The truth about ‘bosom buddies’ Zimbabwe and SA

The first time, Joe Gqabi was lucky. One of his Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) comrades at the ANC’s house in Harare’s middle-class Ashdown Park suburb noticed a thin wire running from underneath the Toyota Cressida to a carport pole.

The car was Gqabi’s regular transport and, on that Sunday morning in early 1981, a gut feeling prompted the MK man to check the car. Seeing the trip wire, he then found the plastic explosives fastened to the chassis. Some weeks later, Gqabi – the ANC’s chief representative in newly independent Zimbabwe – wasn’t so fortunate.

Driving out alone in the Cressida, he was shot, at close range, 18 times. The bullets were all 9mm parabellum. Not long afterwards, an Israeli-made Uzi submachinegun, which had a 30-round magazine of 9mm rounds, was found dumped in a storm water drain nearby.

The hit was child’s play and made easier by the fact that the Zimbabwe authorities – led by its then prime minister, the now-dead Robert Mugabe; and its security minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, now Zimbabwe president, – refused to give the ANC delegation in the country any security.

The only person in the Ashdown Park house permitted to carry a weapon was Gqabi himself – and it was a comparative peashooter: a .38 revolver. That’s the sort of history you wouldn’t have heard much of as President Cyril Ramaphosa poured out his heartfelt regret this week in Harare over the death of Mugabe.

To hear Ramaphosa tell it, you would think the ANC and Mugabe’s Zanu-PF were bosom buddies. That’s not quite the truth – and Gqabi’s killing is only one facet of a relationship between the liberation movements which was always strained.

The why of the tale goes back to the ’60s and ’70s, when the ANC and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) of Joshua Nkomo were proteges of the Soviet Union, which was then engaged in fighting proxy wars with the West.

Zapu was backed with significant amounts of heavy weaponry in much the same way as Moscow supported the MPLA in Angola after it had illegally seized power in 1975 with the help of its allies from Cuba (also a Soviet surrogate).

Almost as stunned as Nkomo in 1980 – when Mugabe and Zanu-PF (backed by China in the liberation war) scored a landslide victory in the independence election – was the ANC, which had backed Zapu and paid little attention to Mugabe. Mugabe saw Zapu as the main impediment to his ideal of a one-party state in Zimbabwe and, in many ways, his “enemy’s friend” – the ANC – also became his enemy.

Thabo Mbeki, who was tasked with trying to establish a better ANC-Zanu-PF relationship, improved matters by the end of the ’80s. But then, when SA won its freedom in 1994, Mugabe felt angry because Nelson Mandela had usurped his place as “African liberator”.

Mbeki was president when the ANC soft-pedalled on the election theft and intimidation which characterised the 2002 polls in Zimbabwe – and enabled Mugabe and Zanu-PF to continue their military backed kleptocracy. Even now, Ramaphosa must still bow the knee to Zimbabwe as he did – to jeers – this weekend when he apologised for the xenophobic violence which targeted foreigners in SA, including Zimbabweans.

But loyal comrades united? No, Cyril, you cannot rewrite history.

Brendan Seery

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