Luke-ing the Beast in the Eye: SPECIAL REPORT: WHO KILLED SOLOMON MUJURU? His life and explosive detail on his last hours with dates, names, times and circumstances

Today marks 14 years since the death of retired army general Solomon Mujuru, also known as Rex Nhongo.

Mujuru was a liberation war hero and independent Zimbabwe’s first army general. He died on the night of 15 August 2011. While the official autopsy report said Rex died of carbonisation by an open fire, his family and many neutral Zimbabweans believe he was murdered.

But who could have killed him and what were the circumstances and intimate nuances and details around his death and the last hours of his life?

But first to the Rex Nhongo that I knew, in my own limited way:

The white Mazda 323 left a trail of black soot in its wake as it meandered up the vlei from Shamva into Bindura, the provincial capital of Mashonaland Central province.

My two companions and I kept our thoughts to ourselves as we pondered our safety in this then volatile province where everything and anyone not directly associated with Zanu PF was considered an enemy.

We were still counting our fortunes that so far, we had survived overzealous Zanu PF thugs who mounted “roadblocks” and “vetted” every visitor and traveller into Mashonaland Central.

Throughout the journey, we had used our own ingenuity to sweet-talk our way past the Zanu PF youths who manned these “roadblocks.”

And it was by some stroke of luck that we finally rolled into Bindura town.

The year was 2001 and I was still living my other life as a journalist, practising my trade as a senior political reporter at The Daily News, then a cradle of bold journalism.

To date, I am still not sure what would have been had those youths discovered that we were reporters from The Daily News, then subjectively considered an “unpatriotic” publication.

By then, brave journalism was really a hard hat area and The Daily News was still a publication that bravely challenged the excesses of the ruling elite.

Only in January of that year, I had been arrested on a trumped-up charge of criminally defaming then President Robert Mugabe; the same month that our printing press was bombed by suspected State security agents in order to silence us.

There were three of us as we drove into Bindura town that day in 2001; then fellow senior political reporter Sandra Nyaira, now late, Aaron Ufumeli, then our news photographer and myself.

We were making our way into volatile Bindura to cover a by-election following the death of then Zanu PF political commissar and Bindura Central MP, Border Gezi.

That by-election had generated interest among all and sundry, not least because of the violence in the area but because of the impending electoral battle pitting Elliot Manyika of Zanu PF and Elliot Pfebve of the MDC.

We in the media had dubbed this crucial by-election” The battle of the Elliots.’

The race to succeed Gezi had become so hot that Zanu PF activists had murdered the MDC candidate’s brother, Matthew Pfebve, at their rural home in Mt Darwin in a tragic case of mistaken identity. They had mistakenly thought Matthew was Elliot.

As the three of us made our way into Bindura, we were very much aware of the blistering political temperature in the area.

We pitched up at Callie’s, then a popular bar and restaurant in Bindura that was being run by Solomon Mujuru, aka Rex Nhongo, a decorated liberation war hero and the country’s first black army general.

There, we found fellow journalists–mostly from the public media–in the company of senior ZANU PF officials. Also in their company was an unfamiliar lady who I later learnt was the chief spook at the local CIO provincial headquarters in Bindura.

Our colleagues from the public media pretended they did not know us. It appeared it was dangerous to speak to us or exhibit any acquaintance with us as the journalists from a “marked” newspaper.

General Mujuru, who unbeknown to our public media colleagues already knew Sandra and I, suddenly appeared at the restaurant. He greeted us and to the amazement of fellow journalists, only took Sandra, Aaron and myself—the Daily News trio—from the restaurant and chaperoned us to his private apartment in the town.

He later told us that his wife, whom he derogatorily referred to in his customary stammer as” icho Joyce”, did not know of the existence of this apartment where he probably relaxed with his reputed multiple concubines.

It was around 11am. My two colleagues did not drink so General Mujuru offered me whiskey and as I took my first sip, the revered soldier said in his trademark stammer:

” Iwe Ta Ta Tamborenyoka. Inguva yekunwa whiskey here kuseni kuno. Sa sa saka muchizonyora zvekunyepa kuti rally yeMDC yanga ine vanhu 10 000 ivo va vari 50 chete.”
(Tamborenyoka, why are you drinking whiskey so early in the day? That’s why you guys write lies that the MDC rally had 10 000 people when in fact it had just 50).

We all laughed heartily!

As I partook to whiskey and conversed with my two colleagues, General Mujuru had already stood up, personally taken to the kitchen and begun preparing sadza, which he later served us with stewed beef.

It was an unforgettable three hours that we spent in his apartment that he had earlier told us his wife, Mai Mujuru, later to become Vice President, did not know about.

By then, amai Mujuru was an ordinary MP for Mt Darwin.

A few months before we met him in Bindura, we had covered a story in which the good general had barred then war veterans’ leader Chenjerai Hunzvi from holding his violent campaigns in Chikomba, which is in Chivhu, Mujuru’s home area.

Chivhu was also Hunzvi’s home area.

As we ate our meal, we asked him why he had done that when both of them belonged to the same violent party and came from the same rural area.

The Retired General’s answer was very simple:

“These are violent guys moving around the country, preaching violence, beating up people and setting families against each other. I cannot have those guys beating up people and creating needless hostilities to do with party allegiances between relatives in my own home area,” he said in his trademark stammer.

“Nda nda ndakamuudza Hunzvi kuti ukafamba uchirova vanhu kumusha kwangu ndi ndi ndi ndinokurova magadziko” (I told Hunzvi that if you engage in violence in my home area I will beat up your bums),” he said.

Magadziko (bums) was liberation war language that was used during the liberation war at all-night virgils ( pungwes ). During those virgils, the liberation fighters would beat up the bums of perceived sell-outs who hobnobbed with the Smith regime ( vatengesi ) .

I had last heard the word magadziko during the war when I was a kid in the late 1970s. Twenty one years after independence, the General was still a “comrade” and felt at ease using the liberation war lexicon.

We spoke about many things that day in Bindura; from the by-election intrigue, the political violence in the province and in the country as well as the succession intrigue that continues to dog Zanu PF to this very day.

We spoke about the public media and their irresponsible journalism.

The General also told us a funny story of his son-in law, his daughter Kumbirai’s husband, who had paid lobola (bride price) to him and he had in turn given the lobola to the same son-in-law’s son, the Rtd General’s grandchild.

” Nda nda ndakapa roora racho kumzukuru wangu , mwana wake iye mukuwasha wacho .”

The decorated military general was blessed with only daughters and did not have a son, at least officially!

It is not too often that you meet, relax and drink with a decorated military general and feel all at ease.

But Mujuru was hewn from a unique stone.

On the night of 15 August 2011, General Mujuru was callously murdered, most probably on the express instructions of the usual suspect.

I was then Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s spokesperson when I learnt of Mujuru’s untimely death in mysterious circumstances in the night hours of August 15, 2011.

We all only got to know the sketchy details of his tragic and untimely death the following morning.

In my other life as a journalist, apart from the incident alluded to earlier; I had known and interacted with Rex Nhongo for years by the time he died, which is why I wrote an obituary for him in the week he died in 2011.

Together with my friend and fellow scribe then, Sydney Masamvu, we would regularly meet, chat and drink with the respected military general.

Masamvu was then the Financial Gazette’s Political Editor while I had risen to assume the same position at the then highly regarded newspaper, The Daily |News.

The two of us would regularly meet, drink and chat with General Mujuru almost every other week.

We would join him in downing his favourite whiskey brands mostly at the Raylton Sports Club in Harare.

Rex, the stammering soft man of hard power, was also a joyful man who loved music. And I know that his favourite song was Simbimbino—that all-time classic by the Bhundu Boys.

I later learnt from his well-researched and detailed biography that Rex, also a football fan, would sing the same song to motivate the players of Black Rhinos, that highly successful army team of the 1980s.

Even as a serving army general, I understand Rex would sing “Simbimbino” in his interactions with the all-conquering Black Rhinos team players who included Japhet “Short Cat” Muparutsa, Simon “AK” Mugabe and Maronga Nyangela “the Bomber”, among many others.

There are intriguingly unsettling pointers around Rex Nhongo’s death.

In his detailed, 348-page biography of Solomon Mujuru, Oxford based civil-military relations expert, Professor Blessing- Miles Tendi digs deep into the life of Solomon Mujuru, right from his birth till his controversial death.

The biography is titled; The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe, with the subtitle Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker.

In cobbling the incisive biography, Tendi draws exclusive material from expansive interviews with Joyce Mujru, the Mujuru family in its broad sense, Solomon’s political and military friends and associates as well as his concubines.

Tendi also uses material from the interviews he had with Heads of State who knew and had interacted with Solomon.

Among those interviewed for the biography were the late president Robert Mugabe as well as Mozambique’s former Presidents Joachim Chissano and Armando Guebbuzza.

But from my own interactions with Mujuru, he was a joyful man who freely and fearlessly spoke his mind.

With Rex, it was always no-holds-barred and once in a while during our numerous conversations at the Raylton Sports Club, the soft man of hard power would spill more than the wise expensive whiskey waters.

That way, my friend Sydney and I often got the news about the goings-on in Zanu PF, which news would be published in spangled banner colours by our respective newspapers.

We would creatively attribute the juicy intricacies to “unnamed Zanu PF sources.”

And upon reading the newspapers the following day, even though we would not have named him, Rex would not mind the news coverage because the feared former general was a free spirit.

In any event, even if anyone within ZANU PF had gotten to know that the general had let slip the news, no-one, absolutely no-one in ZANU PF, could muster enough courage to ask him why he had done so.

As my friend Sydney Masamvu, reminded me earlier this week, Rex would regularly be in the company of Sydney Sekeramayi on the many occasions we met him at the Raylton Sports club.

On one particular occasion, Rex, who was with Sekeramayi, came to our table as soon as we entered the bar. He asked Sekeramayi to join us as well.

“Ne ne nematombo (presumably Sekeramayi’s totem), huyai ti ti ti titaure nevafana va vanoita basa remakuhwa ava. A a asi munotya kutapwa nhau kani? Isu kana tika tika tapwa hatitye isu nekuti zve zvese zvatinotaura tinogona ku kuzvidzokorora futi mangwana kwa kwakachena hazvinei kuti pana ani nekuti ha hatitye munhu isu,” Mujuru said in his characteristic stutter. (Sekeramayi, come let us talk to these journalist acquaintances of mine. Are you afraid of being quoted in the newspapers? Some of us don’t fear to be quoted because whatever we say, we are prepared to repeat it any time in the presence of anyone).

In spite of the General’s exhortation for him to join us, Sekeramayi, never one for the limelight or animated conversations, remained tucked in the corner of the Raylton Sports club all by himself.

Mujuru’s biography tellingly reveals that in 2004, Solomon wanted Sekeramayi to be vice President and later the president of Zimbabwe.

But as we now know from the Mexico Declaration which died a stillbirth with the 2017 military coup, power-shy Sekeramayi has always been a coward at every prospect of occupying the country’s highest office.

In the biography, in which Mujuru’s family members and his political and military allies speak on record, it came out that the decorated military general always wanted to block Mnangagwa’s political ascendancy.

The biography also reveals that General Mujuru believed Sekeramayi was moderate, educated, mature, responsive and had the right character for the highest office.

In 2004, following the death of Simon Muzenda in 2003, Rex did not want Emmerson Mnangagwa to rise politically and initially wanted Sekeramayi to take over the vice Presidency and eventually the State Presidency.

But after Sekeramayi showed his lack of nerve to take the job, even back then, Mujuru backed his wife following lobbying by members of the Women’s League that the post be reserved for a woman.

Rex, who was the power behind Mugabe’s rise to the Zanu PF leadership during the liberation struggle, worked hard behind the scenes for his wife to ascend to the Vice Presidency.

According to the biography, when Sekeramayi showed his reluctance for the vice presidency in 2004, Rex, using his trademark vulgar language, frustratingly quipped in his characteristic stutter to his political allies: “Se se Sekeramayi aramba humambo saka ini nda ndava kutora ma……. angu ndoisa pane mukadzi wangu.” (Sekeramayi does not want the leadership so I am now taking my balls from him and placing them next on my wife).

And in 2004, Rex succeeded in blocking Mnangagwa by rooting for his wife.

But that was not the first time Rex had successfully blocked ED.

At the 1999 Congress, Mnangagwa was angling for the post of Zanu PF national chairman. But Solomon Mujuru, in league with Josiah Tungamirai, Eddison Zvobgo and Dumiso Dabengwa, successfully drummed up support for John Nkomo, a fact confirmed by Joyce in the biography.

Solomon had a gripe with Mnangagwa, who he regarded as always thwarting his business interests.

When Mugabe gave Mnangagwa overall charge of Zanu PF’s companies, a vast business empire which appeared not to make much profit for the party, Solomon saw an opportunity to fight ED, who was allegedly managerially working with the Joshi brothers Jayant and Manharlal, along with Dipak Pandya.

Solomon incited the setting up of an investigating committee to probe the possible looting of the party’s vast business empire with the sole aim of throwing Mnangagwa under the bus.

The investigating committee comprised Solomon himself, Simba Makoni, Thokozile Mathuthu, and Obert Mpofu.

The committee uncovered massive fraud and mismanagement of the Zanu PF companies under Mnangagwa.

Fearing arrest, the Joshi brothers fled Zimbabwe in dramatic circumstances, reportedly with Mnangagwa personally assisting their escape.

To his anger, Mujuru also discovered that ED and Mugabe were acting in cahoots and had together looted proceeds from the party’s companies.

In his biography, one of Mujuru’s confidantes expressed Rex’s frustration at having failed to bring down Mnangagwa through the party companies’ probe.

He reportedly quipped, using his favourite vulgar expression: “ Nda nda nga ndabata ma…. ake (I had his (Mnangagwa’s) balls right in my grip)

Personally, having chatted and drunk with the retired general countless times, I can testify that he very much conversationally enjoyed using the gendered nuance of “balls”, a word whose vernacular term he would liberally throw around, without any compunction, regardless of whoever was within earshot.

Though a decorated soldier, Rex was always a relaxed and joyful drinking partner.

There is always something unnerving about meeting and interacting with these decorated military men of hard power in their private spaces, as fellow Zimbabweans, away from their fearful titular ranks and intimidating epaulettes.

Later, I had almost the same relaxed experience between 2015 and 2020 during my five years of scholarship at the University of Zimbabwe,

At the UZ, I had the occasion to interact with the late senior army general, Douglas Nyikayaramba, who was my classmate for five years. We both studied Political Science and attained our Master of Science degrees in International Relations, again as classmates, at the same institution.

These interactions with top military generals especially for opposition politicians are often mutually beneficial because they help bust mistruths and stereotypes from which we often create false realities about each other.

I remember Nyikayaramba later expressing to me his shock at my views after I had in one lecture spiritedly spoken in support of the land reform programme, minus what I deemed to have been the needless violence and the mindless bloodletting that accompanied the exercise.

But in principle, I pointedly and passionately spoke about the undeniable legitimacy of our case as black Zimbabweans to claim back our land.

After the lecture, Nyikayaramba approached me expressed his shock that an opposition party spokesperson support the legitimacy of black Zimbabweans taking ownership of their land.

My point is that interactions with military generals, especially by opposition politicians, sometimes help bust certain myths, especially the myth that opposition politicians are not patriotic, even though of course the Zanu PF definition of patriotism is highly erroneous.

But Mujuru, the late Rex Nhongo, was hewn from a unique stone.

During our interactions, he was often highly critical of Zanu PF and the government and made no secret of his opinion that it was time for Mugabe to retire.

In Solomon’s biography, Dabengwa makes reference to a meeting in 1992 where Mujuru openly told Mugabe and then Vice President Joshua Nkomo to their faces that they should both retire and allow new blood to take over.

Said Dabengwa: “After Rex told both of them to retire and pave way for young blood, Mugabe kept quiet. Nkomo took his stick, angry, jumped up and said Wena mfana, thula! (Hey you boy, shut up!). Everybody started laughing but Rex simply retorted: “Asi ma ma mandinzwa (You have heard me).”

Having been the only one who could stand up to Mugabe in Zanu PF meetings, it was no wonder that when he became MP for Chikomba after his retirement, he took great offence and threatened to beat up then independent MP, Margaret Dongo, when she stood up in Parliament and referred to all Zanu PF MPs, including Solomon, as being “Mugabe’s wives.”

Rex had lost all the support for Mugabe, especially in the latter years. As a serving service chief, he very much disliked the requirement for him to always be at the airport to see off and to welcome the President back from trips abroad, even at unholy hours.

In his characteristic stutter, when he retired from the army in 1992, he reportedly remarked to his friends and family: “Nda nda ndaneta kumirira Mugabe pa pa airport” (I am tired of playing bridesmaid to Mugabe at the airport).

Rex found the airport ritual very demeaning to his masculine ego.

After my interactions with him during my years in journalism, we were to meet again years later, this time in my new vocation in politics.

I knew that he often talked to my boss, Dr Morgan Tsvangirai. They had first spoken through an intermediary years earlier before they began to talk directly and regularly with each other

It was in June 2007 when I bumped into Rex, long after our frequent interactions when I was still a practising journalist.

I had just come out of a three-month stint in D-class prison on trumped-up terrorism charges when he told me to leave politics and go back to journalism.

“Va va vanokuuraya vanhu veZanu PF ava (they will kill you, these ZANU PF people)”, he said detachedly, as if he was not a member of Zanu PF himself when in fact, he sat in the party’s Politburo.

He spoke to me as if he was not a part of “vanhu ava” (these Zanu PF people).

As they lowered his casket at the national shrine in August 2011, I mused over that remark: “Vanokuuraya vanhu veZanu PF ava” especially amid the very valid speculation that he was murdered.

After his mysterious death in 2011, the major question on everyone’s lips was how a hardened soldier who had survived heavy and sophisticated artillery during the war could die a simple death associated with candles and matches.

Just how could Rex die of a purported fire 31 years after surviving a brutal armed struggle where he had survived some of the many fires that seemed to follow him up in his hectic life?

Not only had Rex miraculously survived a fire in his mother’s grass-thatched hut at Mutusva village in Chikomba during his troubled childhood, but during the Geneva talks in Switzerland, Rex had also survived a fire that started in his hotel room at the Royal Hotel on 4 December 1976.

Some of his liberation war comrades attributed the fire to a moment of negligence during Rex’s sexual tryst inside his hotel room with Bernadette Monteiro, reportedly a beautiful girl of mixed origin that he had become romantically involved with.

But he had survived the fire that began inside his hotel room by escaping through the window, as he later said.

Later, he was to also survive yet another fire in their matrimonial bedroom, together with his wife, Joyce.

The official spin that Mujuru had died of an honest fire inside his Beatrice farmhouse on the night of 15 August 2011 had few takers among many neutral Zimbabweans.

As shall be explained below from the detailed information gleaned from his biography, Zimbabweans have every reason to believe Mujuru was murdered.

On 16 January 2012, five months after his death and probably to silence a sceptic nation, the State opened an inquest into Solomon’s death, which controversially concluded that the cause of death was carbonisation due to open fire.

But for the Mujuru family and Solomon’s lawyer, Thakor Kewada, the testimonies at the inquest raised more questions than answers.

The Mujuru family felt there was a litany of inconsistencies and other pointers that emerged during the inquest but were curiously either glossed over or not pursued at all by the presiding magistrate, Walter Chikwanha.

The Mujuru family and their lawyer believe Solomon was killed, and perhaps rightly so for the following reasons raised in his official biography:

First, in the weeks before his death, Rex had his keys to his farmhouse stolen from him under mysterious circumstances.

On the night that he died, he had upon arrival at the farm driven first to the farm compound to collect the kitchen keys from his maid, Rosemary Short, which he then used to enter the main farmhouse through the kitchen.

The following morning in the aftermath of the so-called fire, with his body lying still in the soft requiem of death, the stolen keys were suddenly found on the open in his bedroom.

Secondly, in the weeks leading to his death and with his keys stolen from him in murky circumstances, Solomon had told his family and close associates that he felt unsafe. He had also complained about the three State-deployed police constables at the main farm guardroom; Constables Obert Mark, Augustinos Chinyoka and Lazarus Handikatare.

Rex had told friends and family that he did not trust these three police deployees and wanted them removed.

The trio, from the ZRP’s VIP protection unit, had perhaps curiously overstayed and worked at the farm for several months, unlike other State-deployed police contingents to the farm who were transferred after only a week or so.

On the exact day of Mujuru’s death, the three were supposed to be transferred but the car that was supposed to take them away reportedly did not pitch up under unexplained circumstances.

When asked during the inquest why they had not rushed to rescue Mujuru during the fire, the three police constables said they did not know the location of Mujuru’s bedroom in the farmhouse.

These were trained officers who had guarded the farm for three months, a far much longer period than any of the police contingents that had preceded them, yet they claimed not to know the location of the master bedroom of the person they were supposed to protect!

The three also told Rosemary Short, Rex’s maid, that they suspected the fire had emanated from the water-heating compartment of the main farm-house. The Mujuru family and their lawyer wondered how they could claim to know the location of this water-heating compartment to the farm-house yet they did not know the location of the main bedroom of the VIP they were supposed to protect!

At the inquest, the agreed facts were that Rex had gone into the farm house around 8: 20pm. Constable Chinyoka claimed to have made several frequent patrols around the farm-house when Rex had gone to sleep.

The Mujuru family found it bizarre that during the more than five hours of Chinyoka’s purported frequent patrols until the fire was discovered at full-blaze with the roof almost collapsing around 0140am, Chinyoka had failed to detect anything.

And if the ZRP trio claimed they saw the fire at 0140 am after it had spread to all the other rooms, with the roof almost collapsing, how then did they know that the fire had emanated from the water-heating compartment as they had claimed when Rosemary asked them?

During the inquest, Mujuru’s maid, Rosemary and Runhare, the private security detail both claimed separately that they heard gunfire from inside the farmhouse on the night of Solomon’s death.

But the three State police officers all claimed they did not hear any gunshots.

They claimed the sound may have come from burning asbestos sheets.

The official inquest glossed over these pointed inconsistencies and did not spiritedly pursue them to establish whether there had indeed been any gunfire inside the farmhouse on the fateful night.

In fact, the State’s presiding magistrate at the inquest, Walter Chikwanha, sided with the three State police officers that the sound could indeed have emanated from cracking asbestos sheets during the fire.

The other suspicious issue is that during the days of the inquest, Rosemary, the maid, told Kewada, the Mujuru family lawyer, that she was under pressure from some State agents who were telling her not to “talk too much.”

According to Kewada, the State’s investigating officer at the inquest was Detective Inspector Chrispen Makedenge, who kept following Rosemary in a threatening manner during the inquest.

Runhare, Mujuru’s private security detail, claimed the retired general came with a passenger whose face he could not clearly see because Rex did not turn on the car lights.

But the three State-deployed constables maintained Rex arrived alone at the farm.

The Mujuru family were also not happy with the autopsy report that had concluded that Rex had died of carbonation due to open fire .

Without the knowledge of the State, they secretly arranged for a reputed South African forensic pathologist, Reggie Perumal to fly to Harare while they arranged to have Rex exhumed for a second post-mortem, which exhumation was later denied.

But they secretly arranged for Reggie to fly into Zimbabwe with the last flight from Johannesburg to Harare.

Says Kewada in the biography: “After Reggie, the pathologist, arrived in Harare, he phoned his wife in South Africa who told him that just after he had left for Harare, Chrispen Makedenge had suddenly appeared at the Perumals’ home in South Africa wanting to see Reggie.”

Kewada said they believed Makedenge had gone to South Africa either to intimidate Reggie or to bribe him.

Unhappy with the State’s handling of the matter of Solomon’s death; his family ordered a separate private investigation to establish the circumstances around his demise.

The private investigation found out that on the night of his death, Rex had received a message on his phone from an anonymous person warning him not to sleep at the farm that night.

It was not clear why in spite of the warnings; he had proceeded to the farm anyway.

But the fact that at the time of his mysterious death in the farmhouse, his jacket, cellphone and groceries were still in his car may suggest that he may have passed through the farm for a stopover, not a sleepover.

The private investigation also established that Rex was in the company of a lady when he arrived at the farmhouse.

The private probe concluded that upon his entry into the farm house, a group of men ambushed him in his kitchen, his entry point into the farmhouse. It is believed the men had gained entry into the farmhouse using Solomon’s keys, which had mysteriously vanished days earlier but were found in the open in his bedroom on the morning of his death.

The private probe also concluded the unnamed lady that Solomon was with was killed first. Then they went for him and first shot him on the knee in order to immobilize him.

The wounded Solomon was then dragged into his bedroom where an accelerant was poured on him. He was then shot through the throat and set on fire.

His cadaver was later transferred to a Moroccan rug located in the mini-lounge where it was later discovered.

The gunmen then disposed of the young lady’s remains and torched the farmhouse.

So Solomon was killed and thus ended the life of this soft man of hard power; a man who had played kingmaker more than once in his illustrious political and military life.

Speaking on record in Mujuru’s biography, Didymus Mutasa, then the State Security minister, says he told Mugabe that Solomon’s death was suspicious because intelligence reports had said he was not drunk. But Mugabe shooed him away, suggesting that the retired army general was a drunkard and could have died of his own recklessness.

Yet we know Mujuru was no longer smoking when he died. It was indeed true that he was not drunk when he arrived home because Portia Kamvura, who had served him some minutes earlier at Beatrice Motel, said he was not drunk when he drove home at around 7:30 pm.

Notwithstanding Mugabe’s nonchalant dismissal of his Intelligence minister’s suspicion of a foul hand in Rex’s death, it was none other than his wife, Grace, who had first publicly raised the murder alarm.

When Grace pitched up to pay her condolences at the Mujuru family home in Chisipite, she had reportedly publicly wailed:
“……When they no longer want someone, why do they kill that person? Killing a person like this is terrible. Burning him until he is just a stick…..”

So Rex died in very controversial circumstances and his family believes the State rushed the processes of autopsy and the inquest, which may all have been done as a ritual.

His family and many neutral Zimbabweans believe he was murdered.

Mujuru was a serial philanderer, reputed to bed even the wives of his juniors. Solomon’s biography also includes the famous story of his military jacket emblazoned with his name at the back that was discovered in Constantine Chiwenga’s matrimonial wardrobe.

Mujuru’s jacket in Constantino’s matrimonial wardrobe reportedly led to the termination of Chiwenga’s marriage to his first wife.

In the biography, Joyce said Solomon pleaded his innocence when she asked him about that jacket.

According to Joyce, Rex insisted that he had given the jacket to Chiwenga, his junior in the army, to wear it after instructing him to go and stand in for him at Mugabe’s welcome party at the airport

So Rex was a serial philanderer, with eight of his 12 children born out of wedlock. He only had four daughters with Joyce.

According to Joyce, Rex was a poor father who was absent in his children’s lives, even though he adequately provided for them. Joyce attributed Rex’s lack of attachment to family to his troubled upbringing without a mother.

Solomon’s mother, Maidei, who Joyce thought could have infused in him the values of affection and family attachment, died when Solomon was still very young.

Joyce says after she gave birth to her fourth and last born child, Kuzivakwashe, she took a decision to stay in the marriage for the sake of her children as Solomon would come back home after a day, days or even weeks.

But she said she always respected her husband for what he was and never gossiped about him with the children, even though they saw for themselves what their father was like after they became grown-up girls.

Rex grew up in poverty and saw money, wealth, status and power as compensatory assets for his tenuous upbringing.

Indeed, Rex philandered in a miasma of cigarette smoke, fine whisky, wealth and music.

His biography makes the point that Rex loved women and they loved him back; even though he was not much of a sex symbol.He lacked social grace, was not a suave dresser, had bloodshot eyes and stuttered, all of which may have been off-putting to many women.

But he had his own way with the fairer sex, who probably felt drawn to him because of his status, wealth and power.

Notwithstanding his stuttering, Rex charmed women, ever since the early days of Monica Chikasha, his first girlfriend during his puberty years at his rural home in Chikomba in Chivhu.

Monica—-the beautiful damsel Rex had charmed in his teenage years as a poor boy who tended his poor father’s parlous “wealth” of only two donkeys named Chari and Jack.

Rex had his own tainted past, especially the Gukurahundi genocide which happened during his time as army commander.

Mujuru often defended himself by saying the North Korean Fifth brigade that orchestrated Gukurahundi operated outside the conventional army.

But he cannot escape culpability because ultimately, as army commander, he was liable for the excesses of a military he headed; a military that killed thousands of innocent Zimbabweans in the Midlands and the Matabeleland provinces.

But the cardinal enduring lesson he left his military colleagues is that any soldier who wants to join active politics must first remove his military fatigue and leave the citizens’ army.

You cannot mix the two vocations; politics and active military service.

Mujuru openly pursued active politics but only after having removed his military gear.

But the big question still lingers: Who killed Solomon Mujuru?

Could it be the usual suspect?

The jury is still out on that one.

Well, let me just conclude by aping his famous stutter: Zo zo zo zororai murugare, Mwendamberi (Rest in peace, Rex).

Luke Tamborinyoka, now based in the United Kingdom, is a citizen from Domboshava. He is a journalist and a political scientist by profession. He is a former secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists and won many awards when he was still with The Daily News. He was awarded the book prize for best student in his Political Science class at the University of Zimbabwe. You can interact with Tamborinyoka on his Facebook page or on the twitter handle @luke_tambo