A truck carrying thousands of copies of Zimbabwe’s leading independent newspaper was burned out last weekend, writes Wilf Mbanga

A 14-tonne truck containing 60,000 copies of last weekend’s edition of the Zimbabwean on Sunday was burned out as it attempted to deliver the newspapers.

The driver, Christmas Ramabulana, a South African national, and distribution assistant Tapfumaneyi Kancheta, a Zimbabwean, were stopped 67km from Masvingo and forced to drive along the Chivi-Mandamabwe road for 16km before they turned off into the Mandamabwe road, where the truck and its contents were set alight. The two men were badly beaten by their kidnappers and abandoned in the bush. They made their way to Masvingo, from where they contacted the Zimbabwean’s Harare office.

Kancheta said his head was badly swollen from the savage beating, and the driver was reported to be having problems breathing.

The Zimbabwean on Sunday was launched in February this year as a sister paper to the popular weekly the Zimbabwean, which since last year has become the largest selling newspaper in Zimbabwe — selling 230,000 copies a week at its peak during the run-up to the landmark 2008 elections.

The Zimbabwean on Sunday quickly established a reputation as the country’s leading Sunday paper.

The Zimbabwean was established in February 2005 to stand up to Mugabe’s media blackout. It exploits a loophole in Zimbabwe’s anti-press legislation by being published and printed in South Africa and trucked into the country.

Despite frequently being denounced, until last weekend every issue of the newspaper had made it safely to Harare, from where it was distributed throughout the country and devoured by a population starved of accurate information. Mugabe’s senior henchman, Emmerson Mnangagwa, recently blamed the Zimbabwean for ZanuPF’s electoral defeat.

Wilf Mbanga is editor of the Zimbabwean