Competing Nationalist Narratives and the Zimbabwe African People’S Union, 1961-1980
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“Yesterday it was One Man One Vote, Today it is One Man One Gun:” Competing Nationalist Narratives and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, 1961-1980 by Nicholas Baker Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia June 2018 © Copyright by Nicholas Baker, 2018 Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….iii Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………….iv Chapter One: Introduction…………………………………………………………………....1 African Nationalism and Resistance in Zimbabwe……………………………………3 The Historiography of ZANU and ZAPU in Zimbabwe……………………………..10 Project Parameters and Methodology………………………………………………..14 Chapter Two: The Initial Stages of African Nationalism in Southern Rhodesia…………...20 Population Change and Government Responses……………………………………..22 Resuscitating the ANC and the Creation of the CYL………………………………..27 Laying the Foundations of ZAPU……………………………………………………36 State in Emergency: The End of the SRANC and the Start of the NDP……………..52 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………58 Chapter Three: ZAPU’s Early Years and the African Nationalist Fracture………………..61 Joining the Party: The Brief Legal Existence of ZAPU……………………………..62 The ZANU-ZAPU Split……………………………………………………………...77 The Impact of the Split on ZAPU……………………………………………………96 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….104 Chapter Four: ZAPU in the Struggle: Confronting the Regime and Internal Dissent….....107 Building a Military………………………………………………………………….109 Confronting UDI……………………………………………………………………123 The ZAPU-ANC Alliance…………………………………………………………..127 Breaking Up: The Second Fracture in ZAPU………………………………………135 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….145 Chapter Five: Settling Down: ZAPU in the Late Stages of the Liberation War and the Achievement of Independence……………………………………………………………...147 The Pearce Commission and a New ANC…………………………………………150 Enlarging the ANC, Détente, and (re)Restructuring ZAPU……………………….158 The ZIPA Experiment and ZIPRA Military Engagements………………………...167 ZAPU’S “Turning Point:” Military Escalation and Accounting for ZAPU’s Ndebele Character in the Latter Stages of the War………………………………...174 Negotiated Settlements, the Patriotic Front, and ZAPU’s electoral Defeat………..185 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….195 Chapter Six: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...197 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….203 ii Abstract This thesis is a political history of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), a significant, yet neglected, African nationalist party active in Zimbabwe’s liberation war between 1961 and 1980. A political history of ZAPU offers an opportunity to challenge and problematize entrenched narratives which privilege the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) as the singular, legitimate expression of African nationalism during the struggle to end minority rule in Zimbabwe. ZAPU has been criticized by politicians, war veterans, and scholars as a toothless, opportunistic party. This study disrupts this strain of historiography by arguing that ZANU’s victory was far from inevitable. By incorporating ZAPU’s substantial political and military contributions, a clearer picture of African nationalism in Zimbabwe emerges: ZAPU provides historians of Zimbabwe with a discursive tool to explore how resistance to colonial authority involved complex, contested processes, rather than a teleological movement from oppression to independence through a single party. iii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, friend, and mentor, Dr. Gary Kynoch. As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I have benefitted enormously from Gary’s patience, support, guidance, and expertise, all of which were crucial to the production of this thesis and to my intellectual development. I would also like to extend my sincerest thanks and gratitude to Dr. Philip Zachernuk. Phil has been a tireless friend and second reader throughout this process, and has been equally tireless during my years at Dalhousie in teaching me new ways to engage and grapple with history. Most especially, I would like to thank Phil for teaching me to think deeply about the world that was, is, and might be. I owe a debt of gratitude and appreciation to my fellow students in the graduate history program at Dalhousie. The comradery, commiseration, and support of my peers and colleagues at Dalhousie have been invaluable sources of encouragement and intellectual stimulation. Ghazi Jarrar, Brenna MacPhee, Kylie Peacock, Brennan Dempsey, Katherine Crooks, and Mary Owusu in particular are all owed special thanks for special reasons I sincerely hope are known to them. Valerie Peck, an island of calm in a sea of madness, cannot be thanked enough. Each student in the graduate history program has the pleasure and good fortune to count Val as a friend from the moment they receive their acceptance letter. Val’s good humour and guidance helps and sustains graduate students in far too many ways to enumerate here, so in the interest of concision, I’ll leave it at this: Thank you for everything, Val. I also wish to thank my partner Ellen Fesseha, whose kindness and generosity of spirit is a source of constant, genuine wonder. One day I hope to emulate her patience, though I fear I lack the endurance. Finally, I’d like to thank my brother, Andrew Baker, sister in law, Kimberly Baker, and my mother and father, Judith and James Baker. Their love and support is immeasurable, and it is for them that this thesis is written. iv Chapter One: Introduction This thesis is a political history of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), and seeks to explore the party’s critical, multifaceted contribution to the liberation of Zimbabwe from minority rule. After the first popular elections in Zimbabwe in February 1980, in which Robert Mugabe and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU) (PF), won a resounding victory, historians, political scientists, and other writers have tended to marginalize ZAPU’s role in the liberation struggle. Indeed, in the decade following independence, numerous authors, such as Martin and Johnson, evinced narratives which collapsed the complexities of African nationalism in Zimbabwe, and erased or diminished contributions of other political and military fronts, privileging ZANU as the only legitimate expression of African resistance to settler rule.1 Furthermore, ZANU (PF)’s sustained hegemonic political dominance in Zimbabwe has excluded competing narratives that seek to incorporate the contributions of other groups which participated in the protracted, messy, bloody war to end minority rule. Indeed, ZANU (PF), which broke away from ZAPU in 1963 following an acrimonious leadership dispute, sought to cement its position as the legitimate inheritor of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial political order by eliminating threats posed to its social and political supremacy, most especially ZAPU and its predominately Ndebele base in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.2 1 David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). 2 Between 1982 and 1987, the Zimbabwe National Army’s (ZNA) Fifth Brigade, which was composed of former ZANU cadres trained by North Korean military elements and led by Zimbabwe’s current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, conducted Operation Gukurhundi in a supposed effort to eliminate ZAPU “dissidents.” The operation, however, amounted to ethnic cleansing in an attempt to eradicate opposition to 1 Authors who privilege the role of ZANU in the process to liberate Zimbabwe from minority rule tend to view contributions by other political and military fronts with a great deal of suspicion, if not outright hostility. The concomitant effects of scholars sympathetic to ZANU (PF) and the party’s quasi-official narrative of even, relatively uninterrupted progress towards liberation, and ZANU (PF)’s post-independence efforts to create a de jure one-party state have obscured ZAPU’s role in the liberation struggle, and distorted the contested processes which ended minority rule at the negotiation table at Lancaster House in 1979. This work seeks to contribute to the historiography of Southern African liberation movements by interrogating ZAPU’s role in the liberation war, tracing the party’s origins in earlier Southern Rhodesian African nationalist groups, through to its defeat at the polls in 1980. A study of ZAPU sheds light on the contested, complex nature of Zimbabwean nationalism, and significantly disrupts historiographical strains which espouse uninterrupted progress towards liberation. Indeed, a political history of ZAPU affords scholars of Zimbabwe’s liberation war an innovative discursive and analytical approach that draws attention to the limitations, failures, and contested nature of African nationalism’s engagement with, and resistance to, settler colonial rule. Considering the privileged place enjoyed by ZANU (PF) in the historiography of Zimbabwe and its extraordinary presence in the current, lived experiences of Zimbabweans, a political history of ZAPU offers an opportunity to complicate and question the struggle against the colonial regime in Zimbabwe, and challenge ZANU ZANU hegemony, with an estimated 20,000 predominately Ndebele civilians killed by government forces. For greater elaboration on Gukurahundi, see especially Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980 to 1988 (Harare, The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace