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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Joshua Nkomo
(1916-1999)Our old man
By Gamal NkrumahJoshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo was an African icon. He never became president of his native land, but was universally acknowledged as the "Father of Zimbabwe" and the "Founder of the Nation," in the words of President Robert Mugabe, speaking at Nkomo's funeral last Monday.
Nkomo, who passed away aged 83 in the early hours of 1 July 1999, was given a state burial at Hero's Acre, Harare, a national shrine where veteran liberation struggle leaders are laid to rest. There could be no more fitting place for a man who had for many years embodied the African peoples' aspiration to freedom and justice.
Nkomo first visited Egypt in the early 1960s. For at least six months, he led the liberation struggle from the African Society building in Zamalek. The octogenarian vice president of Zimbabwe was affectionately known to his people as Umdala Wethu -- Our Old Man.
I first set foot in Zimbabwe in 1986, to cover the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit meeting that was being held in the capital, Harare. I soon fell in love with the city's charms, and spent many hours hiking round its leafy neighbourhoods. Gardens were lush, and quaint bungalows, stately mansions and Olympic-sized pools alike were literally buried among the fragrant flowerbeds. There were roses, passion flowers, pomegranates, Bougainvillea -- and immaculate lawns. In the luxurious hotels, lavish restaurants and suburban villas life seemed to me to approach the idyllic.
The African townships, however, and the surrounding countryside were radically different. The contrast was especially pronounced as one ventured further south and west from the capital through parched parkland that was almost dead. Shaggy emaciated old women fell to their knees as one approached, clapped their withered hands and curtsied. Pot-bellied children lay listless under the gnarled bare trees and the tormenting sun. I associated the bulbous boababs and thorny accacias with the rural reserves of Matabeleland. Lilac jacaranda and scarlet flame tree soon came to seem an exclusively white, suburban flora.
Born in Semokwe, an African reserve in the Malobo district near Bulawayo, Nkomo was a man of the people. Semokwe was as poor and ravaged by overgrazing as any of Zimbabwe's (then, Southern Rhodesia's) numerous other overpopulated "native" reserves, where Africans were herded together and left to eke out a miserable subsistence in remote areas that suffered the poorest soils and least rainfall in the country. The whites, of course, appropriated the choicest farmland.
Even though Nkomo did not have a privileged childhood, he did hail from a long line of Ndebele royalty. By sheer luck, he was spared the terrible hunger that afflicted most of his people -- his mother was a cook at the London Missionary Society, a pillar of the country's colonial establishment. As a baker's delivery boy, Nkomo made the rounds and thus got to see first hand how the other half lived.
Though no duffer at school, Nkomo was hardly in the first intellectual rank. As a mature student -- and a rather rotund one at that -- he suffered the indignity of squeezing his enormous bulk into school desks designed for youngsters half his age. But then, a missionary education was a humbling experience for all Africans of his generation.
Nonetheless, through dogged determination he made his way to Durban, South Africa, where he completed his secondary education. There he also met Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle.
On his return to his native land in 1948, Nkomo launched into a career as a trade unionist, fighting for higher wages and better working conditions for Africans. By 1951 he had been made secretary-general of the African Railway Workers Union, and was later elected president of the Congress of Trade Unions. Within a brief time, the gregarious young man had begun to emerge as his people's most promising political figure.
His formidable frame, reminiscent of pre-colonial Ndebele kings such as Mzilikazi and LoBengula, was unquestionably a political asset. In 1957, Nkomo was voted president of the country's first African mass political party, the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (ANC), which led the fight for African political rights, civil liberties and land reform. The colonial authorities banned the party in 1959.
Nkomo was undaunted though, and through sheer determination, succeeded in setting in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to Zimbabwe's independence. In 1960, he launched the National Democratic Party (NDP), which was even more militant than its predecessor, the ANC. It too was banned, and Nkomo then formed the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in 1962.
In an effort to discredit him, his detractors painted him as an Ndebele tribal chief, not a national all-Zimbabwean leader. This particular charge was to prove his political undoing. In 1963, disgruntled ethnic Shona members of Nkomo's ZAPU, including his former disciple, Robert Mugabe, broke away to form the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which is still in government today. In some ways, their act was unsurprising, for how could an ethnic Ndebele hope to govern a country 75 per cent of whose population were Shona? In pre-colonial times, Nkomo's people had ruled the country from Bulawayo, and memories of their domination were still fresh in the national psyche.
Nkomo had a big heart, but one given to explosive bursts of anger. One did not want to be around when his elephant-sized fury erupted. In 1963, the British colonial authorities imprisoned him for eleven years. After his release in 1974, he left the country for Zambia, from where he waged a bitter armed struggle against the Rhodesians.
The European settlers were set on a collision course with the indigenous African majority. London feigned disdain for Rhodesia's whites, and matters soon came to a head with Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. What today is the most heavily touristed reach of the mighty Zambezi River, was then swarming with freedom fighters. Nkomo's men, with Soviet arms and ammunition, were dug in deep along the riverbank, but it was Mugabe's men -- fighting from Mozambique with Chinese support -- who actually took much of the credit for the country's war of liberation, the Chimurenga.
In 1979, at the height of one of Africa's most brutal wars of national independence, Nkomo was among those who flew to London to attend the Lancaster House Constitutional Conference and conclude a negotiated settlement.
Tensions between Shona and Ndebele festered on after Zimbabwe achieved its independence in 1980. In 1982, Mugabe accused Nkomo of plotting to overthrow his government. Some of Nkomo's men fancied themselves as the heirs of the Ndebele warriors who had overrun Zimbabwe some 150 years ago. But the Matabeleland of the 1980s was no impregnable bastion, and when Mugabe dispatched the Zimbabwean army's fierce Fifth Brigade to quell the rebellion, Nkomo's Ndebele warriors were trounced. Grizzly reports of the massacre of an estimated 10,000 Ndebele people followed. Nkomo fled to London, only to return in triumph in 1987, when a government of national unity was declared. He dissolved ZAPU and, to the chagrin of some of his people, effectively joined ZANU. To his admirers, this was one more calculated move to be recorded to the credit of so convivial and ebullient a politician. Nkomo was a great persuader of the recalcitrant, and he managed to win many of his former enemies over. But some of the younger generation of Ndebele felt he failed them, and that after signing the 1987 unity agreement with Mugabe's ZANU, he made little effort to represent their interests.
The greatest unfinished business of the century now ending is overturning the legacy of racial discrimination. Most indigenous Africans in Zimbabwe are not guaranteed a descent basic income, and poverty is on the rise. The country still suffers a heavy concentration of wealth, which is still predominantly in white hands, even if not exclusively so, as in Nkomo's day.
In Zimbabwe, there is another more specific piece of business waiting to be finished: the unsatiable hunger for land is growing, as the country's economic fortunes dwindle. Prime agricultural land is still largely in the hands of white commercial farmers, and in spite of periodic government threats to expel them, confiscate their land and redistribute it among black peasants, few believe that they will see such justice in their lifetime.
