Kenneth Kaunda. Mainza Chona. Solomon Kalulu. Aaron Milner. Ndabaningi Sithole. Leopold Takawira. Joshua Nkomo. James Chikerema. Can these heroes of Southern Africa’s liberation be mentioned in the same breath as espionage?
The history of liberation is still being written and this account is but one of many narratives emerging from the shadows.
In the 1970s, there was a book Zambian authorities banned because of its controversial content. Now more than 50 years later, the book has been republished, prompting renewed debate around claims and perspectives that many outside the political establishment of then may never have encountered.
Roy Christie’s book For the President’s Eyes Only has the pace and tension of an award-winning political thriller. Yet this is no work of fiction, well at least not entirely.
A South African journalist now retired in England, Christie reconstructs an extraordinary episode from the height of the Southern African liberation struggle, exposing how intelligence games, deception and political urgency intersected at a formative moment in the region’s history.
At the centre of the book is John Henry Poremba Brumer, a Polish-born survivor of Nazi Europe whose unlikely journey takes him to Southern Africa in the early 1950s.
Brumer’s life transforms from a hotel chef in Lusaka to a deeply embedded operative in the Rhodesian intelligence apparatus, tasked with infiltrating African nationalist movements at a time they were desperate for allies, funds and international legitimacy.
One of the book’s most unsettling themes is the vulnerability of liberation movements to imposters and manipulators. There were several white settlers who befriended liberation movements, professing sympathy for their cause.
Brumer exploits this atmosphere masterfully, packaging himself as a committed supporter and thereby gaining the confidence of key figures in the Zimbabwe African National Union, including its top leadership led by Ndabaningi Sithole and Leopold Takawira, whom he regularly meets.
Through covert recordings and reports, he feeds Rhodesian intelligence with valuable insights into the liberation movement’s plans and internal dynamics.
The narrative deepens when Brumer shifts his focus to newly independent Zambia, where he settles and from where he shuttles frequently between Lusaka and Salisbury.
As Kenneth Kaunda takes charge of the country in 1964, Brumer reinvents himself yet again, this time as a well-connected intermediary offering privileged intelligence on Rhodesia.
The book’s account suggests that Brumer succeeds beyond all expectations, winning Kaunda’s personal trust and embedding himself within the highest levels of the Zambian state. The claim that a Rhodesian agent operated from within the State House itself is one of the book’s most startling episodes.
Perhaps most striking is the irony that follows. In 1966, two years after independence, Kaunda tasks Brumer with helping establish Zambia’s intelligence and security apparatus. A foreign agent helping design and potentially shape the very system meant to guard against him? If true, this could amount to the mother of all jackpots as far as the world of espionage goes.
The book is rich in intimate detail, offering rare insight into presidential thinking, ministerial rivalries and the informal networks of power that shaped early post-colonial governance in Lusaka and the long, bitter struggle for an independent Zimbabwe.
Christie writes with the instincts of a reporter and the flair of a storyteller. The story climaxes towards Brumer’s trip to London. What happens when he lands in the British capital is the reason you need to read the book.
One of the book’s key weaknesses, though, lies in its heavy reliance on Brumer’s notes and diaries, sources that are neither independently corroborated nor supported by any named political actors in Zambia and Zimbabwe, where the double agent supposedly ran his show.
At the time the book was being written, several of the liberation figures at its centre were alive and able to lend credence to the narrative or dispute it. The author offers no explanation about why they were not approached.
As a result, much of the narrative rests on a single, uncontested account of a professional deceiver, requiring readers to weigh the author’s compelling reconstruction against the inherent limitations of its evidentiary base. Readers should therefore approach some of the more sweeping claims with caution, but this does little to diminish the book’s value as a window into a murky and under-explored chapter of African history.
Ultimately, the book is a powerful reminder that the struggle for liberation was fought not only on battlefields and diplomatic stages, but also in shadowy rooms where trust was currency and betrayal a constant risk. It is an absorbing and provocative read, one that remains disturbingly relevant.
For the President’s Eyes Only is marketed by Writelake Zambia.