By Trevor Grundy

In his book  Dzino – Memories of a Freedom Fighter (Weaver Press, Harare 2011)  the former guerrilla leader Wilfred Mhanda recalls that when he was 12 in 1962 his father sent him to Dadaya Mission in southern Rhodesia’s border area between the Midlands and Matabeleland for his upper primary education. Dadaya Mission was situated at Hokonui Ranch owned by two New Zealanders, Garfield and Grace Todd.

Garfield had been Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia from 1953-1958 and was removed by his own all-white cabinet, partly because of his efforts  to see an extension to the number of blacks allowed the franchise.

“I went to Dadaya in 1962,” writes Mhanda,  “the year that ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) was formed. The atmosphere at Dadaya was politically charged. I remember Sir Garfield returning from visits to, for example, the United Nations and when making a milk delivery to the school, he would give an impromptu address to the students. More than once, I remember him being lifted shoulder high by the students to the chants of ‘mwana mevhu’ (son of the soil), the rallying cry of African nationalism. Sir Garfield also gave lectures to primary school students on current, civic and governmental affairs.”

Mhanda remembers Todd as a great orator. Young Africans enjoyed his sermons. “Although the inspirational pan-African nationalist anthem ‘Ishe komborera Africa’ (God Bless Africa) was banned at the time in an attempt to suppress African nationalist sentiments, whenever he preached a sermon, he would make sure that it was sung both before and afterwards. “

1962 was the year Mhanda was baptized into the Church of Christ of New Zealand by the Rev W. Adcock, the school’s headmaster.

The nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo often visited Dadaya to hold talks with his close friend Garfield Todd.

Wilfred remembers seeing Landrovers pull up outside the school flying the ZAPU insignia. “Indeed, many of Zimbabwe’s prominent nationalists and politicians had passed through Todd’s Dadaya, either as students or as teachers, among them Ndabaningi Sithole, Robert Mugabe, Cephas Msipa, Rugare Gumbo, Richard Hove and the Mumbengegwi brothers. The school also produced reputable personalities in other walks of life.”

Three years later, Manford Manikidza Nyoni became the school’s first black head teacher.

That was the year that Ian Smith declared his infamous UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) which saw the arrest of Garfield Todd and then his long restriction on Hokonui Ranch.

“Todd,” writes Mhanda, “was restricted to his farm in 1965, ahead of UDI, and was even prevented from attending church services at the school that was located on his farm. I recall occasions when we had to walk some distance across the Ngezi River to his homestead so that he could take communion together with the church congregation.”

Garfield was born in 1907 and he died in 2002.

Ten years after his death, the prominent Zimbabwean playwright, actor and theatre director Cont Mhlanga is gathering material for a drama based on the life and times of Garfield and Grace Todd.

The Dadaya Years (1934-1946) when Garfield was a missionary with no European friends outside his immediate family circle shaped and structured the politician who went on to try and convince  southern Rhodesia’s European population that their future lay not in separation (the polite word for apartheid) and confrontation but rather in co-operation with their black neighbours.

There is a growing interest in Zimbabwe about the 1950s and the failed experiment in regional co-operation – the Central African  Federation (CAF) – that linked the two Rhodesias (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) with Nyasaland (Malawi) from 1953-1963.

One of the people who knew Garfield Todd well is the Edinburgh- based independent researcher and writer, Susan Paul. She has co-authored an article on the way the Dadaya Years gave Garfield Todd  the Christian strength and liberal convictions that maintained his as a politician in the current  issue of the prestigious Commonwealth magazine, The Round Table. *

In it she and her co-author write: “The name of Garfield Todd, Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, became known outside the country in 1958 when his cabinet successfully rebelled against him. Inside the country, the wonder was that he became prime minister in the first place.”

The authors say that historians have concentrated on Garfield Todd’s sudden emergence as an MP in 1946 and his meteoric rise and fall, rather than on his background as a missionary and teacher but go o: ”If failure in the political arena was his destiny, then his legacy is massive success as a missionary and the shaper of lives and careers of so many young men and women who went on to dominate the leadership of several aspects of African life after 1980. The authors believe that the tenth anniversary of Garfield’s death in 2002 is a good time to consider the Dadaya years and their impact on the man …”Robert Mugabe has done his best to airbrush Garfield Todd out of his country’s history.

But the works of men like Cont Mhlanga, Wilfred Mhanda, Michael W. Casey’s The Rhetoric of Sir Garfield Todd (Baylor University Press, 2007) and women like Ruth Weiss/Jane L. Parpart who wrote Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe (British Academic Press, 1999) Judith Garfield Todd’s Through the Darkness – A Life in Zimbabwe (Zebra, South Africa 2007) and Susan Paul will ensure that this great man’s life’s work is understood and valued by young Zimbabweans in years to come.

* See article entitled The Dadaya Years: The Challenge of Understanding Garfield Todd by Susan Paul and Trevor Grundy in the current (December 2011) issue of The Round Table – The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs (Routledge –Taylor & Francis Group)

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