Dingo Firestorm Read Free Page A

life. It drew a line under Mugabe the teacher and ushered in Mugabe the politician. He resigned from his job at the Takoradi Teacher Training College in Ghana and joined the NDP as publicity secretary.
    Using the political skills that his partner and future wife, Sally Heyfron, had taught him in newly independent Ghana, Mugabe promptly formed a youth wing, modelled on Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana Youth League. He mobilised the youth to knock on every door in the townships the night before an NDP meeting, reminding residents to attend. The youth would again remind – and sometimes coerce – the residents on the day of a meeting, beating drums and singing to get them motivated.
    This method of literally drumming up support worked well then, and would serve Mugabe well for decades to come, although it would become a lot more sinister and brutal.
    Anxious to withdraw from the federation, the British government called an all-party constitutional conference in 1961, known as the Salisbury Conference. Joshua Nkomo led the NDP delegation and eventually agreed to accept the 1961 Constitution, which included a qualified all-race voting franchise. Duncan Sandys for Britain, Edgar Whitehead for Southern Rhodesia and Joshua Nkomo for the nationalists signed the 1961 Constitutional Agreement.
    The more radical members of the NDP, realising that their quest for power might be delayed for decades, challenged Nkomo behind the scenes. Sensing his party was in danger of splitting, Nkomo suddenly made a U-turn and disowned the deal. But it was too late. The 1961 Constitution soon became law, and Nkomo had seriously compromised his political standing on both sides of the fence.
    The legislation called for a new voters’ roll and a general election in 1962. The process set in train events that would show the dark side of African politics – intimidation and violence. The nationalists boycotted anything to do with the Constitution and used violence to prevent eligible black people from registering to vote. The intimidation intensified; those siding with the government and failing to carry a party card were dealt with harshly. Gangs roamed the streets, dispensing violent discipline as they saw fit. Mugabe and most of the NDP leadership called for a widening of the conflict to disrupt civil life and force the white people to realise that the Constitution was not viable.
    The Whitehead government reacted by banning the NDP, but the nationalists just as quickly formed a new party to replace it, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU).
    This time the government moved faster. It banned ZAPU, rounded up the leadership and restricted them to their rural-home areas for three months. The restriction order ended just 10 days before the qualified voters went to the polls in the general election of December 1962. By now the federation was doomed and the three countries were going their own separate ways.
    The predominantly white electorate in Southern Rhodesia had already been scared by the mayhem elsewhere in Africa. But it was an event two years earlier, in 1960, that had catalysed the hardening of attitudes among white Rhodesians – the collapse of the former Belgian Congo. There, the murder, rape and chaos became especially frightening because the violence was much closer to home.
    Television images of violence and destruction in Elizabethville and other cities in the Congo dominated the news. Soon, thousands of white refugees were fleeing the Congo for their lives in cars, with all their possessions loaded on the vehicles. They poured over the border into Northern Rhodesia, but there were no facilities to cope with the exodus. So the Royal Rhodesian Air Force (RRAF) stepped in, transporting blankets, medicine and emergency food supplies to refugee points at Fort Rosebery, Mufulira, Solwesi and Mwinilunga, and flying refugees out.
    Soon, over 1 500 refugees had been flown into Salisbury. The sight of these families who had lost everything and the horror