Frustrated Revolutionary

A pointed sense of irony trailed the murder charge lodged against Manpower Minister Edgar Tekere last week in Salisbury: it was the first act of personal violence ever attributed to the former guerrilla revolutionary, even during seven bloody years of civil war. The tough, radical Tekere, 43, had spent his entire adult life--including 15 years in prison or exile--in the struggle to bring black majority rule to his native Zimbabwe, but his role was never that of a fighter in the field. Rather, he was an exclusively political operator who specialized in recruiting, motivating and directing from a desk the tactical planning of the freedom struggle. To this day, some of his comrades say that he would have been happier as a front-line commander. This underlying frustration, as they see it, accounts for his military taste in dress (olive fatigue uniforms and combat boots), his ready identification with "the boys in the bush," as the guerrilla fighters still call themselves, and his continued political aggressiveness.

Compared with his ascetic friend Robert Mugabe, who is a trained and erudite philosopher, the stocky Tekere has always cut the figure of a rough-and-ready, sometimes recklessly outspoken black nationalist with little patience for ideology or gradualism. Last month Tekere scathingly dismissed two top Anglican churchmen--one of whom had spoken against the shooting down of an Air Rhodesia airliner by guerrillas last year--as meddlers who "have no place with us." Even in public, he never hesitated to call his old tribal and personal antagonist Joshua Nkomo "useless and redundant."

It was probably inevitable that Tekere's abrasive outbursts would eventually cause friction even with Mugabe. Last month, after the Nkomo faction accused Tekere and some of his supporters of expending "hot air," Mugabe discreetly conceded that some of his ministers-statements should not be confused with government policy. Responded an unrepentant Tekere: "I will go on releasing hot air because it represents the view of the people. Let us be realistic. Unless we keep riding the tide of revolution, down we go as a government." Explaining that a number of whites had asked him to be more moderate, he added scornfully: "What am I to moderate? What do I owe them?"

The son of an Anglican priest, Tekere was born in the fertile Umtali district of eastern Rhodesia in 1937. He was educated in mission schools and as a boy served at the altar of Salisbury's Anglican cathedral. His first job was in a religious bookstore. In 1959, at age 22, the young Anglican was jailed briefly for distributing black nationalist literature. Imprisonment only intensified Tekere's political zeal, and in 1963 he became one of the founding members of Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). By the time he was jailed a second time, a year later, for his political activities, Tekere was the party's deputy secretary for youth and culture, in charge of recruiting black youths to the cause. When former Prime Minister Ian Smith illegally declared Rhodesia independent in 1965 and began cracking down on black activists, Tekere was jailed again, this time for nine years.

Released in 1974, Tekere went into exile, first in Zambia and later alongside Mugabe in Mozambique. Responsible for ZANU's fund raising and arms procurement as well as recruitment, Tekere traveled to friendly countries to solicit support for the war. China was the principal backer. When the cease-fire was finally declared last year, ending the civil war, Tekere emerged as his party's third-ranking leader.

In recent months, however, Tekere increasingly seemed to be feeling the strain of Cabinet membership. Responsible for bringing equity to a labor system that had always run on black workers and white managers, Tekere was stymied. For one thing, he faced an impossible level of 57% unemployment. Not-so-old hatreds began to resurface when changes were slow to occur. Drinking heavily, he began straying ever further from Mugabe's pragmatic politics. He accused more moderate black leaders of a "gangster mentality and leadership decay." He began to speak of himself as his party's "conscience."

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