By Simon Ngena

THE PATRIOT was recently a guest at a gathering of surviving veterans in Hwedza who operated in the Tangwena Sector, comprising war zones as far afield as Chiduku, Svosve and Hwedza. 

The Tangwena Sector was, we were told, named after Chief Tekayi Tangwena, who although he was not a guerilla or mujibha, can rightly claim  that he “died for this country”.  

But just who is, or was, Rekayi Tangwena?

Born in 1910, Chief Rekayi Tangwena was a traditional chief from Zimbabwe’s eastern province of Manicaland, and was of the Nhewa/Simboti (leopard) totem. 

He is well known as the man who helped Robert Mugabe and Edgar Tekere cross into Mozambique to join the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) guerillas who were waging a fierce guerilla war against Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front government.

However, Chief Tangwena was even better known for his fierce resistance to having his people evicted from their ancestral lands by the racist white minority settler government, refusing to make way for the white settlers.

Despite being arrested more than a dozen times, he continued to resist and rebuild even after his people’s homesteads had been destroyed by settler forces

A Senator in Zimbabwe’s first Parliament (1980-85), he died on 11 June 1984 after suffering a stroke.

He is the only traditional chief in Zimbabwe to have been accorded the status of being a national hero, and he is buried at the National Heroes’ Acre in Harare.

According to reliable family sources, Tangwena never went to school but left home in 1919 to work on a gold mine in Penhalonga. Thereafter, he found jobs in the hospitality sector in Mutare, Harare and Bulawayo. Among the many hotels he worked at were Brown’s Hotel (Mutare), Meikles Hotel, Grand Hotel and Radio House (Harare), and Grand Hotel and Victoria Hotel (Bulawayo), then as engineer’s assistant on the Rhodesia Railways. He returned home permanently on 3 April 1963 eventually succeeding his father as chief of the Tangwena people in 1966.

Tangwena was married to two women, Mai Karongo and  Mai Elijah. The former was said to have been a spirit medium, and had two children with her. Mai Elijah was his father’s younger wife, whom he married after his father died. He had one child with her.

Tangwena’s rift with the colonial authorities started as soon as he was installed chief.

He went to the Nyanga District Office to inform the Native Commissioner that he was now the Chief of the Tangwena people but was informed that it was not possible since the Tangwena people were squatters on a farm owned by a white man, by the name William Hanmer. Much to his chagrin, he was also informed that the Tangwena people were, in fact, registered as labourers on the farm.

On several occasions Tangwena refused to be evicted from his ancestral lands even in light of an eviction order from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. After being dragged to court several times for refusing to move off the land, Tangwena won the ruling and was allowed to live on the land but the Rhodesians resorted to intimidatory tactics.

The authorities crafted a dubious piece of legislation which allowed them to evict Tangwena and his people from their land. It was on 18 September 1969 that the Tangwena were evicted from the land in a violent manner in which some of the Tangwena people were beaten by the Rhodesian Police. Their houses were razed by bulldozers, and within a week, Chief Tangwena and his people were back, rebuilding them. His people lived in hiding rather than settling on the land allocated to them by the government. They were chased by police, bitten by dogs, but remained defiant. 

The defiant Rekayi Tangwena also led a demonstration against the colonial authorities at Nyanga Police Station despite the brutality that had earlier been exhibited by the police when they were evicted. Eventually, Rekayi Tangwena joined the trek into Mozambique to join the liberation struggle. 

In 1975 it was Chief Tangwena who led ZANU stalwarts Robert Mugabe and Edgar Tekere across the border into Mozambique, in order to prosecute the war of independence. The two are said to have stayed at the Tangwena homestead for a while before they were smuggled under cover of darkness into Mozambique.

The Tangwena people’s trials and tribulations are well documented in Suffering for Territory: Race, Place and Power in Zimbabwe, by anthropologist Donald Moore. This book is a must read, which I would recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the Tangwena people.

Suffering for Territory describes the ‘landscapes of dispossession’ prevalent in colonial Rhodesia Zimbabwe, where the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, and its successor, the Land Tenure Act of 1969, held sway.

The two pieces of legislation allocated fixed ‘reserves’ for Africans dispossessed of their fertile lands by the settlers. These were located in areas of poor soils, characterised by difficulty of access and overcrowding. Their former lands became ‘European Areas’. ‘Purchase Areas’ were available to a few (richer) African commercial farmers to buy. 

The author focuses on a single landscape, Kairezi, in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. It emphasises, in the author’s words, ‘the geographies of violence historically sedimented in landscapes of racialised dispossession’.

Kairezi has a special place in Zimbabwe’s history, thanks largely to its charismatic leader, Rekayi Tangwena, who, in the 1960s and 1970s, defied Rhodesian rule by refusing to leave ancestral lands usurped by white conquest. He took his struggle to the courts, but was evicted. His people were forced to disperse, and many settled in Mozambique, just across the common border. 

The author also uses the term ‘landscape’ to describe Kairezi’s entangled social and cultural relations. Landscape describes how a particular location is seen — is Kairezi a white farm, a chiefdom, a rainmaking territory, a resettlement scheme? All these are sites of contestation.

Nyafaru Cooperative, located in the midst of the Tangwena, was a source of great assistance to the villagers in hiding, and provided a school for the children. The conflict entangled the Rhodesian authorities with ‘liberal’ whites, who supported the Kairezians in their struggle to retain their land.

One of its major stakeholders, Guy Clutton-Brock, is the only white person buried at Zimbabwe’s Heroes Acre. He actively supported the Tangwena people in their struggle against eviction and helped to publicise their plight to the wider world.

Rest in peace, Senator Chief Rekayi Tangwena. You will always be remembered as the “uneducated man” who almost single-handedly tore the Land Tenure Act to shreds. Above all, history will remember you as the people’s chief who gave Ian Smith many sleepless nights.