Josiah Magama Tongogara was just too dangerous to live in independent Zimbabwe

The 26th of December 2025 marked exactly 46 years since the death of Josiah Magama Tongogara. And once again, Zimbabwe performed a familiar ritual. Wreaths were laid. Platitudes were spoken. The liberation icon was praised, safely embalmed in history.

What is carefully avoided every year in these rites is the most explosive truth of all. Tongogara, had he lived, would have been profoundly inconvenient to the Zimbabwe that emerged after 1980. His death did not merely precede independence. It made a particular kind of independence possible.

Tongogara was not the sort of liberation hero the post-colonial state prefers. He was not pliable. He was not easily flattered. He did not mistake loyalty to individuals for loyalty to the revolution.

As commander of ZANLA, he wielded real power, the most dangerous kind of power in revolutionary movements. The loyalty of armed men and the respect of the rank and file. That alone made him a threat to anyone seeking to monopolise authority once the war ended.

Unlike many who later wrapped themselves in liberation rhetoric to justify excess, Tongogara believed discipline was non-negotiable. He enforced it ruthlessly, sometimes savagely. This has earned him criticism and rightly so.

But it also reveals a man who understood that revolutions collapse not only because of enemies, but because of rot within.

Indiscipline, corruption and factionalism were not post-independence inventions. They were already present in the camps. Tongogara confronted them head-on. Others learned to live with them and later benefited from them.

He was also politically astute in ways that are often underestimated. Tongogara understood that the gun alone does not build a nation. His support for negotiations at Lancaster House was not a retreat from principle but a recognition of reality.

He knew the war had reached a point where continued fighting would cost lives without fundamentally altering the balance of forces. Yet he was equally clear that political compromise should not translate into moral surrender.

This is what made him dangerous. Tongogara occupied a rare position. He could speak to politicians as an equal and to fighters as a commander they trusted. He could restrain both adventurism and capitulation. In any revolutionary movement, such figures are pivotal and precarious. They stabilise transitions or derail ambitions, depending on where one stands.

Then, conveniently, he died.

The official story of a car accident in Mozambique has never satisfied many Zimbabweans. Not because conspiracy theories are inherently attractive, but because the political consequences of his death were so immediate and so profound.

With Tongogara gone, a critical counterweight disappeared. The path was cleared for the concentration of power in fewer hands, largely unchallenged by figures with independent authority.

Independent Zimbabwe did not simply inherit colonial structures. It perfected them. The security apparatus remained intact, now staffed by black elites. The language of liberation was repurposed to silence dissent.

Those who questioned the new order were accused of betraying the struggle. It is hard to imagine Tongogara accepting this without resistance.

Would he have tolerated the rapid emergence of a ruling class that enriched itself while ordinary citizens queued for basic services? Would he have accepted the transformation of liberation credentials into lifetime entitlement?

Would he have remained silent as the army was increasingly politicised and deployed against civilians? There is no evidence in his record to suggest he would.

This is why Tongogara’s memory is uncomfortable. He cannot be easily assimilated into the mythology of benevolent rulers and grateful masses. His life raises questions the state would rather not answer.

If the struggle was about dignity, why does indignity persist? If it was about justice, why does impunity flourish? If it was about the people, why are the people perpetually sacrificed?

There is a tendency to treat liberation history as sacred scripture, immune from interrogation. Tongogara himself would have rejected this. He was a product of struggle, not its final word. To freeze him in time is to betray the restless, questioning spirit that defined him.

The tragedy is not only that Tongogara died before independence. It is that independence lost a figure who might have forced it to mature differently.

Zimbabwe’s post-1980 trajectory has been marked by centralisation of power, suppression of alternative voices and an almost pathological fear of accountability. These are not the hallmarks of a confident liberation movement. They are the symptoms of insecurity.

One of the great ironies of Zimbabwean politics is that the language of revolution is most aggressively deployed by those least willing to tolerate revolutionary scrutiny.

Tongogara believed authority had to be earned continuously. In independent Zimbabwe, authority quickly became self-justifying. Liberation credentials were converted into political immunity.

Younger generations are often told they do not understand the sacrifices of the liberation war. That may be true. But many veterans equally fail to understand the frustrations of a generation locked out of opportunity by a system that invokes past sacrifice to excuse present failure.

Tongogara’s legacy, if taken seriously, bridges this divide. It insists that sacrifice demands results, not reverence.

Remembering Tongogara honestly forces us to confront an unsettling possibility. That the liberation struggle was not betrayed overnight, but hollowed out gradually, by leaders who learned to love power more than principle.

Tongogara stood at a crossroads between war and statehood. His absence tilted the balance decisively in one direction.

On this anniversary, the most radical act is not to praise Tongogara, but to listen to what his life implies.

That liberation without accountability is hollow. That discipline without justice becomes repression. That revolutions do not end when flags are raised, but when citizens live with dignity.

Josiah Magama Tongogara was not perfect. He was harsh, uncompromising and at times brutal. But he was serious about liberation in a way that makes many of his successors look unserious by comparison. He did not fight to create a new elite. He fought to dismantle an old injustice.

That is why he remains dangerous, even in death.