Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘This is the ZIPRA recruiting-post,’ the guide
explained. ‘For the moment you are safe.’
In the morning while the children were embarking into one of
the cattle trucks, the skinny guide came to Tungata.
‘Go in peace, Comrade. I have an instinct for those who
will survive, and for those who will die in the bush. I think you
will live to see the dream of glory fulfilled.’ And he
shook hands, the alternate grip of palm and thumb which was the
sign of respect. ‘I think we will meet again, Comrade
Tungata.’
He was wrong. Months later, Tungata heard that the skinny
little guide had walked into an ambush at the drifts. With half
his stomach shot away, he had crept into an antbear hole and kept
them off until his last round was fired. Then he had pulled the
pin of a grenade and held it to his own chest.
T
he camp was
two hundred miles north of the Zambezi. There were fifteen
hundred recruits housed in the thatched barracks. Most of the
instructors were Chinese. Tungata’s instructor was a young
woman named Wan Lok. She was short and broad, with the sturdy
limbs of a peasant. Her face was flat and sallow, her eyes
slitted and bright as those of a mamba, and she wore a cloth cap
over her hair, and a baggy cotton uniform like a suit of
pyjamas.
On the first day she made them run forty kilometres in the
heat, carrying a forty-kilo pack. Equally burdened, she kept
easily ahead of the strongest runners, except when she
doubled-back to harangue and chivy on the stragglers. By that
evening Tungata was no longer supercilious and scornful of being
taught by a woman.
They ran every day after that, then they drilled with heavy
wooden poles, and learned the discipline of Chinese
shadow-boxing. They worked with the AK assault rifles until they
could field-strip them while blindfolded and reassemble them in
under fifteen seconds. They worked with the RPG-7
rocket-launchers and the grenades. They worked with bayonet and
trench-knife. They learned to lay a landmine, and how to boost it
with plastic explosive to destroy even a mine-proofed vehicle.
They learned how to set a mine under the black top of a
macadamized highway by tunnelling in from the verge. They learned
to lay out an ambush on a forest path, or along a main road. They
learned how to make a running defence in front of a superior
fire-force, while delaying and harassing it, and they did all
this on a daily ration of a scoop of maize meal and a handful of
dried kapenta, the smelly little fish from Lake Kariba, that
looked like English whitebait.
Zambia, their host country, had paid a high price for
supporting their cause. The railway-line to the south that
crossed the bridge over the Victoria Falls had been closed since
1973, and Rhodesian task forces had attacked and destroyed the
bridges into Tanzania and Maputo, which were land-locked
Zambia’s only remaining lifeline to the outside world. The
rations offered the guerrillas were sumptuous fare compared to
those of the average Zambian citizen.
Starved to the leanness of greyhounds, and worked to the
hardness of iron, half their nights were spent in the political
rallies, the endless chanting and singing, and shouted massed
responses to the commissar’s catechism.
‘What is the revolution?’
‘The revolution is power to the people.’
‘Who are the people?’
‘Who is the power?’
After midnight they were allowed to stagger away to the
thatched barracks and sleep – until the instructors woke
them again at four o’clock in the morning.
After three weeks, Tungata was taken to the sinister isolated
hut beyond the camp periphery. Surrounded by instructors and
political commissars, he was stripped naked and forced to
‘struggle’. While they shrieked the foulest abuse at
him, calling him ‘running dog of the racist
capitalists’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ and
‘imperialist reactionary’, Tungata was driven to
strip his soul as bare as his body.
He shouted aloud his confessions, he told them how he had
worked with the capitalist tyrants, how he had denied his
brethren, how he had doubted and back-slid and harboured
reactionary and counter-revolutionary thoughts, how he had lusted
for food and sleep, and had betrayed the trust of his comrades.
They left him utterly exhausted and broken on the floor of the
hut, then Wan Lok took him by the hand, as though she were his
mother and he her child, and led him stumbling and weeping back
to the barracks.
The next day he was allowed to sleep until noon and awoke
feeling serene and strong. In the evening at the political rally,
he was called to take his place in the front rank amongst the
section-leaders.
A month later, Wan Lok summoned him to her sleeping-hut in the
instructors’ compound. She stood before him, a dumpy squat
figure in her rumpled cotton uniform.
‘Tomorrow you are going in,’ she said, and took
the cloth cap from her head.
He had never seen her hair before. It fell to her waist, as
thick and black and liquid as a spill of crude oil.
‘You will not see me again,’ she said, and
unbuttoned the front of her uniform. Her body was the colour of
butter, hard and immensely powerful, but what startled and
intrigued Tungata was that her pubic hair was as straight as that
upon her head, without any kinking or curling. It excited him
inordinately.
‘Come,’ she said, and led him to the thin mattress
on the dirt floor of the hut.
T
hey did not
use the drifts on the return but they crossed the Zambezi in
dugout canoes at the point where the river flowed into the
immensity of Lake Kariba. In the moonlight the stark silhouettes
of the drowned trees were silver and tortured as the limbs of
lepers against the starry sky.
There were forty-eight of them in the cadre, under a political
commissar and two young but battle-tempered captains. Tungata was
one of the four section-leaders with ten men under him. Each of
them, even the commissar, carried a sixty-kilo load beneath which
they toiled like pregnant hunchbacks. There was no place for food
in their packs, so they lived on lizards and bush rats, and the
half-incubated eggs of wild birds. They competed with the hyena
and vulture at lion kills for the putrefying scraps, and at night
they visited the kraals of the black peasant farmers and emptied
the grain bins.
They crossed the Chizarira Hills and struck southwards through
trackless forest and waterless wilderness until they hit the
Shangani river. They followed it southwards still, passing within
a few kilometres of the lonely monument in the mopani forest
which marks the spot where Allan Wilson and his patrol made their
last heroic but futile stand against the impi of Gandang, son of
Mzilikazi, brother of the last Matabele king, Lobengula.
When they came to the lands of the white farmers, their work
began. On the dirt roads they laid the heavy landmines that they
had carried so far upon their backs. Freed of this onerous
burden, they attacked the isolated white homesteads.
They hit four farmhouses in a single week, secure in the
knowledge that the security forces were no longer moving to the
rescue of a beleaguered homestead during the hours of darkness
because they were aware that the attackers mined all the approach
roads before commencing an attack. So the guerrillas had all
night to finish the job and escape.
The technique was highly developed by this time. At dusk they
poisoned the dogs and cut the ring-wire. Then they fired rockets
into the windows and doorways and rushed the breaches they had
made. At two farms they were held off by a dogged defence, but at
the other two they penetrated. The horrors that they left behind
them were a deliberate provocation to the rescuers who would come
in at first light. What they found might drive the security
forces to take out their shock and rage and frustration on the
local black population, and in doing so drive them into the ZIPRA
camp.
At last, after six weeks in the field, low on ammunition and
explosives, they began to pull back, laying ambushes as they
withdrew. They abandoned the first ambush after two fruitless
days. However, at the second ambush on a remote country road,
they were lucky.
They trapped a white farmer who was rushing his wife,
suffering from a peritonitis following a burst appendix, to the
local hospital. The farmer had his two teenage daughters in the
vehicle with him. He almost broke through the ambush, but as the
armoured vehicle passed Tungata’s position, he jumped up
and ran into the road behind it. He hit it in the soft rear
section with an armour-piercing RPG-7 rocket at point-blank
range.
The farmer and his eldest daughter were killed in the blast,
but his sick wife and the younger daughter were still alive. The
political commissar let the ‘boys’ have the dying
women. They queued up and took them in the road beside the
shattered vehicle, one after the other.
When Tungata did not join the line, the commissar condescended
to explain, ‘When a honey guide leads you to the hive, you
must leave him a piece of the comb. Since the beginning of
history, rape has always been one of the rewards of the
conquerors. It makes them fight better, and it will madden the
enemy.’
They left the road that night and moved back into the hills,
back towards the lake and sanctuary. Ballantyne’s Scouts
caught them in the middle of the following afternoon. There was
very little warning. Just a tiny Cessna 210 spotter plane
circling high overhead, and while the commissars and the captains
were still shouting the orders to deploy and set up a perimeter,
the Scouts came in.
The delivery vehicle was an ancient twin-engined Dakota that
had seen service in the Western Desert during World War II. It
was painted with grey non-reflective paint to thwart the
infra-red seekers of SAM-7 missiles. It flew so low that it
seemed to scrape the ragged rocky crests of the kopjes, and as
its shadow momentarily blotted out the sun, the fighting men
spewed out of the gaping belly-port.
The olive-green umbrellas of their parachutes popped open only
seconds before they hit the ground. As the silk flared, they were
down. They landed on their feet, and even before the parachutes
settled softly in billowing folds, they had snapped their
harnesses and were running forward, firing.
The commissar and both veteran captains were killed within the
first three minutes, and the Scouts swept forward, rolling up the
green panic-stricken guerrillas against the foot of the kopje.
Tungata, acting without conscious thought, gathered the men
closest to him and led them in a desperate counter-attack down a
shallow donga that bisected the line of Scouts.
He heard the Scout commander give the order on the bull-horn.
‘Green and red, hold on your position; blue, clean out that
gulley.’ The distorted voice echoed against the hills, but
Tungata recognized it. He had last heard it at Khami Mission on
the night Constance was murdered. It turned him cold and clear
thinking.
He judged his moment finely, and then pulled out of the donga,
under the whipping crackle of the FNs. His calm steadied the men
with him, and he started the running defence as Wan Lok had
taught him. They were in contact for three hours, in contact with
élite battle-hardened troops, and Tungata kept his little
band in hand and they counterattacked and laid AP mines behind
them and held at every natural strongpoint, until it was dark.
Then Tungata broke off the contact and pulled his men out. By
that time there were only eight of them left and three of these
were wounded.
Seven days later, in the morning before the dew dried, Tungata
opened a passage through the
cordon sanitaire
, probing
with a bayonet until he found the key to the pattern, and he took
his men across the drifts. There were only five of them left.
None of the wounded had been able to stand the pace, and Tungata
had personally finished them with the commissar’s Tokarev
pistol to save them being interrogated by the pursuers.
In the town of Livingstone, on the north bank of the Zambezi
opposite the Victoria Falls, Tungata reported to ZIPRA
headquarters, and the commissar was astonished.
‘But you were all killed. The Rhodesians claimed on the
television—’
A driver in a black Mercedes with the party flag fluttering on
the bonnet took Tungata up to the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and
there in a safe house on a quiet street he was ushered into a
sparsely furnished room where a man sat alone at a cheap pine
desk.
‘Baba!’ Tungata recognized him immediately.
‘Nkosi nkulu! Great Chief!’
The man laughed, a throaty bellow of sound. ‘You may
call me that when we are alone, but at other times you must call
me Comrade Inkunzi.’
Inkunzi was the Sindebele word for a bull. It suited the man
admirably. He was huge, with a chest like a beer-keg and a belly
like a sack of grain. His hair was thick and white, all the
things that the Matabele venerate, physical size and strength and
the hair of age and wisdom.
‘I have watched you with interest, Comrade Tungata.
Indeed, it was I that sent to fetch you.’
‘I am honoured, Baba.’
‘You have richly repaid my faith.’
The big man settled lower in his chair and linked his fingers
over the bulk of his stomach. He was silent for a while, studying
Tungata’s face, then abruptly he asked, ‘What is the
revolution?’
The reply, so often repeated, came instantly to
Tungata’s lips.
‘The revolution is power to the people.’
Comrade Inkunzi’s delighted bull-bellow crashed out
again.
‘The people are mindless cattle,’ he laughed.
‘They would not know what to do with power if anyone was
fool enough to let them have it! No, no! It is time you learned
the true answer.’ He paused, and he was no longer smiling.
‘The truth is that the revolution is power to the chosen
few. The truth is that I am the head of those few, and that you,
Commissar Comrade Tungata, are now one of them.’