In The Rain Goddess (Peter Stiff) one of the main characters of the novel gets lured to Lusaka and more or less forcibly coerced into joining ZANLA (I don't think the name of the group is explicitly mentioned, been a while since I read the book). He is then flown to Moscow for political and weapons training. It also mentions that other recruits were sent to China for their training.
Was this a common method that the guerrilla forces used to recruit their forces? To what extent were the USSR and China involved in training communist or maoist forces fighting in Rhodesia at the time?
Josiah Tongogara, the commander of ZANU’s liberation army in Zimbabwe, trained at a guerrilla camp at Nanjing’s Military Academy in 1966. The training included two months of education on the Chinese Revolution and communist ideology, and months more of training in “mass mobilization, military intelligence, political science, mass media, and guerrilla strategies.” Aspects of Maoist ideology are an evident byproduct of this relationship. Tongogara once related to a BBC reporter:
"When we open a new area, we don’t just go and fight. First of all we make a study – investigation among the masses – they tell us their grievances, and those we exploit and use them...and we explain to them why we have come to them, why you are fighting this war. They have to understand it."
China pursued relations with a number of new-found nations in Africa and other parts of the Third World shortly after liberation. At the Bandung Conference of April 1955 China expressed its support for decolonization and non-alignment of Third World nations. That July, Zhou Enlai expressed:
"The people demand the abolition of military blocs which create splits and hostility between nations...the people of Asia and Africa, in particular, are opposed to such military blocs, since it is quite clear that the colonialists are using such military blocs as a means of setting up their colonial rule."
After the Sino-Soviet split, China reaffirmed its desires to protect nations of the Third World from both Soviet and Western imperialism, and thus was a key component of the Zanu/Zapu rift. While China didn't have any "boots on the ground" in Rhodesia so to speak - they did provide training at camps like the one Tongogara went to, and their large presence in nearby Zambia and Tanzania likely aided the efforts of freedom fighters in Rhodesia - who could utilize the Chinese military and economic aid present in these liberated nations to assist in their own struggle
Sources:
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “A Plundering Tiger with Its Deadly Cubs? The USSR and China as Weapons in Engineering of a “Zimbabwean Nation,” Entangled Geographies: Empires and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, Gabrielle Hecht, ed., (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011).
Portrait of a “Terrorist,” Nick Ross, rep., (BBC Two England, April 19, 1979), URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbU_lQMz7ko.
Kuo-Kang Shao, Zhou Enlai and the Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy, (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Martin Bailey, “Tanzania and China,” African Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 294, (Oxford University Press, Jan., 1975).