Joining the war: Combatants’ experiences from home to the training camps

Herrick Dullie Moyo (nom de guerreDwela Mashingaidze) has a lean frame which belies his big heart. Except for the confidence in his deep baritone voice, you would not think this is a former ZPRA combatant who fought in the Battle of Ratanyane, one of the most famous battles of Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle. Moyo was among the first group of ZPRA members who were trained in conventional warfare, as ZAPU prepared to deploy a regular army, in line with its changing strategies.

The experiences of this battle-hardened guerrilla, tracking into transit camps near Francistown in Botswana, joining the training camps in Zambia, and fighting Rhodesian forces back home, mirror the journey many ex-combatants walked in the struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence. Moyo was aged just 20 in 1977, when he joined a small group of young men and women and made the long journey to the ZPRA training camp, travelling from his village in Gwanda district, Matabeleland South, into Botswana, where he and his group spent what felt like an eternity before they were taken to Nampundwe refugee camp in Zambia. The soft-spoken combatant’s account underlines the sacrifices of this generation in the liberation struggle.

When he decided to move to Botswana, Moyo had just returned home from South Africa for the December holidays, where he had been working for Anglo-American since 1976. He had joined Anglo-American after learning that the company gave workers opportunities to migrate to the USA. In the increasingly bleak economic situation in the then Rhodesia, such an opportunity could profoundly transform a young man’s life.

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Moyo, therefore, effectively shut the door on that dream when he chose ZPRA, an example of how personal dreams and ambitions were often pushed aside when young people decided to join liberation movements, stepping into a very uncertain future. Harsh realities under colonial rule forced many young people to choose the difficult path of war rather than staying home to pursue careers. Some chose that path because of the frustrations they experienced under colonial rule, and also because of the defiant mood that had gripped communities at the time.

For Moyo, among many influences was memories of his difficult childhood after his parents’ political activism got them detained at the infamous Gonakudzingwa, together with Joshua Nkomo and other senior ZAPU politicians. An older former combatant, Marshall Mhambi Mpofu, shocked his interviewer, Zenzele Ndebele, when he disclosed, almost casually, that he had given up an opportunity to train as a medical doctor to join ZPRA in 1973. Unfair treatment in Southern Rhodesia’s racialised work hierarchies pushed a young, politically conscious Mpofu to the edge. He eventually cracked during a work dispute and declared casually to his superiors, ‘Gentlemen, we are going to meet in the Zambezi Valley.’ Speaking with surgical clarity, Mpofu carefully explained that he never regretted his decision, as he recounted Rhodesian, regional, and global politics at the time to Ndebele.

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