Tamsanqa Mlilo writes – In his autobiography Nkomo: The Story of My Life, Dr Joshua Nkomo revealed that his career ended not in triumph, but in despair. The man who may well have been the most important figure in Africa since Jomo Kenyatta said he was fearful for his life and country.

‘The hardest lesson of my life has come to me late. It is that a nation can win freedom without its people becoming free.’

His death on 1 July 1999 rekindles sad memories of his chequered history. Having fought for the liberation of Zimbabwe he was to become, with the advent of Independence, the country’s most prominent casualty of tribal politics. Yet his liberation credentials and commitment to the service of his country remained intact to the end.

Speaking in 1984 at the launch of his memoirs Nkomo The Story of My Life, from Britain where he had been forced to seek refuge from his enemies at the height of the genocide in Matabeleland, the late vice-president said, among other things:

“I don’t have the words optimism‚ and pessimism‚ in my vocabulary. If had, I would never have survived years in detention, because there were days when any human being would have felt: ‘This is the end’. I refused to accept that. I believed I would get through and survive.
“Now a return to political power does not matter to me. What matters is whether we are going to succeed in resolving the situation in which my country finds itself. I may return to power or I may not. The important thing is whether we solve our problems.

“In any man’s life there must be mistakes, but I don’t think I would have done anything differently if I had the opportunity again. I do not see what else I could have done without endangering my country. I could have been naïve, but I don’t think so.

“I want to see a Zimbabwe nation built, but not on tribal lines. I do not want to hear about majority and minority tribes. That is not what I fought for. I fought for a nation. To talk about majority and minority tribes is madness. I am not a man from a tribe in Matabeleland. I am a Zimbabwean. I will always feel so.”

On July 3 1999, the local papers quoted President Mugabe as saying that Vice-President Nkomo had suffered and lost a large chunk of his life struggling to free the country. He went further to say that Nkomo’s death could be linked to the suffering he endured during the struggle.

The President forgot to tell the nation that Nkomo’s suffering did not end with the ushering in of Independence in 1980. In an article published by the Zimbabwe Independent in 1997, the late vice-president, in a letter written while he was in London in 1983 addressed to Mugabe(who was at that time the Prime Minister), said:

“Although I feel I and my family have had to endure personal abuses and suffering at your hands, I still say to you from my heart we must put the interests of our country first and find a way to rescue the nation from the tragedy we are steadily but surely slipping deeper into.”

In short, it means somebody else took over where Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Smith had left off!

It is quite amazing too to learn from Ndabaningi Sithole (Independent, July 9) that the splinter group (i.e. the then newly-formed Zanu) was a result of tactical differences with Joshua Nkomo.

Yet in his book, Zimbabwe Tragedy, Enoch Dumbutshena revealed that when Sithole returned to the then Rhodesia in 1963, he conducted a vigorous campaign against Nkomo’s leadership and urged the Shona who then formed 85% of the African population, to reject the leadership of Nkomo because he was Ndebele.

This is corroborated by the late vice-president in his autobiography.He recalls an incident when Joseph Msika, then deputy treasurer of Zapu, had an even more disturbing experience. He saw Morton Malianga nervously hiding a printed document.
Msika asked to see it. Malianga refused, so Msika snatched it away and read it. He found it was a circular openly urging to bring the “majority tribes” to the leadership of the party and get rid of”zimundevere”.

There is further written evidence of Nkomo’s concern at the situation that prevailed in the country under white rule, when a section of the citizenry was discriminated against and marginalised.

Addressing the delegates at the First Annual Conference of the African National Congress in 1958, Nkomo is reported as having said, inter alia:
“The present discrimination which exists in our country today is a grave menace to our society and is a terrible disease which is eating away the intelligence and energy of our people. It is a disease that has warped the minds of those who practise it and damaged the attitude of those against whom it is practised.”

Take note that this was said more than sixty years ago and the discrimination referred to was that it was practised by the white population against the black.

A prominent feature of the report, as one reads through it, is the forthright manner in which Joshua Nkomo called for the barriers against the African people of Southern Rhodesia to be lifted so that the people as a whole could exercise their right to participate fully and freely in the running of their country at all levels of the state machinery.

His desire was for all (not just the majority) to enjoy this freedom. His sentiments were relevant then, applied to the period immediately following the gaining of Independence and remain equally relevant today.
One wonders, though to what extent his life-long wish for full democracy for all the country’s citizens was realised, given the skewed development that the country has seen under the ZANU PF rule.

When the Bulawayo City Council conferred the Freedom of the City on Vice-President Nkomo on February 27 1992, I asked my late father the meaning of “Freedom of the City”. He advised that it was an honour bestowed upon individuals who had excelled and distinguished themselves in particular ways. They were of the kind that would pursue the well-being and interests of their fellow men at all costs.

Such a man was Joshua Nkomo.

Even to those who barely understand the intricacies of Africa’s politics, Nkomo was a familiar figure. For almost five decades he was the single most public member of the liberation movement which fought to create an independent state from Britain’s last African colony, Rhodesia. When the efforts of the liberation struggle finally came to fruition in 1980, his countrymen began to call him “Father Zimbabwe”.

However, his voice was systematically suppressed, distorted and silenced by the new establishment. The noise of the gun replaced the voice of love and reason. Despite all this turbulence, he never wavered. And for his steadfastness he was vindicated on July 5, 1999, when even his erstwhile detractors sang in unison in fulsome praise of him, unashamedly calling him “Father Zimbabwe, Umdala Wethu!”