The African nationalist movement in Southern Rhodesia was formed, banned, reformed under a new name, banned again, and split — all within eight years. By the time UDI was declared in November 1965, both of its parties were proscribed and virtually their entire leadership was in detention or exile, where most of it stayed for the following decade.
That sequence explains a great deal about the war and about what came after it. A movement whose leaders spend ten years in prison camps while its armies are commanded by younger men in foreign countries develops particular habits: a suspicion of rivals sharpened by confinement, a chain of authority that runs through exile capitals rather than through any domestic institution, and a generation of commanders whose formative experience is war rather than politics.
The parties
The Southern Rhodesia African National Congress was refounded on the 12th of September 1957 — the anniversary of the Pioneer Column's arrival, which was the point — bringing together the old Bulawayo congress tradition under Joshua Nkomo with the Salisbury City Youth League that had run the 1956 bus boycott. It was banned in February 1959 under a state of emergency, and some five hundred members were detained.
The National Democratic Party followed in January 1960, with Nkomo as president and a younger executive including Ndabaningi Sithole, Herbert Chitepo — the country's first African barrister — and Robert Mugabe, a teacher recently returned from Ghana. It was banned in December 1961, nine months after Nkomo had provisionally accepted the 1961 constitution and been forced by his own membership to repudiate it.
The Zimbabwe African People's Union was formed within days of the NDP's banning, with the same leadership. It was banned in September 1962. Its successors thereafter operated from outside the country or not at all.
Three organisations in five years, each a continuation of the last under a new name, each banned within about eighteen months. The pattern taught the movement that legal political activity inside Rhodesia had no future, and it is the immediate cause of the turn to armed struggle.
The split
In August 1963 ZAPU broke in two, and the break was never repaired.
The stated cause was Nkomo's leadership: his handling of the 1961 constitution, a proposal to run the movement from exile in Dar es Salaam that his critics regarded as abandoning the country, and a general sense among the younger executive that four years of bannings had produced no strategy. Sithole, Mugabe, Chitepo, Leopold Takawira and Edgar Tekere announced the Zimbabwe African National Union on the 8th of August 1963. Nkomo retained ZAPU and the loyalty of most of Matabeleland.
Underneath the political quarrel were structural differences that hardened over time. ZAPU's support base was Ndebele and its foreign patrons Soviet and East German, and ZIPRA was accordingly built towards a conventional army — brigades, armour, anti-aircraft, a plan for a regular offensive. ZANU's base was Shona and its patrons Chinese, and ZANLA adopted Maoist protracted people's war: political commissars, the mobilisation of the rural population, the all-night pungwe meeting, and a long campaign of infiltration rather than a decisive battle.
The two movements fought each other. There was serious inter-party violence in the townships in 1963 and 1964, clashes between their armies in the field in 1976 and again in 1979, and a mutual distrust that survived independence and produced Gukurahundi. Attempts at unity — the Joint Military Command, the Patriotic Front of 1976, the ZIPA experiment of 1975–76 — were brokered by the Front Line presidents and none of them held.
Detention
In 1964 Ian Smith's government detained the entire domestic leadership of both parties. Nkomo, Sithole, Mugabe, Takawira, Enos Nkala, Maurice Nyagumbo and others were held at Gonakudzingwa in the south-eastern lowveld, at Wha Wha, at Sikombela and at Salisbury prison. Most of them were not released until late 1974.
Ten years is a long time, and what happened inside the camps shaped the country afterwards. Gonakudzingwa and Sikombela became political schools: the detainees taught each other, ran courses, took correspondence degrees. Mugabe collected three degrees by post from detention and taught other prisoners. Takawira died in detention in 1970 of undiagnosed diabetes, which the movement attributed to deliberate neglect.
Authority also changed hands inside. In 1969 the ZANU detainees at Salisbury deposed Sithole as party leader — he had, under interrogation and at his trial, renounced violence in terms his colleagues regarded as a capitulation — and elected Mugabe in his place. The decision was taken in a prison by men with no access to the party's army, and its legitimacy was contested for years; Sithole continued to claim the leadership, and the confusion it created was a live problem at Lancaster House a decade later.
Meanwhile the external wings ran the war. Chitepo chaired ZANU from Lusaka and was assassinated by a car bomb there in March 1975; Josiah Tongogara commanded ZANLA and died in a road accident in Mozambique days after Lancaster House, in December 1979. Neither man lived to see independence, and both were of a stature that might have altered what followed.
Beginning the war
The armed struggle began badly and took a decade to become serious.
The conventional starting point is the Battle of Sinoia on the 28th of April 1966, when a ZANLA group of seven was intercepted and killed by Rhodesian police and air support. It is commemorated in Zimbabwe as Chimurenga Day and was, militarily, a total defeat. The infiltrations of the later 1960s — including joint ZIPRA and South African ANC operations in the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns of 1967 and 1968 — were similarly destroyed, because armed groups crossing the Zambezi into territory where the population had not been prepared were simply reported and hunted down.
The lesson learned, chiefly by ZANLA, was that the population had to come first. From about 1969 cadres were sent in to organise rather than to fight: to hold meetings, recruit mujibas as scouts and couriers, work through spirit mediums whose authority in the Shona countryside long predated the settlers, and build a base in the north-east where the Portuguese collapse in Tete province was opening a route.
The war proper begins on the 21st of December 1972 with the attack on Altena Farm in Centenary district, and its character was set by what had been done in the three years before it. The next chapters take up the war itself.
End of Chapter V