Rhodesian Bush War

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In an interview published in the New York Times on the 28th of April 1980, Robert Mugabe made a startling admission about the Rhodesian Bush War. His words were: "We did not win a military victory... We reached a political settlement... A compromise." The speaker was days away from leading a country that had just stopped being Rhodesia.

  The conflict he described lasted from July 1964 to December 1979. Depending on who tells the story, it is the Rhodesian Civil War, the Second Chimurenga or the Zimbabwe War of Independence. Even its name is contested.

  Three forces fought it. One was a government led by a white minority. The other two were rival guerrilla armies, and they sometimes turned on each other as readily as on the state.

  A string of questions runs through this documentary. How did a government that no country ever recognised keep fighting for so long? Why did two armies pursuing the same cause end up clashing? Which distant powers supplied the weapons and the training? And if neither side won on the battlefield, who decided how it ended?

  216799961

• 2. A Colony Breaks Away

  ›

  On the 11th of November 1965, the government of Rhodesia declared independence from Britain without London's consent. The people behind that declaration descended from Britons who began settling the territory in the 1890s. The territory never received full dominion status, but its settlers had effectively run it since 1923. That was the year Britain took over from the British South Africa Company and granted self-government to a locally elected, mostly white administration.

  Harold Macmillan's "Wind of Change" speech told the world that Britain would grant independence to its African colonies only under majority rule. Many white Rhodesians looked at the former Belgian Congo, independent since 1960, and feared the same chaos at home.

  The 1962 general election showed how far that fear reached. The United Federal Party, in power since 1934, campaigned on racial "partnership" and promised to repeal every discriminatory law. One of them was the Land Apportionment Act, which set aside some land for black purchase, some for whites only, and some for all races. About 45% of the country was divided this way, and another 45% was Tribal Trust Land, where chiefs and headmen held a degree of self-government. The scheme had originally been designed to stop new arrivals from using their greater wealth to buy up everything.

  The mostly white electorate recoiled from the proposal, fearing for the country's prosperity, its security and their own affairs. They voted in the newly formed Rhodesian Front, a conservative party opposed to any immediate shift to black rule. Winston Field became prime minister, with Ian Smith as his deputy.

  After the declaration, Rhodesia never won diplomatic recognition from any country. It did have the private backing of neighbouring South Africa and of Portugal, which still governed Mozambique. At home, the vote was constitutionally open to all races, yet property requirements kept many Black Africans away from the ballot box. The 1969 constitution set aside eight of the 66 parliamentary seats for "Non-Europeans" and another eight for tribal chiefs.

  The Rhodesian government described its cause as defending Western values, Christianity, the rule of law and democracy against communists. It argued that black grievances were stirred up by foreign agitators. It also claimed that the traditional chiefs, rather than the nationalist parties, spoke for the Shona and Ndebele. The nationalists and the British government of the day saw a war of national and racial liberation. In their view, the country had lived under foreign domination since 1890, and they denounced the wealth gap between the races.

  The first organised African challenge had begun years earlier, over the price of a bus ticket in Salisbury.

  1013891599

• 3. Two Nationalist Armies

  ›

  In September 1956, bus fares in Salisbury rose so high that workers were spending between 18% and 30% of their earnings on travel. The City Youth League boycotted the buses of the United Transport Company and forced the increase to be dropped. On the 12th of September 1957, members of the league and the defunct African National Congress formed the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress under Joshua Nkomo.

  The authorities kept banning whatever came next. They outlawed the congress in 1959 and arrested 307 leaders in Operation Sunrise, though Nkomo was abroad. In January 1960, Nkomo, Robert Mugabe, Herbert Chitepo and Ndabaningi Sithole founded the National Democratic Party, and Nkomo became its leader in October. The government banned that party in December 1961, and Nkomo again escaped arrest because he was out of the country. He then formed the Zimbabwe African People's Union, which the Whitehead administration banned in September 1962. Barred from forming another party, Nkomo moved ZAPU's headquarters to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

  In July 1963, Nkomo suspended Sithole, Mugabe, Leopold Takawira and Washington Malianga for opposing his continued leadership. On the 8th of August they announced a new party, the Zimbabwe African National Union. Disagreements over tactics lay behind the split, along with tribalism and personality clashes. ZANU's military wing was the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, or ZANLA, led by Mugabe and drawing mainly on Shona people. ZAPU's army was the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA, drawn mostly from the Ndebele under Nkomo.

  ZANLA aimed to take and hold ground. Its plan was to supplant the government's administration in rural areas and then launch a final conventional campaign. To win over the countryside it combined force, persuasion, ties of kinship and cooperation with spirit mediums. By the war's end it was present more or less permanently in over half the country, and its close ally was Mozambique's independence movement, FRELIMO.

  ZANLA also tried to choke the Rhodesian economy with land mines on the roads, mostly Soviet TM46s. From 1972 to 1980 there were 2,504 vehicle detonations, which killed 632 people and injured 4,410. The number of mines detonated or recovered rose by 133.7% between 1978 and 1979, from 894 to 2,089. The Rhodesians and South Africans answered by filling tyres with water to absorb the blast. Later they built vehicles with V-shaped hulls that dispersed the explosion, so deaths in them became unusual.

  ZIPRA played a different game. Nkomo's army looked toward Zambia for bases, and its political leadership leaned more on negotiation than on arms, so it grew more slowly. Advised by Soviet instructors, it built up conventional forces in Zambia, including armoured vehicles and small aircraft. The plan was to let ZANLA bring the Rhodesians to the brink of defeat, then seize victory from the lightly armed victors. By the late 1970s ZIPRA had devised a strategy called Storming the Heavens, a conventional invasion from Zambia. A Rhodesian operation to destroy a ZIPRA base near Livingstone in Zambia was never launched.

  Both movements sent recruits abroad for training, and ZANLA's first batch went to the People's Republic of China.

  9398979925

• 4. Patrons and Volunteers

  ›

  By April 1979-12,000 ZANLA guerrillas were training in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Libya, while 9,500 of its 13,500 cadres operated inside Rhodesia. Those camps were one sign of how far the war reached beyond its borders. The Soviet Union backed ZIPRA and China backed ZANLA. Moscow's aims were to counter the anti-communist West and to challenge Chinese influence in the region.

  Soviet weapons soon appeared in the countryside, and by 1979 ZIPRA was using surface-to-air missiles. About 1,400 Soviet, 700 East German and 500 Cuban instructors were deployed to the area. Cuba also trained 6,000 ZIPRA fighters in batches of 2,000 from 1977, at Boma and Lupea in eastern Angola. Yet the Soviets declined to enter the fighting themselves. China's practical help was limited, mostly small-scale sabotage and anti-Western propaganda. North Korean officers taught Zimbabwean militants to use explosives and arms at a camp near Pyongyang, and by 1976 Ethiopia, Yugoslavia and Romania were also offering ZANU training.

  Rhodesian troops found proof of this sponsorship in captured political officers' notebooks and Eastern bloc uniforms and weapons. In November 1977, during a pre-emptive strike on the ZANLA base at New Farm in Chimoio, Mozambique, they even captured a KGB general. In June 1979, Cuba and Mozambique offered direct military help to the Patriotic Front, the joint front of Mugabe and Nkomo. Both leaders declined.

  Ian Smith presented the struggle as an anti-communist cause, which helped warm relations with the West, although Britain stayed neutral. Many white Rhodesians had watched the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya and were determined to resist a majority-rule policy. They also feared that most of the land and economy they controlled would be confiscated.

  On the other side of the ledger, South Africa gave clandestine material and military support to Rhodesia. Israel's government declared its backing, let Rhodesia produce its own Uzis, and supplied helicopters used in counter-insurgency operations. The Uzi became standard issue for the army, the police and white civilians.

  The United States officially refused to recognise Rhodesia. Even so, some American veterans of combat in Vietnam joined the Rhodesian Security Forces. Rhodesia ran advertising campaigns in Western countries to attract soldiers. In the United States, segregationists and the young Religious Right spread pro-Rhodesian propaganda and helped recruit volunteers through magazines such as Soldier of Fortune. They failed to persuade Washington to recognise Rhodesia's sovereignty.

  3738181719

• 5. Rhodesia's Way of War

  ›

  In June 1977, Time magazine reported that "man for man, the Rhodesian army ranks among the world's finest fighting units." The army behind that verdict was small. It had only 3,400 regular troops in 1970. By 1978-79 it had about 10,800 regulars, backed on paper by some 40,000 reservists, though perhaps only 15,000 were available for active service in the final year.

  The Rhodesian SAS and the Rhodesian Light Infantry were all-white units, and the Selous Scouts handled special operations. By 1978-79, though, most of the regular army was black, including the Rhodesian African Rifles. The British South Africa Police added 8,000 to 11,000 men, mostly black, with 19,000 to 35,000 largely white police reservists acting as a home guard.

  By 1978, every white man up to the age of 60 faced periodic call-up. Men under 35 could expect to alternate six-week blocks in the army and at home. Compulsory service for whites rose to one year by 1973 and to 18 months in 1976, taking effect at once for soldiers about to finish. Legislation to conscript black men took effect in 1979, but few answered. Foreign volunteers came from Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Portugal, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Two of their groups were called the Crippled Eagles and 7 Independent Company.

  Sanctions imposed by Britain and endorsed by United Nations members meant a shortage of modern equipment. Oil, munitions and arms still arrived through South Africa and Portugal, along with smuggling schemes through Mozambique. The standard rifle was the Belgian FN FAL, built under licence in South Africa as the R1. The air force flew Second World War era Douglas Dakotas alongside Hawker Hunters and Canberra bombers. South Africa provided training, aircraft and crews from 1966. In the last year of the war, the South Africans diverted several Polish-made T-55 tanks, originally meant for Idi Amin's Uganda, to Rhodesia.

  Daily life bent around the war. Most white citizens carried personal weapons, and white housewives with submachine guns were not unusual. Civilian transport travelled in escorted convoys. The government split the country into eight operational areas, from Operation Ranger on the north-west border to Operation Tangent in Matabeleland, plus SALOPS around Salisbury.

  The fighting began on the 4th of July 1964, when ZANU insurgents ambushed and killed Andrew Oberholzer, a white foreman at the Silverstreams Wattle Company. The killing left a lasting mark on a small, close-knit white community. In August the Smith administration detained leaders including Sithole, Takawira, Edgar Tekere, Enos Nkala and Maurice Nyagumbo. Josiah Tongogara and the barrister Herbert Chitepo remained to lead ZANLA's war council from bases in Zambia and later Mozambique.

  The first major engagement came on the 28th of April 1966 at Sinoia, where seven ZANLA men were killed. Three weeks later, the survivors killed two civilians at a farm near Hartley. For years the border stayed manageable. Along the Zambezi River, from Lake Kariba to the Mozambique border, Rhodesia placed 30-man camps at 8-kilometre intervals, with mobile reaction units behind them. From 1966 to 1970 they killed 175 insurgents at a cost of 14 defenders.

  The quiet ended on the 21st of December 1972 with ZANLA's attack on Altena Farm in the north-east. Rhodesia answered by hitting the nationalists in their foreign camps before they could cross the border. Then, in April 1974, Portugal's left-wing Carnation Revolution signalled the end of colonial rule in Mozambique. FRELIMO took power there on the 25th of June 1975, handing ZANLA 800 miles of friendly border. Smith recognised that Rhodesia was now ringed by hostile nations on three sides and declared a formal state of emergency. Mozambique soon closed its border, but Rhodesian forces kept crossing it in hot-pursuit raids.

  No raid was stranger than the one on Nyadzonya on the 9th of August 1976. Seventy-two Selous Scouts, guided by a former ZANLA commander named Morrison Nyathi, drove into Mozambique at 0005 hours. They wore FRELIMO uniforms, and their vehicles carried FRELIMO colours and licence plates. The white soldiers hid behind black ski masks. FRELIMO sentries saluted the convoy as it passed.

  At 0825 the column reached a camp holding over 5,000 guerrillas and several hundred refugees. The six ZANLA soldiers on duty waved it in. About 4,000 guerrillas stood on the parade ground. A Rhodesian soldier announced over a loudspeaker, in Shona, "Zimbabwe tatora", meaning "we have taken Zimbabwe". Nyathi blew a whistle, and the cadres ran cheering toward the vehicles. The Rhodesians then opened fire. More than 300 insurgents were reported killed, against four lightly wounded Scouts. ZANLA's own report corroborates that figure, although both guerrilla armies publicly insisted the camp was a refugee camp.

  On the 30th of May 1977, during Operation Aztec, 500 troops crossed the Mozambican border and travelled 60 miles to Mapai. Air cover and paratroopers in Dakotas supported them. Rhodesia claimed 32 ZANLA fighters dead and one pilot lost, while Mozambique said it had shot down three planes and a helicopter. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim condemned the incursion, as did the American, British and Soviet governments, and Security Council Resolution 411 followed on the 30th of June. Rhodesian forces withdrew.

  A larger blow came from the 23rd to the 25th of November 1977. Operation Dingo was a three-day surprise attack on ZANLA camps at Chimoio and Tembue. It reportedly inflicted thousands of casualties and probably blunted guerrilla incursions for some months, but the insurgency kept intensifying through 1978.

  2299747558

• 6. Civilians and Poisons

  ›

  On the 3rd of September 1978, ZIPRA fighters camped beneath the flight path out of Kariba Airport fired a Soviet-supplied SA-7 missile at a Vickers Viscount, Air Rhodesia Flight 825. Eighteen people on board survived the crash. Five went off to search for water. Half an hour later, nine ZIPRA fighters arrived, promising help, and three of the thirteen who stayed behind hid when they saw them. In the words of Time magazine, the guerrillas "herded together the ten people at the wreckage, robbed them of their valuables, and finally cut them down with automatic weapons fire".

  Nkomo claimed responsibility in a way many Rhodesians thought gloating, speaking of it to the BBC. On the 12th of February 1979, a second Viscount, Flight 827, was shot down in the same way, and all 59 people on board died. In October 1978, Rhodesian Canberras, Hunters and helicopter gunships struck a ZIPRA base at Westlands farm near Lusaka, warning Zambian forces by radio to stay out.

  Civilians were repeatedly the victims. On the 21st of December 1976, black nationalist guerrillas killed 27 black workers at a tea plantation near the Mozambican border. On the 6th of August 1977, a bomb in a Salisbury Woolworths store killed 11 people and injured 70. Later that month, on the 21st of August, militants from Mozambique burned the homes of farmworkers on a white-owned farm and killed 16 black civilians. In May 1978-50 civilians died in crossfire between Marxist militants and the Rhodesian military, the highest civilian toll in a single engagement up to then.

  Missionaries suffered too. Seven white Catholic missionaries died at St. Paul's Mission, Musami, on the 6th of February 1977. On the 23rd of June 1978, the Vumba massacre killed 12 British missionaries and their children, the worst single attack on missionaries. By mid-1978 guerrillas had killed nearly 40 Christian missionaries in all.

  Rhodesia's security forces also pursued a darker programme. They set up chemical and biological weapons efforts to kill guerrillas inside Rhodesia and in camps in Zambia and Mozambique. One plan was to contaminate supplies that contact men provided, or that were recovered from hidden caches or stolen from rural stores. Another was to poison water along infiltration routes, forcing guerrillas to carry more water and less ammunition, or to cross areas patrolled by security forces. A third was to poison food, drink and medicine in camps in Mozambique. The chemicals most used were parathion, an organophosphate insecticide, and thallium, a heavy metal found in rat poison. The biological agents selected included cholera and anthrax bacteria, and planners also considered typhus, typhoid, ricin and botulinum toxin. Claims about these weapons appeared only in books published after the war.

  Between 1976 and 1979, the Rhodesian Army also sowed dense minefields along the eastern and northern borders, one pattern being known as the Cordon Sanitaire. At independence the fields were estimated to cover 511 square kilometres, a figure later revised down to 310. The Zimbabwean government estimated they held 2.6 million anti-personnel mines. Israeli companies built a 500-mile belt of mines along the borders with Mozambique and Zambia.

  4849636252

• 7. Settlement and Stalemate

  ›

  By 1979, at least 12,500 guerrillas were inside Rhodesia, and 22,000 ZIPRA and 16,000 ZANLA fighters waited uncommitted outside. Insurgents were crossing the border faster than the security forces could kill or capture them. Whether ZIPRA's planned conventional invasion could have beaten the trained Rhodesian army and air force was doubtful. But the insurgency was growing daily, and control of the whole country was under strain.

  In December 1978, a ZANLA unit slipped to the outskirts of Salisbury and fired rockets and incendiary rounds into the main oil storage depot. The tanks burned for five days, sending up smoke visible 80 miles away. Half a million barrels of petroleum product, a quarter of Rhodesia's fuel, were lost. Attacks on civilians had also accelerated white emigration, shrinking the pool of trained reserves, and Rhodesian GDP fell steadily through the late 1970s.

  The diplomatic road had opened earlier. Late in 1976, Smith accepted the basic elements of a plan from US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to bring in majority rule within two years. The Rhodesian military's job was to erode guerrilla strength and buy time for a settlement. That settlement came in March 1978 as the Internal Settlement, which renamed the country Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. In the general election of the 24th of April 1979, Bishop Abel Muzorewa became the country's first black prime minister, and Josiah Zion Gumede became president on the 1st of June.

  The arrangement kept the military, police, civil service and judiciary in white hands and guaranteed whites about one-third of the seats in parliament. Nkomo and Mugabe denounced it as a puppet of white Rhodesians, and the fighting went on. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, elected in May 1979, did not recognise it. Neither did the Carter administration, even though the US Senate voted to lift sanctions. Thatcher sympathised with the settlement and regarded the guerrilla leaders as terrorists. Even so, she was willing to back further compromise, partly because Britain feared recognition would fracture the Commonwealth. So the Thatcher government invited all the nationalist leaders to a peace conference in London.

  The result was the Lancaster House Agreement. The Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government accepted a watering down of the 1978 settlement. Mugabe and Nkomo agreed to end the war in exchange for new elections in which they could stand. Sanctions were lifted in late 1979. By an act of the 11th of December 1979, the country formally reverted to colonial status as Southern Rhodesia, and its parliament voted itself out of existence. Lord Soames arrived in Salisbury on the 12th of December as Governor-Designate to take over from President Gumede. A ceasefire followed on the 21st of December.

  A Commonwealth Monitoring Force oversaw the transition. Britain contributed 800 soldiers and 300 airmen, with small naval and marine contingents, and Australia, Fiji, Kenya and New Zealand added smaller numbers. A nine-man British advance party arrived on the 8th of December to set up a logistics base.

  The 1980 election was not free of suspicion. Mugabe's guerrilla cadres were accused of intimidating voters, and some were said to have skipped the assembly points required under the agreement. Observers and Lord Soames were accused of looking the other way. In March 1980 the Rhodesian military may have seriously considered a coup in two stages. Operation Quartz would attack guerrilla assembly points, and Operation Hectic would assassinate Mugabe and his key aides. Support for Mugabe among the Shona majority could not seriously be disputed, and the plan collapsed for lack of any external backing and for fear of the conflagration that would follow.

  ZANU-PF won 63% of the vote, and Mugabe became prime minister. All Commonwealth forces left by the 16th of March 1980, except 40 infantry instructors who stayed to train the new army. Independence was recognised internationally on the 18th of April 1980. Two years later, on the 18th of April 1982, the capital Salisbury was renamed Harare.

  688697167

• 8. Aftermath and Memory

  ›

  Rhodesian government statistics counted more than 20,000 deaths from December 1972 to December 1979. They listed 1,120 security force members, 10,050 guerrillas killed inside Rhodesia, 7,790 black civilians and 468 white civilians. The toll of guerrillas killed in Mozambique and Zambia was unknown.

  Mugabe at first moved cautiously. He formed a coalition with his ZAPU rivals and the white minority, and Nkomo held a series of cabinet posts. The Rhodesian Army and the guerrilla forces were merged into the Zimbabwe Defence Forces. South Africa recruited white Rhodesian personnel in Operation Winter, and around 5,000 accepted. ZANLA and ZIPRA clashed in 1980 and 1981. In February 1982, Mugabe fired Nkomo and two other ZAPU ministers, and bitter fighting broke out in the Ndebele-speaking region.

  From 1982 to 1985, the army crushed armed resistance in Matabeleland and the Midlands in a campaign called Gukurahundi. The Shona term translates roughly as "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains". The campaigns are also known as the Matabeleland Massacres, and the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade carried them out. German journalist Shari Eppel estimates that about 20,000 Matabele were murdered in those first years after the war, most of them in public executions. Violence between the former guerrilla armies lasted until 1987. In December of that year they merged into ZANU PF under Mugabe, who became President as the office of prime minister was abolished.

  The war's reach extended past Zimbabwe. Rhodesian support for the Mozambican rebel group RENAMO, which fought FRELIMO even as Rhodesians fought ZANLA on Mozambican soil, helped spark the Mozambican Civil War. That conflict lasted from 1977 until 1992 and claimed a million lives.

  Women carried a share of the fighting. ZANLA said that 25-30% of its fighting force was female at independence. Women served in logistics, in transport, and sometimes in combat, and some commanded male troops. Under Maoist and Marxist-Leninist ideas, fighters wore identical uniforms and addressed one another as comrades. Mistreatment of women, especially new recruits, was nevertheless not uncommon. The story of a 1978 attack on the town of Umtali shows how contested these accounts are. ZANU claimed at the time that the 450 attackers were women, but in 1996 Joyce Mujuru said most were men and that ZANU had invented the story to impress Western organisations. After independence, the Legal Age of Majority Act gave women the right to hold public and civil offices, and the Zimbabwe Women's Bureau, founded in 1978, expanded its work.

  Unlike many post-colonial African conflicts, this one produced a large written military history. Rhodesian veterans, many from the Rhodesian Light Infantry or the Selous Scouts, published memoirs, often self-published or issued by small specialist presses. The first major one, Selous Scouts Top Secret War, appeared in 1982 from Galago, a house run by Peter Stiff. Its author, Reid-Daly, later testified in a lawsuit over authorship that he had "exaggerated or embellished the true story". When Galago re-released Chris Cocks' Fireforce, Stiff removed all references to drug use because he wanted the Light Infantry portrayed as heroes.

  On the nationalist side, Terence Ranger's Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe, published in 1985, was the first major academic account from the guerrillas' perspective. It concluded that rural blacks were "united" behind the guerrillas, and Ranger later admitted it echoed ZANU's own rhetoric. In her 1992 book Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War, Norma J. Kriger found that relations between guerrillas and villagers in Mutoko District were mostly marked by violence and coercion. Historian Luise White challenged the Rhodesian claim that the army "won every battle but lost at the negotiating table", noting there were few real battles and no decisive victories. Academic M. T. Howard added that an image of a nearly invincible Rhodesian Army suited both sides. White Rhodesians could point to a force never beaten in the field, and Zimbabwean nationalists could argue that their eventual success was all the more impressive.

  8794919773