How Joshua Nkomo survived three assassination attempts after independence

When I was growing up in my dusty village in Ward Five of Tsholotsho district, villagers there, including my grand mother worshipped Joshua Nkomo. The superstitious ones even believed Nkomo was immortal and not a normal human being.

Most homesteads had a portrait of Nkomo wearing his chequered black and white shirt with his mysterious magic wand or induku by his side. That potrait became one of the most famous images of Umdala throughout the struggle years.

Little did I know that one day, as a journalist,  I would meet face to face with Umdala, the father of Zimbabwean nationalism, the man the Shona christened Chibwetichedza. In Matabeleland he was known as Umafukufuku.

After independence, I tried to unravel the mystery behind Nkomo's life and what made him survive several assassination attempts by the Rhodesians during the war. My article however will focus on how Nkomo survived three assassination attempts after independence.

I will focus on three attempts to assassinate Nkomo after independence. We all know how the Rhodesians tried several times to kill Nkomo during the war for independence.

When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, Nkomo thought he was finally safe from the eagle eyes of political assassins. Little did he know his problems were just beginning. Zimbabweans however,  never imagined that a black government under Robert Mugabe would try to kill the man who became a symbol of unity and a unifier.

But the reality is, there were three assassination attempts on Nkomo's life in the early 80s but only two were known to the people of Zimbabwe. The first attempt to assassinate Nkomo after independence was in 1983 at his house in Phelandaba and the second attempt in Masvingo when the Zapu leader's black Mercedes Benz was sprayed with bullets fired by gunmen in a crowd of Zanu(PF) supporters.

Nkomo survived the hail of bullets because his Mercedez Benz was bullet proof. He survived the Phelandaba assassination, because, say intelligence sources, he was given a tip off by some state agents and managed to get out of the house before the soldiers arrived for the kill.

Others in the intelligence community and liberals in Zanu were also against killing Nkomo fearing it could have had serious international repurcusions. They feared assassinating him would have given the remaining Zipra soldiers in the national army a good reason to join the rebellion in Matabeleland.

And that could have led to a full scale war with far reaching consequences for the region which was trying to contain two brutal wars in Mozambique and Angola.

My source, a former intelligence officer now based in the United Kingdom,  tells me the British, who had become Zanu-PF's new backers were not happy with the Fifth Brigade's attempt to kill Nkomo at his Phelandaba house in 1983 even though they wanted his party and army crushed.

There were also rumours that the tip off that saved Nkomo's life had come from his arch enemy, Enos Nkala. But when I interviewed Nkala at his house in 1997, he denied saving Nkomo's life. He told me that although he hated Nkomo, he did not want him dead.

"My anger was with his supporters, amaNdebele akithi.  Oh,  Ndebeles are fools, fools, fools for supporting Nkomo. That man had no vision. Thats why his people perished," said Nkala, speaking like a servant of God after his conversion to Christianity.

He was attending Victory Fellowship Church but Nkala did not show any signs of a born again Christian. He was still the same firebrand,  tough talking and no nonsense hardliner whose sharp tongue spit political vernom each time you mentioned Nkomo's name. But Nkala told a group of Matabeleland activists who visited him that he had helped a few Zapu officials and supporters to escape death.

Nkala enjoyed calling Zapu leaders fools. In his own world, everyone in Zapu was a fool. When he left Zanu after the Willowvale corruption scandal, his former colleagues in that party including Mugabe were added to his list of fools.  

According to Nkala, not everyone in Zanu wanted Nkomo dead. Only the hardliners and extremists were prepared to take the risk to eliminate him. They strongly believed killing Nkomo would have eliminated all threat against Mugabe.

Nkala had promised that everything about his relationship with Nkomo would be revealed in his book which he was writing. He had instructed the book be published when he is dead. But as things stand, the book will never be published and Nkala took all his secrets with him to the grave.

When the Fifth Brigade(the monster created by North Koreans) arrived at Nkomo's residence, the Zapu leader had already left. While the soldiers were busy shooting his workers in the house, Nkomo was  briefing a few Western journalists at a safe house. Nkomo's aides were later found dead in a pool of their own blood.

But what Zimbabweans did not know was that there was a third attempt after independence to kill Nkomo while on his way from his home in Kezi  to Bulawayo. That was a top secret mission and remains a mystery till this day.
"I wont give you much about the third attempt to kill Nkomo because the would be assassins bungled the operation and Nkomo survived again," said the source. The operation was to be carried out by a team of pysdo dissidents who were to ambush Nkomo's motorcade while on his way from his home district of Kezi to Bulawayo.
According to the source, the ambush was laid and the assassins were ready. When Nkomo's motorcade approached the ambush site close to Matobo National Park , the gunmen panicked and freezed allowing the convoy to pass without any incident. Nkomo survived again. Those were incidents that made many blacks to believe Nkomo was a mysterious human being.

 "Not a single hitman was able to pull the trigger until the motorcade passed them," added the source.
If the assassination had been successful, the government would have blamed disgruntled renegade members of Zipra who had joined dissidents. It was the time when there was tension within Zapu. Some former guerrillas and officials were not happy with Nkomo accusing him of being a weak leader.

This was after Nkomo had intervened in 1980 and 1981 to stop the fighting between Zipra and Zanla guerrillas in Bulawayo's Entumbane township. Extremists and radicals in Zapu who included ordinary supporters wanted Zipra to wage an all out war against the government.

 Zipra and Zanla fought each other in the township of Entumbane first in 1980 and then 1981. On both occasions, Nkomo intervened to stop Zipra regular army units from leaving Gwayi River Mine camp to join in the fighting. A Zipra officer sent to stop the regular army units from Gwayi River Mine from advancing into Bulawayo was allegedly run over by his colleagues.

When it became clear that Zanla did not have the capacity and firepower to defeat Zipra's conventionally trained soldiers the government sought help from the Rhodesian military high command. The airforce was called in to bomb Zipra positions and attack its tanks along Esigodini.

But Zanla vowed revenge for their humiliation by Zipra at Entumbane and they got it in the form of the Fifth Brigade. Peter Walls, former Rhodesian army commander, later boasted that it was his forces that saved Mugabe from an embarrassing defeat by Zipra in the second deadly clashes in 1981. Walls was later banned from coming back to Zimbabwe.

After the unity deal when Nkomo's security men were intergrated into the Central Intelligence Organisation(CIO), I met one of them and asked him why they risked their lives protecting Nkomo. The former bodyguard told me protecting Nkomo was a calling to some of the people who worked with him for many years.

"I really don't know how we survived those dangerous times when we were hunted like animals but that's the time I believed God protected us and Nkomo. Thats the time I also became a strong believer in God," the former bodyguard told me.

In an interview with the BBC in 2011, Peter Bowyer who served in the elite units of the Rhodesian army ruled out God's protection for both Nkomo and Mugabe during the struggle.

"Nkomo survived simply because each time we tried to kill him, he would be tipped off by the British secret service. They  feared killing the Zapu leader would jeopadise any peace process to end the war," Bowyer was quoted as saying.

During my coverage of Matabeleland killing fields in the 80s, I got closer to the Zapu inner circle from the top leadership to the lowest rank.  I told party secretary-general Welshman Mabhena that even though I grew up in Zapu, but as a journalist I wanted to remain impartial despite being affected by the situation.

"You can be impartial but you are still a child of Zapu. Your reports in the British media helped Amnesty International locate many Zapu prisoners including myself,"said Mabhena when we met at Manilal Naran's office.
But the Zapu leaders were not happy when I criticized them too but they soon understood the nature of my job as a writer. At one stage Nkomo suspected I was double dating his two secretaries Siboniso and Primrose for the purpose of extracting information from them.

But of course I denied the allegations but the old man was not convinced because he kept seeing me with them on different occasions.

The founding commander of the Rhodesian Selous Scouts, Ronald Reid- Daly said although his unit was very successful in its operations against guerrillas, his only disappointment was failing to kill Nkomo. Nkomo died of cancer in June 1999. Reid-Daly fled Zimbabwe after independence together with other top Rhodesian military leaders.

The South African Defence Force(SADF) appointed him commander of the Transkei Defence Force. He died in Cape Town in 2010.