It was Tekere’s tenacity of spirit, bravery and courage that remained a defining feature of his lifetime, as much in struggle as in illness. Not until last week Tuesday when we had to take him into hospital for the last time did he confess the end was nigh: ‘‘Ibbo, I feel very low today, very, very low …….’’, he muttered to me on the telephone. Prior to that, Tekere’s tenacity bordered on self-denial: “I am fighting fit, I will be all right…”
And, not surprisingly, he would defy the odds, including the doctor’s advice to stay in bed. So, on one occasion last year, while at Avenues Clinic, Harare, he tried to get out of bed unassisted: he stumbled and fell, broke his right leg and bruised his head seriously.
A Lifetime of Struggle indeed, a title he chose for his autobiography; and it was a struggle to the very end.
I met Tekere for the first time in February 1979, at Zanu PF Headquarters in Maputo; although we had a glimpse of him and his fellow detainees while myself and other fellow students were in the Salisbury Remand Prison in July, 1973.
Tekere had just been elevated to the position of secretary-general of Zanu PF two years earlier in 1977. We bonded almost immediately, as I did with most of that group of nationalist leaders to whom we were irresistibly attracted as young radicals in those heady days of the struggle: Mugabe, Nathan Shamuyarira, Eddison Zvobgo, Dzingai Mutumbuka, Josiah Tongogara, Solomon Mujuru, Sydney Sekeremai, etc.
At independence in 1980, Tekere was appointed Minister of Manpower Planning and Development. As an entirely new ministry in the maze of the state structures that were still largely Rhodesian in content, Manpower Planning and Development proved to have been pivotal, if not also central in the process of transformation, not to mention the task of human resources development and genuine indigenisation.
As both secretary-general of the ruling party and minister of such a key section of the new state machinery, Tekere’s role and leadership was palpable. Without him, it is doubtful that we, as officials in the ministry, could have achieved such feats as were both controversial and even resisted, not only by the former settlers but also by some within the new state itself.
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Tekere: A founding icon of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle
EDGAR Tekere was one of the founding members of Zimbabwe’s nationalist movement, along with Joshua Nkomo, Joseph Msika, Maurice Nyagumbo, James Chikerema and George Bonzo Nyandoro.
Tekere was hardly 22 years old when he was detained for the first time in March 1959, after the banning of the ANC of Southern Rhodesia a month earlier. Clearly the youngest political detainee among such senior nationalists as Nyagumbo, Stanley Parirewa and Sylvester Mushonga, Tekere was as fearless and defiant as he has always been throughout his life.
Tekere spent what would otherwise have been the best years of any young man, in detentions, restrictions and prison for more than 10 years, until his release in December 1974, together with Ndabaningi Sithole, Robert Mugabe, Nyagumbo, Enos Nkala and Moton Malianga.
Tekere volunteered, in March 1975, following the assassination of Herbert Chitepo in Lusaka, Zambia, to accompany Robert Mugabe to Mozambique.
Tekere was a true nationalist, a genuine patriot: like Joshua Nkomo, he lived beyond race, tribe and ethnicity. So it was that his Ministry of Manpower Planning and Development was staffed by cadres from both Zanu PF and PF-Zapu; it was a genuine ‘‘Patriotic Front’’ ministry.
Short-lived stint in government
As is well-known, Edgar Tekere’s stint in the government was short-lived, following the ‘‘Adams Case’’ (in which a Mr Adams was shot and killed in a bizarre incident involving Tekere and his bodyguards). But the real fall-out between Tekere and Mugabe was at the party level when, on April 8 1981, he ‘‘was suddenly sacked from the position of secretary-general of the party, at a meeting I did not attend’’.
After this, Edgar entered the political wilderness, so to speak, became a thorn in the flesh for Mugabe and those who remained around him, virtually immune to advice, even from those of us close to him.
In many respects, therefore, Edgar leaves us in the midst of a transition that promises to usher in a ‘‘New Zimbabwe’’, emerging from a tumultuous decade of immense political and economic problems, towards a growing convergence, among the Zimbabwean people as a whole, around obvious national priorities.
Ending Mugabe’s one-party-state project struggle
The formation of Zimbabwe Unity Movement (Zum) by Edgar Tekere in 1989 heralded the end of the one-party-state in Zimbabwe, the beginnings of the multi-partyism we are enjoying today.
It is true that the formation of Zum constituted the foundations of a new democratic Zimbabwe, of the kind Edgar believed should have accompanied the post-independence period throughout.
For him, this would amount to the reassertion of the very principles and goals of the struggle for national independence.
