ident John Vorster. In a candid chronicle, Nkala dismisses the official version that Smith recruited a Scotsman in Salisbury, now Harare, to carry bomb parts into Zambia and blow Chitepo away. Chitepo’s widow Victoria also disputes this version. In an embargoed memoir that will only be published following his death, Nkala brings to light, for the first time, details of the gruesome assassination of the lawyer-cum-politician, who many back then viewed as the charismatic alternative to Mugabe as leader of Zimbabwe. “It is a frank journal that will expose some people, you know, what they did during the liberation struggle. It is a controversial book that is why I will only have it published after I am dead. Sometimes it is better to know some unpleasant truths …when the person is gone,” Nkala said, refusing to confirm reports that there was “growing political pressure on him” not to write the memoir. He said he was aware that there were many “false and convenient reports” swirling around the murder of Chitepo, whom he described as an “astute politician” who made history by becoming the first black advocate in southern Africa. Chitepo, a top liberation war strategist, died when a car bomb planted under the driver’s seat in his VW Beetle detonated as he was trying to reverse the car from the garage of his Zambian house on March 18 1975. Nkala said his book would embarrass some people, but he was entitled to exercise his intellectual freedom. The memoir also contains a critique of a report of the Special International Commission on the assassination of Chitepo, which was commissioned by former Zambian President, Kenneth Kaunda, in Lusaka, 1976. The report fingers the late Zanla commander, Josiah Tongogara; current minister of Economic Development, Rugare Gumbo, who was then secretary for information and publicity; Henry Hamadziripi, Kumbirai Kangai, and Mukudzei Mudzi as the people responsible for assassinating Chitepo. The report claims Chitepo was a victim of a tribal power struggle within the party. The report claims Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru’s liberation war name) supplied the bomb that blew Chitepo to smithereens. Tongogara was the commander of ZANU’s guerrilla forces in exile at a time of dangerously high ethnic tensions within the movement, between Chitepo’s Manyika clan of the larger tribal Shona grouping, and Tongogara’s Karanga clan. Nkala said he was writing the book to “set the record straight.” In his memoirs, he also reveals how Tongogara was killed. No autopsy results or photographs of Tongogara’s body were ever released, leading to further speculation. A CIA briefing two days later described Tongogara as a potential political rival to Mugabe because of his “ambition, popularity and decisive style”. On the same day, the US embassy in Zambia issued a statement saying, “Almost no one in Lusaka accepts Mugabe’s assurance that Tongogara died accidentally. When (our) ambassador told the Soviet ambassador the news, the (latter) immediately charged ‘inside job’.” Nkala said his book would “answer many questions” and “step on a lot of toes.”
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