Toward non-hagiographical reflections on Zimbabwe’s ‘heroes’: Dumiso Dabengwa’s history

ABSTRACT

Dumiso Dabengwa’s death in May 2019 offers the opportunity to reflect on Zimbabwe’s fraught liberation struggle and its consequences today.¹ That Robert Mugabe’s passing was a few months later makes such considerations more pertinent. This article thus revisits some of the liberation war’s moments of evident tension between its two main nationalist movements, as well as those in the post-1980 era. It also considers some of Dabengwa’s last, most historically important and philosophically interesting reflections.

RÉSUMÉ

La mort de Dumiso Dabengwa en mai 2019 offre l’occasion de réfléchir sur la lutte de libération du Zimbabwe et ses conséquences aujourd’hui. Le fait que le décès de Robert Mugabe soit survenu quelques mois plus tard rend ces considérations plus pertinentes encore. Cet article revient donc sur certains des moments de tension évidente de la guerre de libération entre ses deux principaux mouvements nationalistes, ainsi que sur ceux de l’après-1980. Il examine également certaines des dernières réflexions de Dabengwa, les plus importantes sur le plan historique et les plus intéressantes sur le plan philosophique.

KEYWORDS:

• Zimbabwe
• ZAPU
• Dabenga
• ZANU–PF
• Mugabe
• liberation war

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Zimbabwe
• ZAPU
• Dabenga
• ZANU–PF
• Mugabe
• guerre de libération

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Galbraith and Nqobile Zulu for help at the start.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

David Moore is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1 Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZPRA) Intelligence Chief and President of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). Born on 6 December 1939, died 23 May 2019 in Nairobi en route to Zimbabwe, returning from treatment in India for liver cancer. Son of Mavakatsha and Mahliki Dabengwa. Survived by his wife Zodwa Khumalo and children Ijeoma, Dingumuzi, Sithembile, Nombulelo and Vusisizwe. Buried in Ntabazinduna on 1 June 2019.

2 The phrase was coined by Ranger (2004). It has been nuanced by Mujere, Sagiya and Fontein (2017) very well.

3 Some acronyms may need elaboration. ZANU–PF, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front, is Zimbabwe’s ruling party. It split from ZAPU (the Zimbabwe African People's Union) in 1963 and became ZANU. ‘PF’ harks back to a temporary united front of the main liberation parties, ZANU and ZAPU, for diplomatic facility in the liberation war. This followed ZIPA’s (Zimbabwe People’s Army) short-lived and ideologically challenging efforts from late 1975 to early 1977 to unify the liberation armies (ZAPU’s army was the Zimbabwe African People’s Revolutionary Army, ZPRA, while ZANU’s was the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, ZANLA). That those within ZIPA whom the ‘old guard’ feared were both a generational and ideological threat is indicated by the fate of the youthful March 11 (1971) Movement in ZPRA’s Zambian training camps. That ‘ethnic’ permutations permeated the nationalists’ many internecine battles is indicated by FROLIZI, arising in the early 1970s as the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe. That ‘PF’ remains an appendage to the ruling party’s nomenclature even after its late 2017 intra-party coup was the nearly inevitable culmination of decades of factionalism, and has appended many iterations of ZANU and ZANU monikers since 1980, suggests a forlorn hope for some form of united aspirations within Zimbabwe’s ruling consortium. The most recent acronym in Zimbabwe’s political array is the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, also hosting many variations on the theme given its constant splintering, preyed upon carefully by the ruling party (Raftopoulos 2020).

4 A new book by two relatively ‘liberal’ ex-Rhodesian intelligence officers adds another possibility to ZAPU’s endgame. It asserts that in early 1980 ZPRA soldiers were training with Rhodesian counterparts in plans to ensure Mugabe and ZANU would never gain power (Ellert and Anderson 2020, 356–359). Thus, now the precise chronology of these decisions has to be ascertained, although it seems as if Nkomo’s command to cancel Operation Zero preceded the 1980 plans (which were in any case cancelled at the last moment). Dabengwa’s role in these decisions should be queried too. The following nine paragraphs, except that noting Grennan, rely heavily on Moore 2014a.