The Wankie battle of 1967 is not only a Zimbabwe-South Africa story.
The guerrillas from the two countries had trained at Kongwa camp in Tanzania alongside recruits from Mozambique’s FRELIMO, the first liberation movement to pass through Kongwa’s training grounds, according to the Southern African Development Community’s official history of the region’s liberation struggles. Namibia’s SWAPO had launched its own armed struggle against South African rule barely a year earlier, in 1966.
On the night of 30 to 31 July 1967, about 80 guerrillas gathered on the northern bank of the Zambezi, east of Livingstone and roughly 15 kilometres below Victoria Falls.
Below them was one of the river’s more dangerous stretches. Ropes had been fastened to trees along the high bank. One by one, the fighters held on and lowered themselves down the cliff towards a small boat waiting far below.
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The current was strong. Many of the men could not swim.
On the Zambian side, senior leaders Oliver Tambo and Dumiso Dabengwa remained until the fighters were safely across.
Chris Hani, then a young MK commander and political commissar of the combined force, remembered the mood years later.
“When we began the process of crossing, we were ready for anything, and the spirit of MK combatants was very high.”
They were carrying rifles, ammunition and limited supplies into a country most of them barely knew. Ahead lay hundreds of kilometres of bush, Rhodesian security forces and, for the South Africans among them, the distant hope of crossing another river — the Limpopo — and finally going home.
It would not happen as planned.
Before Wankie, there was Kongwa
The Wankie Campaign is often told as a Zimbabwean-South African story involving ZAPU and the African National Congress.
It was all of those things. But it was also part of something considerably larger.
In the 1960s, Kongwa in central Tanzania became a major crossroads for Southern Africa’s liberation movements. SADC’s official history records FRELIMO as the first movement trained at Kongwa, followed by SWAPO. Other research shows ANC, MPLA and ZAPU cadres subsequently occupying neighbouring camps and training in the same environment.
Mozambicans preparing to fight Portuguese colonial rule, Namibians preparing to confront South African occupation, South Africans preparing to fight apartheid and Zimbabweans preparing to overthrow white minority rule encountered one another there.
Historian Christian Williams argues that places such as Kongwa are obscured when liberation history is written only through separate national stories. Their history, he writes, demands “a regional approach to exile”.
Wankie is an example of why.
The men who crossed the Zambezi in 1967 came from different countries, but their military lives had already been shaped by a regional network of camps, governments, borders and liberation movements.
Inside those camps, however, patience was wearing thin.
MK veteran and High Command member Mavuso Msimang recalled the frustration of cadres who had trained for war but remained in Tanzania waiting for deployment.
“People wanted to go home, and they just did not want to sit in Kongwa.”
Wankie offered a road south.
The Luthuli Detachment
By 1967, the ANC and ZAPU had developed an operational partnership.
Their interests converged. ZAPU needed trained fighters inside Rhodesia. The ANC needed a route through Rhodesia that could carry MK guerrillas towards South Africa after previous attempts to move cadres through Botswana had resulted in arrests and interceptions.
The two movements developed a joint political and military structure. ZAPU was particularly important in reconnaissance and intelligence because the operation would take place on Rhodesian territory.
John Dube, also known as Charles Sotsha Ngwenya, was appointed commander of the combined detachment, with Chris Hani as commissar.
Shortly before the crossing, the group was named the Luthuli Detachment, in honour of ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Chief Albert Luthuli, who had died on 21 July 1967.
SADET’s Road to Democracy records Oliver Tambo saying the name was bestowed on the banks of the Zambezi, minutes before the crossing.
It gave the mission an additional symbolic meaning. The fighters were not simply leaving Zambia. They believed they were beginning the journey home.
Dumiso Dabengwa, who was deeply involved in planning ZAPU’s side of the operation, is quoted by The Thinker as saying Wankie was a watershed in the armed liberation struggles of Zimbabwe and South Africa.
“The Luthuli detachment’s indomitable fighters proved the lie of the invincibility of the Rhodesian and South African racist and apartheid regimes.”
A plan built around avoiding battle
The irony at the heart of what became known as the Wankie battles is that the original plan was not to seek a major battle in Rhodesia.
For MK, Rhodesia was supposed to be a corridor.
South African History Online records that the planners intended to avoid unnecessary clashes with Rhodesian forces. One section would move south towards South Africa, while another would remain inside Rhodesia and help establish infrastructure through which future MK fighters could move.
Hani later described the concept as building a “Ho Chi Minh trail to South Africa”.
But almost immediately, geography began to dismantle the plan.
The fighters discovered that their understanding of the terrain was poor. The watercourses they expected to find were dry. Supplies dwindled. They were forced to hunt game and approach villagers for water and food, increasing the chances of detection.
Hani remembered some of those encounters warmly. Local people, he said, supplied food and water, helping the column to keep moving.
Some contemporary Rhodesian reports, however, claimed that rural traditional authorities passed information to police and troops. The historical record also contains accounts of villagers feeding fighters, providing intelligence and assisting their movement.
Even the precise circumstances in which the guerrillas were first detected remain disputed.
Then the shooting began
On 13 August, the eastern group made contact with Rhodesian security forces near the Nyatuwe or Inyantuwe River between Wankie and Dete.
It became the first major battle of the campaign.
The SADC history records a fight lasting about seven and a half hours. Rhodesian forces suffered casualties and eventually withdrew. When they returned to recover bodies, five guerrillas were found dead.
For the fighters, the romantic idea of finally taking up arms now collided with the reality of watching friends die.
ZPRA veteran Ectwell Siwela, whose nom de guerre was Peter Banda, was a medic with the detachment. More than five decades later, his memory was not of slogans or military communiqués, but of men bleeding in front of him.
“It was not an easy thing to helplessly watch your comrades dying in your arms.”
The battles multiplied.
The southward-moving Dube-Hani group fought major engagements on 21 and 22 August as Rhodesian forces tightened the pursuit. Food and water were dangerously low. Reconnaissance aircraft searched from above.
Men disappeared from the column. Some were killed, others captured. Eventually, groups of survivors crossed into Botswana, where many were arrested and imprisoned.
Yet battlefield memory and military outcome would eventually produce two very different histories of Wankie.
When Pretoria entered the battlefield
Wankie also changed the geography of South Africa’s war against the ANC.
On 8 September 1967, Prime Minister John Vorster publicly acknowledged that South African policemen were operating in Rhodesia alongside Rhodesian forces.
“We are doing it openly,” he declared, presenting the deployment as necessary to prevent South African guerrillas from reaching home.
The significance went beyond the number of policemen involved.
A group of African freedom fighters assembled through exile networks in Tanzania and Zambia had crossed into Rhodesia, and their presence had helped draw the apartheid state’s security apparatus north of the Limpopo.
The battlefield was becoming regional. So was the language of the liberation movements.
In a joint declaration issued by Tambo and ZAPU vice-president James Chikerema during the fighting, the two organisations described their fighters as “comrades-in-arms on a common route” who were “facing a common fate”.
Those were not empty words.
South Africans were dying in Rhodesia. Zimbabweans were helping South Africans find a route home. Zambia was providing the rear base. Tanzania had provided the training environment. Botswana would imprison survivors. Pretoria was sending its police north.
Wankie had become a Southern African war in miniature.
Basil February and the long journey home
Among the young South Africans in the detachment was Basil February, known in MK as Paul Petersen.
He was 24 and a former University of Cape Town medical student. February was separated from the main guerrilla column while on a special mission.
Researcher Nicole van Driel, drawing partly on accounts from former Rhodesian policemen, places his death at Figtree near Bulawayo on 15 August 1967, although official records gave 16 August, possibly because that was when his death was formally recorded.
February was buried in Bulawayo.
His parents died without bringing their son home.
In September 2024, 57 years after the Wankie Campaign, his remains were among those repatriated from Zimbabwe and Zambia by the South African government. He was finally buried with his family in Somerset West the following month.
His younger brother, Terence February, summed up the cruelty of those lost decades after the burial. Their mother, he said, had mourned Basil from 1967 until her death in 2004.
In that one family lies another meaning of Wankie.
The campaign did not end when the shooting stopped.
For some families, it lasted 57 years.
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