Zimbabwe: its history and fight for independence

The land of Zimbabwe was settled by the British in 1890 and named Rhodesia after its founder, Cecil John Rhodes, who believed that the British had the right of imperial rule in Africa because they were the “first race in the world and therefore the more of the world they inhabited, the better it would be for the human race”. It is this ideology which served as the basis of the discriminatory colonial policies that were set up to serve the interests of the white minority which had settled most of the best land in the country, and excluded the African majority who had virtually no rights in their own land. These policies led to the demand for change by the Africans within the limitations of the colonial constitution and when this did not work, the African nationalists became more radical when they realised that violence and bloodshed were inevitable if there was to be any change in the country. It was the stress of this oppression that forced the people of Zimbabwe to take up arms as the only solution to their problems. The armed struggle was led by two political parties namely the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) which had splintered from ZAPU. These two nationalist organisations got a lot of support from external forces which contributed to the success of the liberation movement in Zimbabwe.

These external forces consisted mainly of neighbouring independent African states – known as the frontline states, other armed liberation movements in neighbouring countries, and the Communist bloc led by China and the Soviet Union. The Communist bloc through the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U.) gave aid to the Zimbabwean liberation movements in the form of arms and money. Some also provided training for the liberation combatants within their territories such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Algeria, and Tanzania. These countries further provided instructors who trained the recruits in the camps who had come from Zimbabwe to join the struggle for majority rule. Furthermore, organisations such as the United Nations, the World Council of Churches and certain left-wing organisations in the west and in Scandinavia gave moral and financial support.

The Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) was the armed wing of ZAPU which was formed in the 1960s and had camps in Angola and in Lusaka, Zambia which were provided by the Zambian government to help in the liberation of their fellow Africans in Zimbabwe. ZIPRA’s crossing points to and from Zimbabwe were at Feira in Zambia opposite Mashonaland East. It was more influenced by the Soviet Union than by China as it adhered to Marxist-Leninist principles of mobilising the urban workers rather than the Maoist principles of mobilising the rural peasantry pursued by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the military wing of ZANU. ZIPRA was also in a formal alliance with Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress in South Africa. In the mid-1960s, these two allied organisations mounted a celebrated mission into Southern Rhodesia, although this mission was not militarily successful. This mission, known as the Wankie fiasco, saw several hundred ZIPRA and MK freedom fighters enter Rhodesia through the uninhabited areas of Wankie and these were either killed or captured by a joint Rhodesian-South African force. Other countries, such as North Korea, had its military officials train the Zimbabwean freedom fighters how to use explosives and arms at a camp near Pyongyang.

ZANLA, on the other hand, was formed in 1965 in Tanzania and was heavily influenced by the Maoist guerrilla tactics that had been used very successfully by FRELIMO in Mozambique, that is, by infiltrating combatants into Zimbabwe, politicising the peasantry, and participating in ‘hit-and-run’ ambush operations. Even before Mozambique’s independence from Portugal, FRELIMO had supported ZANLA by allowing it to use the territory it controlled in Tete district along the Rhodesian border as a base of operations against the Rhodesian government. Because of its close ties with Mozambique’s FRELIMO, ZANLA gained a lot of support after Mozambique’s independence when its government permitted ZANLA to open training and supply camps along the Mozambican-Zimbabwean border which greatly assisted in the recruitment and training of troops.

The OAU member states’ meetings and resolutions concerning the white minority regime in Rhodesia induced Britain to push the United Nations to invoke mandatory sanctions against Rhodesia in 1968. However, these sanctions had many failings which included: the long period of time which had elapsed since Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1961 which had enabled the white regime to make adjustments and arrangements for the evasion of sanctions; the refusal of South Africa and Portugal to apply sanctions by continuing normal trade with Rhodesia and acting as go-betweens to market its goods and import on its behalf; and the general lack of political will on the part of most members of the United Nations to make sanctions work effectively. These sanctions against Rhodesia, although they did not work, helped to give a moral boost to the liberation movements in Zimbabwe, because despite the internal divisions within it, the OAU supported their fellow Africans in their struggle for freedom. Through its Liberation Committee, the OAU co-ordinated the material and financial support sent to the liberation movements in Zimbabwe from independent African states and from abroad. It also sought to reconcile the differences between ZANU and ZAPU, the main revolutionary groups in Zimbabwe so as to unify their forces against the common enemy. Both ZANU and ZAPU had gotten embroiled in the struggle within the Communist bloc between China and the Soviet Union about the latter’s leadership of the bloc. Each of these nationalist movements had adopted the communist doctrines of its main sponsor, such that ZAPU had adopted those of the Soviet Union while ZANU had adopted those of China. This resulted in the difficulty that kept these movements apart as well as various battles between their military wings.

The coup against the Salazar regime in Portugal in 1974 and its subsequent decolonisation policy helped the liberation movement in Zimbabwe a great deal because the white minority government lost one of its most important outlets for its exports namely, the ports of Mozambique. This coup also shocked the white regime and its main ally, South Africa, into the realisation that the African liberation movements could, through long and sustained armed struggle, force a colonial power to decolonise. This led the government of South Africa to adopt a more conciliatory approach to its relations with the newly independent black African states as well as its commitment to a political solution to the crisis in Rhodesia. South Africa was in a key position to influence Rhodesia because its roads and railways were the lifeline of the Rhodesian economy and as such was the only government in the region that was capable of putting pressure on it. The moderation of the policies of its chief ally towards its enemies led the embattled Rhodesian government to start negotiations with the African nationalists in Zimbabwe and finally to the beginning of majority rule in the country.