David Martin and Phyllis Johnson: The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War, Faber, 1982, £3.50.
In his approving foreword, Robert Mugabe, Premier of Zimbabwe, correctly points out that a book written by observers not participating cannot tell the full story of the liberation struggle. Anyone looking for a detailed account of the guerilla war and the process of mass mobilisation in the vein of Che Guevara's Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War will be disappointed. This is, however, an extremely well-researched account of the period 1972-79, which should be required reading for every South African revolutionary who retains any illusion that one can rely on unconditional support from the surrounding black states.
The core of the book is an account of the exercise in detente initiated by Kaunda of Zambia and Vorster of South Africa, both desperately fearful of the repercussions of continued mass upheaval on their borders, in the period 1974-6. Their bargain involved Vorster's reining-in Ian Smith while Kaunda shackled the freedom fighters. Predictably only Kaunda delivered. Using as an excuse the murder in Lusaka in March of ZANU leader, Herbert Chitepo, he closed all operational bases, put more than 1100 guerillas in detention and charged nearly the whole leadership, including commander Tongogara, with being accessories to the killing.
The result was to delay the development of war for at least twenty months. ZANU could only resume the operations that finally toppled the government after its cadres were liberated as a precondition of the abortive Geneva negotiations set up by Kissinger in late 1976.
Nor was it only Zambia that interfered. For a whole period Mugabe and Tekere were detained away from the war zone by the new FRELIMO government in Mozambique. Later a number of leaders, the most prominent Hamadziripi, were in jail there for up to three years because ZANU leaders, backed by Mozambique's President Samora Machel, saw them as 'ultra-leftist'. Martin and Johnson skip quickly over this affair.
More fundamentally they never make a substantial assessment of ZANU's political functioning inside Zimbabwe nor confront the critical related question of the relative passivity of the urban working class during the war. Nor do they ever examine ZANU's own internal decision-making process, which was certainly not in any way democratic. And as the book ends with the February 1980 elections, it never begins to look at the government and policies that emerged from the war.
In Zambia, throughout this episode, we were told daily by press and politicians that all our economic problems were caused by ungrateful Zimbabweans who preferred killing each other in tribal conflicts to dealing with Smith. Martin and Johnson show this to be a nonsense: no important difference within ZANU took this form. They also show the supposedly international commission of inquiry into the murder was designed simply to take the heat off the government which itself manipulated its deliberations and report. Throughout its deliberations it refused to countenance the obvious explanation that Smith's agents killed Chitepo.
The problem that runs through this book is well illustrated here. While it is brilliant investigative journalism that uncovers a wealth of new evidence, it never tries to explain why Zambia's government behaved as it did. All judgements are value judgements. Kaunda, Smith, Vorster, Sithole, Muzorewa etc are the baddies; Mugabe, Chitepo, Tongogara etc the heroes. Nowhere are the motivations and class positions of the actors examined.
For South Africans the lesson of Zimbabwe, where 'detente' nearly wrecked the Struggle, is that a guerilla struggle that depends on support from surrounding States can easily be derailed. For socialists it is that only mass political mobilisation can ensure uninterrupted continuation to the overthrow of capitalism.
TONY SOUTHALL has written widely on Southern Africa and lived and worked in Zambia for several years during the 1970s.