Dingo Firestorm Read Free

the Hunter the right way up, the machine now in a perfect 30-degree dive towards the target. As the rusty-red roof started filling the sights, the pilot’s right index finger instinctively found the trigger on the stick – he squeezed it firmly. The jet shuddered violently and slowed as all four cannons fired, sending a hail of deadly 30-mm cannon shells towards the target.
    He saw glints of light and dust being kicked up as cannon shells struck the earth right in front of the house. ‘Perfect,’ he said to himself as he released the trigger and pulled back on the stick, feeling a force five times that of gravity tugging at his body as the Rhodesian warplane pulled out of its deadly dive.
    Below, cannon shells slammed through the roof of Robert Mugabe’sheadquarters in Mozambique. The Battle of Chimoio, the first phase of Operation Dingo, had begun.

Part 1
THE GATHERING STORM

1
Stirrings at home
    Modern black political consciousness was fairly slow to develop in Southern Rhodesia compared with other parts of the continent. It was not until 1957 that the first mass political movement came into being there. It was named the African National Congress (ANC) after its counterpart in neighbouring South Africa, formed 45 years earlier. The ANC projected a moderate image and chose a moderate leader, an Ndebele called Joshua Nkomo. It filled a political vacuum and quickly grew into a large organisation.
    This was at a time when the independence drum was reverberating across Africa. The self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British protectorates of Northern Rhodesia (to become Zambia) and Nyasaland (later Malawi) were joined in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland under the Crown. The federation, an awkward grouping of countries, was Britain’s counterweight to South Africa, where Britain’s influence had suddenly diminished when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party won the general election in the self-governing territory in 1948.
    With the black nationalist tide rising fast both in the federation and in Britain, the Southern Rhodesian government banned Nkomo’s ANC, which responded by forming a new party: the National Democratic Party (NDP). Nkomo was elected party president.
    The NDP platform was more radical than the ANC and made no bones about what its mission would be: to establish black majority rule. One of the senior NDP members, Leopold Takawira, a former teacher turned politician, addressed the party’s inaugural meeting, telling the delegates that the issue was no longer asking the white establishment to rule the black majority well; it was about the majority ruling itself.
    The agenda was set; the call for majority black rule, one man, one vote, had been made. A clash of some kind was inevitable.
    On 19 July 1960, Takawira and other NDP leaders were arrested under the new Unlawful Organisation Act. The arrests sparked a protest march of some 7 000 people from the black township of Highfield to the centre of Salisbury (now Harare), a distance of 12 kilometres, to discuss matters with Prime Minister Sir Edgar Whitehead. Police stopped the march before it could reach the city centre and defused the situation by promising the marchers that Whitehead would meet a delegation the following morning. As the next day broke, the crowd quickly swelled to over 40 000, draining the black labour pool and virtually paralysing Salisbury.
    In the crowd was a teacher, on leave in Rhodesia from his teaching job in Ghana, an introvert called Robert Mugabe.
    Whitehead reacted angrily. Refusing to meet the NDP delegation, he instead went on state radio to call up army reservists and warn that political meetings in the townships would be banned. On the third day, the police moved decisively to break up the crowd, scattering it and chasing people back to the townships. More than 100 protestors were arrested. The government’s action came as a rude shock to the nationalists.
    It was also a watershed in Robert Mugabe’s