The Portuguese started pushing the Muslims out of Mozambique and wrested control of Mozambique Island from them in 1505. In 1522 they built a chapel on the island, which they named the Capela de Nossa Senhora do Baluarte (Chapel of Our Lady of the Rampart), the oldest European building in the southern hemisphere, which is still standing today. When trade started drying up in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese lost interest in the interior and Tete Province.
Centuries later, in the late 1960s, operating from Zambia, an anti-Portuguese liberation group, FRELIMO (an acronym for Frente de Libertação de Moçambique – ‘Freedom Front of Mozambique’), had penetrated deep into Tete Province and consolidated their position. This did not seem to bother the Portuguese, who were content with merely protecting the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric facility on the Zambezi. With Tete forming a 350-kilometre border with Rhodesia, from Kanyemba in the west to just south of Nyamapanda in the east, the Rhodesian government was very uncomfortable about the idea of FRELIMO running free in the province.
The Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) was also concerned about a change in FRELIMO’s modus operandi. ‘FRELIMO had switched from their prime objective of attacking Cahora Bassa to politicising the population and they were systematically eliminating all the tribal chiefs north of the Zambezi,’ recalled CIO head Ken Flower in his memoirs.
It became obvious that if the Portuguese failed to contain FRELIMO in Tete, ZANU and ZAPU would move in, perhaps even threatening Manica Province to the south. This concern led to high-level talks between the two governments and set in train a Rhodesian military involvement in Mozambique that would last for the rest of the war.
In December 1968, under strict secrecy, four Alouette helicopters of the RhAF led by Norman Walsh landed in the small hamlet of Bene on the Luangua Grande River, just off the main road linking Tete town with Zambia. Bene is very close to Tembue, the site of a ZANLA camp that would be the second target – known as Zulu 2 – during Operation Dingo, nine years later. Peter Petter-Bowyer, flying one of the Alouettes, remembers Bene only for its stench. The camp ‘architect’ had done one thing properly: he put the communal toilet downwind of the camp, but, unfortunately, it was right next to the helicopter LZ.
‘The latrine arrangement,’ recalls PB, ‘was one single trench line about 45 metres in length, over which a continuous wooden seat was set with at least 30 holes for users, who were afforded no privacy.’ It was so bad that the Rhodesians arranged daily ‘toilet flights’ in an Alouette to a nearby bald granite dome. The rock is part of the Granitos Castanhos range, which aptly translates as ‘brown granite’. The Portuguese were shocked at the eccentricity of these strange Anglo-Saxon types who used an expensive helicopter to go for a crap.
Nothing they saw in Bene impressed the Rhodesians much, except for one piece of military kit: a 20-mm light cannon fitted to a Portuguese Alouette helicopter. The reason the cannon attracted such interest was that shooting a moving target from a moving platform with a machine gun is very difficult. But a cannon firing high-explosive shells that explode on impact and deliver shrapnel over a good radius reduces the need for pinpoint accuracy. This weapon was truly impressive, but it would take another four years for Rhodesia to circumvent the arms embargo and acquire the French-made weapon. This cannon turned the Alouette into one of the deadliest air-to-ground weapons of the war.
The objective of the operation, codenamed Operation Natal, was for the Rhodesians to help the Portuguese reverse FRELIMO’s gains in Tete. An RLI captain, Ron Reid-Daly, who had served with Peter Walls in the Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS) in Malaya and would later command the Selous Scouts, was one of the first infantry officers to work closely with the Portuguese in Tete. The Portuguese army serving in Mozambique were mainly conscripts from Portugal, whereas most of the Rhodesian servicemen were born in Africa and believed their future lay in the continent. Despite cultural differences, well illustrated by the daily toilet trips to the Granitos Castanhos, and very different ways of seeing and doing things, the Rhodesians were determined to make it work.
And they did. Clandestine Rhodesian military involvement in Mozambique began in 1968. Sometimes the Rhodesians combined with the Portuguese, but often they were on their own. The SAS were the first troops deployed in Mozambique, initially to help the Portuguese track FRELIMO, and later to attack FRELIMO directly.
The Rhodesians would make life a lot tougher for FRELIMO.
It had taken Josiah Tongogara years to persuade Herbert Chitepo and the ZANU politicians of the need to wage war in three distinct and sequential phases – firstly, politicising the peasants, then engaging in hit-and-run battles to stretch the Rhodesians, before finally moving to conventional battles. The Dare reChimurenga eventually endorsed Tongogara’s plan in 1971, allowing him to begin Phase 1, which involved covertly infiltrating ZANLA insurgents into north-eastern Rhodesia through Mozambique’s Tete Province.
Before Tongogara could dispatch his men into Tete, he first needed permission from FRELIMO, who were fighting an escalating battle with the Portuguese. FRELIMO had consolidated their position in Tete to the point that they were agreeable to the idea of Rhodesian guerrilla forces using Tete to enter north-eastern Rhodesia.
Much to Tongogara’s frustration, however, FRELIMO invited its natural ally, ZAPU, to open a new front in the north-east. Meanwhile, the ZAPU war council was paralysed by a rift, with politician James Chikerema on one side, and military leader Jason Moyo on the other. Preoccupied with this power struggle, ZAPU ignored the offer of a new front in Mozambique, a move that would prove to be a massive strategic error. Zimbabwean history might have been very different had ZAPU accepted FRELIMO’s offer.
Reluctantly, FRELIMO allowed ZANU to use Tete and work with them to gain war experience and learn how to organise the peasant population.
By late 1971, Tongogara was ready to begin Phase 1. On the night of 4 December 1971, Amon Zindoga and Justin Chauke were the first ZANLA commissars to cross the Rhodesian border in the north-east, near Mukumbura, beating a pathway that thousands would follow in the years to come.
Politicising large groups of people without attracting the attention of the Rhodesians would be a challenge, but for ZANLA there was a very effective way around this problem – the
pungwe
.
For centuries, the
pungwe
, a gathering of people at night, was a time of spiritual encounter between families and clans, on the one hand, and on the other, it provided contact with the spiritual ancestors, who offer security, guidance, healing and renewal. The
pungwe
became especially significant during times of strife and hardship.
Titus Presler, a scholar of Shona customs and culture, writes in his book
Transfigured Night: Mission and Culture in Zimbabwe’s Vigil Movement
: ‘The pungwe is a flexible but formative ritual phenomenon in Shona life. It is a movement of wilderness nights during which the people engage the major spiritual struggles of their lives, gain victory and so make of the wilderness a garden.’
The guerrillas exploited the
pungwe
to great effect, using this age-old ritual as a means to preach the politics of ZANU while promising to restore the ‘wilderness’ of their overcrowded and overgrazed farm plots to a vast ‘garden’ of fertile land taken back from the white people.
Usually, the
pungwe
consisted of an all-night vigil of drumming and singing liberation songs, interspersed with breaks for political speeches. The singing and drumming would usually last until first light. By combining spiritual, political and military concerns, ZANU had tapped the mother lode.
The Rhodesians struggled to come to grips with Tongogara’s strategy, and it would eventually pave the way for a landslide election victory for Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party in 1980. The
pungwe
would be resurrected in a sinister form, but to great effect, long after the war was over to keep Mugabe in power for decades to come.
ZANLA copied many of FRELIMO’s politicisation methods, and a number of Portuguese words entered the Shona language, such as
povo
(the populace/peasants) and
parara
(go to). Every encounter with peasants started with the chanting of simple slogans extolling the ideals of the struggle and condemning the enemy. The slogans would soon become a greeting ritual. Typically, the guerrilla commander or commissar would chant
pamberi nehondo
(long live the war of liberation). The peasants would respond
pamberi
(long live). After a host of
pamberi
chants, it was time to focus on the enemy:
pasi nevatengesi
(down with sell-outs).
Pasi
, chanted the peasants.
Pasi nemabhunu
. (
Mabhunu
is a derogatory word for ‘white people’.)
Pasi
.
Pasi naSmith.
Pasi
.
And so the chants would continue, accompanied by clenched fists for emphasis.
The peasants in the north-eastern border area were descendants of the old kingdoms of the Monomotapa and Rozwi, and shared the same culture and language. To these people, the border between Rhodesia and Mozambique was of little consequence. FRELIMO were able to cross the border into Rhodesia to obtain supplies and avoid detection by the Portuguese. FRELIMO slowly garnered sympathy for their cause among the peasants in Rhodesia. By the time ZANLA arrived in the area years later, they pushed at an open door.
Building on FRELIMO’s contacts, many of whom were schoolteachers and sympathetic local chiefs and headmen, ZANLA found a receptive audience for their propaganda. The FRELIMO support enabled the guerrillas to spread their message quickly and effectively across a sizable area of the north-east. Simultaneously, ZANLA was able to bring large quantities of war materials across the border and cache them in Rhodesia.
ZANLA named this new war zone the Nehanda Sector, after the spirit medium who was a catalyst in the Mashona Uprising, or First Chimurenga, in 1896. The adjacent sectors east of Nehanda were named Chaminuka, after the most famous Shona spirit, and Takawira, after Leopold Takawira, ZANU’s vice-chairman, who died of diabetes in Salisbury Prison in 1970.
The Rhodesian CIO soon got a whiff of Tongogara’s new strategy. ‘The lull in the war showed signs of being over in the latter half of 1971,’ recalled Ken Flower. ‘Intelligence reports coming from the northeastern districts indicated a guerilla presence in the border regions and fleeting contact was made with columns of porters passing southwards through the Mazarabani and surrounding areas … More and more frequently the words Chaminuka and Nehanda appeared in reports.’
The risk was perceived to be low, which gave ZANLA the best part of a year to politicise the peasants. Flower recalled: ‘The guerilla presence and activity were not defined clearly enough for the Security Forces to react militarily.’
Within a year of the first ZANU commissars beating a path into Rhodesia, ZANU had managed to politicise pockets of peasants across a vast area stretching from Sipolilo in the north-west to Mtoko in the east, a distance of 170 kilometres.
Making up a large chunk of this area was fertile commercial farmland along the Zambezi escarpment. Here, the Rukowakuona and Mavuradonha mountain ranges rise sharply above the Zambezi Valley, creating ideal conditions for summer rain, essential for growing tobacco and maize. The summer rains also filled the rivers and greened the bush, providing cover for Tongogara’s forces.
Tongogara told the Dare in November 1972 that it was time to start the war in north-eastern Rhodesia. He chose one of his best commanders to organise the first attack, Soviet-trained Rex Nhongo, who was by now totally converted to the Chinese military way of doing things. Nhongo (real name Solomon Mujuru) slipped into Rhodesia in late November 1972 and blended into the Chiweshe Tribal Trust Land (TTL), ready to strike when the time was right. By that stage, the Chiweshe population had been well politicised by ZANLA, with the blessing of its most senior citizen, Chief Chiweshe.
The TTL nestled in the centre of the major commercial farming areas of Centenary, Mount Darwin, Bindura and Umvukwes. From this ideal vantage point, Nhongo studied the lay of the land and in particular the commercial farms. Tongogara wanted multiple attacks on farms to take place between Christmas and New Year, when the Rhodesians would be enjoying the holiday and least expect an attack.
Meanwhile, the Rhodesian SB was gaining ground in the intelligence field. The SB had pieced together information that would confirm the ZANLA presence in the north-eastern border area. Detective Inspector Winston Hart based himself in Bindura, a farming and mining town 70 kilometres north of Salisbury, and kicked off intelligence-gathering operations in the north-east and Tete. It soon became apparent to the SB, by working with the Portuguese military and intelligence services, that FRELIMO had firmly established itself along the Rhodesian border. More alarming was the discovery of ZANLA reconnaissance groups in the same area.
Detective Section Officer Peter Stanton, who was seconded to help Hart, recalls: ‘One of the most important features of the ZANLA reconnaissance missions was to establish contact with the local Rhodesian border populace and gauge its standing and reception.’
Stanton soon learnt of a FRELIMO camp at Matimbe, just across the Rhodesian border, and strongly suspected that ZANLA would be there too. The Portuguese, still sceptical about a ZANLA presence in Tete, reluctantly allowed the Rhodesians to recce and then attack the camp. In March 1972, the SAS, under Lieutenant Bert Sachse, attacked Matimbe and killed a number of defenders, but it was impossible to establish whether the dead were from FRELIMO or ZANLA. The SAS brought all the documents they could find for Stanton and his SB colleagues to sift through, but most of them were written in Portuguese or the local border dialect. Nevertheless, Stanton managed to find something: ‘I came across a small note written in English indicating that the “comrades” had arrived. The message was for a local inhabitant in Rhodesia.’