The War Notebooks
3 min read
By Margaret Kamba
There was a lot of propaganda by Rhodesia in order to ward off many sons and daughters of Zimbabwe from going to war.
Despite all the attempts to ensure that Zimbabwe does not get its independence, the spirit of the war would not have it otherwise.
ZANU PF Secretary for Information and Publicity Cde Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa says the war notebooks gave a panoramic view of the war making it easy to control it through radio.
“When I went to Maputo after I got wounded, I trained in the ideological school, then Yugoslavia and then I ended up in the Information Department at the Party Headquarters,” Cde Mutsvangwa said.
“Tongogara made sure that when you are in the field you had a notebook and you would write the reports. If there was a battle and your commander got wounded, before you even thought of taking his gun, you must retrieve the report.
“So the reports were then sent to Tongogara. So you can imagine a front of 1000 kilometres and Tongogara was reading the war. So the most important archives of the war of the Zimbabweans are those war archives.”
Ambassador Mutsvangwa added the input made by His Excellency, President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa in setting up the professional intelligence unit.
“So President Mnangagwa is collecting all these reports from Zambezi to Limpopo. His Secretary to report to the Politburo to Mugabe is my wife. So she is the one who becomes the repository of all these war communiques to the point when we became free, first she couldn’t go to Lancaster because she was now pregnant because we had gotten married towards the end of the war, then second, she could not come back home because she was the custodian of all these so she had to bring a plane load six months into independence when the country was safe.
“So Emmerson Mnangagwa comes back to war a second time. He is the first one to reorganise the ZANLA forces to have a professional intelligence organisation.
“The Chinese side emphasized on the political commissar, the KBG and the Russian side emphasized the professional intelligence officer.
“So when we went to war we had challenges coming from University because we were quickly branded as traitors. So when Mnangagwa comes in he says no no no so he brings in the KGB trained former ZIPRA guys who had come to Mozambique with their manuals then combines them with Rhodesian defects from the special branch so he forms the first professional intelligence organisation of ZANLA forces and my wife was the pioneer student.”
Cde Mark Grey Marongwe aka Cde Tichatonga also recalled that the war was intensifying at that time.
“Many progressive countries started training lots of comrades such that the cost of fighting for Rhodesia was 1mil United States dollars. That time I was in Zimunya and got wounded, so I had to go back to Chimoio and work in the Department of Information. Mozambique had an English Bulletin which was converted to Voice of Zimbabwe. I was working with Webster Shamu, Charles Ndhlovu among others.”
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