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Extract from "A Massacre, a crash, and the fight to survive".
Some things in life cannot be justified. There were many atrocities perpetrated by both sides in this struggle, atrocities which might have even made old Lobengula's blood curdle, and I must relate one of them, not least because it affected my thinking for the next few years.
The drive for Mozambican independence had developed apace, and in 1962 several anti-colonial political groups formed the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which initiated an armed campaign against Portuguese colonial rule. After 10 years of sporadic warfare and Portugal's return to democracy (partially as a result of the expenses from the wars in Angola and Mozambique), FRELIMO took control of the capital via a coup in April 1974. Within a year, almost all Portuguese colonists had left - some expelled by the new government, some fleeing in fear - and Mozambique became independent on June 25th, 1975.
Mozambican Independence had, at a stroke, pitched Rhodesia into a war. What had until the previous year been little more than a police action with the main fight being on the economic front, suddenly became a full scale war, and we on the tea estate were on the front line, the Mozambique border.
And so it was there, on a Sunday morning just before Christmas, December 19th., 1976, that a group of "Freedom Fighters" rounded up the inhabitants of a workers' village nearest the main road into the tea estate, separated the women and children from the men, took the men onto the bridge which marked the tea estate boundary with the next door tea estate, and there shot them.
Twenty seven of them were killed, because they were working for Murungu (whites) for less than Rh$1 a day - and most of the dead were Malawians (foreigners) anyway. A couple were saved by the attentions of the delightful, charming petite and overworked African nurse, Ennie Kadira, to whose arrival at the scene as soon as it was light they owed their lives. The perpetrators of this massacre had been drinking with them in the beer hall the previous - Saturday - evening. As a matter of record they were getting only marginally less than Rh$1, worth in today's English money about £3, or just about four times what the same labourer doing the same job in Zimbabwe is getting in 2008.
The distinctive noise of the AK firing - AK's (Kalashnikov's), used by the "Freedom Fighters" made a higher "crack" than the Belgian FN's used by the Rhodesian security forces - could be heard all over the valley, the office being at the head of it. There was a Police Reserve "stick" (4 white Police Reservists, often businessmen or farmers doing their "stint") stationed at the office, and they rang everybody for help - including me, in bed, in Salisbury.
I was relying on the Flying Club or a local Air Charter firm for hire planes. There wasn't anything available that Sunday morning, but I found someone who was going in that general direction and persuaded him to drop me off. I duly arrived on the tea estate where they had laid down all 27 bodies on the road, not a sight I want to remember but equally one I can't forget. I don't remember how I got back to Salisbury that day, but I must have done, because I was there again the next day with an aeroplane.
The estate had come to a halt, hardly surprising in view of the demonstrable ability of the "freedom fighters" to come and go at will and shoot people in the middle of the night. So should we give up, and close the place down? Or try and carry on and make tea?