A South African government memorandum, squirrelled away by a former apartheid operative, has revealed the answer to a 42-year-old mystery: who was behind the devastating 1982 sabotage of the air force of the newly independent Zimbabwe?
A South African government memorandum, squirrelled away by a former apartheid operative, has revealed the answer to a 42-year-old mystery: who was behind the devastating 1982 sabotage of the air force of newly independent Zimbabwe? Much more than just another military episode in an unstable era, its violent after-effects hammered yet another nail into the coffin of the fledgling nation’s multi-ethnic experiment.
The newly independent black government, hot with rage, arrested many white air force officers, some of them British citizens, and held them incommunicado, without access to lawyers. It later emerged that a number had been tortured in order to extract false confessions. The public’s reaction in Britain was violent. So, too, was Mugabe’s response to representations by Her Majesty’s government about due process and the presumption of innocence.
Yet the Zimbabwean government held to the view that the airmen, or at least some of them, were “guilty as hell”. Mugabe and his ministers remained convinced that officers of the predominantly white air force had connived with apartheid South Africa to destroy the country’s airpower from within.
Moreover, the government’s investigators lost interest in the real culprit when, under duress, he provided them with the pre-scripted fiction they had constructed to implicate an elaborate network of traitorous senior officers. Had they conducted a more competent investigation, they might have not only secured a conviction but also uncovered the real espionage ring outside the air force, one that continued its work unmolested for many years afterwards.
That was half of the story. Some of the other, less auspicious half was clear to the air force board of inquiry that was convened in the immediate aftermath of the sabotage. Manned by white officers, the board recalled that Weir had appeared to have become disenchanted with the air force and Zimbabwe after his return from Britain, and had recently been seen in Pretoria at the recruitment office of the South African Air Force while on leave.
Nothing has changed in the decades since. Weir has continued to be willingly numbered among his innocent and abused colleagues. In the late 1980s, the victims collaborated in an authorised history of the event. Penned by former Rhodesian government writer Barbara Cole,described the inculpatory evidence against Weir and set it against the counterarguments he had given to investigators.
Branfield also spoke explicitly about how they constructed an alibi for Weir: “He would go to a wedding and pretend to be totally arseholes and be dropped off at home … would pick him up from there. That was part of his cover that he’d been to this big wedding. In case any shit happened. Pick him up and met the team. They cut a hole in the fence. They went in with Neville.”
The larger questions are systemic. The extent to which the British government hired southern African whites in the 1980s with intelligence connections to the apartheid regime – who they were, what secrets they may have stolen and how that was allowed to happen – is one that remains largely unexplored.
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