1-9.fm Page 1 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM FAY CHUNG Re-living the Second Chimurenga Memories from the Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe With an introduction by Preben Kaarsholm THE NORDIC AFRICA INSTITUTE, 2006 Published in cooperation with Weaver Press 1-9.fm Page 2 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM Indexing terms Biographies National liberation movements Liberation Civil war Independence ZANU Zimbabwe RE-LIVING THE SECOND CHIMURENGA © The Author and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2006 Cover photo: Tord Harlin The Epsworth rocks, Zimbabwe Language checking: Peter Colenbrander ISBN 91 7106 551 2 (The Nordic Africa Institute) 1 77922 046 4 (Weaver Press) Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab, Stockholm, 2006 1-9.fm Page 3 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM Dedicated to our children's generation, who will have to build on the positive gains and to overcome the negative aspects of the past. 1-9.fm Page 4 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM 1-9.fm Page 5 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM Contents Introduction: Memoirs of a Dutiful Revolutionary Preben Kaarsholm ................................................................................................................ 7 1. Growing up in Colonial Rhodesia ...................................................... 27 2. An Undergraduate in the ‘60s ............................................................ 39 3. Teaching in the Turmoil of the Townships ................................. 46 4. In Exile in Britain ............................................................................................ 65 5. Learning from the Zambia of the 1970s ...................................... 71 6. Joining the Liberation Struggle in Zambia ................................ 75 7. Josiah Tongogara: Commander of ZANLA ................................. 124 8. Post-Détente Intensification of the War: Nyadzonia and Chimoio ............................................................................ 140 9. The Formation of the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA), 1976 ........................................................................................... 145 10. The Geneva Conference: Old Enemies and New Friends .......................................................................................................... 153 11. Post-Détente and the Defeat of the ZANU Left Wing ........ 171 12. I End Up in a Military Camp ............................................................... 189 13. Traditional Religion in the Liberation Struggle ..................... 197 14. The Formation of the ZANU Department of Education .................................................................................................................... 203 15. The Internal Settlement and Intensified Armed Struggle 229 16. The Lancaster House Agreement .......................................................... 242 17. Prelude to Independence .............................................................................. 248 18. The Fruits of Independence ...................................................................... 254 19. A Vision of Zimbabwe Tomorrow ....................................................... 327 Appendix 1: The Mgagao Declaration by Zimbabwe Freedom Fighters (October, 1975) ........................ 340 Appendix 2: Curriculum Vitae: Fay Chung .............................................. 347 Acronymes ................................................................................................................................ 351 Index of names ..................................................................................................................... 353 1-9.fm Page 6 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM 1-9.fm Page 7 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM Memoirs of a Dutiful Revolutionary Fay Chung and the Legacies of the Zimbabwean Liberation War An Introduction by Preben Kaarsholm1 Scholars and activists who followed the dramatic events of the nation- alist liberation struggle in the 1970s, and the first years of Zimbabwe’s independence from 1980 will remember Fay Chung, and associate her name with the high hopes invested in reform and expansion of the country’s educational system. They will remember how educational re- form was seen to be a central part in a transformation, which went be- yond the appropriation of state power, and which – by applying didactic principles developed in refugee camps in Zambia and Mozam- bique in the 1970s – would help to build a nation of new citizens who were both well-trained and decolonised also mentally. The new educa- tion system would be democratic by offering primary education to all, and broadening access to secondary and tertiary training radically. It would also be socialist in its application of principles of ‘education with production’ and of ‘dialogic teaching’ inspired by the writings of Paolo Freire. Fay Chung was at the forefront of these aspirations – both in ZANU(PF) and within the Ministry of Education – and kept on fighting for them against increasing bureaucratic obstacles and – eventually – the restrictions imposed by Structural Adjustment, until she resigned from the Ministry in the early 1990s, and left Zimbabwe to work for UNICEF. 1. Preben Kaarsholm teaches International Development Studies at Roskilde Uni- versity, and is a member of the Nordic Africa Institute’s editorial board. He has been doing research for many years on culture, politics and urban history in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and is the editor of Cultural Struggles and Develop- ment in Southern Africa (1991) and Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa (2006). He is grateful to Brian Raftopoulos, David Moore, Terence Ranger and Wilfred Mhanda for commenting on draft versions of the introduc- tion. — 7 — 1-9.fm Page 8 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM RE-LIVING THE SECOND CHIMURENGA Fay Chung’s account of her experiences and reflections upon them is an important historical document, and will be of great interest – not only to students and researchers, but also to a more widespread group of readers concerned with the Zimbabwean experiment in social trans- formation from the 1970s to the present. It will be so also in the light of the tremendous crisis in which this experiment finds itself from the late 1990s, and readers will look forward to Fay Chung’s narrative and interpretation of Zimbabwe’s trajectory over the last thirty years, from nationalist and socialist uprising, through the promises of the first in- dependent government, to populist dictatorship, state violence, and economic collapse. The memoirs are significant in several respects. Though written with some formality and restraint, they give insight into the very unu- sual circumstances of growing up, from the early 1940s, in a Roman Catholic Chinese family – settled in Rhodesia’s capital, Salisbury, since 1904. Fay Chung’s account of her childhood and youth lets the reader look into the racially segregated life of Rhodesia from the special angle of a Chinese minority, which was so small that it did not really figure within the state’s categorisation of population groups. As an adolescent with a Chinese family background, Fay Chung was able to experience the system from a position of both relative privilege and oppression, and therefore perhaps as particularly arbitrary. Her narrative has a spe- cial focus on her school experiences, and describes the efforts of liber- alisation that took place in the 1950s and early 1960s in the context of Southern Rhodesia’s membership of the Central African Federation. Of particular interest is her account of her period of study at the Uni- versity of Rhodesia and Nyasaland around 1960, then an outpost of liberal reform and debate among intellectuals – an experience that played an important role in deciding Fay Chung’s future political ori- entation. On completing her first degree, Fay Chung went on to teach Afri- can students, first at a secondary school in Gwelo, and then in the tu- multuous circumstances of Salisbury’s townships, where she experi- enced the growing radicalisation of nationalist mobilisation, and the tightening of state governance, following the Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the coming to power of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front party in 1965. From there, she moved on in 1968 to post-grad- uate studies in English literature at the University of Leeds in England, — 8 — 1-9.fm Page 9 Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:57 PM Introduction where she was influenced by the students’ rebellion, and was intro- duced to the political thought of Marx, Lenin, Mao and Machiavelli. She then moved back to Africa, and in the early 1970s worked as a lec- turer in the Department of Education at the University of Zambia, be- ing an active member of the growing diaspora of refugees from Rhodesia in Zambia, and – following the escalation of the guerrilla war inside Rhodesia – joined up with ZANU and the liberation struggle in 1973. The memoirs give the reader unique insights into her experiences as an insider with the nationalist movement in exile – first in Zambia and from 1975 in Mozambique – where Fay Chung had her primary tasks within the ZANU Department of Information and Media and subse- quently its Department of Education. Belonging to the ‘university group’ within ZANU, she was considered a leftist and an intellectual, but avoided direct involvement with the two famous take-over at- tempts by intellectuals within the movement in the 1970s – the young officers’ revolt led by Thomas Nhari in 1974-75 and the more leftist vashandi mobilisation