John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
I was 10 years old in December 1964. We had crossed the border between independent Zambia and a Rhodesia that was less than a year away from declaring its unilaterally independent status as a white-ruled entity that, said Ian Smith, would last for at least a thousand years.
The four of us (my dad in the front, my sister and me with mum in the back) were crammed into a white Austin Mini that belonged to our friend Mick Pearce, who was driving. We were on our way to spend Christmas at Mick’s mother’s home in the eastern highlands of Southern Rhodesia.
After a tense but ultimately successful crossing into the white south at Chirundu, we stopped in a small farming town that the settlers insisted on calling Marandellas – Marondera is the proper Shona name. The five of us walked into the Marandellas hotel to buy some refreshments before continuing on the last leg of our long safari. We caused a storm by the mere fact of going in through the front door as a multiracial group, casually studying the wares and discussing our requirements among ourselves in self-confident English.
The tannie behind the till was poised between rage and confusion, but then decided to save herself a nervous breakdown by declaring loudly, for all the shop to hear, that she had suddenly realised who we were.
“They’re that family of singing Negroes from America,” she proclaimed. “And he’s their manager. I’ve been reading about them.”
Of course we were nothing of the sort, and she didn’t ask us to confirm or deny what she had said. Nor did we offer to enlighten her. In those days, both sides simply drew a convenient blanket of silence over the fact that there could be such a thing as interracial friendships in Southern Africa.
The world has changed, Rhodesia has become Zimbabwe, a new South Africa that was unimaginable in those days has been born, and many of us who have survived the transition remain close friends. Mick Pearce is certainly on that list.
It was a bit of a jolt, then, to see him in the background of the front-page picture in my Sunday paper, being manhandled into a traditional Southern African kwela-kwela by a couple of Zimbabwean riot policemen, right behind the dynamic activist and journalist Grace Kwinjeh.
The camera’s focal point, naturally, was Kwinjeh, a highly recognisable figure in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – outspoken, defiant, attractive and black. Pearce, in soft focus, was just an anonymous white man in a white T-shirt and jeans, a black fisherman’s cap sitting low over his spectacles, chin down, undramatic, keeping a low profile as usual.
A picture, they say, can be worth a thousand words. The Zimbabwean situation being as highly charged as it is, black and white readers probably assumed that this was just another white farmer interfering in African politics and getting his just deserts (or being abused, depending on where you stand).
But in this case, it would take more than a thousand words to describe the past lives of the actors in that picture, and to explain what was to happen to them in the hours and days that were to come.
Kwinjeh and Pearce are colleagues in the MDC. Far from being a farmer, Pearce is an outstanding architect who has transformed the Harare skyline in the 18 years since he has been practising in his native land. His own offices occupy the top floor of one of the wings of Eastgate, the multiple-award- winning shopping complex he designed. His practice used to be a hive of activity. Now those offices are more than half empty, many staff members retrenched and business is in the doldrums – along with the rest of the once-thriving Zimbabwean economy.
The MDC, led by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai, is a multiracial political grouping dedicated to making the first successful challenge to what they describe as the increasingly fascist rule of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu- PF. Pearce has given over several hundred square metres of now-unused office space for the use of an MDC support group – making the MDC agenda the main business conducted from his offices at this time.
Kwinjeh, Pearce and three MDC colleagues spent the weekend of April 1 to 3 in cells in Harare Central police station, after their peaceful demonstration, ostensibly protected by a court order, was attacked by Zanu thugs and then broken up by the riot squad. They were the lucky ones. Many of their colleagues who were not arrested suffered severe beatings at the hands of the attackers, none of whom were picked up by the police.
The detainees were treated quite well at the police station, although Pearce, no spring chicken at the age of 62, became quite ill due to the filthy and overcrowded conditions in the tiny cells in which they were confined, packed in like sardines among thieves, pickpockets and men busted for various forms of assault.
They were released on the Monday morning, but warned that charges against them were still under consideration.
On the same day Kwinjeh, 26 years old and a mother of two, started receiving death threats by phone. The callers, presumably members of Zanu, wanted her to understand that blacks like her who stood with whites against the Mugabe regime were regarded as being “puppets of the British”, and would be dealt with accordingly.
She was inclined to take these threats seriously. Two weeks before, while she was walking her three-year-old to nursery school, she had been stalked by six black men in a car. As soon as she was alone, they had leapt out and attacked her. Her hand was badly cut as she fought to fend off one of the attackers, who was striking at her with a large butcher’s knife. Astonishingly she was able to beat them off and they fled, taking her cellphone.
The death threats and the attack that had preceded them were a wake-up call to Pearce, who until then had preferred to keep a low profile. He decided that he had nothing to lose by “coming out of the closet” about his own extraordinary role in the struggle that had brought the very same Zanu-PF to power. Few outside his closest circle of family and friends had heard the story till then. Few of his erstwhile comrades in the struggle had been prepared to acknowledge that he had played a role.
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 had raised the political stakes, but armed resistance by the organisations representing the black majority had been more talk than action in the years that followed.
Pearce had long decided that he could not live and work in the stifling atmosphere of white Rhodesia and had become part of an innovative architectural partnership in Lusaka. He was on friendly terms with some fellow Zimbabweans who had made Zambia their exile base – men like Herbert Chitepo and Josiah Tongogara. Both were to become leading figures in Zanu: Chitepo on the political side, Tongogara as supreme military commander of Zanla, the armed wing of Zanu. Both were to lose their lives under dubious circumstances.
In order to kick-start the war against the Smith regime, caches of the weapons that were being supplied by the Chinese needed to be made available to cadres on the ground inside Rhodesia. Pearce, who also had various architectural initiatives running in Botswana, would travel on commercial airlines between Lusaka and Francistown with weapons of war concealed in the false-bottomed suitcases he was carrying. The weapons were stored at a secret location near the Zimbabwe border, where they were collected and ferried into Rhodesia.
As the war escalated, more shipments were made, with increasing ingenuity. On one occasion, the headmaster of the school in eastern Botswana which had unwittingly become a makeshift arsenal for the Zimbabwean chimurenga (liberation war) gaily went about the task of marking examination papers on his fine antique desk without realising that Pearce had secretly made its drawers and shelves shallower in order to construct the compartments in which Tongogara had packed five sub-machine guns and a number of handguns, before obligingly sending the article of furniture by train from Lusaka.
All conceivable means of transportation were exploited. A parallel unit would pack arms and ammunition in among furniture being sent to Salisbury (now Harare) in Stuttafords trucks originating in Lusaka. The loading and unloading of the trucks was done by blacks, and the white management remained ignorant for years.
Pearce went as far as risking the well- being of his family on his most audacious (or perhaps most reckless) arms run. With their two infants in the car, he and his wife drove through the border post at Chirundu, seemingly a normal white Rhodesian family going on home leave. They kept up the pretence by complaining bitterly to the white border officials about the horrors of life under a black regime in Zambia. The border officials waved them through without paying much attention to the car.
Packed inside every conceivable hiding place behind the panels and floorboards of the Peugeot 204 was ammunition for use with the armaments that Pearce had taken through on those earlier runs. Despite a tense moment when the car broke down in Bulawayo and the family had to wait for several hours at a garage while white mechanics swarmed all over the vehicle, the ammunition reached its destination intact.
Pearce’s cover was blown in 1973 and his family had to withdraw from Zambia to the safety of Sunderland in the cold north- east of England to escape reprisals from the Rhodesian security services. His mother, a courageous woman now in her late 80s, had already been (incorrectly) implicated as the mastermind behind these operations and also had to escape from Rhodesia to avoid a five-year jail sentence. Pearce and his family remained in England until 1982 when an old acquaintance, now a Cabinet minister, wrote and suggested that they return to liberated Zimbabwe.
For 18 years Pearce has stayed in the background, his contribution to the country attested to only by the superb physical structures he has designed.
When he told his story to a local newspaper after being released from the police cells two weeks ago, his compatriots became aware of his earlier contribution to the liberation struggle for the first time. Support was immediate and widespread – including a call from his jailer at Harare Central, appalled that he had been an instrument in the incarceration of an unsung hero of the revolution.
Neither Kwinjeh nor Pearce is typical of their respective origins in Zimbabwe. But the fact that they exist, and have an unswerving belief in their country and the course it should take towards a better future, is a symbol of hope for a country at the precipice.