On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider Dr. Obert M. Mpofu Dip,BComm,MPS,PhD Contents Preface vi Foreword viii Commendations xii Abbreviations xiv Introduction: Obert Mpofu and Self-Writing in Zimbabwe xvii 1. The Mind and Pilgrimage of Struggle 1 2. Childhood and Initiation into Struggle 15 3. Involvement in the Armed Struggle 21 4. A Scholar Combatant 47 5. The Logic of Being ZANU PF 55 6. Professional Career, Business Empire and Marriage 71 7. Gukurahundi: 38 Years On 83 8. Gukurahundi and Selective Amnesia 97 9. The Genealogy of the Zimbabwean Crisis 109 10. The Land Question and the Struggle for Economic Liberation 123 11. The Post-Independence Democracy Enigma 141 12. Joshua Nkomo and the Liberation Footpath 161 13. Serving under Mugabe 177 14. Power Struggles and the Military in Zimbabwe 205 15. Operation Restore Legacy the Exit of Mugabe from Power 223 List of Appendices 249 Preface Ordinarily, people live to either make history or to immortalise it. Dr Obert Moses Mpofu has achieved both dimensions. With wanton disregard for the boundaries of a “single story”, Mpofu’s submission represents a construction of the struggle for Zimbabwe with the immediacy and novelty of a participant. Added to this, Dr Mpofu’s academic approach, and the Leaders for Africa Network Readers’ (LAN) interest, the synergy was inevitable. Mpofu’s contribution, which philosophically situates Zimbabwe’s contemporary politics and socio-economic landscape, embodies LAN Readers’ dedication to knowledge generation and, by extension, scientific growth. LAN Readers is a social science research and publishing entity with the aim of contributing to emerging discourses on developmental issues of both national and regional significance. Although the publication was initially intended as a reflection on Zimbabwe’s pre- and post- independence political journey with a focus on the impact of the liberation on contemporary politics, the November 2017 developments that birthed the “New Dispensation” necessitated a broader scope. While Mpofu’s contribution still follows the original blueprint, his book gives due regard to recent socio-political and economic developments. Through a collaborative process with LAN Readers, the final form of the contribution took shape. It was never the author’s intention to pen a memoir. However, by contextualising the historical narrative within the personal – Mpofu breathes new life into the Zimbabwean story, colouring our history with a human element, a story with a depth and multifacetedness often absent from the standard textbook reading. This is the gift that LAN Readers presents to you. Pofela Ndzozi, Research and Publications Coordinator, Leaders for Africa Network (LAN). Bulawayo Foreword Throughout history, colonialists have made unrelenting efforts to decentre African national liberation movements. At present, it is the pervasive neo-liberal discourses that threaten to dismantle emancipatory causes on the continent. In the post-independence era, African sovereignty has consistently been subjected to deconstruction by the West and its imperialist proxies. It is against this background that Dr Obert Moses Mpofu’s memoir mounts an African anti-colonial reconstruction agenda from a Zimbabwean perspective. Already suffering natural attrition through the demise of elderly African national liberation fighters and leaders, the movements’ atrophy has been precipitated by neo-colonial mechanisms and institutions. In the face of such protracted neo-colonial endeavours to dismantle African nationalist movements and the values they embody, an epistemic re-remembering of the liberation philosophy is called for. Indeed, in contrast to permanence, the epithet “movement” itself signifies ephemerality which warrants perpetual dialogue. Appropriated by neo-liberally inclined non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs), African national liberation designs have been erased and supplanted by neo-liberal schemes, with Africans engrossed in empty-shell neo-liberal discourses where they should instead be focused on the reclamation of their land and other resources. Accordingly, Mpofu stresses the principal motive of the armed struggle as economic in nature - while noting that politics was, and still is, used simply as a tool for “democratising the economy.” Paradoxically, in lieu of taming neo-imperialist forces, Western CSOs have preoccupied themselves with the post-independence phase of neo- colonialism, courting citizens to pursue empty-shell neo-liberal freedoms. On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider - Obert Mpofu Consequently, Africans have abandoned the struggle for land restitution and other resources in favour of secondary neo-liberal struggles for freedom of movement, freedom of press and so on. These neo-liberal freedoms, though significant, have been deceptively presented by global capitalism as mutually repelled from economic democratisation. Indeed, whenever resource nationalism or other emancipatory ideas blossom in the so-called Third World, they are swiftly uprooted by the West, repackaged and branded as an affront to property rights or tyranny. Our people and their future leaders have, therefore, given primacy to comparatively immaterial ideals that serve in part to detour Africa’s path towards economic liberation. In light of this, comrades such as Mpofu, whose commitment to holistic African liberation has remained consistent, are worth celebrating. In a global environment dominated by neo-liberal ideologies, Mpofu’s contribution offers a relevant contemporary antithesis to a Western political doctrine that rallies African youths against their own liberators. Ironically, the same external forces that disparage African liberators and leaders, gloss over their hand in perpetuating the global status quo through their failure to restitute the victims of colonialism. From Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Samora Moses Machel and Kamuzu Banda, the African national liberation agenda is being consigned to history as nationalist founding fathers depart for the next world before their wisdom has been sufficiently tapped for posterity. Thus, while African national liberation movement leaders such as Dr Sam Nujoma, Dr Hifikepunye Pohamba, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, Cde Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Dr Hage Geingob, Cde Thabo Mbeki, Cde Jacob Zuma, Cde Emmerson D. Mnangagwa and many others are still alive, African youths need to be reoriented to the African liberation agenda. Cast as mere historical trinkets, African national liberation movements must appeal to the African youths whose attention is increasingly captured by neo-liberal institutions and organisations. As it stands, the colonial appetite is not only unsatisfied by the continued looting African resources but also seeks to consume African minds and histories. To this end, Mpofu’s submission offers a relevant counter-hegemonic alternative to this crisis of ideas. x Foreword In dissecting the minds of African liberation heroes and fighters such as Mpofu, African youths are reoriented to the exigencies of the struggle to free Africa from the external predatory forces which pose as the would-be liberators of the same continent that they have dispossessed and exploited for centuries. Left without land, without history, and without jobs, African youths face bleak futures unless they revert to the African liberation plans to repossess their land and use it as a source of livelihood in the emergent deindustrialised world. While African youths have been persuaded by neo-liberal ideologies to desist from repossessing their land in favour of employment, the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution is diminishing the very jobs which they had been promised. As such, African youths will not only confront landlessness but also utter joblessness - and it is then that they will remember their liberation heroes’ calls to repossess the land. Artwell Nhemachena, (PhD) – University of Namibia &Visiting Associate Professor, Kobe University, Japan xi Commendations From the reviews of On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider. The politics of self-writing is always a subjective enterprise. Conscious of this vice that naturally haunts autobiographical Truths, Mpofu here makes bold claims of providing a contrasting narrative – a counter discourse to the tainted official historical metanarrative and other self-written historical accounts of the Zimbabwean nation-state. Writing within the genre of self-writing, which is defined more sturdily by its paradoxes than by what binds it together, the narrative (re)configures our views of some of Zimbabwe’s exalted father figures, glorifying and challenging “grandstandings” by some of them, albeit controversial. Imbued with a politics of its own that starkly threatens any possibilities of narrating cohesive self-imaginaries of the Zimbabwean nation-state, the memoirs further espouse Mpofu’s convictions on the contexts that shaped liberation war movements during the colonial era and continue to shape contemporary Zimbabwe’s political and socio-economic landscapes. A powerful political account narrated from the perspective, for a change, of the foot soldier of Zimbabwe’s revolutionary war! Collen Sabao, (PhD) – University of Namibia: Languages and Literature Department Writing as an insider, Obert Mpofu brings to the fore both historical realities crucial for understanding contemporary