Joshua Nkomo

Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo (June 19, 1917 (date uncertain) – July 1, 1999) was a Zimbabwean nationalist leader and revolutionary, a member of the Ndebele (or Matebele) ethnic group, and the leader and founder of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU).

Early life

Nkomo was the son of missionary teachers in Matabeleland and was educated in South Africa, where he met Nelson Mandela and other regional nationalist leaders at the University of Fort Hare. However, he did not attend university at Fort Hare University. After returning to Bulawayo in 1948, he became a trade unionist for black railway workers. He also became one of Zimbabwe's wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs.

Armed struggle

Nkomo was detained by Ian Smith's government in 1964, with fellow revolutionaries Robert Mugabe and Ndabaningi Sithole, until 1974, when they were released due to pressure from South African president B.J. Vorster. Following Nkomo's release, he went to Zambia to continue the liberation struggle through the dual process of armed conflict and negotiation. Unlike ZANU's armed wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, ZAPU's armed wing, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, was dedicated to both guerrilla warfare and conventional warfare. At the time of independence ZIPRA had a modern military stationed in Zambia and Angola, consisting of Soviet Union-made Mikoyan fighters, tanks and armoured personnel carriers, as well as a well trained artillery units.

ZAPU forces committed two acts of terrorism during their war to overthrow the Rhodesian government when his troops shot down two Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscount civilian passenger planes with surface-to-air missiles. The first, on September 3, 1978, killed 38 out of 56 in the crash, with a further ten survivors (nine of whom were women or minor children) shot by ZIPRA ground troops dispatched to inspect the burned-out wreckage. The eight remaining survivors managed to elude the guerrillas and walked 20km into Kariba from where the flight had taken off (it was headed for Harare). Some of the passengers had serious injuries, and were picked up by local police and debriefed by the Rhodesian army. The second shootdown, on February 12, 1979, killed all 59 on board. The real target of the second shootdown was General Peter Walls. Due to the large number of tourists returning to Salisbury a second flight had been dispatched. General Walls received a boarding card for the second flight which departed Kariba 15 minutes after the doomed aircraft. No-one has been brought to trial or charged with shooting down the aircraft due to amnesty laws passed by both Smith and Mugabe. In a televised interview not long after the first shootdown, Nkomo laughed and joked about the incident while admitting ZAPU had indeed been responsible for the attack on the civilian aircraft. In his memoirs, Story of My Life, published in 1985, Nkomo expressed regret for the shooting down of both planes which goes contrary to his earlier broadcast sentiment.

Politics

File:Nkomo-ZAPU.jpg

ZAPU election badge, c1980

Nkomo founded the National Democratic Party (NDP), and in 1960, the year British prime minister Harold MacMillan spoke of the "wind of change" blowing through Africa, Robert Mugabe joined him. The NDP was banned by Smith's white minority government, and it was subsequently replaced by the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), also founded by Nkomo and Mugabe, in 1962, itself immediately banned. ZAPU split in 1963 and while some have claimed this split was due to ethnic tensions, more accurately the split was motivated by the failure of Sithole, Mugabe, Takawira and Malianga to wrest control of ZAPU from Nkomo. ZAPU would remain a multi-ethnic party right up until independence.

An unpopular government called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, led by Abel Muzorewa, was formed in 1979 between Ian Smith and Ndabaningi Sithole's ZANU, which by now had also split from [Mugabe's more militant ZANU faction. However, the civil war waged by Nkomo and Mugabe continued unabated, and Britain and the USA did not lift sanctions on the country. Britain persuaded all parties to come to Lancaster House in September 1979 to work out a constitution and the basis for fresh elections. Mugabe and Nkomo shared a delegation, called the Patriotic Front (PF), at the negotiations chaired by Lord Carrington. Elections were held in 1980, and to most observers' surprise Nkomo's ZAPU lost in a landslide to Mugabe's ZANU. The effects of this election would make both ZAPU and ZANU into tribally-based parties, ZANU with backing from the Shona majority, and ZAPU the Ndebele minority. Nkomo was offered the ceremonial post of President, but declined.

Nkomo was appointed to the cabinet, but in 1982 was accused of plotting a coup after South African double agents in Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation, who were attempting to cause distrust between ZAPU and ZANU, planted arms on ZAPU owned farms, and then tipped Mugabe off to their existence. Mugabe unleashed the notorious Fifth Brigade upon Nkomo's Matabeleland homeland in the operation known as Gukurahundi, in an attempt to destroy ZAPU and create a one-party state. After the Gukurahundi, in 1987 Nkomo consented to the absorption of ZANU into Zanu-PF, leaving Zimbabwe as effectively a one-party state, and leading some Ndebeles to accuse Nkomo of selling out. These Ndebele individuals were, however,in such a minority that they did not constitute a meaningful power base within the cross-section of ZAPU. In a powerless post, and with his health failing, his influence declined.

When asked late in his life why he allowed this to happen, he told historian Eliakim Sibanda that he did it to stop the murder of the Ndebele (who supported his party) and of the ZAPU politicians and organziers who had been targeted by Zimbabwe's security forces since 1982. Nkomo died of prostate cancer on July 1 1999, at the age of 81.

References

• The Zimbabwe African People's Union 1961-1987: A Political History of Insurgency in Southern Rhodesia.

• Terence O. Ranger, ‘Nkomo, Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo (1917–1999)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 18 June 2006

External links

• The Hunyani Disaster (about the first Viscount shootdown)
• Obituary