused Freed: Police ‘Boob’ Kills Prosecution Chief’s Case,” Times of Zambia, 21 October 1976, p. 1; “Ex-ZANU Men Acquitted of Chitepo Murder,” Zambia Daily Mail, 21 October 1976, p. 1. 39. “Kaunda’s Role.” 40. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 35–39, 39–40, 47–51; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 188. 41. Price of Detente, p. 9; Special International Commission, Report, p. 40. 42. “Chitepo Bodyguard Held,” Times of Zambia, 5 June 1975, p. 1. 43. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 37–38, “50 ZANU Men Killed in Internal Fighting,” Zambia Daily Mail, 9 May 1975, p. 1; “‘Chitepo Murder Accused Statements Were Voluntary,’” Zambia Daily Mail, 8 September 1976, pp. 1, 10. 44. The Trial and Detention of Zimbabwe Nationalists in Zambia (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976), p. 3; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 181. 45. Price of Detente, pp. 8, 9. 46. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 147–65, 200–201, 211–17. 47. “Lawyers Shame KK’s Ridiculers,” Times of Zambia, 10 June 1976, p. 3; “Lawyer Who Posed as Zambian in Court,” Zambia Daily Mail, 11 August 1976, p. 4; Leo Solomon Baron, NAZ/ORAL/239; Judith Todd, interviewed by Ian Johnstone, Bulawayo, 7 March 1988, NAZ/ORAL/unprocessed. 48. Price of Detente, p. 11; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 186; David B. Moore, “The Contradictory Construction of Hegemony in Zimbabwe: Politics, Ideology, and Class in the Formation of a New African State” (Ph.D. dissertation, York University, 1989), p. 306. 49. Special International Commission, Report, pp. 10–13, 50–51. 50. Price of Detente, p. 11. 51. Author’s field notes, 16, 24 July 2001. 52. “Zambia: Commission Findings Will Shock Africa,” Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 25 May 1975, p. 3. 53. “Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole: On the Assassination of Herbert Chitepo and ZANU, 10 May 1976,” in Zimbabwe Independence Movements, ed. Nyangoni and Nyandoro, pp. 308–14. 54. Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” pp. 314–39; author’s field notes, 16, 22, 24 July 2001. 55. Liberation Support Center, Zimbabwe People’s Army: The First Published Statement by ZIPA, the New Zimbabwe Liberation Force (Richmond, B.C.: Liberation Support Movement Press, 1976), p. 8. 56. “Kaunda’s Role.” 57. Repeated in “Court Told of Tribal Conflicts in ZANU,” Zambia Daily Mail, 7 September 1976, p. 7; author’s field notes, 17, 24 July 2001. 58. “Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole: On the Assassination of Herbert Chitepo and ZANU, 10 May 1976,” in Zimbabwe Independence Movements, ed. Nyangoni and Nyandoro, pp. 308–14. ZANU’s response to Sithole’s letter, written by another exile, a pro-
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fessor in the U.S., Eddson Zvogbo, was curt: if the Reverend could not see that Chitepo was killed for any reason other than “the promotion of capitalism,” he needed to read Mao and Lenin. Zimbabwe News 3 (1976), p. 6, quoted in Sithole, Struggles-within-theStruggle, p. 105. 59. Letter to President Nyerere, 1 June 1978, NAZ/IDAF/MS 589/11. 60. Martin and Johnson call the plotters “the unity group,” for their purported wish to join ZAPU, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 275, but Peter L. Moorcraft, A Short Thousand Years: The End of Rhodesia’s Rebellion (Salisbury: Galaxie, 1979), pp. 166–67, uses the regional term. 61. Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, pp. 8–12, 87–115.
Chapter Four 1. Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1987), pp. 148–49; Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, 5 May 1976, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/241/ Box 159, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 2. The Price of Detente—Kaunda Prepares to Execute More ZANU Freedom Fighters for Smith (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976), p. 5. 3. Lionel Cliffe, “Some Questions about the Chitepo Report and the Zimbabwe Movement,” Review of African Political Economy 3, no. 6 (1976), pp. 79–80; David B. Moore, “The Contradictory Construction of Hegemony in Zimbabwe: Politics, Ideology, and Class in the Formation of a New African State” (Ph.D. dissertation, York University, 1989), p. 308n. 4. “Chitepo Dies in Car Blast,” Times of Zambia, 19 March 1975, p. 1. 5. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), p. 190; idem, The Chitepo Assassination (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), p. 100. 6. Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 7. Peter Stiff, See You in November: Rhodesia’s No-Holds-Barred Intelligence War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), pp. 15–16. Some Rhodesians call the day of Mugabe’s election “Black Tuesday” and the next day, when the incinerations began, “Ash Wednesday.” Author’s field notes, Durban, 1 August 2001. How much was actually destroyed is not clear: a vast amount of paper was taken to South Africa in the early months of 1980, before the election, and is now deposited in the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. 8. Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 125–27. 9. Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 129, 133–35. 10. Stiff, See You (1985), p. 140. 11. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 102. 12. Author’s field notes, 18 June 1999, 22 July 2001. 13. “Chitepo Killer Named,” Herald, 19 March 1985, p. 1; “‘Hard Man’ Was Chitepo’s Killer,” Herald, 25 March 1985, p. 5, and on 26, 27, and 28 March 1985. 14. Author’s field notes, 8, 16, 22 Ju1y 2001. 15. “The Scrutator,” “Herbert Chitepo—A Look at the Newly Published Book,” Herald, 23 March 1985, p. 6. Another point of objection by the Scrutator was the CIO’s claim that it had assassinated J. Z. Moyo, a murder that the South African Bureau of State Security claimed it had committed in retaliation for the deaths of South African
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soldiers at the hands of ZIPRA; see chapter five. Many people claim “The Scrutator” is Ibbo Mandaza. Author’s field notes, passim. 16. Henry Muradzikwa, Sunday Mail (Harare), 24 March 1985, quoted in Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles-within-the Struggle (1957–1980), 2nd ed. (Harare: Rujeko, 1999 [1979]), pp. 112–13. 17. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, from the interview with the proxyconfessor, p. 109. 18. Author’s field notes, 1 August 2001, for pressel switch; Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 55–56, 59, 109–10. 19. “Blast Kills Chitepo,” Zambia Daily Mail, 19 March 1975, p. 1; “ZANU Men Arrested,” Times of Zambia, 29 March 1975, p. 1. 20. Special International Commission on the Assassination of Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Report (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1976), p. 39; Stiff, See You (1985), p. 136. 21. Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 86–90. 22. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 46–50; for Stirling and surveillance in Britain and Southern Rhodesia, see also Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 56, 67, 73–74, and Peter MacKay, “We Have Tomorrow,” unpublished ms., pp. 61, 64–65. 23. David Stirling, London, to Margery Perham, Oxford, 14 September 1953, Margery Perham Papers, 713/1, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University; Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 196–97. 24. Peter MacKay, “We Have Tomorrow,” unpublished ms., pp. 64–65; Col. David Wolfe-Murray, CAS, London, to all members, 20 July 1960, Capricorn African Society Papers, CAS/26, Borthwick Institute. Nyerere’s name appears on several lists of supporters appended to Stirling’s pamphlets from 1953 to 1956, while Takawira remained in CAS longer than many of his African colleagues. Capricorn African Society Papers, CAS(SR)/307A and CAS(SR)/307B, Borthwick Institute. 25. Stanlake Samkange read his speech. Hardwicke Holderness, Lost Chance: Southern Rhodesia, 1945–58 (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), pp. 169–70; Ian Hancock, White Liberals, Radicals, and Moderates in Rhodesia, 1953–1980 (Beckenhem: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 41; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” p. 125. A few other Capricorns did not show up to deliver their keynote addresses at the conference, including Laurens van der Post, a frequent fund-raiser with Stirling; see J. D. F. Jones, Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post (London: John Murray, 2001), pp. 254–55. Michael West has suggested that the Capricorns’ conferences were successful because they afforded the Africans the opportunity to make business contacts with liberal whites. See West, African Middle Class, p. 198. 26. Speech of H. W. Chitepo, Salima, June 1956, Salima, RH Mss Afr 970, Capricorn Convention, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University. 27. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 45–47; West, African Middle Class, pp. 195–97; B. M. de Queben, Federal Investigation and Special Branch, to private secretary of the minister of transport, Salisbury, 1 August 1955, MSS Welensky 518/8, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University; Hancock, White Liberals, pp. 30–33, 40–49; Holderness, Lost Chance, pp. 170–72. For Stirling’s success in Northern Rhodesia, see Doris Lessing, Going Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1996 [1957]), pp. 98–99, and for his failure, see Mwelwa C. Musambachime, “The Impact of Rumor: The Case of Banyama (Vampire-Men) in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–1964,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 2 (1988), pp. 201–15.
NOTES TO PAGES 69–78
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28. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 47; Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” p. 138. 29. Dulverton Trust and Capricorn African Society, notes by Harry Crookenden, 18 November 1957, CAS (SR) 307/A, Borthwick Institute; Jones, Storyteller, p. 197; Hancock, White Liberals, pp. 42–44; author’s field notes, 8 July 2001. 30. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 49. 31. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000). 32. Uday Singh Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 59–85, and idem, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. chapters 1 and 2. 33. Capricorn Convention, Salima, 16–18 June 1956, CAS(SR) 303, Borthwick Institute. Hardwicke Holderness put it somewhat more succinctly: among the things that made Salima memorable was “white Rhodesians hobnobbing with black ex Mau Mau Kenyans under the stars.” Lost Chance, p. 171. 34. Superintendent Isermonger, Special Branch, British South African Police HQ, Salisbury, Report on Terrorist Tactics, 28 June 1977, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/010/Box 869, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 35. Peter Stiff, See You in November: The Story of an SAS Assassin (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 2002). 36. Stiff, See You (2002), p. 116. 37. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), pp. 95–97. 38. Stiff, See You (1985), p. 143; idem, See You (2002), p. 124. 39. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 190; Andre Astrow, Zimbabwe: A Revolution That Lost Its Way? (London: Zed, 1983), p. 84; Stiff, See You (1985), p. 141. 40. “Freedom Fighter to Hang for Murder,” Times of Zambia, 15 April 1976, p. 1; “Death Verdict Quashed,” Times of Zambia, 3 March 1977, p. 1; author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. 41. Price of Detente, p. 10. 42. “Court Told of Tribal Conflicts in ZANU,” Zambia Daily Mail, 7 September 1976, p. 7. 43. Washington Malianga, letter to the editor, Zambia Daily Mail, 20 April 1976, p. 8; see also Price of Detente, p. 12. 44. Moore, “Contradictory Construction,” pp. 348–50; see also Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 244. 45. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 257, 328.
Chapter Five 1. The Price of Detente—Kaunda Prepares to Execute More ZANU Freedom Fighters for Smith (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976), p. 7; Peter Stiff, See You in November: Rhodesia’s No-Holds-Barred Intelligence War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), p. 138; David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), pp. 178–79; “Smith’s Heart of Stone,” Times of Zambia, 23 March 1976, p. 1; author’s field notes, 23, 24 July, 6 October 2001.
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2. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 178; idem, The Chitepo Assassination (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), p. 64; author’s field notes, 17 July 2001. Kaunda still maintains that these rapid departures implicated the high command. Conversation with author, Gainesville, 12 November 2002. 3. “Colleagues Killed My Husband—Chitepo,” Standard, 15–21 July 2001, pp. 1, 4; author’s field notes, 16, 17 July 2001. 4. “ZANU Men Arrested,” Times of Zambia, 29 March 1975, p. 1. 5. David Martin, “Rhodesian Guerillas Executed in Zambia,” Observer, 28 April 1975, p. 7; “Bush Massacre,” Times of Zambia, 6 May 1975, p. 2; Martin Ennals, secretarygeneral of Amnesty International, letter to editor, Zambia Daily Mail, 12 June 1975, p. 8. 6. “50 ZANU Men Killed in Internal Fighting,” Zambia Daily Mail, 9 May 1975, p. 1. 7. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 174. 8. Martin Meredith, The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe (London: Pan, 1980), pp. 179–80; Joshua Nkomo, The Story of My Life (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 159. 9. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 179; idem, Chitepo Assassination, p. 61. 10. “Don’t Blame Killings on One Tribe—Chikerema,” Times of Zambia, 13 May 1975, p. 4. 11. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 38, 40; Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1987), p. 147. 12. Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles-within-the-Struggle (1957–1980), 2nd ed. (Harare: Rujeko, 1999 [1979]), pp. 113–14. 13. Leo Solomon Baron, NAZ/ORAL/239. 14. Flower, Serving Secretly, pp. 148–49. For Tiny Rowland’s relations with Nkomo, see Nkomo, Story, pp. 182–84, 241–42. 15. Flower, Serving Secretly, pp. 147–50. Other CIO operatives exonerated Tongogara a few years later; see Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 99. A few people close to the Chitepo family claimed that this part of Flower’s memoirs, which were published posthumously, was altered after his death. Author’s field notes, 5 October 2001. When I asked Kaunda if Flower had indeed proclaimed Tongogara’s innocence he would only say that Flower “was not a man whose word I would trust.” Conversation with author, Gainesville, 12 November 2002. 16. Commander’s Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Minutes, 20 March, 27 March, and 9 April 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/172(A)/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 17. Commander’s Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Committee, Minutes, 5 May 1976, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/241/Box 159, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 18. Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 140–42; see also Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 180–81. Tungamirai does not appear in the list of witnesses before the Chitepo Commission, but several key witnesses, especially Kenneth Kaunda, were omitted from it. Special International Commission on the Assassination of Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Report (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1976), p. 58. 19. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 62. 20. Rhodesia Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fact Paper 2/77, “Rivalry and Factionalism among Rhodesian Nationalists,” and idem, Fact Paper 8/78, “Southern Africa—Reality and the Viewpoint of Andrew Young,” both in Sterling Memorial Library, African Collection, Group 605/63/1183 and Group 605/78/1453, Yale University.
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21. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 256–65. 22. David Dyzenhaus, Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Apartheid Legal Order (Oxford: Hart, 1998), pp. 4–10; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 20–27; Luise White, “Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History,” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (2000), pp. 11–22. 23. Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 147. 24. See for example, Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 128, 269; D. Fairall to Army HQ, Observations and Recommendations, 26 October 1977, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/088/Box 1391, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. 25. Lt. Col. Ron Reid-Daly, as told to Peter Stiff, Selous Scouts: Top Secret War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1982), p. 109. 26. Lt. Col. Ron Reid-Daly, Pamwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts (Weltervreden Park, South Africa: Covos-Day, 1999), p. 173. 27. Stiff, See You (1985), p. 148. Several people who had been in Lusaka in the 1970s guffawed when I read them this passage. Author’s field notes, 12, 25 June 1999. 28. The Scrutator, “Herbert Chitepo—A Look at the Newly Published Book,” Herald, 23 March 1985, p. 6. 29. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, pp. 86, 91. 30. Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 179. 31. Sister Janice McLaughlin, interviewed by Ian Johnstone and Sita RanchodNilsson, Harare, 23 May 1989, NAZ/ORAL/244. Many people who knew Tongogara in Lusaka said he greatly admired Chitepo. Author’s field notes, 24 July 2001. 32. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 99. 33. Author’s field notes, 16, 24 July 2001. 34. Author’s field notes, 16 July 2001. 35. Leo Solomon Baron, NAZ/ORAL/239. 36. Judith Todd, NAZ/ORAL/unprocessed; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 351–52. 37. Nkomo regarded Nyerere as having dismantled unity within the liberation struggle to the point that, when he allowed ZIPRA cadres to train in Tanzania, they were indoctrinated against Nkomo’s bourgeois tendencies. See Nkomo, Story, pp. 158–62. 38. Leo Solomon Baron, NAZ/ORAL/239. 39. “Chitepo Murder Accused Freed: Police ‘Boob’ Kills Prosecution Chief’s Case,” Times of Zambia, 21 October 1976, p. 1; “Ex-ZANU Men Acquitted of Chitepo Murder,” Zambia Daily Mail, 21 October 1976. 40. Leo Solomon Baron, NAZ/ORAL/239. 41. “ZANU Detainees Released,” Zambia Daily Mail, 18 October 1976, p. 2. 42. “Ex-ZANU Men Acquitted of Chitepo Murder,” Zambia Daily Mail, 21 October 1976. 43. Leo Solomon Baron, NAZ/ORAL/239. 44. Nkomo, Story, p. 160; author’s field notes, 18 July 2001; Sithole, Struggles-withinthe-Struggle, p. 184. 45. Andrew Nyathi with John Hoffman, Tomorrow Is Built Today: Experience of War, Colonialism, and the Struggle for Collective Co-operatives in Zimbabwe (Harare: Anvil, 1990), p. 38; author’s field notes, 23, 24 July 2001. 46. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 99. 47. Pat Scully, Exit Rhodesia (Ladysmith, South Africa: Wescott, 1984), p. 171; Nkomo, Story, pp. 201–202; Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 338–39.
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48. Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 338–39. 49. Henrik Ellert, The Rhodesian Front War: Counter-insurgency and Guerrilla War in Rhodesia, 1962–1980 (Gweru: Mambo, 1993), p. 148. 50. Flower, Serving Secretly, p. 252n. 51. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 319. 52. Author’s field notes, 1, 23 July 2001; Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, pp. 184–85. 53. Author’s field notes, 1, 19, 23 July 2001. 54. Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, p. 184. 55. Norma J. Kriger, “The Politics of Creating National Heroes: The Search for Political Legitimacy and National Identity,” in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 139–62 (the quotation is on p. 145 and is from the brochure for Heroes Acres); Richard Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory, and Reinscription in Zimbabwe,” in Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. Richard Werbner (London: Zed, 1998), pp. 71–104. Most of the war dead were never brought back. 56. “Thousands Pay Last Respects to Chitepo,” Herald, 12 August 1981, p. 1. 57. Author’s field notes, 8, 21, 23 July 2001. Chapter Six 1. R. W. Johnson, “Paranoid President Mugabe on Antidepressants—Haunted by Ghost,” Sunday Times (London), 12 August 2001, p. 18; “Tongogara’s Ghost,” Financial Gazette, 23 August 2001, p. 3. The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Authority built a recording studio in the home of the young musician who released the song, whose lyrics implored people not to fight over the crown, because it was sacred. See “Protest Songs Challenge Corrupt Government,” Daily News, 13 December 2001, p. 5. 2. Chakanaka Chakarehwa, “Tired of Sickening Lies,” letter to the editor, Daily News, 4 September 2001, p. 6. 3. Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism, and the Search for Social Justice (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002), pp. 68–73. 4. Norma J. Kriger, “Transitional Justice as Socioeconomic Rights,” Peace Review 12, no. 1 (2000), pp. 59–65; idem, Guerrilla Veterans in Post-war Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics, 1980–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5. Bond and Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge, p. 27; Martin Meredith, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), p. 133. 6. Meredith, Our Votes, pp. 136–38; Kriger, “Transitional Justice,” p. 63. 7. Meredith, Our Votes, p. 138; David Blair, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 39–40. 8. Meredith, Our Votes, pp. 138, 167–70. Farm invasions were not new in independent Zimbabwe. In 1981 squatters occupied white-owned farms in central Zimbabwe. The squatters were ordered to leave, but with such little compulsion that their occupations dragged on for over a year: “the outraged landowners have the law on their side but the squatters have the party.” See David Caute, “The Politics of Rough Justice,” The New Statesman, 16 April 1982, pp. 12–13, quoted in Terence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
NOTES TO PAGES 95–99
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1985), pp. 306–307. Ranger suggests that emerging African landowners were those most interested in ending land invasions, see Peasant Consciousness, pp. 324–26. 9. Blair, Degrees in Violence, pp. 74–75. Hunzvi sometimes claimed to have been in ZAPU’s high command, but senior ZAPU officials denied this, saying he briefly worked in their Lusaka office before going to Eastern Europe; see Meredith, Our Votes, p. 134. 10. Blair, Degrees in Violence, pp. 39–41, 73–74. 11. Bond and Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge, p. 77. 12. Blair, Degrees in Violence, pp. 4, 53, 132; Martin Meredith, The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe (London: Pan, 1980), pp. 380–81; idem, Our Votes, pp. 118–20. 13. Joshua Nkomo, The Story of My Life (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 195–96. 14. Meredith, Another Country, pp. 378–80; Jeffrey Davidow, A Peace in Southern Africa: The Lancaster House Conference on Rhodesia, 1979 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984), p. 63; Stephen John Stedman, Peacemaking in Civil War: International Mediation in Zimbabwe, 1974–1980 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988), p. 182, quoting Davidow. 15. M. Tamarkin, The Making of Zimbabwe: Decolonization in Regional and International Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1990), pp. 264–65, quoting a summary of radio broadcasts monitored in Salisbury; see also David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (New York: Monthly Review, 1981), pp. 318–19. 16. Michael Charlton, The Last Colony in Africa: Diplomacy and the Independence of Rhodesia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 79–80; Meredith, Our Votes, pp. 119–20. 17. Bond and Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge, p. 77. 18. Author’s field notes, 21, 23, 24 July 2001; R. W. Johnson, “Paranoid President Mugabe on Anti-depressants—Haunted by Ghost,” Sunday Times, 12 August 2001, p. 18. 19. See for example the editor’s preface to Tekere’s account of who killed Chitepo: “One of the quickest ways into Heroes Acres is to be assassinated by Mugabe.” “Chitepo Murdered by ZANU: Tekere,” Financial Gazette, 28 August 1997, p. 1. For more subtle accusations, see R. W. Johnson’s interview of Dzinashe Machingura [Wilfred Mhanda], “How Mugabe Came to Power,” London Review of Books 23, no. 4 (22 February 2001), p. 6. 20. Blair, Degrees in Violence, pp. 105–106. 21. Bond and Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge, p. 67. 22. Robert Mugabe, 25 October 2000, quoted in Blair, Degrees in Violence, p. 186; Mugabe, April 1999, quoted in Meredith, Our Votes, p. 175; Mugabe, 25 October 2000, quoted in Blair, Degrees in Violence, p. 198; Mugabe, April 2001, quoted in Meredith, Our Votes, p. 210. 23. Jonathan Moyo in ZBC interview, February 2000, quoted in Blair, Degrees in Violence, p. 61. 24. Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 22–26. 25. “Chitepo Murdered by ZANU(PF): Tekere,” Financial Gazette, 28 August 1997, p. 1. 26. “Alleged Assassin Chimurenga Hits Back at Tekere,” Financial Gazette, 4 September 1997, p. 2. 27. “Smith Joins Chitepo Assassination Debate,” Financial Gazette, 11 September 1997, p. 1.
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28. Jonathan Moyo, 19 June 2000, quoted in Peter Stiff, Cry Zimbabwe: Independence—Twenty Years On (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 2000), p. 443, and Mugabe, July 2000, quoted in Meredith, Our Votes, p. 192. 29. Simon Muzenda, quoted in Stiff, Cry Zimbabwe, p. 443, and Bond and Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge, p. 82. 30. Quoted in Meredith, Our Votes, p. 218; see also Blair, Degrees in Violence, pp. 225–26. 31. “Chitepo Killers Named,” Standard, 30 September 2001, p. 1. 32. Richard Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory, and Reinscription in Zimbabwe,” in Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. Richard Werbner (London: Zed, 1998), p. 77. 33. Kriger, “Transitional Justice,” pp. 59–65. It could also be applied to the guerillas’ teenage auxiliaries, who received no compensation for their help. 34. This point is well documented; see John Day, International Nationalism: The Extra-territorial Relations of Southern Rhodesian African Nationalists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); Carol B. Thompson, Challenge to Imperialism: The Frontline States and the Liberation of Zimbabwe (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985). 35. This point is taken from Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 229–36. For the membership of the London and Lusaka defense committees, which includes many of the people quoted in this chapter, see Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 351–52n. 36. The Price of Detente—Kaunda Prepares to Execute More ZANU Freedom Fighters for Smith (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976), pp. 8–9. 37. Peter Niesewand, In Camera: Secret Justice in Rhodesia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), p. 22; Dick Pittman, You Must Be New around Here (Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, 1979), pp. 6–15. 38. Meredith, Another Country, p. 380. 39. Meredith, Another Country, p. 378; Charlton, Last Colony, p. 78; see also the tangled history of Border Gezi, in Blair, Degrees in Violence, p. 69. 40. Quoted in Blair Rutherford, Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe (London: Zed, 2001), p. 249n. 41. See Rutherford, Working on the Margins, pp. 250–52; the quotation is from Chen Chimutengwende, then minister of information. 42. Author’s field notes, 17, 21, 24 July 2001. Such talk went on beyond the line of sight of a number of observers. Two recent books by journalists that seek to understand the ways that Mugabe clings to power never use these terms; see Blair, Degrees in Violence, and Meredith, Our Votes. 43. Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun.” 44. Quoted in Blair, Degrees in Violence, p. 156. 45. Quoted in Stiff, Cry Zimbabwe, p. 443. Stiff does not see any irony in such statements. 46. Ian Smith, The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (London: Blake, 1997), p. 182. 47. Peter Stiff, See You in November: Rhodesia’s No-Holds-Barred Intelligence War (Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), p. 148. There were many jokes about Chief Chirau and his role in the internal settlement, but they focused on his innocence and perhaps stupidity, not his proximity to whites. In one story, he did not know how to flush a toilet, and when he figured out how to work the chain, he exclaimed, “Just like
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Victoria Falls!” In another, he visited London on a diplomatic mission, having been told the importance of a good first impression and a firm handshake. All went fine until Chirau went to the bathroom, and there, confronted with a man he had not greeted before, he tried again and again to shake his hand, only to knock against a wall of glass: Chief Chirau had been trying to shake the hand of his image in the mirror. See Timothy Burke, “Spiders and Captives: Three African Lives and the Web of History,” unpublished ms. 48. Editorial, Herald, 20 June 2000, p. 10.
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INDEX African National Council (ANC), 19, 60, 79, 112n9 Badza, Dakarai, 19, 20, 22, 27. See also Nhari, Thomas, and Nhari rebellion Banda, Hastings, 43 Baron, Leo Solomon, 80–81, 88, 89, 103 Bond, James, 24, 113n31 Britain, 5, 96 British South Africa Company, 4 Bryce, Taffy, 35, 50, 68, 74. See also Stiff, Peter Capricorn Africa Society (CAS), 16, 68–69, 70. See also liberalism Carrington, Lord Peter, 96 Central African Federation, 4, 17, 69 Central African Party, 16 Chigowe, Cletus, 26, 30–31, 32–33, 42, 43, 45, 50, 53, 75, 101 Chikerema, James, 49, 54, 79–80, 83, 116n58 Chikowore, Enos, 23 Chimurenga, Joseph, 26, 39, 52, 53, 81, 89, 99 Chinese aid, 20–21, 21, 22, 23, 112nn16–17, 113n18 Chirau, Chief Jeremiah, 106 Chitepo, Herbert, 1, 2, 3–4, 6–8, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 28, 39, 41, 42, 43–48, 52, 55, 67–68, 69–70, 71, 72–76, 78, 85, 92, 96–97 Chitepo, Victoria, 3, 69, 78, 92, 103 Chitepo Commission, 48, 49, 51, 53–54, 55–56, 60, 74. See also Report of Chitepo Commission Chung, Fay, 23, 89 CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency), 33, 60, 112n17 CIO (Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organization). See Flower, Ken, and Rhodesia’s CIO dare. See ZANU war council (dare)
Dauramanzi, Charles, 26, 39, 52 Davidson, Basil, 89 death lists, 26, 30, 42–43, 44, 78, 118n12 Dovi, Alec, 45, 50 Dziruni, Nelson, 26, 39, 40, 42–43, 75 Edden, Michael, 28–29, 35, 105 ethnicity, 16, 46–47, 49, 55–59, 60, 71, 79, 83–85 Flower, Ken, 20, 23, 28, 34, 35–37, 60, 80, 81–87, 102, 105 FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), 20, 36–37, 90 FROLIZI (Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe), 17, 49, 55, 59, 60, 75 Great Britain, 5, 96 Gumbo, Rugare, 18, 25, 27, 28, 39, 43, 50, 51, 52, 54, 58, 89–90, 101 Hamadziripi, Henry, 18, 42, 43, 50, 58, 101 Heroes Acres, 14, 92, 93 Hinde, Chuck, 62, 65–66, 68, 69–70, 72, 74, 83 Holland, Sekai, 24, 39, 42 Hove, Richard, 12, 24–25, 39, 40, 42 Huggins, Godfrey, 4 Hunzvi, Chenjerai “Hitler,” 95, 101, 127n9 informers, 29, 30–33, 37–39, 80, 82–85, 106, 115n51, 116n58 Kangai, Kumbirai, 18, 25, 27, 28, 39, 50, 78, 89–90, 101 Kaunda, Kenneth, 17, 48–49, 50, 78, 79, 81. See also Zambia “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” 22, 23, 26, 27, 49, 51 Khama, Seretse, 18 Kissinger, Henry, 18
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Kufamadzuba, Sadat, 1, 44–45, 49, 51–52, 65, 83, 89 Lancaster House negotiations, 13, 77, 95, 96, 98, 103 letters, 43–44, 45–46, 47–48, 71 liberalism, 16, 61, 70, 71. See also Capricorn Africa Society (CAS) Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Holding Company, Ltd.), 18, 23, 26 Machel, Samora, 50, 57, 76, 88, 90. See also Mozambique Machingura, Dzinashe, 25, 26, 27, 44, 56, 57, 76 McLaughlin, Sister Janet, 87 Madekurozwa, Edgar, 27, 39, 40, 41, 42–43, 53, 75, 79 Malianga, Washington, 76 Manyika, Robson, 17, 27, 44, 52, 53 Mataure, John, 24–25, 26, 27, 39, 40, 41, 42–43, 50, 79 Maxey, Kees, 89 Milner, Aaron, 17, 50, 79, 89, 103 Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), 94, 100–101, 105 Moyo, Dick, 50, 79 Moyo, Jason, 18, 34, 76–77, 86–87, 92 Moyo, Jonathan, 98, 100–101, 105 Mozambique, 2, 19, 76. See also FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique); Machel, Samora Mpunzarima, Patrick, 52 Mubako, Simbi, 30 Mudzi, Mukudzei, 27, 28, 41, 50, 58, 89–90, 99, 101 Mugabe, Robert, 12, 16, 19, 21, 33, 48, 60, 76–77, 79, 94–96, 97–98, 105, 112n15 Mukono, Noel, 18, 39, 40, 42, 50 Musalapasi, Enos “Short,” 52 Mutambanengwe, Simpson, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 50, 54, 60 Mutumbuka, Dzingai, 23 Muzenda, Simon, 101 Muzorewa, Bishop Abel, 5, 19, 45, 49, 78 Mwaanga, Vernon, 45 National Democratic Party (NDP), 3, 16 Ndangana, William, 26, 39 Nhari rebellion, 22–23, 25, 27, 28–29, 35–36, 39, 101, 105, 114n34
Nhari, Thomas, 17, 19, 20–21, 22–27, 28–29, 30, 35–38, 39–40, 41, 102, 113n31, 114n34, 114–115n43 Nhongo, Rex, 17, 24, 27, 50, 52, 76, 79, 113n31 Nkomo, Joshua, 16, 32, 54, 79, 81, 90, 96 Nyandoro, George, 49, 54 Nyerere, Julius, 3, 50, 56, 57, 69, 88, 89. See also Tanzania Organization of African Unity (OAU), 16, 17–18, 24 Platts-Mills, John, 88–89 regionalism. See ethnicity Reid-Daly, Ron, 86 Report of Chitepo Commission, 7, 8, 20, 25–28, 42, 44, 45–46, 51, 99–100, 101. See also Chitepo Commission Rhodesia, 4–5, 17, 20, 22, 23, 28, 35, 37–38, 50, 60, 62, 63, 65, 83, 85, 86, 102, 103, 105–107 Rhodesian agents. See informers Rhodesian Front (RF), 4, 5 Rhodesia’s CIO, 20, 23, 28–29, 34, 35–38, 60, 63, 80, 81–87, 121n7. See also Flower, Ken Rowland, Tiny, 23, 49, 81 Rusheshe, Opah, 91 Russian aid, 17, 21, 22, 23, 112n15 Sanyanga, Cornelius, 23, 26, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 54, 57, 75, 92 Shamiso, Silas, 1, 26, 45, 50 Sithole, Edson, 23 Sithole, Masipula, 22, 58–59, 80 Sithole, Rev. Ndabaningi, 16, 18–19, 22, 27, 38, 56, 57–59, 113n28, 114n40 Smith, Ian, 18, 44, 78, 99, 106, 118n12 Southern Rhodesia, 4. See also Rhodesia Soviet aid, 17, 21, 22, 23, 112n15 Special Air Services (SAS), 62, 63, 68, 69, 105 Stiff, Peter, 62–65, 72–74, 78, 83, 86–87, 109n9 Stirling, David, 68, 69, 70 Sutherland, Ian, 63, 64–65, 66, 74 Takawira, Leopold, 16, 69 Tanzania, 3, 17, 24, 56. See also Nyerere, Julius
INDEX Tekere, Anne, 33, 58 Tekere, Edgar, 16, 58, 98–99 Todd, Garfield, 62 Todd, Judith, 89 Tongogara, Josiah, 18, 20, 24, 26, 27, 35, 39, 43, 50–51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 78, 79, 81, 85, 87, 89, 90–91, 92, 93, 96–97, 99, 101 tribalism. See ethnicity Tungamirai, Josiah, 20, 24, 26, 83, 114n38 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), 4–5, 17 United Federal Party, 16 Unity Accord, 18, 19, 26, 112n9 Walls, Peter, 91 war veterans, 94, 95, 102, 104 Zambia, 17, 23, 28, 41, 48, 49, 50, 51–52, 53, 67, 80. See also Kaunda, Kenneth
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ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army), 20, 21, 22, 25, 28–29, 37, 76, 79–80. See also Nhari rebellion ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), 2, 3, 5, 16–17, 18–19, 25, 26, 41, 42–43, 44, 50, 51, 53–54, 55, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 94, 100–101, 118n12 ZANU war council (dare), 18, 55, 57–58 ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union), 5, 16, 17, 17–18, 24, 26, 44, 60, 75, 76, 77, 118n12 Zimbabwe, 5, 22, 23, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103–104 Zimbabwe, historiography of, 9–10, 11–13, 36–37, 61–62, 67, 69–72, 95, 96, 97, 99–100, 102–103, 105–107 Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, 5 ZIPA (Zimbabwe People’s Army), 57, 76, 77 ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army), 14, 87, 90 ZUM (Zimbabwe Unity Movement), 98
Luise White is Professor of History at the University of Florida. She is the author of The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, for which she won the Herskovits Award, and Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, and the co-editor (with David William Cohen and Stephan F. Miescher) of African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History.
