JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Zimbabwe’s independence war hero Dumiso Dabengwa died on Thursday morning after a long battle with liver disease, his ZAPU party said.

He was 79.

The ZAPU leader was returning home after undergoing treatment in India when he died in Kenya, where he was transiting. His wife, Zodwa, was with him.

Dabengwa’s family has reached out to the government for help in repatriating his body.

Iphithule Maphosa, the ZAPU spokesman, said Dabengwa died after a “long and strenuous struggle against illness since November 2018.”

“He leaves behind seeds of freedom, peaceful co-existence and national development that will germinate in all of us as we follow in his footprints,” Maphosa said.

Last month, ZimLive obtained exclusive pictures of Dabengwa being wheeled in a wheelchair at the Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo International Airport – spreading national concern for the respected former Home Affairs Minister.

Dabengwa actively supported MDC leader Nelson Chamisa’s campaign in the run-up to elections last July, after ZAPU joined the MDC Alliance.

A former intelligence chief of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Party (ZIPRA) during the bush war for independence in the 1970s, Dabengwa announced in 2009 that he was leaving Zanu PF and withdrawing ZAPU from a unifying pact signed in 1987.

Dabengwa was detained at Chikurubi Maximum Prison from 1982 to 1986, accused of plotting an overthrow of the government of former Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. Lookout Masuku, with whom he was detained, died shortly after release from prison in what is widely considered as one of the worst legal injustices in post-independent Zimbabwe.