The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe

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
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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 xi
a note on place names xv
Chapter One 1
Chapter Two 16
Chapter Three 41
Chapter Four 60
Chapter Five 78
Chapter Six 93
notes 109
bibliography 131
index 137
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 an-
other trip to Zimbabwe, the article was withdrawn to become this book.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 re-
ception given me by the Department of Economic History at the Uni-
versity 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 McCart-
ney, 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 Collec-
tion 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 Memo-
rial 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
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
good fortune to work with two superb librarians at the University of
Florida: Peter Malanchuk and Dan Reboussin have been fantastic, an-
swering 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 Foun-
dation 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 Depart-
ment 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 al-
lowing me to come and go as a North American teaching schedule al-
lowed. This book was written when I had a fellowship from the Na-
tional 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 friend-
ship and accommodation. Because so much of the conduct of black and
white nationalism in Zimbabwe’s national history was in fact interna-
tional, 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 gra-
cious 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 Zim-
babwe 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
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
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 man-
uscript for Indiana University Press, and Stephen Ellis and Alex de
Waal read it for James Currey. All of these readers did exactly what read-
ers 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 prac-
tice involving books and readers and many foreign places. Writing
books is also a grounded practice at one’s own institution, and I owe spe-
cial 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 vi-
olence in Africa held at the University of Cologne in 2000. In 2000 and
2002 I subjected my colleagues in the history department to two sepa-
rate 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 histo-
rians of Africa rarely do, which is to cite my field notes rather than ref-
erence 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 Rho-
desia
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 inter-
nal affairs in ZANU dare
Ken Flower, director-general of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Orga-
nization
Josiah Tongogara, minister of defense in ZANU, Lusaka, dare and chair-
man 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
xii CHARACTERS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
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 de-
fense 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
CHARACTERS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE xiii
Taffy Bryce, Rhodesian operative
Simpson Mutambanengwe, ZANU member in Lusaka, until 1973 po-
litical 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 Decem-
ber 1974 as provincial security officer
Enos Musalapasi (“Short”), ZANU member and mechanic
James Chikerema, chairman of the Front for the Liberation of Zim-
babwe (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 Opera-
tions
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 Zimbabwe-
Rhodesia
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 be-
came Zimbabwe-Rhodesia in 1979 and Zimbabwe in 1980, and the cap-
ital 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 chi-
murenga) of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), head-
quartered 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 Zam-
bians, by Rhodesians, by his own party, and by other liberation move-
ments 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 Zim-
babwe1 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 col-
laboration and cover-up that question carries, were important in the lib-
eration struggle and are no less important more than twenty years after
liberation was achieved. Why?
2 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 strug-
gle in the 1970s. It precipitated a crisis in ZANU, which was exacer-
bated 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 pur-
sue 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 re-
produced and how power is produced and reproduced by these narra-
tives. 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 mo-
ment. 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 Chi-
tepo’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 pro-
duction.” 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
CHAPTER ONE 3
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 ac-
tivists, 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 af-
terlife, 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 proclaim-
ing) 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 gradua-
tion 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 Peo-
ple’s Union (ZAPU) and became a legal advisor to its president, Joshua
Nkomo, a man who would become one of several political rivals. Chi-
tepo 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, Chi-
tepo 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-
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 Zim-
babwe. In the years between 1966 and his murder, he became increas-
ingly 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 so-
cialist state in Zimbabwe by including middle-class support in mass mo-
bilization. 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 set-
tlement in 1890, Southern Rhodesia was granted self-governing do-
minion 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 popu-
lation 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 Rhode-
sia and Nyasaland had been bandied about by white Southern Rhode-
sian 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 God-
frey 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 in-
transigent and resisted majority rule. But minority rule seemed unimag-
inable in Africa in the mid-1960s, until November 1965 when Rhodesia
rebelled from Britain and issued a unilateral declaration of indepen-
dence (UDI) under the government of the Rhodesian Front (RF), led
CHAPTER ONE 5
by Ian Smith. To almost everyone’s—including many Rhodesians’—sur-
prise, 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 Rhode-
sia 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 emigra-
tion, 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 settle-
ment was almost beside the point, as the armies of the nationalist par-
ties 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 Zim-
babwe-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—Zam-
bia and Mozambique, both of which have a place in this story—pres-
sured ZAPU and ZANU into negotiating a cease-fire, a constitution,
and arrangements for free elections. For this to happen, Zimbabwe-Rho-
desia 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 in-
dependence 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
five argue, the use of the term, and of “decolonization” for the period
after 1980, often obscures a complex political history and linkages be-
tween 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 in-
dependence. 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, Rhode-
sia, 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 libera-
tion 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 assas-
sinations, 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 con-
fessions as there were hints and analyses that fixed the blame on politi-
CHAPTER ONE 7
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 in-
sist that they alone are culpable, and organize evidence and anecdotes
to show that they did the deed. A recent book by Peter Stiff, for exam-
ple, 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 re-
veal a more accurate history, as Terence Ranger has done with the dif-
ferent 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 be-
tween 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 cir-
cles in and out of Zambia two weeks after Chitepo’s death. The Report
of Zambia’s Special International Commission (usually called the Chi-
tepo 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 Intelli-
gence 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
two separate Rhodesian agents; both these confessions were published
in 1985. And there are said to be more confessions, suppressed or re-
pressed. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson are British and Canadian
journalists who began their respective careers in East Africa; later Mar-
tin 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 pat-
terns 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 pat-
terns 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 Chi-
tepo 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 Chi-
tepo Commission argued haphazardly and some scholars argued in
greater detail, the assassination was caused by ethnic tensions, then eth-
nic 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 in-
terference 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 be-
come the founding myth of the new nation. The twentieth century pro-
vides 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 nar-
rative, but that each act of fixing becomes a starting point that makes a
new and linear national narrative possible. Fixing blame for an assassi-
nation 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 dif-
ferent confessions tells a story of political treachery and national tri-
umph; 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 con-
tain 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 im-
portant 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-
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 acci-
dent? 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 se-
quence? 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 expla-
nations, so that the layers of confession and accusation reveal an arche-
ology of the conflicts in which they were produced? To answer these
questions I rely heavily on scholars who have studied politics as perfor-
mance, 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 pol-
itics 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 ma-
terialist and nationalist traditions, terms like “performance” or the ob-
servation that events are “staged” and texts are “scripted” can be
interpreted to mean I am calling these texts and the events they de-
scribe 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 pub-
lished 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 ac-
tors, published years later. I do not use these terms to imply that a con-
fession (even a confession by proxy) is made up, but as a way to think
CHAPTER ONE 11
critically about what has gone into the construction of all these confes-
sions, 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 narra-
tive 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 pro-
vided a frame for subsequent research. Like all frames, it may have made
the historical relations it depicted more rigid than they were in prac-
tice.22 In a history of insurgency and counter-insurgency, for example,
not everything is known, so much has to be pieced together from frag-
ments 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 spec-
ulations to be written about as if they were possible or even likely. In
this way, Martin and Johnson, quoting the Rhodesian security opera-
tives they have interviewed over the years, have provided a frame that
has allowed many other authors to make connections and draw conclu-
sions 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 in-
sists 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
contradict each other; and African nationalists’ memoirs that are in-
terspersed 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 Zimbab-
wean 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 under-
utilized 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 ge-
nealogies of politics and authorship give all these accounts, when taken
together, a particular strength and vitality: using these sources to re-
construct 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 to-
gether, 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 in-
telligence, 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 ma-
jority-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 absen-
tia at the same chimurenga council meeting that cast grave suspicions
on Chitepo, served in Mugabe’s first cabinet. Ken Flower was the direc-
tor 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 be-
tween African nationalist parties but between factions within African
nationalist parties. Many of the men in this story participated in the re-
pression, 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 be-
cause 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 en-
emies. 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 peo-
ple 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 in-
terviews 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 Zam-
bian 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-
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 He-
roes Acres that his family contested, much to the dismay of party stal-
warts.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-spe-
cialists 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 eas-
ily.26 Some acronyms are used, and pronounced, as words: ZANU and
ZAPU and their respective armies, ZANLA (Zimbabwe African Na-
tional Liberation Army) and ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolution-
ary 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 Com-
mission 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 Imperi-
alism 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
CHAPTER ONE 15
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 pol-
itics 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 Zimbab-
weans, 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 var-
ious texts about one assassination strive to define a political realm in
which the assassination took place, and which in turn shaped contem-
porary Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER TWO
ZANU was formed in July 1963, when it split off from the more estab-
lished 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 Rhode-
sian 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 Organiza-
tion 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 lead-
ership 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, in-
volved 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 leader-
ship 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
CHAPTER TWO 17
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 Afri-
can Federation, and Rhodesia had declared UDI in November 1965.
The ZANU external wing began a training program for armed infiltra-
tion and struggle almost at once. In April 1966, six months after UDI,
Chitepo resigned his position in Tanzania and moved ZANU head-
quarters 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 Mil-
ner. 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 Rhode-
sia 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 be-
tween 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 ad-
dress the common issues of the liberation struggle and by their own de-
clining followings therein, formed a new party, the Front for the Lib-
eration 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
funds to the liberation movement of the OAU’s choice. What fragile
fictions of unity existed between ZANU and ZAPU were created to ob-
tain 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 com-
mand 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 fig-
ure 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 An-
gola 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 meet-
ing in Lusaka on 8 November 1974 with the presidents of the frontline
states: Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Ken-
neth 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, re-
placing Noel Mukono as minister of defense, marked the first real over-
lap 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 at-
tend the Lusaka meetings because members of ZANU’s central com-
mittee, also in prison in Rhodesia, had dismissed him as president and
CHAPTER TWO 19
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 be-
came obvious to all, but in a few days the external wing of ZANU rein-
stated 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 pres-
idents, 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 strug-
gles and rumors of leadership struggles within ZANU.8
The unity meetings were tense, but on 3 December 1974 a declara-
tion 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 mobiliza-
tions 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 Com-
mittee. ZANU’s executive committee—including and perhaps espe-
cially 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 di-
luted 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 com-
mand. Thomas Nhari and Dakarai Badza led the rebellion. They were
young, educated commanders who had recently been demoted to ordi-
nary soldiers, and who had considerable support at the front, among
both male and female guerillas, and in Lusaka. The rebellion—it is al-
most 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 pre-
sent a chronological summary of what is called the Nhari rebellion and
to show the number of alliances, affiliations, and betrayals involved in
it, many of which may have come into play in the assassination of Her-
bert 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 dif-
ficulties there. The high command was riddled with corruption and
tribalism. There were rumors that leaders misappropriated funds in-
tended 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 Tun-
gamirai. 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 insub-
ordination, 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 un-
duly impatient in the face of long-term shortages. He insisted that the
rebellion was instigated by Rhodesian propaganda, which sought to de-
moralize soldiers at the front by discrediting leading freedom fighters,
himself especially.11 Later authors followed Tongogara’s analysis, reduc-
ing the rebels’ grievances to the inevitable problems of equipment in a
guerilla war and to ZANU’s internal conflicts over the party’s new ori-
entation toward Mao’s China. Martin and Johnson, and many in ZANU,
made much of Nhari’s supposed opposition to Chinese aid and equip-
ment. 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
CHAPTER TWO 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 un-
armed, 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 dis-
mayed 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 com-
rades.” Guns, she was told, were only to be used for killing “fascist sol-
diers” and eliminating “racial discrimination, capitalism, and exploita-
tion 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 un-
armed: 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 lit-
tle guns they gave us.”14
Whatever the meaning of strong or weak weapons, there were ob-
jections 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 ex-
pected to exaggerate the number of communist-made weapons—re-
vealed 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 ex-
port of arms was reduced; Chinese arms manufacture began to pick up
again after 1978, but failed to dominate export markets. By 1980 Chi-
nese 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
Wherever his weapons came from, Nhari found an attentive audi-
ence 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 Mu-
kono’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 Novem-
ber 1974 just over the border in Mozambique. Were these part of other,
amiable border crossings? The Special Branch men told the comman-
ders 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 rebel-
lion 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 sup-
port.21
Although Martin and Johnson based these statements on interviews
with former Rhodesian police and soldiers, they were commonplace ex-
planations 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 Ton-
gogara.22 A less frequently cited document is “Kaunda’s Role in De-
tente”: 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 as-
sassination, 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 de-
tailed 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-
CHAPTER TWO 23
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 Zim-
babwe 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 ef-
fort 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. Start-
ing 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, in-
cluding Nhari and Badza. These men all believed that the armed strug-
gle would be accelerated if the pro-Chinese ZANLA leaders could be
eliminated, so that ZANLA could return to Russian support and the su-
perior 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 re-
bellion—struggles over recruitment. This was not a neutral issue within
liberation movements. Starting in 1967, the OAU required evidence of
new recruits before it funded any army in exile, while Tanzania threat-
ened 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 ado-
lescents, led by Nhari and his subordinate, James Bond, reached Chi-
fombo, 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 inter-
views Rex Nhongo gave to several scholars in the late 1990s, however,
Nhari was motivated by personal envy, not party loyalty or any particu-
lar attachment to Soviet weapons. He had coveted Nhongo’s record of
voluntary recruitments, and even though ZANU policy was to leave stu-
dents alone, Nhari proposed and carried out the abduction of St. Al-
bert’s Mission without party permission. When the operation failed,
Nhari was demoted for his adventurism. The problem, Nhongo ex-
plained, 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 com-
plaining 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 sis-
ter, Sekai Holland, assured them the high command lived modestly in
Lusaka. They complained that the high command never visited the
CHAPTER TWO 25
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 griev-
ances 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 com-
mander 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 sup-
ported 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 in-
ternational 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 lead-
ership 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 rebel-
lion 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 Mar-
tin 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 Chi-
fombo. 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-
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 cap-
tured 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 Ndan-
gana, ZANLA’s chief of operations, Charles Dauramanzi, ZANLA’s sup-
ply 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 op-
posed 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 fi-
nancial support is known to have come from wealthy Zimbabweans
within ZANU,” namely Cornelius Sanyanga and Nelson Dziruni, an-
other businessman in Lusaka. The rebels “also received substantial fi-
nancial 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 min-
isters 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—
CHAPTER TWO 27
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 Kan-
gai and Mukudzei Mudzi. The Zambian police said they could do noth-
ing. 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 chil-
dren and the other hostages over the next two days. They arrested the
rebels, who escaped almost at once, quite possibly with Zambian acqui-
escence. “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 lab-
oratory technician at the University of Zambia.40 On 12 December the
dare met and Tongogara announced that the high command would re-
take 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, en-
tered 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, how-
ever. 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 inac-
tions. But by then, what Zambians were doing or not doing hardly mat-
tered: there was no rebellion left; many had been killed, including
perhaps Badza. After that, there is no clear explanation of what hap-
pened. Martin and Johnson claim half of Nhari’s supporters had already
deserted and many had reintegrated themselves into the party. The au-
thor or authors of “Kaunda’s Role in Detente” claim that the pro-Russ-
ian ZANU leaders were defeated once and for all and no longer had any
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 exe-
cuted. Chitepo said that the party would like the men returned to them.
Executions were not permitted in the party’s code of discipline, and ex-
perience 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 Spe-
cial Branch, which arranged “low-key secret meetings” in the northeast
in September 1974. They first met with Nhari and Badza and then in-
cluded 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 af-
termath 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 dis-
counted them altogether.48 Edden’s press briefings declared that intelli-
CHAPTER TWO 29
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 re-
markable analysis of the Report of the Chitepo Commission written by
the ZANU detainees jailed in Zambia after the murder of Chitepo. Pub-
lished 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 docu-
ment. The “Introduction” rehearses many of the arguments and the lan-
guage 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 “unbeliev-
ably 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 trans-
lations, 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 un-
pack two paragraphs that describe how the rebels, led by Nhari, march-
ing from the front to Chifombo, confronted a “self-confessed enemy
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 de-
tainees were appalled that the commission did not question these sum-
mary 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 de-
tained 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 un-
derstanding that accusations of spying and double agency were too com-
monplace, 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 meet-
ings, 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 discov-
ered by ZANU’s questions, but some agents slipped through. Nhari and
his followers apparently blamed Chigowe for this: according to the de-
tainees, his name was first on the rebels’ supposed death list.50
It is altogether possible that ZANU insisted on the rigidly hierar-
chical 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 vio-
lence and protect the guerillas’ legitimacy. Executing civilian informers
could cost guerillas popular support. In parts of Matabeleland, for ex-
ample, widespread summary executions of informers or witches were
seen as evidence of the weakness of local ZAPU officials; they had not
CHAPTER TWO 31
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: com-
manders 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 intelli-
gence—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 execu-
tions 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-ordinat-
ing Committee, the events of February 1975 in Mozambique and Rho-
desia 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—con-
demn 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 in-
formers actually were. Philip Frankel’s exemplary study of the Sharpe-
ville 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 collabora-
tors 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 dis-
cipline and morale—than what could have been accomplished by exe-
cuting 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-
alty and speech, or that seek to locate that identity in who pays the per-
son, may be too simplistic to allow an understanding of the social world
of struggle, insurgency, and counter-insurgency. Such questions, wheth-
er asked by chiefs of security or by historians, take the either/or histori-
cal 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 lit-
erature, 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 sec-
ondary literature, Nkomo’s ability to negotiate so many spaces is seen as
proof of the weakness of his politics, rather than of his political pru-
dence; 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 splen-
did 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 con-
tradictory 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 mis-
givings 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 simi-
larly 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
CHAPTER TWO 33
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 ques-
tion. 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, in-
cluding 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 oc-
cupied 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 in-
formers 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 Mc-
Gregor, 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-
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 sug-
gests 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 Mozam-
bique, but the damage the report did to ZAPU. Such fictions “smear our
international standing and prestige” and attempt to “discredit its cred-
ibility as an authentic and effective Liberation Movement in Zim-
babwe.”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 mid-
1970s. Certainly he had tried to maintain cordial relations with British
intelligence during the war.68 Flower writes as a disinterested civil ser-
vant, describing his work for Rhodesia. His job was to protect the in-
terests 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. Read-
ing—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 narra-
tive 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 posi-
tion, 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 prob-
lem 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.
CHAPTER TWO 35
Given this reading of some of the texts I cite, how do we under-
stand Rhodesian claims to have activated the Nhari rebellion? In par-
ticular, what did Michael Edden mean when he told Martin and John-
son, “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 hap-
pened 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,” dis-
mayed by problems of resupply, “went to the provincial base at Chi-
fombo and collected dissidents to rev up the Chimurenga High Com-
mand in Lusaka. . . . That did us tremendous favor. It meant that the
cream of the terrorist crop had been taken out of Hurricane [the Rho-
desian operational area] and been executed by their own side.”69 Later,
however, he told Martin and Johnson that Rhodesians were able to ma-
nipulate 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 com-
plaints—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-ordi-
nating 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 com-
manders “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 per-
sonally 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 be-
hind 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 in-
formed him of ZANU’s “in house rebellion” in December 1974. He
mentioned Nhari and some of those captured at Chifombo by name.73
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 cor-
rosive 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 aban-
don 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 na-
tionalism. If war and violence can be uncoupled from the history of na-
tionalism 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 ne-
gotiate their tensions and ambiguities. The study of resistance to au-
thority, 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-insur-
gency, 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
CHAPTER TWO 37
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 sug-
gests 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 infor-
mation, could breed a mutiny? Even Flower did not claim that the
rebels’ grievances were caused by misinformation, or that they were dic-
tated to subalterns less imaginative than security officers. As Greg Den-
ing 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 disci-
pline 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 com-
mands 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 demot-
ing commanders would have peopled the war zone with men accus-
tomed to giving, not taking, orders, and this may have disturbed guer-
illas’ sense of order and discipline more than anything Rhodesian agents
could have done. Such demotions also must have made everyday nego-
tiations 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-
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 op-
portunity, 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 Mar-
tin 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 re-
alize 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 lead-
ership, but because all negotiations within ZANLA and between
ZAPU and ZANU and between Rhodesians and ZANU—secret, well-
known, or whatever—were diffuse. They were not only so between sub-
alterns 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 over-
lapping 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. Sto-
ries about abductions and detentions circulated through Lusaka to the
front and to Salisbury without being started or enhanced by any partic-
ular 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
CHAPTER TWO 39
credit; they also make claims of information and confession just as in-
credible.
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 be-
fore the Chitepo Commission. However coerced or flawed that testi-
mony 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 Ma-
taure 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 pro-
Chinese 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 re-
bellion: 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 Madeku-
rozwa. Only Mataure was reported to have defended himself, saying he
was forced at gunpoint to supply transport to the rebels, and that his as-
sociations 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.
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 Com-
mission. What is known is that many ZANU officials who had left Zam-
bia, 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 Chi-
tepo’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, Mukud-
zei 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 ev-
idence. It was a time of great distrust and suspicion in Lusaka, and cer-
tainly 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 ac-
cused 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
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 re-
bellion), 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. Hamad-
ziripi 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 writ-
ten 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, presi-
dent 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 Ac-
cording 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; cer-
tainly 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 brother-
in-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 Chi-
tepo’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
CHAPTER THREE 43
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 advis-
ing 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 ini-
tially 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 com-
mand. He probably was under great pressure—he had been named as a
suspect in the Nhari rebellion—but whether that explains these con-
tradictory 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, Ton-
gogara, and Hamadziripi. In the same conversation, Chitepo asked
Kaunda to intervene and request that the Malawian government release
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 in-
compatible with the intelligence and strong character of Chitepo. Chi-
tepo 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 re-
ceived 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 ar-
gued, “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 fa-
vorite 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 con-
tained. Dzinashe Machingura said that the repression of the Nhari re-
bellion soon got out of hand, and anyone who had crossed his comman-
der could be executed, at least in the first weeks of 1975.13 Lists—and
stories of lists—could have assured Nhari supporters and ZANU stal-
warts 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
CHAPTER THREE 45
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 body-
guard, 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 every-
where, except when he went to State House, where he was always ac-
companied 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 poi-
soned. 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 Chi-
tepo’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, Zimbab-
weans 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 support-
ers. Vernon Mwaanga, Zambia’s foreign minister, told friends that Chi-
tepo 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 al-
ready 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 cir-
cumspect 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 Re-
port 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
man.” He told his wife of the list “of men I suppose the Karangas in-
tended to eliminate,” including himself. “I am not in fear of my life im-
mediately, 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 ethnic-
ity, and ethnic strife, into the discussion of ZANU internal politics.
Terms like “Manyika” and “Karanga” depict regional distinctions be-
tween 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 be-
tween 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 cul-
tural 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 “Karan-
ga” 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
CHAPTER THREE 47
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 fam-
ily, 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 var-
ious recollections. Why then did some letters use ethnic terms while
others did not? Did this show Chitepo’s growing confusion, as the com-
mission 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 ac-
count all the things the terms “Manyika” and “Karanga”—or the ab-
sence 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 posi-
tions, we have already seen, were fairly fluid in the first months of 1975.
I suggest that these letters were written to different audiences for differ-
ent purposes. It may be useful to see the discrepancies between the let-
ters, 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 cate-
gories 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 dif-
ferent 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 shift-
ing 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-
ing factions while still maintaining his right to exercise authority. Chi-
tepo 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 let-
ters, 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 interpreta-
tions of events are scripted to address the confusion that was the after-
math of the Chitepo assassination.
There were many accusations about who killed Chitepo after his
death, and a few rumored confessions followed by published confes-
sions—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 suf-
fered 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 de-
mand” 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 repre-
sentatives 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 crit-
ics, 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
CHAPTER THREE 49
as directed. First, for example, the commission was set up with an un-
wieldy 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 simulta-
neous translations.29 Third, Cornelius Sanyanga’s testimony, which was
crucial to the commission’s findings, argued that Chitepo was killed be-
cause of ethnic strife, and thus presented a picture of a liberation move-
ment 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 de-
scribe 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, Chi-
tepo 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 re-
fused 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 in-
sisted 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 per-
son who escaped with minor injuries was the passenger in back, the
bodyguard Sadat Kufamadzuba.31
“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 execu-
tions 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 af-
fairs, 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 Mo-
zambique, Nhongo to Tanzania, and Moyo to Botswana, where he be-
came 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 in-
volvement in Chitepo’s murder. Instead, he thought that there were
three possible perpetrators of the assassination: ZANU’s “counter-revo-
lutionaries,” like Sanyanga, Mukono, and Mutambanengwe; Chigowe
and Hamadziripi; and the security at Chitepo’s home. It was not possi-
ble, 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 Ton-
gogara had been entrapped. Bryce and his amanuensis, Peter Stiff, in-
sisted that the Zambian police had gone to Mozambique to convince
Samora Machel, an old friend of Chitepo’s from Tanzania, that Ton-
gogara was behind the assassination. According to the Stiff/Bryce ac-
count, Tongogara was returned to Lusaka only after being interrogated
by Machel’s secretary and two Zambian police officers disguised as FRE-
LIMO soldiers.35 The detainees, however, did not think there were
CHAPTER THREE 51
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 “elo-
quent and articulate” in both English and Shona, the detainees wrote,
whereas this statement read as a “pastiche” of decontextualized transla-
tions. 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 coer-
cion, although nothing about coercion, the detainees complained, was
mentioned in the Report.37 Seven months later, however, as the crimi-
nal 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 ac-
cused of assassinating Chitepo were never tried.38 Kufamadzuba’s con-
fession 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 out-
side 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 consider-
ably different, as was the description of Kufamadzuba’s wounds, which
are critical to both confessions and to the Rhodesian critique of Zam-
bian 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 hav-
ing been in the back seat of the car, shielded from the blast by the two
bodies in front. Had he been standing outside the car, the expert con-
cluded, 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 un-
named 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 coun-
sel 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 con-
cluded that the bomb was “improvised”—that is, home-made from the
powerful explosive TNT—and “pre-packaged”—that is, made some-
where else and transported to the scene—and was placed inside the
fender of the right wheel, probably with magnets; it weighed 1.6 kilo-
grams.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 de-
tainees wrote, “The absurdity is too great to believe.” Why did the mur-
derers 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
CHAPTER THREE 53
“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. In-
deed, 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 com-
mission 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 mur-
der, 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 state-
ments” 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 as-
pects 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
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 de-
tainees 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 sub-
stance” 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 con-
fess 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 De-
tente” 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.
CHAPTER THREE 55
I am not arguing that torture and coercion were not used in Zam-
bian jails. There is ample evidence that they were. My point is that tor-
ture 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 Never-
theless, the commission tried to acknowledge the intricacies of the tes-
timonies 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 “unbe-
lievably 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 “Zim-
babwean” precisely to confound ethnic purists within the party.48 Cer-
tainly the commission’s findings were almost ridiculous in their history
of ethnic conflict in ZANU. In 1969 the dare consisted of five Man-
yikas 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 ex-
plain Karangas’ supposed fear of Manyika influence, or a need for a
Karanga takeover of the dare they already dominated, and so they ar-
gued that Karangas “erroneously” thought that Manyikas had “master-
minded” the Nhari rebellion and this had caused a Karanga “backlash”
against the Nhari group and Nhari’s Manyika supporters. Such simpli-
fications muffled its more subtle findings, in particular that the dare
believed that Chitepo was a threat to them after the murders of Ma-
dekurozwa and Mataure, because he might divulge their criminal ac-
tivities to Zambian authorities, and its subtle one, that Chitepo was
killed because he stood in the way of the ruthlessly ambitious Ton-
gogara. Several witnesses had told the commission that Tongogara had
boasted that he would be the first president of independent Zim-
babwe.49
It was the ZANU detainees—one of whom was Tongogara—who
wrote the most passionate defense of Tongogara. They called the com-
mission “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, plot-
ted 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 domi-
nated 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 sup-
ported 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 pre-
ceded Chitepo’s assassination.
Before the commission even met, the Tanzanian Sunday News car-
ried 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 dis-
placements 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 Tan-
zania; after Chitepo’s assassination, Julius Nyerere, unlike Samora
Machel, refused to return Nhongo to Zambia. While many in the
CHAPTER THREE 57
ZANLA high command were in jail in Zambia, Nyerere and Machel au-
thorized and supported the Zimbabwe People’s Army (written and pro-
nounced ZIPA in the manner of Zimbabwean acronyms), an army
formed entirely of cadres who achieved a degree of unity that Zimbab-
wean 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 dif-
ferences . . . 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 Sit-
hole and Nhongo?
What may have been most important about ethnic terms in mid-
1970s ZANU politics is that not everyone agreed about their impor-
tance, 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 misunder-
standings” between Manyikas and Karangas, “and these misunder-
standings filtered down to the ordinary members of the party,” which
many took to mean that the ZANU rank and file were not overly con-
cerned with such ethnic terms.57 Once the Report was published it
seemed that these terms became concrete. In his letter to all Zimbab-
weans, Rev. Sithole wrote that the conclusions of the Chitepo Com-
mission 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
charts about how many Karangas on the dare made ZANU ZARU, his
figures were no more convincing than were those of the Chitepo Com-
mission. 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 prob-
lem, 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 ar-
gued, 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 Zezeru-
ism, 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 be-
tween political and ethnic terminologies.60
Rev. Sithole had another motive for promoting the notion of eth-
nic 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 Mutam-
banengwe 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 vio-
lence.
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
CHAPTER THREE 59
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 dom-
inating 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 re-
gionalism. But once the Zezerus defected to FROLIZI in 1971, the party
was bipolarized and competition between Karangas and Manyikas in-
tensified, so that by the time of the Nhari rebellion, late 1974, ZANU
was ripe for rebellion, assassination, and personal ambition. In no un-
certain terms, Professor Sithole describes the inordinate ambition and
cunning of Josiah Tongogara. Not only does he script an imaginary di-
alogue in which Tongogara drills camp commanders in calling him “the
Liberator,” but he accuses Tongogara of ordering Chitepo’s assassina-
tion. Basing his analysis on the Report, he sees the real shift not in Ton-
gogara’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 rebel-
lion. Chitepo’s name was read as “only a suspect, no evidence at the
moment.”61
CHAPTER FOUR
If the Chitepo Commission had been charged with establishing Zam-

bia’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 de-
tainees in Zambia’s jails, of course, and Ken Flower, the director of
Rhodesia’s CIO, who published his memoirs in 1987. Even as the com-
mission was meeting, Flower said he had taken extraordinary measures
with Zambia’s Special Branch to assure them that Tongogara had noth-
ing 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 Opera-
tions Co-ordinating Committee that he thought the CIO should publi-
cize 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
CHAPTER FOUR 61
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 arti-
cle titled “Some Questions about the Chitepo Report and the Zim-
babwe 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 assassina-
tion, Zambian police stated that Chitepo was killed by a land mine—a
“guerilla weapon”—buried in his driveway. Second, once the police de-
cided 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 confes-
sion 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, how-
ever 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 or-
ders 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 ac-
complice. 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 Com-
mission describes the condition of the fence after the blast; the first
Zambian news reports noted that the bomb “ripped up” the fence that
surrounded Chitepo’s house, but said nothing about the condition of
the fence.4 Given this—and assuming accuracy in the newspaper ac-
counts 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 estab-
lish 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 con-
fessions that it’s not unreasonable to ask who the guilty parties are con-
fessing 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 de-
scriptions of reconnaissance, entering the premises, car bombs, and get-
aways. The circumstances of revelation and publication are noteworthy:
one account is published as an as-told-to memoir, and the other is a con-
fession 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 Rho-
desian 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 identi-
ties 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 Rhode-
sian 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 au-
thority thereof. Barbie Zelizer has argued that one way journalists es-
tablished the credibility of their version of the assassination of John F.
CHAPTER FOUR 63
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 hav-
ing 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 body-
guards 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 im-
portant 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 Febru-
ary, however. They returned to Salisbury for a new briefing that in-
cluded 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 op-
portunity 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.
This had nothing to do with the ideological baggage of such items or
the clues they might leave, but was important because boxes and ex-
plosives 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 in-
serted 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 detona-
tor, also placed behind a front wheel, would be crushed when the car
moved, and the two crossed nails, powered by tiny batteries, would cre-
ate 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 morn-
ing 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 Cau-
casian 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 ef-
ficient 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 re-
hearsed 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
CHAPTER FOUR 65
Sutherland stopped the car: “They’re my best wire cutters. I’m not leav-
ing 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 Rhode-
sians 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 effi-
ciency 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 assas-
sination to look like the work of Africans, did they shun communist-
made 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 hospi-
tal patient.” Once jailed, all treatment for what they called “his griev-
ous 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, Mar-
tin and Johnson published another one. Interviewing a Rhodesian op-
erative 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 con-
fession. In Martin and Johnson’s account, Hinde worked with Suther-
land, 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
politburo debated about whether or not the book should be published
at all, and suggest that the politburo approved the book precisely be-
cause it ignored the issue of ethnicity, and thus effectively left Zim-
babweans 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 in-
sisted that it was never taken seriously.14 A critical review by “The Scru-
tator” was published in the Herald, suggesting that the revelations of a
Rhodesian CIO man might be especially suspect, particularly since Mar-
tin and Johnson did not interview the surviving operative, Ian Suther-
land, then resident in South Africa. The Scrutator suggested that Mar-
tin 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 con-
tains 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, be-
cause 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 an-
other 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 John-
son 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.
CHAPTER FOUR 67
Why are the bombs so different in all these confessions and accusa-
tions? 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 iden-
tity? Or is it because, as Paul Cohen argues, when texts compete to rep-
resent 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 con-
tainer which provided the fragmentation effect.” The Zambian bomb
disposal expert thought the bomb was detonated by a pull-release de-
vice fitted with a safety fuse so it did not go off right away. The com-
mission 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 in-
side 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 po-
lice.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 Zam-
bian 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
the relationship between the seemingly opposing audiences of Rhode-
sians 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 lov-
ing 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 en-
gineering 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 suc-
ceeded on his second attempt. Without a war, however, there was no
place where Hinde could practice “the considerable and advanced mil-
itary 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. Watch-
guard International undertook military surveys, trained counter-insur-
gency forces and bodyguards, and prepared them for action in the event
of a coup; sometimes it helped British intelligence with coups and sur-
veillance. 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 con-
tacts 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 multi-
racial, 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 fran-
chises for Africans. The Capricorn philosophy of inclusion was un-
equivocal in its motivation: Stirling wanted a multi-racial party that
could thwart the emergence of an “effective African nationalist move-
ment whose purpose would be to push the European out of Africa.”23
CHAPTER FOUR 69
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 Accord-
ing to their own literature, the great Capricorn successes were their con-
ferences. At the one in Salima, Nyasaland, in 1956, Chitepo was one of
several keynote speakers. Chitepo is usually described in liberals’ ac-
counts 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-determina-
tion. Yet his keynote speech clearly proposed liberal inclusion as a strat-
egy, 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 them-
selves of Europeans,” but now, in the mid-1950s, some African organi-
zations 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 body-
guards and a counter-coup force. This brought several former SAS men
into the region, including Hinde, who, according to Martin and John-
son, 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 in-
terest 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
actors and exclude others, is key here: the straight line that links Stir-
ling to Hinde may or may not be accurate, but its articulation excludes
Chitepo from all political organizations other than ZANU and it ex-
cludes 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 re-
placed 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 pro-
vides 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 ob-
scure the Capricorns even more; it locates African politics in the polit-
ical 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 prin-
ciples of tolerance as a strategy, a way to guarantee peace and prosperity
in the midst of decolonization; they did not seem to think that toler-
ance, 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 oth-
ers 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-cen-
tury India, for example, or Central Africa in the 1950s—the practice of
liberalism became unequal, with groups allowing those less equal than
CHAPTER FOUR 71
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 colo-
nial forms were being contemplated in Central Africa, the Capricorns
began to appear like another form of tutelage, a fancy version of Hug-
gins’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 nar-
rative 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 re-
pression, 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 un-
equal 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 Chi-
tepo 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 na-
tionalism, or as proof of weakness or even of capitulation. Such a char-
acterization 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 contra-
dictory letters written to and from Malawi, his inclusion of the petite-
bourgeoisie in the struggle for a free, socialist Zimbabwe, were ways of
addressing ZANU’s complex factions: they were also traces of the Capri-
corn 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 Capri-
corn 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-deter-
mining political connections, the kind that make Stirling and Hinde
old chums, conceals the kind of political venue the Capricorn Africa
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 pic-
ture. 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 differ-
ent details—which they do—but that each of these confessions has dif-
ferent 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 de-
volves—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? Sec-
ond, and equally important, who is the intended audience of these con-
fessions: 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 de-
grees 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 amus-
ing 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.
CHAPTER FOUR 73
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 sev-
eral 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 assas-
sination 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 assas-
sins 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 im-
plies that the Bryce/Stiff account is not intended for an African audi-
ence, or even an audience familiar with the Martin and Johnson version
of events, or any other published confession. Indeed, the near-repro-
duction 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 hes-
itate 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 re-
gard. In 1985 Bryce explained why he and Hinde carried AK-47s—be-
cause 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 dedi-
cated, professional assassin whose version of events we must believe be-
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 assas-
sination 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? Cer-
tainly 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 con-
fessions that were published after 1985—confessions that the first edi-
tion 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 com-
missioners 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 Rhode-
sian 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 acciden-
tal 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
CHAPTER FOUR 75
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 in-
ternational ZANU, with its detainees’ defense committees in Lusaka,
England, and the U.S. These were the groups who heard, and articu-
lated, 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 au-
dience 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 de-
tainees were in Zambian jails. In their “Analysis” of the Report the de-
tainees—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 sanc-
tion 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 de-
tained, 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 pre-
sented his ideas about ethnic conflict. Describing how “misunderstand-
ings” 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
they firmly believed had the ear of the commission? However problem-
atic ZANU members found the Report, it seems to have created a dia-
logue between ZANU members in jail and those who were free in
Zambia. Washington Malianga, for example, had been defeated by Ru-
gare 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 testi-
mony, 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 iden-
tity 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 So-
viet Union.44 There were presumably many ZIPA cadres in Tanzania and
Mozambique in those months to whom the detainees would have want-
ed to speak.
A few weeks before Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba
were released, Jason Moyo of ZAPU joined Robert Mugabe in negotia-
tions that led to the creation of the Patriotic Front, an umbrella body
CHAPTER FOUR 77
that would negotiate for ZANU and ZAPU at peace conferences. Such
a front would hinder British and Rhodesian attempts to divide the free-
dom 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 Cen-
ter 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. Nev-
ertheless, detainees claimed that she wanted ZANU to arrange the fu-
neral, 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 bureau-
crats, 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 cere-
mony—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 Manica-
land—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
CHAPTER FIVE 79
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 author-
ities learned of the disappearances of two other ZANU members. A few
days after the funeral, Aaron Milner, Zambia’s Rhodesian-born minis-
ter 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 im-
mediately 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 self-
seeking maniacs” and there is “no justification” for blaming any ethnic
group. “Let us isolate the criminals and deal with them accordingly and
not as a single tribe.”10 Like Chitepo’s letters to the Malawian authori-
ties, these two statements are only contradictory if one insists on a sin-
gle 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 Chik-
erema’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 at-
tempt 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 ac-
knowledged 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 “disinforma-
tion to the Zambian Special Branch” that, early in 1975, Chitepo “be-
came 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 Tongo-
gara, 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
CHAPTER FIVE 81
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, not-
ing 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 multi-
national 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 cir-
cumstances leading up to it, Flower did not seem to command an at-
tentive audience in Zambia for anything he said about the assassination.
According to his published memoirs, in late 1975 and ’76 Flower be-
came distressed at the brutal treatment of Tongogara. When he received
what turned out to be a false report that Tongogara’s back had been bro-
ken during interrogation, he took “the unusual step” of contacting the
head of Zambia’s Special Branch, informing him that Rhodesia’s “disin-
formation 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 sug-
gested that the lawyer check with Zambia’s Special Branch, he later
learned that his “‘confession’” had gone unheeded, adding to “the gen-
eral 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 ques-
tions: one of the accuracy of his published memoirs, and the other of
how important—however accurately reported they might be—his ac-
tions were. I argue that Flower’s published memoirs reflect the compli-
cated 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
and some present, some in Zimbabwe and some in exile. Often his pub-
lished words contradict, or complicate, what he said at the time. In his
unpublished words to the Rhodesian Operations Co-ordinating Com-
mittee, Flower said his sources of information about the Chitepo assas-
sination 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 Chi-
tepo’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 cam-
paign 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 con-
temporary 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 success-
ful or unsuccessful it may have been, directed at Zambians, Zimbab-
weans in exile, or Rhodesians at home? Other Rhodesian texts, written
by men who did not have Flower’s access to Zambian authorities, de-
CHAPTER FIVE 83
scribed the Zambians’ lack of interest in truth, even when such an in-
terest 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 de-
tainees, 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 au-
thors and ZANU(PF) authors tell the same story. It is possible that they
may have been writing to address a wider audience than either Zim-
babweans 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 sophisti-
cated beyond the standards of those elsewhere in the region, an audi-
ence for whom ZANU was a noble foe temporarily suppressed by
Zambian misconduct. It is possible that the texts by Martin and John-
son and Stiff/Bryce share many details because they share a specific kind
of nationalist narrative, one in which Rhodesia became Zimbabwe de-
spite the clever covert actions of Rhodesia and the obstructions of Zam-
bian authorities.
Whatever Flower claimed to tell Zambians, Rhodesians at home—
and their admirers around the world—were fed another kind of disin-
formation 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 Com-
mission but quoted from the Report extensively, once to verify ethnic
strife within ZANU and once to show the inordinate ambition of Ton-
gogara.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
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 de-
nied 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 in-
tended 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, ar-
ticulates 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 atone-
ment”: such revelations are spectacles, of telling the truth, to be sure,
but spectacles nonetheless. These confessions set up an implicit audi-
ence, someone being confessed to, while the confession itself is unidi-
rectional: 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 sys-
tem of justice, and Michel Foucault’s ideas about confession. Foucault
sees confession and the telling of secrets as tools of increased surveil-
lance, the very techniques by which states extend their control over in-
dividual 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 dis-
closure 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-
CHAPTER FIVE 85
empower others, but what do these stories and confessions do to Rhode-
sian mythologies, and the locus of memories with no state? Do Rhode-
sian confessions invent a Rhodesia of successful secret agents, foolproof
assassinations, and military expertise, as both editions of See You in No-
vember might indicate? Do they make Rhodesia more powerful in mem-
ory than it ever was in practice?
My question, in short, is who is confessing to whom in this litera-
ture 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 national-
ity, 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 un-
known 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 out-
right.”23 Who was Flower speaking to with his passive voice? Two an-
swers, 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 discourag-
ing 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 in-
telligence that many in service to Rhodesia loathed.24 Nevertheless, one
Rhodesian soldier took Flower at his word and described the assassina-
tion of Chitepo as one of the colossal mistakes of Rhodesian counter-
insurgency. 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 chap-
ter, 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. Chi-
tepo’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, mili-
tarily, 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 un-
common in the Rhodesian now-it-can-be-told literature. Flower him-
self 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 iden-
tical 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 Rhode-
sians, however. Within a few months there were widespread reports that
Moyo had been killed by South Africa’s Bureau of State Security
CHAPTER FIVE 87
(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 automo-
bile accident in Zambia six days later.29 Publishing two years later,
Flower was equivocal, and made no definite claim for Rhodesian in-
volvement. 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 depic-
tion 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 hap-
pened? 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 op-
eratives 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 informa-
tion and disinformation seems to have conveyed any of these confes-
sions and absolutions to Tongogara, who was to go to his own un-
explained 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 Ton-
gogara at the front in Mozambique in mid-1978 he told them, “‘Kaunda
almost blackened my revolutionary name. I want it cleared after inde-
pendence.’ 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
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 pres-
idents 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. Ny-
erere 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 infor-
mation beyond that which was published in the Report.34 But whatever
testimony the commission heard—and whatever appeared in the Re-
port—may not have had much to do with the detainees’ eventual re-
lease 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 assas-
sins and the final outcome of the case were different issues. He pre-
sented 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 Ton-
gogara 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 ap-
proaching 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 Tan-
zanian 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
CHAPTER FIVE 89
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 tor-
ture: “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 Platts-
Mills 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 in-
tense public and international efforts at unity in the Zimbabwean lib-
eration struggle of which the release of the detainees was a part.38
Tongogara, Chimurenga, and Kufamadzuba were never tried; Kufa-
madzuba’s confession was deemed inadmissible because of police mis-
conduct 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 pres-
sures, the “political thing” that released the detainees, were anything
but secret. On 18 October Aaron Milner confirmed that Mudzi, Ha-
madziripi, Kangai, and Gumbo—none of whom had been formally ac-
cused of any crime in Zambia—had been released to attend the Geneva
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 al-
liances and betrayals that ground one analysis trouble another one.
Many in ZANU and in ZAPU claimed that Nkomo exerted the pres-
sure required to release Tongogara and the other dare members, includ-
ing 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 nego-
tiated 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 conversa-
tion 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 ex-
plain 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 mur-
der. Tongogara was killed on 26 December, the letter maintained, be-
cause 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,
CHAPTER FIVE 91
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 out-
raged 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 comman-
ders were then compromised. These same “poison pen ‘spoilers’” forged
the letter about Tongogara’s murder in a last-minute attempt to dis-
credit ZANU.49 Only Ken Flower seemed unwilling to connect Chi-
tepo’s death and that of Tongogara. Instead he worried that this par-
ticular untimely death put ZANLA under more direct control of the
ZANU(PF) leaders who opposed the cease-fire and wanted a field vic-
tory. 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 sat-
isfied 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 con-
clusions.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 dri-
ver 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 main-
tained, caused the accident.52 Even so, within ZANU there was a per-
sistent 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
spirits of the children he had had them abort.53 A year later the ZANU
representative in Swaziland told Masipula Sithole that perhaps Chi-
tepo’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 gov-
ernment 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 comrade-
ship” 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 offi-
cials 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 publi-
cation? Why does this murder come back to trouble Zimbabweans in
this third decade of their independence? Chitepo is not alone. Tongo-
gara’s ghost has occasionally been seen in and around Heroes Acres
since he was reburied there in 1980. In August 2001, as a pro-govern-
ment song called “Tongogara” was played on state radio, stories circu-
lated 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 assassi-
nations 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 pro-
moted, and some are silenced, some fall by the wayside and others ap-
pear in unlikely combinations, but how they are used and recycled cre-
ates new histories of political power.
In Zimbabwe today, the political world of the 1970s is now con-
tested as the founding moment of the nation. Independent Zimbabwe
bases much of its moral legitimacy on the liberation war, but that legit-
imacy 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-industrializa-
tion 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 vet-
erans of the liberation war have compounded the already chronic short-
age 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 in-
dependence, 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 veter-
ans had long complained about their pensions; not only was the amount
lower than that paid to former Rhodesian enlisted soldiers, but the sup-
port available to them seemed to devalue their contribution to the lib-
eration 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 lib-
eration struggle. The awards they received, and the ailments that enti-
tled 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 em-
powered 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 in-
juries.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
CHAPTER SIX 95
shaky legitimacy could not withstand repudiation by former guerillas.
But the funds needed to pay the war veterans were more than Zim-
babwe’s frail economy could manage. When Mugabe promised to reset-
tle 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 disas-
trous 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 re-
ceived veterans’ pensions than had been demobilized in 1980, for ex-
ample. 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, in-
clusive war narrative took hold in Zimbabwean political lore, as several
observers reconstructed Zimbabwe’s history in order to make every
1970s politician a guerilla. David Blair reinscribed Mugabe as a military
man. Mugabe had sent troops to the Congo, Blair wrote, to remind Zim-
babweans that he could do “what he once did best—commanding sol-
diers 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 fail-
ure 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 agree-
ment, stories of promises made and broken have taken hold in Zim-
babwe today: the silences and what Trouillot calls the inborn absences
of the agreement thus become the foundation of the new nation. In-
deed, all contemporary accounts of the deals made and unmade at Lan-
caster 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 confer-
ence stalled or broken up over the issue of compensation, and de-
manded that Mugabe give it up.15 During a BBC interview in 1990,
however, Mugabe took responsibility for “having to compromise on cer-
tain fundamental issues,” especially land. He regretted giving up his
party’s demands for land, he said, but he “got the concession . . . on de-
mocratic elections” and the cease-fire.16 Bond and Manyanya put it suc-
cinctly: 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 accusa-
tions of who had broken which 1979 promise, there was renewed inter-
est 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
CHAPTER SIX 97
ghosts, both men were portrayed as more heroic, more charismatic, and
more judicious figures than they had ever been considered in their life-
times. 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 Ton-
gogara 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 Chi-
tepo and Tongogara, although such accusations were not uncommon.19
Chitepo and Tongogara come back, as it were, to show that the presi-
dent 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 Zim-
babwe’s decline—land, failed promises, war veterans—it is not so dif-
ferent 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 Zam-
bia or Malawi, is that so much of the problem is attributed to specifically
Zimbabwean ideas about race, citizenship, loyalty, and politics. Never-
theless, 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, do-
minion 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 coun-
try can protect its national sovereignty. These questions have revolved
around the place of whites in the country, and the place of political par-
ties in protecting the country from foreign encroachments, since UDI
in 1965. That these ideas arouse Zimbabwe twenty-two years after ma-
jority 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 Zimbab-
wean 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”
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 in-
dependence . . . 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 gov-
ernment’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 be-
came 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 inter-
pretation at all. They do not contain words that serve as empty vessels
into which any contemporary debate can be inserted. Texts, and the ge-
nealogies 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 con-
tradictory 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 cir-
cumstances 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 mur-
der 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 Zim-
babwe Unity Movement (ZUM). In 1977 and ’78 he had been, along
with Josiah Tongogara, in charge of the repression of the so-called anti-
Mugabe “Gutu clique”—Gumbo, Mudzi, Chigowe, and Hamadziripi—
in Mozambique. In 1997 he told a Zimbabwean newspaper, “Chitepo’s
CHAPTER SIX 99
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 Zim-
babwe 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 secu-
rity, “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 be-
fore 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 Zam-
bia at the time: “I think he is doing this because he is desperate to be ac-
cepted 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 expe-
rience to his brief summary of the Report. More than a decade after
Stiff/Bryce, Martin and Johnson, and Flower had published their con-
fessions 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 be-
cause 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 Com-
mission 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
emotions and concerns of a nation struggling with, and struggling
against, history reduced to guerilla struggle or the high politics of nego-
tiating 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 ob-
tained 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 sur-
round 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 Com-
mission 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 Zim-
babweans who were active in politics in Zambia, whatever their polit-
ical 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 rein-
terpretations 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
CHAPTER SIX 101
existence is provocative.” Mugabe’s words were stronger: the MDC is
“implacably moored in the colonial yesteryear and embraces . . . the re-
pulsive 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 com-
mittee, 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 in-
troduced as if it were a textual version of Tongogara’s ghost, returning
to Zimbabwe to accuse the party of heinous crimes. Without any dis-
cussion 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 re-
sponsible, 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 Re-
port of course described a very different ZANU, one that was the break-
away 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 Re-
port powerful reading in 2001, and good for newspaper sales. Framed by
the newspaper as a way to think about ZANU(PF), the text itself de-
picts 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 fis-
sured 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 main-
taining discipline while rewarding relatives. According to the Report of
the Chitepo Commission, ZANLA guerillas mutinied because of in-
equality, indiscipline in the higher ranks, and punishment meted out
without justice or regard for the struggle. According to various Rhode-
sian confessions, Nhari and his men rebelled because Rhodesian opera-
tives 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 fair-
ness in the guerilla struggle. In the Rhodesian confessions, even those
authorized by ZANU(PF), cadres were easily manipulated, their strug-
gles orchestrated from outside the party and its promises. Many de-
scriptions 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 dis-
sension in the guerilla army and offer traces of a peace movement
within ZANLA. However flawed or unreliable these particular confes-
sions are, they stand in sharp contrast to war veterans’ claims of uniform
sacrifice and uniform entitlement, claims that have, as Richard Werb-
ner argues, provided a new foundation for citizenship based on partici-
pation 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 politi-
cians, 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 through-
out 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, un-
dermine 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 eu-
phemism, 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 Mo-
zambique 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 sin-
gle, territorial sovereign nation-state that has an equally singular his-
CHAPTER SIX 103
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 interna-
tional 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 Tan-
zanian government service—were not firmly rooted to a notion of ter-
ritorial 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 in-
sisted 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 cen-
tury 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 immi-
grated to Rhodesia during UDI to reapply for citizenship in the new,
black-ruled country.38 White farmers with longer histories in the coun-
try 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 lib-
eration 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
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 mi-
grants from Mozambique or Malawi and they neither possessed the pa-
perwork 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 slot-
ted neatly into the new either/or paradigms of race and loyalty in Zim-
babwe. 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 con-
ditions during colonialism were much worse” and that they should
thank ZANU(PF) for any improvements in their lot.41 Again, the over-
lapping 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 Chi-
tepo Commission, in which veterans—even in one party—were not a
unified group, citizenship hardly mattered at all, and race was no guar-
antee 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. What-
ever meaning the categories of Karanga, Manyika, and Zezeru had in
1975 and ’76 in exile, and whatever meaning they had within the coun-
try 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 liter-
ally black and white terms, some of that literalism has been bolstered by
years of talk about Shona ethnic categories. Those who theorized end-
lessly 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 im-
portant because any reexamination of his death forces a discussion of
CHAPTER SIX 105
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 pre-
sent-day politics. This, however, does not explain why there are so
many Rhodesian confessions to Chitepo’s murder, and why Zimbab-
weans 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 vio-
lence 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 Chi-
tepo’s assassination, as the importance of the SAS in them suggests. Fif-
teen 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 con-
nects 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 in-
stead 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-
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 dis-
unity in the liberation movement that was not directed by whites:
African unity was natural and unproblematic; there was a natural fit be-
tween 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 politi-
cians loyal to Rhodesia, such as Chief Chirau, were thought to be buf-
foons, 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 de-
grees, 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 mem-
bers 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) un-
less paid to do so did not begin in the liberation movement and its sev-
eral parties, of course. Whether it originated in the several Rhodesian
CHAPTER SIX 107
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 pol-
itics 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 ac-
counts 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 attrib-
uted 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 Af-
terlives (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 John-
son, 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 (Jo-
hannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1998), p. 226; Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Mid-
dle 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 Rebel-
lion (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 Ober-
holzer in July 1964,” History in Africa 24 (1997), pp. 273–83.
110 NOTES TO PAGES 7–11
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 (Blooming-
ton: 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 Septem-
ber 1997, p. 2; “Smith Joins Chitepo Assassination Debate,” Financial Gazette, 11 Sep-
tember 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 un-
less 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 His-
tory,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (2001), pp. 359–78; Ludo de Witte, The As-
sassination 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 Gil-
martin, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative,” Jour-
nal 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 Califor-
nia Press, 1995), p. 51.
19. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Ter-
ror 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 National-
ism 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 Zim-
babwe’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.
NOTES TO PAGES 11–19 111
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: Diplo-
macy and the Independence of Rhodesia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 78.
25. “Thousands Pay Last Respects to Chitepo,” Herald, 12 August 1981, p. 1; au-
thor’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 Zim-
babwe Press, 1995), vol. 1, pp. viii–x.
27. Carol B. Thompson, Challenge to Imperialism: The Frontline States and the Liber-
ation 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: In-
diana University Press, 2002), pp. 216–23; Joshua Nkomo, The Story of My Life (Lon-
don: 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; Mau-
rice 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 Libera-
tion 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 No-
vember 1965. Zambia Broadcasts re UDI, National Archives of Zimbabwe (hereafter in-
dicated 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 Sol-
diers 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. disserta-
tion, 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 In-
stitute of Historical Research, University of York (hereafter Borthwick Institute);
Nyagumbo, With the People, pp. 218–20; Nkomo, Story, pp. 150–51; Martin and John-
son, 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 No-
vember 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: “profes-
sional, 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 Re-
liable Source on 16.12.74 Re ZANU and the New ANC,” CAT/CH/3, Catholic Com-
mission 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 mor-
tar 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 Ter-
rorists Armed by Communists: Many Weapons Same as Those Used by Vietcong to Kill
Americans,” Rhodesian Information Office, Washington D.C., 1968, Zimbabwe Col-
lection, 1551/3/44, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Paresh Pandya, Mao Tse-
tung 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 Military-
Business 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 oc-
casionally 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.
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.
Publishing House, 1985), pp. 28–30.
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 doc-
ument 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: Counter-
insurgency 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 Com-
missioner, London, 20 January 1963, Roy Welensky Papers, 664/3, Rhodes House Li-
brary, 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 Chinyan-
ganya; 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 de-
tachment commander who later married Rex Nhongo. Many people, including Nhongo
and his wife, have resumed their “real” names (in their case, Solomon and Joyce Mu-
juru), 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 Zim-
babwe, 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-
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 well-
educated 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.
37. Conversation with author, 16 July 2001.
38. The Report of the Chitepo Commission did not mention Tungamirai’s abduc-
tion, 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, Strug-
gle for Zimbabwe, pp. 180–81.
39. “Kaunda’s Role”; Meredith, Another Country, 161.
40. This summary is from “Kaunda’s Role”; Special International Commission, Re-
port, 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; As-
trow, 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 cease-
fire 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 opera-
tions of the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland.
42. “Kaunda’s Role”; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 166; Special In-
ternational 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 discus-
sion 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
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 mystifi-
cations 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 Teu-
rai 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 Com-
mittee 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 dis-
tinguish 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 an-
swer; 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 Mem-
ory: 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 vio-
lence against police informers in the township, PAC headquarters in Johannesburg ad-
vised 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 (Johannes-
burg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2001), p. 64.
55. O/C SB, Centenary, to P. M. Stanton, Operation Hurricane, Terrorist Camps
and Routes within Mozambique, 9 May 1973, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Pa-
pers, 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 Feb-
ruary 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 Pa-
pers, 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 typ-
ical 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 Ter-
ror 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: Uni-
versity 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 Co-
ordinating 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 No-
vember 1975, Rhodesian Security Forces material donated by Michael Holman, corre-
spondent 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 Zim-
babwe, 1974–1980 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988), p. 55.
72. Flower’s report, Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Commit-
tee, Minutes, 27 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/
172(A)/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
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 Zim-
babwe (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, inter-
viewed 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 peo-
ple. . . . 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 John-
stone, 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.
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, Strug-
gle for Zimbabwe, pp. 176–77.
6. Flower’s report to Commanders’ Secretariat, Operations Co-ordinating Com-
mittee, Minutes, 27 March 1975, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/
172(A)/Box 146, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
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.
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 Hamil-
ton, 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 attrib-
uted 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, Mutamba-
nengwe, 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.
Publishing House, 1985), p. 45; “Kaunda’s Role”; Price of Detente, p. 13; author’s field
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 (Johan-
nesburg: 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; au-
thor’s field notes, 8, 24 July 2001.
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 num-
ber 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 Ar-
gentina’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, Judg-
ing the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Apartheid Legal Order (Ox-
ford: 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 Chi-
fombo 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
33. Hugh Macmillan and Frank Shapiro, Zion in Africa: The Jews of Zambia (Lon-
don: 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 Com-
mittee, 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.
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.
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 Mur-
der,” Zambia Daily Mail, 21 October 1976, p. 1.
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, Strug-
gle 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, Bul-
awayo, 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, Ide-
ology, 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.
51. Author’s field notes, 16, 24 July 2001.
52. “Zambia: Commission Findings Will Shock Africa,” Sunday News (Dar es Sa-
laam), 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 Nyan-
doro, 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 State-
ment by ZIPA, the New Zimbabwe Liberation Force (Richmond, B.C.: Liberation Support
Movement Press, 1976), p. 8.
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 Nyan-
doro, pp. 308–14. ZANU’s response to Sithole’s letter, written by another exile, a pro-
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-the-
Struggle, 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-ordinat-
ing Committee, 5 May 1976, Rhodesian Army Association Trust Papers, 2001/086/241/
Box 159, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
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, Ideol-
ogy, and Class in the Formation of a New African State” (Ph.D. dissertation, York Uni-
versity, 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 (Al-
berton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), pp. 15–16. Some Rhodesians call the day of Mu-
gabe’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 de-
stroyed 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
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 proxy-
confessor, 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 Ar-
rested,” 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 surveil-
lance 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 (Blooming-
ton: 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 sup-
porters 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: South-
ern 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, in-
cluding Laurens van der Post, a frequent fund-raiser with Stirling; see J. D. F. Jones, Sto-
ryteller: 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 lib-
eral whites. See West, African Middle Class, p. 198.
26. Speech of H. W. Chitepo, Salima, June 1956, Salima, RH Mss Afr 970, Capri-
corn 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 pri-
vate 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 Rhode-
sia, 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.
28. Martin and Johnson, Chitepo Assassination, p. 47; Moore, “Contradictory Con-
struction,” 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; Han-
cock, White Liberals, pp. 42–44; author’s field notes, 8 July 2001.
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 In-
stitute. 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.
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 John-
son, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 244.
45. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, pp. 257, 328.
Chapter Five

for Smith (London: Zimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Committee, mimeograph, 1976), p.
7; Peter Stiff, See You in November: Rhodesia’s No-Holds-Barred Intelligence War (Alber-
ton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), p. 138; David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Strug-
gle 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.
2. Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zimbabwe, p. 178; idem, The Chitepo Assassina-
tion (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, secretary-
general 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.
8. Martin Meredith, The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe (Lon-
don: 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 Se-
cretly: 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 Ton-
gogara 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 Octo-
ber 2001. When I asked Kaunda if Flower had indeed proclaimed Tongogara’s inno-
cence 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 Zim-
babwe, pp. 180–81. Tungamirai does not appear in the list of witnesses before the
Chitepo Commission, but several key witnesses, especially Kenneth Kaunda, were omit-
ted from it. Special International Commission on the Assassination of Herbert Wilt-
shire Chitepo, Report (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1976), p. 58.
20. Rhodesia Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fact Paper 2/77, “Rivalry and Factional-
ism among Rhodesian Nationalists,” and idem, Fact Paper 8/78, “Southern Africa—Re-
ality and the Viewpoint of Andrew Young,” both in Sterling Memorial Library, African
Collection, Group 605/63/1183 and Group 605/78/1453, Yale University.
21. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Ar-
gentina’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,” His-
tory 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, Ob-
servations 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 (Al-
berton, South Africa: Galago, 1982), p. 109.
26. Lt. Col. Ron Reid-Daly, Pamwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts (Welter-
vreden 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,” Her-
ald, 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 Ranchod-
Nilsson, 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.
33. Author’s field notes, 16, 24 July 2001.
34. Author’s field notes, 16 July 2001.
36. Judith Todd, NAZ/ORAL/unprocessed; Martin and Johnson, Struggle for Zim-
babwe, pp. 351–52.
37. Nkomo regarded Nyerere as having dismantled unity within the liberation strug-
gle to the point that, when he allowed ZIPRA cadres to train in Tanzania, they were in-
doctrinated against Nkomo’s bourgeois tendencies. See Nkomo, Story, pp. 158–62.
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 Mur-
der,” Zambia Daily Mail, 21 October 1976.
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.
44. Nkomo, Story, p. 160; author’s field notes, 18 July 2001; Sithole, Struggles-within-
the-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.
47. Pat Scully, Exit Rhodesia (Ladysmith, South Africa: Wescott, 1984), p. 171;
Nkomo, Story, pp. 201–202; Stiff, See You (1985), pp. 338–39.
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.
52. Author’s field notes, 1, 23 July 2001; Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, pp.
184–85.
54. Sithole, Struggles-within-the-Struggle, p. 184.
55. Norma J. Kriger, “The Politics of Creating National Heroes: The Search for Po-
litical 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.
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 National-
ism, 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 inde-
pendent Zimbabwe. In 1981 squatters occupied white-owned farms in central Zimbabwe.
The squatters were ordered to leave, but with such little compulsion that their occupa-
tions 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,
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 Davi-
dow.
15. M. Tamarkin, The Making of Zimbabwe: Decolonization in Regional and Interna-
tional 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.
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.
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 Vi-
olence, 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 Sep-
tember 1997, p. 2.
27. “Smith Joins Chitepo Assassination Debate,” Financial Gazette, 11 September
1997, p. 1.
28. Jonathan Moyo, 19 June 2000, quoted in Peter Stiff, Cry Zimbabwe: Indepen-
dence—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 Man-
yanya, 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 An-
thropology 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 gueril-
las’ 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: Ques-
tioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp.
229–36. For the membership of the London and Lusaka defense committees, which in-
cludes many of the people quoted in this chapter, see Martin and Johnson, Struggle for
Zimbabwe, pp. 351–52n.
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 Farm-
ers 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 Vio-
lence, 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 state-
ments.
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 (Al-
berton, South Africa: Galago, 1985), p. 148. There were many jokes about Chief Chi-
rau 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
NOTE TO PAGE 106 129
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 Chi-
rau 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,” unpub-
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48. Editorial, Herald, 20 June 2000, p. 10.
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INDEX
African National Council (ANC), 19, Dauramanzi, Charles, 26, 39, 52

60, 79, 112n9 Davidson, Basil, 89
death lists, 26, 30, 42–43, 44, 78,
Badza, Dakarai, 19, 20, 22, 27. See also 118n12
Nhari, Thomas, and Nhari rebellion Dovi, Alec, 45, 50
Banda, Hastings, 43 Dziruni, Nelson, 26, 39, 40, 42–43, 75
Baron, Leo Solomon, 80–81, 88, 89, 103
Bond, James, 24, 113n31 Edden, Michael, 28–29, 35, 105
Britain, 5, 96 ethnicity, 16, 46–47, 49, 55–59, 60, 71,
British South Africa Company, 4 79, 83–85
Bryce, Taffy, 35, 50, 68, 74. See also Stiff,
Peter Flower, Ken, 20, 23, 28, 34, 35–37, 60,
80, 81–87, 102, 105
Capricorn Africa Society (CAS), 16, FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of
68–69, 70. See also liberalism Mozambique), 20, 36–37, 90
Carrington, Lord Peter, 96 FROLIZI (Front for the Liberation of
Central African Federation, 4, 17, 69 Zimbabwe), 17, 49, 55, 59, 60, 75
Central African Party, 16
Chigowe, Cletus, 26, 30–31, 32–33, 42, Great Britain, 5, 96
43, 45, 50, 53, 75, 101 Gumbo, Rugare, 18, 25, 27, 28, 39, 43,
Chikerema, James, 49, 54, 79–80, 83, 50, 51, 52, 54, 58, 89–90, 101
116n58
Chikowore, Enos, 23 Hamadziripi, Henry, 18, 42, 43, 50, 58,
Chimurenga, Joseph, 26, 39, 52, 53, 81, 101
89, 99 Heroes Acres, 14, 92, 93
Chinese aid, 20–21, 21, 22, 23, Hinde, Chuck, 62, 65–66, 68, 69–70, 72,
112nn16–17, 113n18 74, 83
Chirau, Chief Jeremiah, 106 Holland, Sekai, 24, 39, 42
Chitepo, Herbert, 1, 2, 3–4, 6–8, 12, 14, Hove, Richard, 12, 24–25, 39, 40, 42
16, 17, 18, 19, 28, 39, 41, 42, 43–48, Huggins, Godfrey, 4
52, 55, 67–68, 69–70, 71, 72–76, 78, Hunzvi, Chenjerai “Hitler,” 95, 101,
85, 92, 96–97 127n9
Chitepo, Victoria, 3, 69, 78, 92, 103
Chitepo Commission, 48, 49, 51, 53–54, informers, 29, 30–33, 37–39, 80, 82–85,
55–56, 60, 74. See also Report of 106, 115n51, 116n58
Chitepo Commission
Chung, Fay, 23, 89 Kangai, Kumbirai, 18, 25, 27, 28, 39, 50,
CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence 78, 89–90, 101
Agency), 33, 60, 112n17 Kaunda, Kenneth, 17, 48–49, 50, 78, 79,
CIO (Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence 81. See also Zambia
Organization). See Flower, Ken, and “Kaunda’s Role in Detente,” 22, 23, 26,
Rhodesia’s CIO 27, 49, 51
Khama, Seretse, 18
dare. See ZANU war council (dare) Kissinger, Henry, 18
138 INDEX
Kufamadzuba, Sadat, 1, 44–45, 49, Nhari, Thomas, 17, 19, 20–21, 22–27,
51–52, 65, 83, 89 28–29, 30, 35–38, 39–40, 41, 102,
113n31, 114n34, 114–115n43
Lancaster House negotiations, 13, 77, Nhongo, Rex, 17, 24, 27, 50, 52, 76, 79,
95, 96, 98, 103 113n31
letters, 43–44, 45–46, 47–48, 71 Nkomo, Joshua, 16, 32, 54, 79, 81, 90,
liberalism, 16, 61, 70, 71. See also 96
Capricorn Africa Society (CAS) Nyandoro, George, 49, 54
Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Nyerere, Julius, 3, 50, 56, 57, 69, 88, 89.
Holding Company, Ltd.), 18, 23, 26 See also Tanzania
Machel, Samora, 50, 57, 76, 88, 90. See Organization of African Unity (OAU),
also Mozambique 16, 17–18, 24
Machingura, Dzinashe, 25, 26, 27, 44,
56, 57, 76 Platts-Mills, John, 88–89
McLaughlin, Sister Janet, 87
Madekurozwa, Edgar, 27, 39, 40, 41, regionalism. See ethnicity
42–43, 53, 75, 79 Reid-Daly, Ron, 86
Malianga, Washington, 76 Report of Chitepo Commission, 7, 8, 20,
Manyika, Robson, 17, 27, 44, 52, 53 25–28, 42, 44, 45–46, 51, 99–100, 101.
Mataure, John, 24–25, 26, 27, 39, 40, 41, See also Chitepo Commission
42–43, 50, 79 Rhodesia, 4–5, 17, 20, 22, 23, 28, 35,
Maxey, Kees, 89 37–38, 50, 60, 62, 63, 65, 83, 85, 86,
Milner, Aaron, 17, 50, 79, 89, 103 102, 103, 105–107
Movement for Democratic Change Rhodesian agents. See informers
(MDC), 94, 100–101, 105 Rhodesian Front (RF), 4, 5
Moyo, Dick, 50, 79 Rhodesia’s CIO, 20, 23, 28–29, 34,
Moyo, Jason, 18, 34, 76–77, 86–87, 92 35–38, 60, 63, 80, 81–87, 121n7. See
Moyo, Jonathan, 98, 100–101, 105 also Flower, Ken
Mozambique, 2, 19, 76. See also FRE- Rowland, Tiny, 23, 49, 81
LIMO (Front for the Liberation of Rusheshe, Opah, 91
Mozambique); Machel, Samora Russian aid, 17, 21, 22, 23, 112n15
Mpunzarima, Patrick, 52
Mubako, Simbi, 30 Sanyanga, Cornelius, 23, 26, 39, 40, 42,
Mudzi, Mukudzei, 27, 28, 41, 50, 58, 49, 50, 54, 57, 75, 92
89–90, 99, 101 Shamiso, Silas, 1, 26, 45, 50
Mugabe, Robert, 12, 16, 19, 21, 33, 48, Sithole, Edson, 23
60, 76–77, 79, 94–96, 97–98, 105, Sithole, Masipula, 22, 58–59, 80
112n15 Sithole, Rev. Ndabaningi, 16, 18–19, 22,
Mukono, Noel, 18, 39, 40, 42, 50 27, 38, 56, 57–59, 113n28, 114n40
Musalapasi, Enos “Short,” 52 Smith, Ian, 18, 44, 78, 99, 106, 118n12
Mutambanengwe, Simpson, 39, 40, 42, Southern Rhodesia, 4. See also
43, 44, 50, 54, 60 Rhodesia
Mutumbuka, Dzingai, 23 Soviet aid, 17, 21, 22, 23, 112n15
Muzenda, Simon, 101 Special Air Services (SAS), 62, 63, 68,
Muzorewa, Bishop Abel, 5, 19, 45, 69, 105
49, 78 Stiff, Peter, 62–65, 72–74, 78, 83, 86–87,
Mwaanga, Vernon, 45 109n9
Stirling, David, 68, 69, 70
National Democratic Party (NDP), Sutherland, Ian, 63, 64–65, 66, 74
3, 16
Ndangana, William, 26, 39 Takawira, Leopold, 16, 69
Nhari rebellion, 22–23, 25, 27, 28–29, Tanzania, 3, 17, 24, 56. See also Nyerere,
35–36, 39, 101, 105, 114n34 Julius
INDEX 139
Tekere, Anne, 33, 58 ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National
Tekere, Edgar, 16, 58, 98–99 Liberation Army), 20, 21, 22, 25,
Todd, Garfield, 62 28–29, 37, 76, 79–80. See also Nhari
Todd, Judith, 89 rebellion
Tongogara, Josiah, 18, 20, 24, 26, 27, 35, ZANU (Zimbabwe African National
39, 43, 50–51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, Union), 2, 3, 5, 16–17, 18–19, 25, 26,
78, 79, 81, 85, 87, 89, 90–91, 92, 93, 41, 42–43, 44, 50, 51, 53–54, 55, 74,
96–97, 99, 101 77, 78, 79, 80, 94, 100–101, 118n12
tribalism. See ethnicity ZANU war council (dare), 18, 55, 57–58
Tungamirai, Josiah, 20, 24, 26, 83, ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s
114n38 Union), 5, 16, 17, 17–18, 24, 26, 44,
60, 75, 76, 77, 118n12
Unilateral Declaration of Independence Zimbabwe, 5, 22, 23, 94, 95, 96, 97,
(UDI), 4–5, 17 103–104
United Federal Party, 16 Zimbabwe, historiography of, 9–10,
Unity Accord, 18, 19, 26, 112n9 11–13, 36–37, 61–62, 67, 69–72, 95,
96, 97, 99–100, 102–103, 105–107
Walls, Peter, 91 Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, 5
war veterans, 94, 95, 102, 104 ZIPA (Zimbabwe People’s Army), 57, 76,
77
Zambia, 17, 23, 28, 41, 48, 49, 50, ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s
51–52, 53, 67, 80. See also Kaunda, Revolutionary Army), 14, 87, 90
Kenneth 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.

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