After reading the interview, two questions rushed to my mind. The first one was: What, so this is how things happened?! The details given by the widow took me aback, providing a dramatic perspective to what I had already read of the tragic accident that ended Tongogara’s life.
The second question was more contemporary. I wondered what had motivated the publication of the interview, whose content has the capacity to re-open the can of worms that ate Tongogara. If the question-and-answer had come out in the independent media, my curiosity would certainly have been limited to the account that Angeline gave. My eyebrows went up because the article appeared in the state-controlled media.
But more about that later. I will start by probing the details that Angeline gives the reader. First, she says she was never—at least up to the day she granted the interview after the December memorial of a her husband—taken to the scene of the accident in Mozambique. Thirty years on, she does not know where her husband died, but she still nurses a burning wish to go there. She was told Samora Machel had ordered that no-one should visit the scene.
If the accident was a genuine one, why should people, especially the widow, have been barred from visiting the scene? Granted, Mozambique was still in a state of civil crisis, but if people could go back to Chimoio and Nyazonia, where hundreds of people were massacred, why not one spot that claimed a single life?
Maybe Samora never gave such an order. Maybe no accident took place. By the way, some time back in 1995, a post-graduate colleague related to Tongogra through his mother introduced me to one of Tongogara’s sons. As we sat over drinks in Glen View, we got to talk about Zanu (PF) politics and the liberation struggle.
Inevitably, the conversation ended up on his father’s death. “The whole thing is confusing,” he said. “We have not been shown the wreckage of the car and how is it that only one person died while the rest escaped without a single scratch?” The case was rested as we were in a public place full of prying ears.
Then Angeline tells us that the late Josiah Tungamirai barred her from viewing her husband’s whole body. After that, she was given an injection whose purpose she is still vague about and which made her lose consciousness. I am not sure about medical procedure, but I am fighting hard the temptation to speculate that she was deliberately sedated because she was too agitated about her husband’s death. They let her see the face, but would not let her view the body. Maybe what she was stopped from knowing could have revealed more about how Tongogara died.
I am also still confused by the fact that when she settled down to mourn her husband, she was not let back into her own bedroom back there in Mozambique, as the keys had been confiscated. The bedroom is the most intimate place in any home. Why bar her?
Finally, she was not invited when her husband’s remains were shifted at Heroes’ Acre. There are certain things you just cannot and should not do, and these include burying or reburying a man without consulting his wife. Mysterious, is it not?
Regarding the media outlet: I am firmly persuaded that the article was consciously planted by some people well beyond Angeline to make certain statements. The revelations, powerful and useful as they are, betray the gross factionalism within Zanu (PF).
I am sure that the publication of the interview was meant to bring out a message from some quarters within the party, especially when you consider the far-reaching implications of doing so. The details from the interview seem to target at least three living people. These include Joice Mujuru, President Robert Mugabe (who was on leave at the time of the publication) and Oppah Muchinguri.
It is unavoidable to consider Mugabe as part of the matrix because he was the leader of the party. When it comes to such matters as Angeline being barred from getting back to her bedroom and omitting inviting her for the Heroes Acre reburial, he would have been expected to intervene, unless things were being done behind his back.
But I cannot fathom what those who could have pushed for the interview wanted to achieve by implicating Mugabe. Angeline’s account tells of neglect by Joice Mujuru, whose children she looked after during the armed struggle – an obvious attempt to expose the vice president. I will not explore the merits or demerits of that neglect here, but this is one of the messages the interview intends to send and the verdict is out against Joice.
Regarding Oppah—I am not sure which faction she belongs to now—the question seems to be: “Can you tell the world how you survived that ‘accident’?”
The question that I leave the reader to ponder is: Who was in fact responsible for causing the publication of this seemingly choreographed interview and to what ends? – For feedback, please write to majonitt@gmail.com
Post published in: Analysis