Shocking truths about President Canaan Banana

Early and Personal Life

Born on the 5^th March 1936 in Esiphezini, Southern Rhodesia, Banana was the son of an immigrant worker from Nyasaland, now Malawi. He was married to Janet Mbuyazwe in 1961 and had 3 sons and one daughter. 

CAREER

Teacher and Minister

He trained first as a teacher and then as a minister at a local theological college. After ordination in 1966 he served in the Methodist Church in a variety of posts. But, as the independence struggle intensified, Banana found himself drawn increasingly into politics.

Politics

By the beginning of the 1970s, he had become vice-president of the opposition African National Council (ANC), a group outlawed by the Smith regime. As ever more of his colleagues were rounded up by the Rhodesian security forces, Banana left for the US. Upon his return in 1975 to Salisbury (as Harare was then known) he was briefly imprisoned.

After being released, he emerged as the ANC’s chief press spokesman and attended the 1976 Geneva conference which failed to break the deadlock over the future of Zimbabwe. In the last three years of white Rhodesia, Banana was again detained on several occasions, before majority black-ruled Zimbabwe was finally born in 1980.

Under the country’s initial parliament-based constitution, Mugabe as Prime Minister and leader of the largest party held executive power, while the ceremonial duties of head of state were left to a figure-head president. As a long-standing ally of Mugabe, yet linked by birth to the minority Ndebele people, Banana was a natural choice.

Those were Zimbabwe’s best years when the country seemed poised to become a model for independent black Africa. As President, Banana was Zimbabwe’s representative at the marriage of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Later he was credited with brokering a deal between the country’s two largest political parties, thus ending an army crackdown by Mugabe on his opponents.

But, in 1987, Mugabe pushed through a revised constitution, turning Zimbabwe into the presidential republic it is today.

Scandal

His important earlier contribution to the struggle to overthrow the white supremacist regime of Ian Smith were overshadowed by the scandal that engulfed his final years: his trial and conviction on charges of homosexual sodomy which ended his career destroyed his marriage and ruined his reputation.

Even during his years in office, extravagant rumours about Banana’s private sex life had circulated in Harare. The tales, however, only became public in 1998 during a sensational court case. Jefta Dube, a 36-year-old policeman who had served as Banana’s bodyguard, was on trial for the murder of a colleague.

Dube testified that in the 1980s Banana, then President, had seduced him at the State House in Harare, having laced his drink with drugs after dinner one night. When he awoke the following morning Dube said he found himself half-naked covered by a duvet on the carpet. Standing over him was a smiling head of state who informed him, “We have helped ourselves.” There followed, Dube claimed, a coerced homosexual relationship that lasted three years. The bodyguard claimed he had shot his colleague dead after the latter had taunted him as “Banana’s wife”.

Not only did the tale electrify the country. Homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe, punishable by up to 10 years in jail, and President Robert Mugabe had not long before denounced gays and lesbians as “lower than pigs or dogs”. Within days of the Dube allegations, the authorities launched a criminal investigation against the former president.

It soon transpired that the story told by Dube had plenty of supporting evidence. A leading Harare sports journalist recounted how he was once invited to breakfast at the presidential palace, apparently to discuss the fortunes of Zimbabwean football, of which Banana was such a devotee that he even ran his own team, the State House Tornadoes. “He told me that I had a pretty body and invited me to come and watch his players during training,” the journalist said. “I finished my tea and got out as quickly as I could.”

Similar complaints were voiced by students past and present at the University of Zimbabwe, where Banana, a former Methodist minister, was Professor of Theology. The former president, it was said, regularly visited the student dorms after dark. On one occasion, a fellow professor told the police, “some students had to chase him out of the hostel at three in the morning”.

The trial began in June 1998, and though Banana maintained throughout the case that the charges were “pathological lies” and part of a vendetta against him, the court concluded otherwise. Shortly before he was due to be sentenced, Banana fled to South Africa, convinced that President Mugabe was plotting his assassination. In the end he was persuaded by the South African president Nelson Mandela to return to Harare, where Banana was sentenced to a year in prison. After his final appeal was dismissed by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court in 2000, he spent eight months in jail before being released early for good behaviour.

The damage, however, was long since done. In October 2000 Janet, his wife of 39 years, went to live in London with the couple’s daughter. Banana lost his job at the university and was removed from his work as the Organisation for African Unity’s special envoy to crisis-torn Liberia.

There was talk that he might serve as a mediator between President Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, after the controversial elections of March 2002 that were blatantly rigged by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF movement. But such plans came to nothing when Tsvangirai launched a court appeal against the result, and Banana fell victim to illness.

Banana was forced to step down. His subsequent personal descent mirrored that of his country under the increasingly tyrannical and paranoid rule of his former ally. By the end of his life, Banana was deeply saddened by the disaster that Zimbabwe had become, but was powerless to change its fortunes