Details emerge on Mujuru’s infidelity

Fresh detail has emerged on the late General, Solomon Mujuru’s playboy life following his wife’s recent revelation that he was a womaniser.

Widow Joice Mujuru, who is President Robert Mugabe’s deputy in both party and government, recently revealed that her husband, the first commander of the defence forces after independence, was “naughty”.

She was speaking at the 20th marriage anniversary of Minister of State for Mashonaland Central province, Martin Dinha.

“Do you think I didn’t know that Solomon was misbehaving (with other women)? I heard about it but the moment he arrived at my gate, he came as a clean and innocent man and I used to like that… Look, some of us were widowed after 34 years of marriage but who was as naughty as Solomon? He was very naughty,” said Mujuru.

The general, who had retired to concentrate on a vast business empire but remained a kingmaker in Zanu (PF), died in 2011 fire incident at his farm in Beatrice, some 60km southwest of Harare.

A female veteran of the 1970s war against British rule that brought independence in 1980 told The Zimbabwean that the late general sired nine children with an equal number of women during the war and before he married Joice, whose name de guerre was Teurai Ropa (Spill Blood).

“Joice knew what she was getting into when she married Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru). He made nine female comrades pregnant and finally settled on her for a wife,” said the ex-fighter who declined being named.

She added that, in most of the cases, the decorated fighter, who then deputised the late Josiah Tongogara in Zanla, the Zanu military wing, would coerce the young fighters into sexual relationships.

“He would just summon them to his tent and declare that he intended to have sex with them. Most of them succumbed because Rex was a feared man and he would punish those that turned him down,” she added.

The sexual encounters, she further revealed, occurred in Mozambique where Zanu commanded the war from.

The late Mujuru would give women who rejected him dangerous assignments, said the source, who testified that she was among those that turned him down, after which the guerilla commander attempted to send her to a front named Seguranza.

The assignment was reversed, she added, when the late Vice President Simon Muzenda, then Mugabe’s deputy during the war, intervened after she begged him.

“I had my own boyfriend and Rex knew about, yet he still wanted to have sex with me. There are so many female guerillas that came back from the war with children who were a result of rape by our leadership,” said the source.

While she admitted that Muzenda was also notorious for dating female fighters, she described Mugabe as a shy leader who never participated “in this rape of innocent girls”.

Mujuru did not stop his extra marital relationships when Zimbabwe got independence, she said, and would mostly be seen in the company of young girls and that had caused sharp marital differences with Joice, who she said lived alone for a long time.

The two reportedly resumed living together as husband and wife in late 2004, just before Joice was made Vice President of Zanu (PF) at a congress.

Mugabe is understood to have brought them together so as to preserve Joice’s dignity.

A teacher at a school to the Mujuru Beatrice farm said he visited the plot mostly in the company of different women. The Zimbabwean