Tongogara's ghost

Tongogara was killed in a 'car accident' and was reburied in Heroes Acre - on the outskirts of Harare in 1980.

Six days after the Lancaster House Agreement was signed Robert Mugabe, on the Voice of Zimbabwe radio station, conveyed "an extremely sad message" to "all the fighting people of Zimbabwe": the forty one year old Tongogara was dead, killed in a car accident in Mozambique on December 26 1979. Josiah Tungamirai, the ZANLA High Command's political commissar relates that on the night of the fatality, he and Tongogara had been travelling with others in two vehicles from Maputo to Chimoio. Tungamirai said he was in the front vehicle. It was dark and the roads were bad. Tungamirai's car passed a military vehicle that had been carelessly abandoned, with no warning signs at the side of the road. After that, he could no longer see the headlights of the following car in his rear view mirror. Eventually he turned back, and, as he had feared, they found Tongogara's car had struck the abandoned vehicle. Tongogara was sitting in the front passenger seat. Tungamirai told me that he had struggled to lift Tongogara out of the wrecked car. He said that as he was doing so, Tongogara heaved a huge sigh and died in his
Margaret Dongo was one of the last people to see him alive. "We were eighteen girls who were having a function and he came to say a few words to bless the occasion."

ZANU released an undertaker's statement saying his injuries were consistent with a road accident, but no autopsy results or pictures have been released(the undertaker who gave the report was indeed Mr K.J Stokesand not Mr R Silke).

His ghost has been reportedly seen by a number of people in and around the burial place.

It is also said that he haunts the State House in Harare and that this has driven a certain person to antidepressents!