History battle: Zambia’s dubious role in Namibia’s freedom fight

“There is no such a thing and the allegations are totally false,” President Banda responded to the allegations from Namibia’s National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) that he and former President Kenneth Kaunda had entered into a dtente with South Africa and Henry Kissinger’s USA, leading to the disappearance of Namibian fighters.

“And you know my conscience will not allow me to be a leader even here if I was involved in any disappearance of anybody anywhere in the world. I will not be President of this country and I will be prepared to resign even today. There was no such a thing,” President Banda insisted.

What are the accusations that make a Zambian President offer his resignation if found true? They are explosive enough to cast a dark shadow over Zambia’s and Namibia’s history and their current leaderships. And historians speaking to Afrol News confirmed there was much truth to the allegations.

Debate

NSHR Director Philya Nangoloh started the debate in anticipation of President Banda’s official visit to Namibia, demanding an explanation for what happened to dozens of SWAPO freedom fighters that disappeared in Zambia during a 1976 purge against the left wing of the freedom movement, which is now Namibia’s ruling party.

Himself a SWAPO fighter in those days, the outspoken human rights activist outlines how SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma – Namibia’s first President – and Zambian President Kaunda together with his FM Banda plotted to disarm SWAPO fighters then based in Zambia who were in opposition to Mr Nujoma’s anti-communist stance.

According to Nangoloh, an anti-communist dtente between the US, apartheid South Africa and Zambia was in the making in 1974. The alliance was to stop the advance of Marxist movements in the region; in particular Angola’s MPLA and partly Mozambique’s Frelimo, but also Zimbabwe’s ZANU led by Robert Mugabe and Zambia-based factions of SWAPO, both seen as radical and pro-communist.

As part of this dtente, “SWAPO’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) – like Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) forces in Rhodesia – had to be disarmed and be barred from using Zambia as a springboard to attack South African forces in Namibia’s Caprivi Strip,” Nangoloh said.

During September 1975, Zambia formally ordered PLAN fighters to cease all military activities on Zambian soil. In April 1976, Namibia’s PLAN fighters in south-western Zambia were “violently disarmed by Zambian troops,” he adds.

Nangoloh claimed PLAN fighters in Zambia were thereafter taken to “the notorious Mboroma concentration camp near Kabwe” in Zambia, where several were killed. At a later location, the Nyango camp, between 40 and 60 “radical” or “rebel” PLAN commanders “started disappearing without a trace individually and or in small groups.”

The majority of PLAN fighters however were later sent for “rehabilitation” to Nujoma’s new main basis in Angola. Also here, many “disappeared” or were killed at Nujoma’s orders.

Nangoloh’s allegations have spurred strong reactions in Zambia, not only from President Banda. According to official history writing in Zambia, the front line nation plaid an important role in the independence struggle of Southern Africa. Zambia hosted a large number of freedom movements, was a safe haven for oppressed neighbours and showed great hospitality at a great political and economic price.

This “official history” of Zambia undoubtedly is true, and Zambians can for the most take pride in their nation’s important part in Southern Africa’s liberation history.

But also Nangoloh’s accounts are mostly to be believed, historians hold. They are parallel truths driven by a very difficult situation for Zambia in the 1970s, which however has been poorly documented and described so far.

Bizarre meeting

Indications of President Kaunda’s double play can be found in standard history textbooks, such as Oliver and Atmore’s trendsetting “Africa since 1800”. Here, both Zambia’s key role as a front line state hosting foreign freedom movements and President Kaunda’s “bizarre meeting” with South African Prime Minister John Vorster in a train coach straddling the Zambian-Rhodesian border in August 1975 are described.

Also, President Kaunda’s tense relations with Robert Mugabe’s Zanu and Angola’s MPLA are well documented and referred to in common textbooks. ZANU fighters were arrested in Zambia, having to evacuate to Mozambique and Tanzania. Mugabe in a 1976 interview even called the Zambian government “an enemy of our revolution.” Kaunda only had a relaxed relation to the South African communists (SACP), who formed the core of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe.

As Cape Town history professor emeritus Christopher Saunders writes in a 2007 essay, there are “worrying trends” in current Namibian history writing concerning “patriotic history” as supported by the ruling SWAPO.

All other accounts have come from exiled Namibians or foreign historians. Siegfried Groth, a German pastor who had worked closely with SWAPO, in 1995 published his critical book “Namibia: The wall of silence”. “When Groth’s book appeared, the Namibian President, Sam Nujoma, appeared on state television to warn the nation against Groth’s ‘false history’,” Professor Saunders noted.

Paul Trewhela, a former South African political prisoner and exile, is among those having dug most deeply into these aspects of the Southern African liberation struggle. Trewhela in a longer interview told Afrol News that Nangoloh’s accounts were “at least generally correct.” President Banda was “wilfully and knowingly not telling the truth. This has been the case with the SWAPO government throughout too,” he added.

“In the decades following independence, Zambia was in a very difficult situation,”

Landlocked

Trewhela however defended the Kaunda government. Zambia, as a landlocked country at the time had hostile white minority governments to its west, south and east, including Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique, apartheid states South Africa and Rhodesia and South African-occupied South West Africa (Namibia).

Zambia’s economic routes to the coast were very vulnerable. “In the mid-1970s, President Kaunda was also very suspicious of Soviet interests in Africa,” Trewhela confirmed. There was an enormous pressure placed on Zambia by Western and South African interests to resist Soviet penetration, in Angola in particular, once the Portuguese colonial empire collapsed in 1974.

“This took the form of requiring, and securing, Zambian state participation in measures to prevent the Marxist MPLA from gaining control of Angola following the departure of the Portuguese forces. The Zambian state in turn required, and secured, collaboration in this from the SWAPO leadership, then based in Zambia,” Trewhela explained.

Several international, non-Namibian historians confirm this. The Canadian historian Lauren Dobell writes in a 1995 book that “SWAPO had been a minor but captive player” in the Kissinger detente strategy of the mid-1970s. Also heavyweight historians Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba in a 1992 book say SWAPO had “compromised dangerously with the Vorster-Kaunda-Kissinger plan to invade Angola” in order to get President Kaunda’s support to move headquarters from Tanzania to Zambia.

Zambia and SWAPO thus initially sided with pro-Western UNITA in the Angolan civil war. At one moment, “units of the SWAPO military were ordered into battle in Angola on the same side as UNITA and the South African army, against the MPLA and its Cuban allies,” Trewhela said, around the same time as SWAPO was fighting the South African army in Namibia.

Editors note: This is part of the original article by Afrol News.