Online Reporter
Amb Christopher Mutsvangwa
COMRADE Shumba Nyamukwati, also known as Ambassador John Mvundura, paid a heavy price to transform ZANLA at Tembwe Base.
He was victimised and imprisoned in “Pidigu” alongside ex-University of Rhodesia student recruits, including Cdes Willard “Zororo” Duri, John “Mandebvu” Mayowe, Dr Masimba “Mamvura” Mwazha, Ambassador Christopher “Che Guevara” Mutsvangwa and the late Neville “Malcolm X” Hoko.
The accusation against them was being branded as “spies”.
We, who voluntarily joined the struggle inspired by the 1974 Samora Machel-led FRELIMO victory, were falsely viewed as spies.
Traditionally, recruitment occurred through the voluntary acceptance of an initiative by a battlefield comrade at the frontlines.
However, the influx of willing recruits from schools and towns across the border into Mozambique baffled and unsettled the dominant trained cadres at Tembwe.
There were also overtones of the wayward Muzorewa and Sithole irredentism being abused as it was turned into collective mass accusation with petty regionalist agendas.
We were mercilessly whipped and tortured with burning cigarettes as we were asked to confess to imagined charges of espionage generated by wartime vices of insecurity, fear and jealousy at the advent of overwhelming numbers coming through Manicaland.
Ambassador Mvundura and Duri were particularly targeted for their unwavering refusal to yield.
I coyly and expeditiously “confessed” after a week of penury, only to be trumpeted as a converted spy ready to be forgiven and thus be re-incorporated to bona fide ZANLA ranks.
I had quickly seen through the personal limitations of our tormenting comrades.
More so because we had absconded from a multiracial institution that we shared with Rhodesian whites.
We were thus lumped together into the rubric of an African sellout.
Perversely understandable.
They had been targets of and seen the population being victimised by murderous Selous Scouts and other elements of the Rhodesian army marauding between 1969 and 1975 in the north-east offensive against a ZANLA that had embedded itself with the masses.
The baffling question was how students who shared class and dormitory with hated and hateful Rhodesian whites left comfort for the rigours of war.
They could not fathom that the fruits of their military success had inspired and aroused the whole nation to unprecedented sacrificial militancy in the wake of the 1974 FRELIMO victory in neighbouring Mozambique.
Back to the Tembwe Military Training Base.
What saved our dire plight was the arrival of well-trained and better-enlightened ZIPA cadres from Mgagao after their famous Declaration rescued the struggle by resuming the war on a larger scale.
The take-away is that the moulding of ZANLA to be a force it became was a long, tortuous and painful journey as disparate youths sought to find each other.
It needs be recalled that eight decades of penance and penitence to the military supremacy of the British Empire had stripped us of any shred of military virility.
The 1960s-1970s saw us stumble back to the recovery and reconstruction of our military potency through ZANLA and ZIPRA.
The road was riddled with thorns and stones as we struggled to find each other to knit into a coherent and disciplined guerrilla army that would bring down the enemy at epic battles like Mavonde and Mapai.
In essence, we crossed the river by feeling the pebbles, as we had no standard manual that could serve as a military tradition. This had been dispensed with by a near century of imperial and colonial subjugation.
Along the way, we had to overcome our struggles within the struggle through lessons from the venerable revolutionary Amílcar Cabral and fellow PAIGC guerrilla national liberation movement of the then-Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.
Once the Mgagao cadres freed us at Tembwe, we happily and eagerly went through training. The subsequent joint deployment with our errant and misguided tormentors did not deter nor hinder us.
We proceeded to deal telling blows to the enemy and tame Kissingerite Detente Diplomacy to abort the Zimbabwe Chimurenga-Mvukela armed struggle.
The 1976 Geneva Conference on Zimbabwe was the first diplomatic signpost that the struggle had embedded and jelled into a ravaging people’s war. The politico-military formula spawned by national chairperson Herbert Chitepo; Josiah Magama Tongogara, the military genius; Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo; and Nikita Mangena, among many other luminaries of the Zimbabwe guerrilla warfare, had begot a “terrible new beauty” of military virility, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, speaking on the republican power of Irish nationalism.
This was also a ringing vindication of pioneer volunteers of the militant agenda of ZAPU and ZANU as they morphed into armed national liberation movements.
Our current Head of State, President ED Mnangagwa, is a survivor of that generation of intrepid youths who set the vision of our revived military virility.
Comrade Shumba Nyamukwati, aka Ambassador Mvundura, is an outstanding cadre and an archetype of the 1970s Samora Machel-Soweto Generation of abundant mass militants who delivered bountiful recruits to the national liberation movements of the sub-region.
He is of the firebrand generation that was the inflection point of “quantity to quality” in the evolution of the Chimurenga-Mvukela national liberation movement.
The unavoidable birth pangs and other pitfalls, such as at the Tembwe Military Base, only served to temper him and instil willpower in battle.
He epitomises that inflection point of the leap from quantity to quality in the evolution of Chimurenga-Mvukela national liberation war.
The road to the creation of the only African guerrilla army that humbled the Rhodesian army — the cat’s paw of the British Imperial Army, succoured by the biggest empire of the world — had its litany of stars.
Ambassador Mvundura is one such.
The youth of posterity can only draw inspiration as we mould a highway to Vision 2030 of President Mnangagwa and the prospect of an upper middle-income society status.
Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa is the ZANU PF Secretary for Information and Publicity.
