Edgar Tekere was one of the few surviving freedom fighters from the 1970s guerrilla war against white rule in Rhodesia who dared stand up to President Robert Mugabe and denounce him for betraying the African revolution and surrounding himself with corrupt “Mafia-like” sycophants.
Known as “Two Boy” to fellow guerrillas during the war against Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Army and Air Force, Tekere spent almost ten years in Hwa Hwa Prison with Mugabe after they were arrested for “subversion” by officials from Smith’s Rhodesia Front Government in 1964. The next year it declared UDI (unilateral declaration of independence), breaking from Britain and then the Commonwealth.
Edgar Zivani Tekere was born near Rusape in the Rhodesian Eastern Highlands in 1937, the second son of an Anglican pastor and his schoolteacher wife. He was educated at St Augustine’s School, Mutare.
At the birth of African organised nationalism in 1956, he joined the City Youth League. Detained briefly in 1959 as a member of a radical organisation, he joined Zanu(PF) at its inception in 1963 and was elected deputy secretary-general for youth and culture in 1964. Soon afterwards he was arrested and detained for ten years for recruiting people to go on military training.
After the release of key black leaders, including Joshua Nkomo, the Rev Ndabaningi Sithole and Mugabe, at the end of 1974 so that they could attend “detente” and “unity” talks in Zambia with the South African Government and African frontline state leaders, Tekere and Mugabe fled in 1975 to Maputo to continue their fight for black majority rule from guerrilla camps in newly independent Mozambique.
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At Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980, Tekere was Secretary-General of the victorious Zanu(PF) and was appointed Minister of Manpower Planning. He gained notoriety when he shot dead a 68-year-old white farmer, Gerald Adams, at a homestead near Harare. The High Court found him not guilty but his reputation made him a figure of terror to the rapidly diminishing European community.
However, Tekere fell out with Mugabe in 1988 after telling a mass rally in Mutare: “Democracy in Zimbabwe is in intensive care and the leadership has decayed.” He said that leaders around Mugabe were depositing money into Swiss accounts “just like the Mafia” and that the revolution had been betrayed. He was expelled from Zanu(PF) and the following year formed his own party, the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), which received some 20 per cent of the vote in presidential and parliamentary elections held in 1990. But because of the first-past-the-post system in Zimbabwe, ZUM won only three seats in the enlarged 150-seat House of Assembly.
After the collapse of ZUM, Mugabe was neither troubled nor much bothered by his erstwhile right-hand man whom he had helped personally and financially when “Two Boy” was battling alcoholism. What did exercise Mugabe was Tekere’s book, A Lifetime of Struggle (2007), in which he wrote that Mugabe had never fought in the liberation war, knew nothing about guerrillas or weapons and had destroyed not only Zimbabwe but also Zanu(PF).
Tekere is survived by his wife, Pamela, and a daughter.
Edgar Tekere, freedom fighter, was born on April 1, 1937. He died on June 7, 2011, aged 74