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War Stories: Guerrilla Narratives of Zimbabwe's Liberation War

Article  in  History Workshop Journal · March 2004

DOI: 10.1093/hwj/57.1.79 · Source: OAI

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ZIPRA guerrillas drilling.

War Stories: Guerrilla Narratives of

Zimbabwe’s Liberation War
by Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn
McGregor

INTRODUCTION
Much scholarly attention has recently been paid to the ways in which wars
are remembered and stories told about them. Some writers have focused
on individual ‘trauma’, and the ways in which former civilians and soldiers
cope – or fail to cope – with disturbing memories of violence.1 Others have
concentrated on broader social processes, on the creation of a culture of
memory (or amnesia) about a troubling and divisive past.2 But trauma and
violence are only part of a wide range of experiences and emotions

History Workshop Journal Issue 57 © History Workshop Journal 2004

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surrounding war. A recent popular study of soldiers’ experiences in the two

world wars and Vietnam, focusing specifically on accounts of killing, has
highlighted the range of soldiers’ emotions – from exhilaration, to relief at
action after periods of long delay, to fear, guilt and horror.3 A study of
Indian soldiers’ World War I letters has emphasized expressions of personal
valiance, loyalty to empire and the king, and the generosity of their French
hosts.4 What type of stories are told about war depends on the character of
the war, who is doing the telling and under what circumstances.
Here we contribute to debates about soldiers’ narratives through a study
of the retrospective war stories of veterans of the Zimbabwe People’s
Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), one of two guerrilla armies that took up
arms against settler rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s.5 In some ways these
stories are typical of other soldiers’ ‘personal narratives’. They tend not to
be ‘victim’ stories as, in Samuel Hynes’s words, ‘no man with a weapon can
be entirely a victim’.6 In reflecting on the liberation war as a transformative
experience, ZIPRA guerrillas’ accounts show the distancing effects of time.
As Hynes argues, ‘war annihilates the past selves of young men, changes
them so utterly from youths into soldiers that a return to a past life is
impossible’. The memoir expresses ‘nostalgia for the lost past, the will to
be an agent in one’s own personal war, the sense of irreversible change in
self and the self’s world’. These elements are not present in wartime letters
and diaries, but ‘are the elements of retrospection and reflection, of war
remembered as another time.’7 The sense of personal agency in ZIPRA
guerillas’ war stories, and the narrative devices used to convey passages
over time and space, have much in common with those of soldiers in other
contexts. Guerrillas described their military training, travel and service in
the familiar terms of a journey or odyssey, as a career, a series of progres-
sive steps, a rite of passage or initiation, an enlightenment or a descent into
hell.8
ZIPRA guerrillas’ journey was, however, specific to its time and place
and to the conditions of anti-colonial struggle in the cold war era. They
were not members of a conscript army, and their purpose was not to serve
a state. There was great individual initiative involved in becoming – and
remaining – a guerrilla, and their commitment was political. Guerrillas were
soldiers but they were also nationalists and, over time, some became social-
ists. Political ideology and loyalty to party leaders are crucial aspects of
their identity, and were much tested in the course of war as divisions racked
the liberation movement and as external backers intervened in internecine
disputes or pressed their own agendas. Guerrillas’ sense of agency was most
threatened in the training camps outside Zimbabwe, where they became
pawns in the international and internal disputes of their backers and
leaders. It was least threatened when they returned home to face the
Rhodesian enemy.
The language of ZIPRA narratives was shaped by a variety of literary
genres, some of which they share with those of soldiers elsewhere, and some
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Zimbabwe War Stories 81

of which are specific to their Zimbabwean origins. Influences include the texts
that shaped the emergence of the region’s literate class, as well as generations
of school children across the globe, such as the bible (in various translations),
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and other staples of a mission school
education.9 They show the influence of boys’ adventure stories, Rider
Haggard-inspired imperial romance and travel narratives, and what scholars
of the First World War have referred to as ‘high diction’. This ‘high diction’
was used in the popular media in World War I: it drew on abstractions, late
romantic idiom and a vague spiritualism, expressed in terms and phrases such
as the ‘renewal of youth’, ‘glorious baptism of fire’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘comradeship’
and ‘peril’ – some of which appear in guerrilla accounts (though for them
‘comradeship’ had a specifically socialist connotation).10
The guerrillas’ stories also show the influence of oral traditions, which
guerrillas would have heard not only at home, but also through contact with
the cultural nationalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s.11 Zimbabwe’s
nationalist leaders looked back to the heroes of the ‘primary resistance’
movements of the late nineteenth century as a source of inspiration, popu-
larizing their names, and invoking their spiritual sanction. As we discuss
below, guerrillas also invoked supernatural signs of encouragement, often
fusing biblical and traditional religious symbolism. Other reference points,
such as revolutionary texts, were more specific to the guerrillas’ military and
socialist training. These set guerrillas apart from Zimbabwe’s civilians and
indeed many of the country’s nationalist political leaders, but brought them
into a shared frame of reference with other revolutionaries and insurgents
across the globe.
Although the guerrilla stories recount personal experiences and indi-
vidual biographical trajectories, they should also be seen in some ways as
‘collective’. They reflect the shared experiences of members of a particular
guerrilla army, with its own modes of organization and a unique role in
Zimbabwe’s liberation war. ZIPRA guerrillas owed their loyalty to the
nationalist party ZAPU, the loser in Zimbabwe’s first elections. The guer-
rilla army associated with the victorious ZANU(PF) was known as
ZANLA.12 These two armies harboured deep suspicions of one another. At
the height of the war, they were based in different countries, and were
backed by different superpowers, ZIPRA by the Soviet Union and its allies,
ZANLA by China. They had contrasting military strategies and, inside
Zimbabwe, they fought in different regions of the country, ZIPRA focusing
predominantly on the Ndebele-speaking regions of Matabeleland. Where
they met in the field, they often fought.13 ZIPRA guerrillas’ shared perspec-
tive was reinforced by their relationship with the ZANU(PF) government
after independence. Both armies were initially seen as a potential threat to
order, but as followers of the opposition, ZIPRA guerrillas were also seen
as a political danger, and they were targeted in a vicious war of repression
in the 1980s. During this time, they, along with ZAPU civilians and ‘the
Ndebele’ as a whole with whom they were associated, were hunted down,
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82 History Workshop Journal

jailed, tortured and killed. A small number of ZIPRA guerrillas took up

arms again.14 This experience distinguished ZIPRA guerrillas from their
ZANLA counterparts, some of whom participated in the persecution of
ZIPRA as members of the murderous Fifth Brigade,15 as well as from
soldiers who had fought in the Rhodesian armed forces and the veterans of
the two world wars.16
ZIPRA guerrillas’ collective perspective was also shaped by their
relationship to post-independence civic organizations. Most notably, a
veterans’ association – the Zimbabwean National Liberation War Veterans’
Association – was formed in 1989, bringing together for the first time
former combatants from both guerrilla armies. It allowed for old friend-
ships to be rekindled, for individual experiences to be worked through, and
collective versions of wartime history to be tested and voiced in public.17
The existence of such an association was made possible by the conclusion
of the post-independence conflict in 1987. ZAPU was absorbed into
ZANU(PF) and thereby ceased to pose a threat to the political order.
There were, however, new threats. The return of peace along with a combi-
nation of severe drought, economic decline and corruption scandals
provoked a vigorous political debate. The 1990s were notable for burgeon-
ing criticism of the ruling party, for public protest and the emergence of new
opposition parties. It was in this context that the Veterans’ Association
pressed for material compensation for its members’ war-time sacrifices with
renewed vigour.18 When we recorded these narratives the veterans had not
yet gained the payouts and pensions they would secure in 1997, which
would cement a new alliance between them and the ruling party. Rather,
they were engaged in an extended process of negotiation in which they
expressed their anger through protest and riot, and challenged the ruling
elite’s monopolization of liberation war history for its own political ends.
This was a time of political ferment in which not only the liberation war
but also post-independence repression was revisited. The silence over the
repression of the 1980s was first broken by journalistic investigations into
massacres and atrocities, and then by the very public release of a meticu-
lously-researched human-rights report in 1997.19 The open debate over past
violence, the growth in protest, and the renewed political muscle of the
veterans, created a context in which ZIPRA guerrillas were more willing
than ever before to speak about the past, and in which they spoke with a
palpable sense of purpose. They wanted to insert their experience into the
nation’s history, and to engage in the widespread reassessment of the
meaning of the nationalist struggle. For these guerrillas, telling their life
stories was a process of both personal and political redress.
ZIPRA guerrillas’ narratives of war made significant contributions to
Zimbabwean politics in the mid 1990s. They also make an important contri-
bution to the historiography of the liberation war. The strengths of early
academic work on the war lay in studies of rural communities, religious and
social change, and nationalist ideology and mobilization.20 If the most
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Zimbabwe War Stories 83

influential of these studies tended to romanticize the nationalist struggle,

later work developed a far more critical picture, exploring the uses of
violence in wartime mobilization, and the deep divisions within rural
communities.21 But research on the experiences of guerrillas lagged behind,
and work on ZIPRA was particularly neglected because victor’s history
dominated the study of the guerrilla armies.22 ZANU and ZANLA were
given the lion’s share of the credit; studies of ZANLA centred on the
achievements of its leaders, serving to create a celebratory narrative that
buttressed ZANU(PF)’s claim to power.23 The ZANU(PF) government
symbolized this history in a hierarchy of Heroes’ Acres, burial grounds for
nationalists and guerrillas that privileged its own elite. The semi-official
mythologies of war left little room for the losers, or for the rank and file,
despite the heated demands guerrillas made for recognition.24
The overwhelming focus on ZANLA, and on the elite, only began to
change in the 1990s, with the work of Jeremy Brickhill and Dumiso
Dabengwa, both insiders to ZIPRA’s struggle.25 In our own study of north-
western Zimbabwe, we found that ZIPRA’s war was very different from
that prosecuted by ZANLA.26 We also found that the form and focus of
guerrilla stories differed markedly from those of civilians. Civilian accounts
of the war stressed ZAPU’s lengthy and uninterrupted political history, and
the authority that this gave to unarmed civilians in their relationships with
ZIPRA’s young, AK-wielding soldiers. They expressed a tremendous pride
in the risks and sacrifices undertaken in war-time, in the strength and
adaptability of nationalist ideology in the face of new challenges. But
perhaps above all, civilian accounts explored the moral challenges posed by
war, the constant and not always successful efforts to spread the material
demands of guerrillas equitably, to broaden and unify nationalist organiz-
ation, and to define and enforce acceptable uses of violence. Civilian ZAPU
leaders elaborated norms of law and order, they sought to enforce a moral
economy of supply, and they struggled to establish a socially-inclusive
political practice. The most heated debates and the most vivid and painful
stories centred on the treatment of people accused of having ‘sold out’.
These are murky stories in which there is a reluctance to assign blame and
responsibility, and a keen awareness of the dangerous ambiguity of action
and choice in wartime.
The memories of guerrillas were very different. They had little to say
about the moral and social challenges of prosecuting a war so heavily
dependent on civilians. Rather, these were stories told as a series of
passages or trials on a journey that served to initiate them as soldiers, and
so to create a new identity.

ZIPRA GUERRILLA NARRATIVES OF THE MID 1990s

The accounts we collected from some eighty ZIPRA guerrillas take diverse
forms. Some were written by guerrillas themselves, either at our request or
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84 History Workshop Journal

independently. They vary from lengthy autobiographies to short notes.

Some very detailed accounts were collected in interviews undertaken by
ourselves. But the bulk of interviews took the form of responses to a
prepared list of questions. These were carried out by Mark Ndlovu, the late
K. K. Inyati, Nicholas Nkomo and Richard Dube, all formerly senior
members of ZIPRA and of the Mafela Trust, an organization established
by former guerrillas to identify and commemorate ZIPRA war dead in the
late 1980s.27
We focus on one narrative, that of Nicholas Nkomo, the former comman-
der of ZIPRA’s northern front. Nkomo’s story is exceptionally rich, taking
the form of a 25,000-word autobiography written in English and evocatively
titled ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’.28 Nkomo wrote his auto-
biography almost entirely before we began our research, and thus it is little
influenced by our own agendas and ideas. We have combined this story with
other accounts drawn largely from our lengthy interviews and other auto-
biographical accounts, so as to draw out points of comparison and contrast.
Nkomo’s story cannot represent all guerrillas’ experience, but it can serve
as a means of discussing many of the shared experiences and concerns of
ZIPRA guerrillas. Its narrative form and idiomatic use of language have
similarities with many other accounts. What follows is nonetheless certainly
not a complete account of guerrilla lives, and nor do we mean it to be taken
as an accurate account of war, or even of guerrillas’ experience of war. It is
meant as an exploration of the ways in which guerrillas ordered and
publicly represented their memories of the war at a particular point in time.
Like the stories of so many others, Nicholas’s account is focused around a
series of events and points of transition that transformed him into a soldier.
Below we follow the stages of his journey.

JOINING ZIPRA
The first stage in the journey of many guerrillas-to-be was the process of
politicization that led to the decision to join ZIPRA. Guerrillas’ expla-
nations of their decision to go to war focus on their contacts with the
nationalist party ZAPU, and their personal experience of discrimination
and exploitation. Many of those who would find their way into ZIPRA, and
especially those in the first generation of recruits, grew up in families that
had an established link to nationalism, and often themselves participated in
ZAPU’s youth wing.29
Nicholas’s first contact with nationalism came at his rural home when his
uncle was arrested for his nationalist activities in 1959. Nationalists subse-
quently visited his rural school, a key recruiting point for many guerrillas-
to-be, and he soon became a devoted follower of Joshua Nkomo, the leader
of ZAPU.30 At the age of seventeen, Nicholas left home to look for work
in the provincial capital of Bulawayo, a normal career track for young men
such as himself. Staying with relatives in the city, some of whom were
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Zimbabwe War Stories 85

involved in ZAPU, he found work as a ‘garden boy’, that is as a general

servant for a white family. His treatment reminded him of ‘the way we
treated dogs back home’.31 Workers such as Nkomo found an outlet for
their anger over daily humiliation and mistreatment (or, if they were unem-
ployed, for their spare time) in the youth politics of the townships. Former
guerrillas describe the party youth as hot-headed and anti-white. Nicholas
began to have regular contact with senior politicians. This was for him a
‘political school’, and he soon gave up his job for involvement in ZAPU’s
early urban sabotage campaigns. His time was now divided between
political activity and periods of police detention.
Police brutality, the suppression of political activity, and the exploitation
of black labour convinced Nkomo of the need for a violent response. Ian
Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965
served to confirm his conviction. He writes:

There was a lot of talk about people, especially from the youth wing,
being sent out of the country to receive training in guerrilla warfare. I
had already met some who had completed their training in sabotage and
the use of explosives. . . . I liked this very much because I had come to
the conclusion that violence was the only language the colonialists could
understand. They had never listened when we had tried and tried to talk
to them.

He felt he had no choice: ‘An acceptance of violence and war was thrust
upon me by the fact that freedom was denied us. War, according to our
elders, was a man’s affair. To me it became the correct response to suppres-
sion.’32 Nicholas’s decision to leave the country – to become a man and a
fighter – finally came as a result of police harassment and his restriction to
his family home. He left in 1970, with other members of his ZAPU youth
branch.
In many of the guerrilla accounts, there is a similar trajectory: a focus on
the petty and cruel aspects of Rhodesian administration, a concern with the
lack of economic opportunity, a focus on the political activism and suppres-
sion of family and friends. This emphasis shifted in the case of those who
left for the war after it had spread through the rural areas. Then, contact
with guerrillas, the radio broadcasts of ZAPU’s famed Jane Ngwenya, or
simply the ‘spirit of war’ or ‘the enthusiasm of fighting’ was more often
credited with precipitating a decision to leave the country.33 Others left
when they were called up for service in the Rhodesian army, or when the
war had made life ‘unbearable at home’;34 some did not make a voluntary
decision, but were simply bundled across the border in groups taken from
schools by guerrillas as ZIPRA intensified its recruitment at the height of
the war.35 Gertrude Moyo was ‘recruited’ by two guerrillas while at a
wedding party: ‘we were all recruited, even the bride and groom’, she
recalled.36 This later generation of guerrillas often did not have the lengthy
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86 History Workshop Journal

history of political activism of the early recruits – their ‘political lessons’

came later, in the camps, but first they had to undertake the often danger-
ous journey out of the country.

CROSSING BORDERS
Leaving Rhodesia comprised the next step in former guerrillas’ accounts of
becoming a soldier. Aspirant guerrillas had to make their way across the
heavily-patrolled Botswana border, no easy task for young men who were
considered, by definition, suspect. Once in Botswana, they had to travel
through inhospitable countryside; they had to negotiate the hardships of the
camps, and finally fly to Zambia. This was a passage through space, over
international boundaries, into a plane for the first time; it was also a passage
into another level of political and personal commitment and a journey often
marked by supernatural events and signs.
Nicholas’s story of his border crossing is one of individual initiative, but
for many of those crossing in later periods, the journey was a more organ-
ized one, undertaken with the help of party members or guerrillas who
actively recruited and provided guides to the borders, or who drew on the
support of a network of bus drivers and conductors who dropped recruits
at specified points, schooled them on how to behave at road blocks, and
gave them detailed directions. The Pelandaba bus service was, by 1977,
providing free trips to the border for would-be guerrillas.37 Nicholas simply
left with a number of his comrades on a bus from Bulawayo’s main station,
bound for the border town of Plumtree. He crossed the border river on foot
in the evening. Nicholas records what he remembers as a ‘strange event’ in
the night:

We were in an area called Jakalasi and a passer-by stopped us and said

he had seen a fire ahead of us. We stopped and looked and yes, we could
see a fire ahead of us. We thought it was a fire at a homestead, and so
we thought of going to seek directions from the people there. The fire
didn’t look so far away but somehow we just couldn’t reach it. Then it
disappeared and reappeared again behind us. It looked as though a big
tree was burning. But how could we have passed a big fire without being
aware of it? My father in the past told me stories about fires like this. He
attributed them to ghosts. . . . When we got to Francistown and related
this event to others from home, they said they had followed the same
route and witnessed exactly the same event.39

Such occurrences were not unusual in guerrilla accounts: Maclean Ncube,

separated from the party with which he was travelling and lost somewhere
near the border, caught sight of ‘a very big star with a tail which gave light
from the east Rhodesian side across to Botswana in the west. . . . I thanked
God because I knew that it shows victory is on our side’.39 Such events were
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Zimbabwe War Stories 87

often given spiritual interpretations and taken as confirmation that the

journey, and the armed struggle, were the right path.
Guerrilla stories often stressed the kindnesses of the Botswanans whom
they met after crossing the border, people who, though strangers to them,
and with whom they often struggled to communicate, nonetheless gave
them food, shelter and directions.40 Botswana also simply felt different.
Nicholas described how, ‘It was exciting to be in a free country. I hadn’t
been outside Rhodesia before and I felt light hearted and relaxed.
Somehow it felt safer to sleep in the bush in Botswana than to sleep in a
house in Rhodesia’.41 This was new territory in which it was possible to feel
in new ways.
But this sense of safety and providential guidance did not always last.
Many accounts described the period of waiting in the Botswanan camps (or
jails in some cases) as an ordeal. It was often the first intimation that recruits
had of conflicts within ZAPU, between it and ZANU, or between the
nationalist parties and host governments; it was their first encounter with
the bureaucratic procedures of the United Nations and Botswana authori-
ties. These young men often became pawns in conflicts they little under-
stood. Nicholas arrived in Botswana at a time of internal strife within
ZAPU that left him stranded for many months. It was a tense time: the
Zimbabweans were dependent on scant and unreliable UNHCR rations
and the tolerance of the Botswanan authorities; they were vulnerable to
Rhodesian infiltration. Nicholas recalls, ‘We were being infiltrated by
Rhodesian spies, some of whom we caught red-handed. We were fearing
for our lives. We knew that the Rhodesians were taking advantage of our
prolonged stay. . . . We nearly took the law into our own hands’.42 These
sorts of pressures worsened as the numbers of recruits increased. Food was
short to the point of ‘starvation’, and screening procedures were toughened
to root out spies. Many guerrillas stressed the tremendous relief they felt
when they were finally allowed to board the planes to Zambia.43 They also
recalled the excitement of their first plane ride: Bongani Mpofu exclaimed,
‘That was the first time for me to board an aeroplane and I felt, Oh! ZAPU
is great!’44

THE CAMPS
Life was not, however, to grow any easier for many guerrillas. Having
undertaken the journey to Zambia, they faced new challenges in the camps.
The descriptions of camp life in ZIPRA accounts are often among the
longest sections, and stand out as the time when they became soldiers, a
new identity symbolized by their acquisition at their induction of war
names, by which they would be known henceforward. The camps are
depicted as a society in themselves: many recruits spent long periods in
them; some were based there permanently working in logistics, training or
in air defence groups. Others stayed because they were too old, too young
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88 History Workshop Journal

or too sick to fight, or because they were women – ZIPRA’s women’s battal-
ion never left the camps. The hardships endured in the camps were
portrayed by many as by far the most horrific of the war. These were places
where the rights and obligations of soldiers were painfully negotiated,
where guerrillas at times felt deprived of any control over their lives, where
the momentum of their journey was stalled. But the period of training was
also a time of wonders experienced in foreign countries, and of pride in new
military abilities and political sophistication.
Recruits arriving in Zambia passed from the airport to the great clearing
house of Nampundu where they were first screened, itself a frightening
process, and given their war names. Recruits had very little idea of what to
expect. Those with qualifications were often deployed as teachers and
medics, a decision over which they had no control, and which often left
them disappointed because they had wanted to fight.45 When Nicholas
arrived in Zambia, he thought that, ‘all that was needed was for us to be
shown how to use guns, to be issued with guns, and then straight away we
would go home and fight the Rhodesians’.46 Instead, he was moved from
camp to camp in Zambia, where he underwent intense physical training,
and was introduced to marching drills, guerrilla training and political
instruction, all of which he greeted with great excitement. Training stands
out as important in many guerrilla accounts. Learning to endure depri-
vation of all sorts was depicted as part and parcel of becoming a guerrilla.
So was learning the art of ‘bushcraft’ and the practical and spiritual relation-
ship with nature that it involved. Guerrillas were taught ‘tracking where
there were no paths, looking for berries and roots to eat and digging for
water where we found wet patches on sandy ground’;47 they hunted for their
meat and had to cope with competition from lions.48 A number of guerrilla
narratives portray the natural world as changing from threatening to
benign, the transition often seen as part of the process of becoming a guer-
rilla.
Women recruits, trained separately in Mkushi camp, developed their
own ways of coping with the difficulties of camp life, largely through
building relationships with Zambians. Recruits described shortages of soap,
clothing and food. They usually had only one uniform and had to sit naked
while it dried, or wear it wet, after washing it. Their relationship with
Zambian instructors was resented by their Zimbabwean counterparts.
Gertude Moyo recalled, ‘If seen talking to them you would be in hot
soup. . . . As the Zambians were very kind, they used to give us some beef,
Colgate and soap for bathing. The Zimbabwean instructors were very
jealous about that offer. Those ladies who fell in love with the Zambians
were beaten up seriously and punished the whole week’.49
Conflict within the party was also an intermittent and demoralizing
feature of camp life in which recruits’ political loyalties were put to the test
and their journeys disrupted. Nicholas’s training was brought to a rapid end
due to division within ZAPU in 1971. Guerrilla trainees once again became
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Zimbabwe War Stories 89

pawns. The causes of division remained opaque to them: they were given
‘story after story about what was said to be the cause of the crisis in the
party’; it was ‘enough to make one run mad’. The Zambian authorities
demanded that they back James Chikerema rather than Joshua Nkomo,
their long-time leader; the trainees refused, seeing the move as a betrayal
of ZAPU: ‘We said that not only were we military recruits, we were also
political activists. We had been sent to Zambia by our party at home. We
were not prepared to go off for military training if that meant leaving our
mother, the party, to die.’50 In response the Zambian authorities deported
them, handing them over to the Rhodesians at the border. Nicholas
describes the sense of betrayal felt by his group as they were stripped naked
and interrogated, before being sent to prison for six months under appalling
conditions. Nicholas was eventually allowed to travel home where he was
kept under police surveillance; he soon repeated his trip across the
Botswana border and on to Zambia in 1973.
This time Nicholas did not stop in Zambia, but along with many others
travelled on to Tanzania by truck. At Morogoro camp he was happily
reunited with some of his colleagues from two years before. He was
impressed by them, and envious: ‘they really looked like soldiers. . . . I
longed for the day when I could see my self in that state’. His description
of this camp, like that of other guerrillas, goes into great detail about the
camp command, the geography of the area, the rigours and discipline of
training. In this setting, where Nicholas finally felt himself to be a soldier,
nature no longer appeared dangerous as it had in Zambia: ‘The lions, the
kudu, hyena, roan antelopes and other animals that roamed the area were
like comrades to us. Even if some of them were theoretically dangerous,
like the lion, there was not a day when any of us felt threatened by them’.
More dangerous were the instructors who could give such terrible punish-
ments for infringement of camp rules that, ‘if you did not understand within
your marrow the reasons for such terrible punishment, you could easily
desert, even to the enemy’.51 These were strong words indeed, and high-
lighted the constant need for negotiation between soldiers and commanders
within the camps.52
A great pride in the mastery of new skills and weapons marks many of
the accounts of the camps. Political education is equally prominent: ‘Most
of us recruits had always thought we were simply fighting against the white
people’, Nicholas wrote, ‘But through these political lessons we learned that
the wrong we were fighting lay in the system of government in our country,
not in the colour of people.’53 Guerrillas learned the principles of socialism
from political instructors, during visits abroad, or from reading revolution-
ary literature. Patson Mabuza remembered reading Che Guevara: ‘That is
the man . . . who spiritually turned me into a soldier’, a man of ‘steel
nerves’.54 In many of these accounts, the description of political instruction
takes on the quality of an epiphany: ‘Before, we were ignorant’, guerrillas
maintained.
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Guerrillas’ accounts of their training outside Africa are often tinged with
humour, and with wonder at the strangeness of people and languages, food
and weather, especially snow. Nicholas’s description of his time in the
Soviet Union in 1975 is no exception. Though he provides a triumphal
account of the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union’s liberating role in
Eastern Europe, Nicholas also had misgivings about his hosts and
wondered if he would find the place ‘populated by normal people without
tails and fangs’. Like many guerrillas, Nicholas had a particular sensitivity
to discrimination, and his first impressions were not good: ‘extensive
medical tests were conducted on us. . . . This action by the bloody commu-
nists reminded us of the treatment we used to get from whites back
home. . . . Were they doing all this to us because we were black and might
affect the superior race with our animalistic diseases?’55 But he was finally
convinced of his hosts’ good intentions when the African soldiers were
given the same living conditions as their Soviet counterparts.
The most bitter experiences described in guerrilla narratives also
occurred in the camps, in Tanzania and Mozambique. These were due to
the divisions which beset the liberation movements and their external
backers, and they were portrayed as moments in which nationalism and
the power of the gun were abused and distorted, when they became not a
means of liberation but of violence and repression. ZANU was portrayed
as the chief villain in this, a portrayal shaped not only by the experiences
of the 1970s but also by post-independence violence. In the mid 1970s the
two liberation movements came under intense pressure from their hosts to
unite under one military command. The Zimbabwe People’s Army or
ZIPA was the result. David Moore portrays ZIPA as reflecting the ascend-
ancy of a new generation of radical and educated leaders within ZANLA.
He notes divisions based on ethnicity, age and education, but stresses the
role of ideology.56 The ZIPRA guerrilla accounts, however, are focused
entirely on the treachery of ZANLA and its allies. They share an almost
complete silence on the question of ethnicity and social division. The
emphasis is rather on the deviousness of external backers – the Mozam-
bicans or Tanzanians or ZANLA-allied Chinese, and the megalomania of
ZANU and ZANLA leaders. Bitter fighting between ZIPRA and ZANLA
first erupted in the Tanzanian camps. ZIPRA guerrillas recall Chinese
instructors siding with ZANLA, and disarming and persecuting ZIPRA.
These conflicts were recounted with great anger and sadness. Andrew
Ndhlovu recalls a battle in which eight ZIPRA recruits were killed: ‘Our
group was disorganized since we were recruits and it was our first time to
hear a sound of a gun on a target, that particular target being a comrade
in arms, really it was very painful.’57 Other battles claimed many more
dead.58
Similar conflicts occurred in Mozambique. Nicholas was sent to Mozam-
bique to become part of the newly-unified command structure, but
remained deeply suspicious. His worst fears were soon confirmed: ‘Nothing
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was known about [the unified command] in this base. . . . We were regarded
as people who had come to join ZANLA. . . . We were forced to denounce
our party, ZAPU, and its leadership.’ Nicholas and his comrades were
imprisoned and tortured ‘just as if we were in Rhodesian captivity’.59 He
and another ZIPRA guerrilla were sent into the country with fifty-seven
ZANLA guerrillas, one of whom told them that they were to be executed.
The two fled in the night, making their way across the entire breadth of
Zimbabwe, fighting and recruiting along the way, and eventually arriving in
Botswana for the third time. In Botswana, Nicholas met many other
ZIPRA guerrillas who had similarly fled their supposedly united units.
These memories were by far the most bitter in ZIPRA accounts, and were
told in the mid 1990s to underline the illegitimacy of nationalist division and
the untrustworthiness of ZANU and ZANLA.
Another source of horror within the camps came from the bombing raids
of the Rhodesian air force. Thousands were killed in these raids: guerrillas
describe them as haunting, as ‘burned into their memory’. Josiya Tshuma
recalled the anguish of burying comrades killed in the bombing in
trenches.60 Women ZIPRA guerrillas suffered terrible casualties. As
Gertrude Moyo recounted:

The day I will never forget is on the 19th October 1978 at around 11:00
a.m. when the enemy, Rhodesian forces, bombed our camp Mkushi. . . .
When they started raiding most of the women just got into the river and
were eaten by crocodiles alive. Very few managed to swim across the
river. Those who managed to get to the gathering points were also
killed.61

But there was another side to the bombings: for those who were part of the
anti-aircraft units, the air-raid stories are heroic. Khupusizi Nyathi, trained
in the use of the ZGU anti-aircraft gun, gave a very different account of the
Mkushi attack. From his position in the Zambezi gorges, he watched as
Rhodesian planes and helicopters returned from their attacks:

As they came nearer my position, it was already in my mind that any of

them which would fly past our position would taste the hot soup and
beans prepared for them. . . . My position was under camouflage, pro-
fessionally concealed. Without any delay I opened the first revenging fire
to what had been perpetrated by these helicopters and their blood
hungry mercenaries. . . . [This short burst of rounds] caused [an] effect
to one helicopter – as a result it flew down behind the rest of the others
puffing black smoke.62

Such accounts deployed an adventure-story tone, and were often used not
only to emphasize ZIPRA’s military sophistication, but also to make
negative comparisons with ZANLA. ZIPRA’s equipment and defensive
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capacity was contrasted to ZANLA’s reliance on the Mozambican military

for air defence, and the decimation of unprotected ZANLA camps.
Camp life was thus both a source of great pride and discovery – acquir-
ing new skills, becoming a disciplined and professional soldier, travelling to
new countries – and one of great bitterness and sorrow over the costs of
betrayals and divisions, and the terrible casualties of air raids. Those who
survived described themselves as truly ‘men of steel’.

RIVER CROSSINGS
ZIPRA guerrillas’ bases in Zambia meant that they had to cross the great
Zambezi river in order to enter Zimbabwe. The crossing was recounted as
a terrifying and symbolic event – because guerrillas were on their way to
engage the enemy face to face for the first time, and because of the perils
of the river itself.
Nicholas recalls a song that he and other trainees sang in the camps:
‘ “Zambezi, one river. One river to freedom. We shall carry our guns and
our hand grenades. There is only one river to freedom.” We sang the last
line, “There is only one river to freedom”, without understanding what
“only one river” meant.’63 He would discover that it meant the arduous
journey through the Zambezi’s narrow and steep gorges, often laden with
some seventy to eighty kilos of weapons and supplies, the tension of waiting
until nightfall when Rhodesian patrols came to an end, and the confron-
tation with the river itself. The river inspired poetic and terrifying descrip-
tions. Nicholas recalled,

What then greeted the new guerrillas was the . . . expanse of the great
Zambezi river, the mighty dark blue, swift running waters. At almost all
the crossing points I ever used [there were] herds of giant hippopotamus,
absolutely terrifying to many new fighters, most of whom had never seen
a live hippopotamus before. Crocodiles were also abundant. So the very
first orders from the commanders to the new fighters before the crossing
was to keep their feet from dangling over the sides of the dinghies.64

The fear that these conditions inspired was compounded by the fact that
many guerrillas could not swim:

So it was during this first stage of crossing the Zambezi river that most
of the new fighters would be gripped by real fear. The fear of having the
boat tossed in the air and then capsized in the deep waters by the giant
hippopotamus; the fear of terrible currents in the water which, because
of the river’s mountainous course, might sweep the dinghies down into
the numerous rapids which would result in instant drowning; the fear of
being eaten by crocodiles or other predators. Then there was the terrible
fear of being fired upon by the enemy from the Rhodesian side of the
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Zimbabwe War Stories 93

river while we were yet to cross. As our crossing always had to take place
in the dark, there was always the real possibility of being caught helpless
upon the water, or vulnerable while disembarking.65

The Zambezi was ‘the first real enemy a guerrilla crossing from Zambia to
Rhodesia had to overcome’. For Nicholas it provided,

our first real sense of satisfaction, once it had been vanquished. Once the
river was crossed, once we had eluded the enemy, once we had, on the
Rhodesian side, gone up again through the steep gorges and ascended
the steep cliffs and got to level ground, more tired than ever before, we
enjoyed that wonderful knowledge of a victory achieved, a normal
feeling for any unit successful in battle against the enemy.66

Not all guerrillas emerged victorious from their encounter with the river.
Many accounts detail the terrible losses incurred in ambushes and
bombings. Davidson Ndlovu’s party was attacked while crossing: ‘we heard
machine guns and the dinghy caught fire and twelve died on the spot. . . .
jets came and fired on the Zambian side. . . . I can’t tell you what happened.
I dived under a rock. . . . Even today I don’t want to think about it. You
could find bodies scattered, lying. You could sense some were still living.
Many were left behind.’67 And of course, to vanquish the river, was merely
to bring oneself into the Rhodesian battlefield.

FACING THE ENEMY

ZIPRA accounts of operations in Zimbabwe focus on their military aspects,
on hierarchies, strategies and tactics; on the fate of guerrillas themselves,
and their ‘contacts’ – military engagements – with Rhodesian forces, on
casualty numbers. The accounts are repetitive and detailed. They are often
heroic, and stress the overcoming of fear and hardship, the ways in which
Rhodesian forces were outmanoeuvred and tricked, the good stead in
which their professional training and sophisticated weaponry stood them in
the field. As Mjoni Mkandla put it, ‘I loved to be a well trained soldier with
discipline because that was [the] ZIPRA gospel of power’.68 This emphasis
served not only as a vindication of ZIPRA’s skill, discipline and training,
but also as an implicit criticism of ZANLA’s strategies and methods.
ZIPRA guerrillas’ emphasis on certain victories and battles was also at
times meant as a corrective to the claims to those same victories made by
ZANLA.
The first ‘contact’ was often described as the final initiation in guerrillas’
long passage. Where white soldiers were involved, it also often acted as a
source of revelation that such men could be killed. Nicholas describes in great
detail the first experiences he had after crossing the Zambezi. A week into
their southward journey, his unit was spotted and fired upon by a helicopter:
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The intention of the enemy had apparently been to squeeze us against

the hill on which we were based. As I was fresh from training, I knew
that it was my duty to engineer a breakthrough from the encirclement
and not to render my men targets by climbing higher up the mountain.
We successfully broke through the right flank of the enemy. There were
no casualties on our side.

This was an important moment, and ‘high diction’ underlined its signifi-
cance:

I still refer to that day as my initiation, my baptism by fire. I had often

wondered what it would be like to be fired upon by angry people. There
would be bullets whizzing past and the immediate world would be full of
ricochets from the bullets bouncing off rocks and metal. . . . We were face
to face with a real target, a mobile trained and intelligent target for that
matter. But I was now more determined than ever before to free my
motherland.69

Nicholas goes on to recount many more battles, stressing throughout his

and his unit’s rapid learning curve, and the use to which they were able to
put their training.
Many ZIPRA guerrillas described their first contact as an initiation
much as Nicholas did, or as a moment in which fear and doubt were
overcome. Melusi Ncube had his first contact in Hwange in July 1977:

The attack went on for two and a half hours. As my first contact, at a
later stage of the siege, I felt like running away. I had made my mind up
to do so. When I tried to retreat, a commanding voice within our ranks
said, ‘no retreat, phambili madala [forward men]!’ The next command
was ‘Assault!’ The war was on. At the end of the attack I realised it was
our first victory. This experience remained in my mind. . . . It gave me
the zeal to fight on and never retreat.70

Cohen Tsambani, who killed two white soldiers in his first contact, recalled,

I never believed that my gun would work. I was frozen to the spot, taking
no action. . . . I switched [my rifle] on to automatic because I wasn’t sure
what would happen next. . . . I fired; the white man fell over, but the gun
was still firing. . . . I took cover . . ., then I crawled, ran, God played a big
role. . . . That is where I got my rank. Two white men died. After that I
became brave and knew these people could be killed by anyone.71

Guerrilla accounts of operations within Zimbabwe are full of a sense of

their military accomplishment and transformation into professional
soldiers: they say very little about the topics that preoccupied civilians.
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Explicit accounts of relations with civilians are few, and are often told
principally as a means of distinguishing ZIPRA methods from those of
ZANLA, notably in terms of ZANLA’s much derided practice of holding
all-night political meetings or pungwes. ZIPRA guerrillas argued they did
not need to hold such dangerous and diversionary gatherings as they could
rely on the long-established ZAPU committees. This relationship was
portrayed as unproblematic, and mutually supportive. As Patson Sikhum-
buzo explained,

As far as political structures were concerned, the locals did it themselves

without interference from the fighting men. We had no time to organise
bush rallies and singing in the mountains. . . . The men with whom I
served were highly trained in both modern warfare and guerrilla warfare,
they were soldiers not armed politicians! Therefore, sloganeering and
singing was not their appetite.72

The moral ambiguities of violence used against civilians rarely appeared in

guerrilla narratives. The killing of civilians accused of aiding the enemy
went entirely unmentioned, save where it had become a threat to military
hierarchy.73 Instead, the violence guerrillas employed in the course of their
operations was portrayed as unproblematic, justified, and heroic.

CONCLUSION
The moment in which these ZIPRA narratives were told was characterized
by a contentious relationship with the government, a public debate about
the legacies of war, and wide-ranging criticism of official commemorative
practice. The stories were an attempt to reclaim what ZIPRA guerrillas had
been denied since Zimbabwe’s independence: recognition of their courage
and their formidable military skills, acknowledgement of their experience
– and survival – of terrible violence, and credit for their vital contribution
to the nationalist struggle. As collective memories, these accounts ordered
individual experiences, and allowed for the telling of war stories that
contributed to a broader understanding of the liberation war, different both
from the experience of civilians and the official myths of war.
ZIPRA accounts contrast powerfully with the civilian-focused picture of
Zimbabwe’s liberation war documented in previous studies. They are
concerned with geographical and personal passages across borders and
boundaries real and imagined. The sheer extent to which guerrillas trav-
elled is remarkable. Many not only journeyed across the southern African
region more than once, but also much farther afield. These travels brought
them into contact not only with different people and cultures but with guer-
rillas from a host of other liberation movements, thus placing their own
struggle in an international context. These passages constituted important
markers in guerrilla accounts – they were part of their becoming men, and
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becoming soldiers, they were trials and tests. Sometimes they took on a
spiritual aspect, such as in the references to the signs of stars and burning
trees, or the beneficence of nature.
The focus on life in the camps is of course absent from civilian accounts,
but this experience was crucial to combatants. They literally took on new
identities as they adopted war names, and it was here that they became ‘real
soldiers’. The pride they took in becoming ‘trained personnel’ is every-
where stressed. The camps were also important for the experience of
divisions within the ranks of their own movement, for the conflicts with
ZANLA, as well as for the Rhodesian bombings. While civilian-focused
accounts of the war have often treated the memories of violence on the
battlefield within Zimbabwe as a central concern, the ZIPRA accounts do
not emphasize their experience within the operational areas, but rather see
the most cruel and memorable violence as that which occurred in the camps
– the bombing because of the tremendous carnage it left in its wake, and
the internecine violence between and within guerrilla armies because of its
illegitimacy. The negative image of ZANLA that permeates the ZIPRA
accounts was certainly shaped by these experiences, and it was an image
that was much hardened by the experience of exclusion and persecution
after independence. The pride in their professionalism stands not only as
an explicit critique of ZANLA during the liberation war, but also as an
implicit critique of the politicization of the army and its use against the
losing faction of the liberation movement by ZANU(PF) after indepen-
dence.
In the mid 1990s, former ZIPRA guerrillas could present themselves
with justification as the unrecognized and persecuted ‘heroes’ of the liber-
ation war. Their grievances against the ruling party dovetailed with the
concerns of the ordinary people among whom they lived, and who had
suffered with them in the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1990s
there had, however, been a significant shift. The gulf with civilian experi-
ence so notable in guerrilla narratives was translated into practice as
veteran politics were transformed by ZANU(PF)’s decision to grant them
material benefits, and to embrace them politically. The once-critical
Veterans’ Association became a potent ally of the ruling party, a step which
was particularly ironic for ZIPRA guerrillas who had once faced persecu-
tion at the hands of ZANU(PF). While the vast majority of Matabeleland’s
population rejected the ruling party in the elections of 2000, many ZIPRA
veterans joined their ZANLA counterparts not only in leading the ‘inva-
sions’ of farms, companies and state offices, but also in the use of violence
against civilians associated with the political opposition.
In this context, liberation war history was publicly retold as ‘patriotic’
history. It was narrowed to the struggle for the land and the heroic acts of
a single, unified guerrilla army. The role of the popular nationalism that
linked civilians and fighting men was suppressed, the bitter rivalries
between the nationalist movements were forgotten, as was the Rhodesian
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enemy: the perfidious British and their ‘imperial’ ambitions now stood as
the prime threat to Zimbabwe’s fragile sovereignty and its revolutionary
goals. In many ways, this ‘patriotic’ story is a travesty of the histories we
have recounted. As political violence escalated in 2000 and after, it became
difficult for former guerrillas to voice an alternative version of the war from
that articulated by the Veteran Association’s leaders, however much some
of them personally disagreed with it. ZIPRA guerrillas who had put so
much emphasis on a political education that taught that their opponents
were not the ‘whites’ but the ‘system’ now privileged a racial discourse;
ZIPRA guerrillas who had taken such pride in their professionalism and
their unproblematic relationships with civilians were now agents of partisan
violence, directed against the very same civilians who had once supported
them.74
There were also some continuities with the war stories of the 1990s.
Former guerrillas continued to emphasize comradeship, loyalty and disci-
pline, and they continued to draw on the idioms of past struggles. They used
the language of heroism and sacrifice, of service to the nation and anti-
colonial revolution. The new boundaries of exclusion were also drawn in a
wartime language of ‘sellouts’, ‘colonial stooges’ and ‘enemies of the
people’. This invocation of abstractions and the potent political ideas of
nationalism and liberation masked the way in which the content of these
ideals had been transformed, and hid the bitter reality of violence and state
repression. In the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, the war poets
had rejected the vague spiritualisms and abstractions of ‘high diction’ in
favour of a language of stark realism. In the Zimbabwean context, it will be
interesting to see how the idiom of national liberation and the telling of war
stories changes in the future, as relations between the veterans, public and
government continue to shift. The remaking of the public sphere will
require not only a redefinition of the meaning of nationalism. It will also
necessitate revaluing the language of national liberation and the telling of
different war stories.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 See for example, Kim Lacy Rogers and Selma Leydesdorff with Graham Dawson,
Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives, London, 1999.
2 As for example in the huge recent literatures on memorial culture in Europe following
the First and Second World Wars, and on the various truth commissions set up to deal with
violent pasts in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa.
3 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth
Century Warfare, London, 1999.
4 John Bayley, ‘Strange Things’, London Review of Books, 2 Sept. 1999, p. 8, reviewing
David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914–1918, London, 1999.
5 The narratives were collected in the course of research for Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn
McGregor and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark
Forests’ of Matabeleland, Oxford, 2000.
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6 Samuel Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in War and Remembrance

in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, Cambridge, 1999, p. 219, and
see his earlier book, The Soldier’s Tale, London, 1997. See also Bourke, An Intimate History,
pp. 369–70.
7 Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives’, p. 218.
8 See John Nunnelley, Tales from the King’s African Rifles, London, 2000, for an account
of ‘one man’s odyssey’. See also the sources and discussion in Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives’.
9 On the impact of biblical idiom on oral historical narratives see Isabel Hofmeyer ‘We
Spend Our Years as a Tale that is Told’: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom,
Oxford, 1993. On debates over Christianization, narrative and power, see Jean and John
Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: the Dialectics of Modernity on a South African
Frontier, vol. 2, Chicago, 1997, pp. 43–52; John Peel, ‘The Colonization of Consciousness’,
review of Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, in Journal of African History 33, 1992, pp. 328–9;
John Peel, ‘For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and
Historical Anthropology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37: 3, 1995, pp. 581–607.
On Bunyan’s influence in Africa, Europe and elsewhere, see Isabel Hofmeyer, ‘John Bunyan,
His Chair and a Few Other Relics: Orality, Literacy and the Limits of Area Studies’, in African
Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, ed. Luise White, Stephan Miescher
and David William Cohen, Bloomington, 2001, and ‘Dreams, Documents and “Fetishes”:
African Christian Interpretations of Pilgrim’s Progress’, Journal of Religion in Africa 32: 4,
2002, pp. 440–56.
10 See Ted Bogacz, ‘ “A Tyranny of Words”: Language, Poetry and Antimodernism in
England and the First World War’, Journal of Modern History 58, 1986; Paul Fussell, The Great
War and Modern Memory, New York, 1975, pp. 21–2.
11 On cultural nationalism and its influence in rural Matabeleland, see Alexander,
McGregor and Ranger, Violence and Memory, chaps 5 and 6; Terence Ranger Voices from the
Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe, Oxford, 1999, chap. 7.
See also Joshua Nkomo, Nkomo: the Story of My Life, London, 1984.
12 ZAPU was the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, ZANU was the Zimbabwe African
National Union, formed in 1963 as a breakaway from ZAPU. At independence it added
Patriotic Front to its name, hence ZANU(PF). ZANLA was the Zimbabwe African National
Liberation Army.
13 See Alexander, McGregor and Ranger, Violence and Memory, chaps 7, 8; Ngwabi
Bhebe, The ZAPU and ZANU Guerrilla Warfare and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
Zimbabwe, Gweru, 1999, chaps 1–4.
14 Jocelyn Alexander, ‘Dissident Perspectives on Zimbabwe’s Post Independence War’,
Africa, 68, 2, 1998, pp. 151–82; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger, Violence and Memory, chaps
8, 9.
15 For a detailed account of the politics of war veterans, see Norma Kriger, Guerrilla
Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics 1980–1987, Cambridge,
2003.
16 There has been a surge of writing on Africans’ contribution to and experiences of the
world wars, and the political and social importance of military service in other parts of the
continent. See for example, Timothy H. Parsons, The African Rank and File: Social Impli-
cations of Military Service in the Kings African Rifles 1902–1964, Oxford, 1999; Myron J.
Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa 1857–1960,
Oxford, 1991; John Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: a Senegalese Oral History of the First
World War, Oxford, 1999.
17 On the role of civil society groups in processes of post-war remembrance, explored as
a means of rooting debates about collective memory, see Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan,
‘Setting the Framework’, in War and Remembrance, ed. Winter and Sivan, pp. 6–39.
18 Norma Kriger, ‘The Politics of Creating National Heroes: the Search for Political Legit-
imacy and National Identity’, in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe
and Terence Ranger, London, 1995; Norma Kriger, ‘War Victims’ Compensation: Collusion
Between Zimbabwean Ex-Combatants and Government’, Journal of African Conflict and
Development 1, 2000, pp. 35–45.
19 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace/Legal Resources Foundation, Breaking the
Silence, Building True Peace: a Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands,
1980–1988, Harare, 1997.
20 For the best recent overview of this literature see the two volumes edited by Ngwabi
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Bhebe and Terence Ranger, Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, and Society in Zimbabwe’s
Liberation War, Oxford, 1996. The two key early monographs were Terence Ranger, Peasant
Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe, London, 1985, and David Lan, Guns and Rain:
Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, London, 1985.
21 The crucial study in making this transition was Norma Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla
War: Peasant Voices, Cambridge, 1992.
22 Exceptions are Teresa A. Barnes, ‘The Heroes’ Struggle: Life After the Liberation War
for Four Ex-Combatants in Zimbabwe’, in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Bhebe
and Ranger, pp. 118–39, and Michael Raeburn, Black Fire! Narratives from Zimbabwean Guer-
rillas, Harare, 1978. There are also numerous fictional accounts of guerrillas’ wartime experi-
ences and of the war generally.
23 The key text in this regard is David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for
Zimbabwe. The Chimurenga War, Harare, 1981.
24 Kriger, Guerrilla Veterans and ‘The Politics of Creating National Heroes’.
25 See Jeremy Brickhill, ‘Daring to Storm the Heavens: the Military Strategy of ZAPU,
1976–79’, and Dumiso Dabengwa, ‘ZIPRA in the Zimbabwe War of National Liberation’, both
in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Bhebe and Ranger.
26 See Alexander, McGregor and Ranger, Violence and Memory, chap. 6.
27 On the Mafela Trust, see Jeremy Brickhill, ‘Making Peace with the Past: War Victims
and the Work of the Mafela Trust’, in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Bhebe and
Ranger, pp. 163–74.
28 Nicholas Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil: the Autobiography of Nicholas
Nkomo’, ms., n.d.
29 See also Brickhill, ‘Daring to Storm the Heavens’, pp. 65–8.
30 Many guerrillas spoke of their schools as crucial places of politicization. See for example
interviews, Mjoni Mkandla, 18 Jan. 1995; Makhobo Ndhlovu, 30 Sept. 1995.
31 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 3.
32 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 6.
33 Interview, Davison Ndlovu, 17 Feb. 1996; Autobiography of Smile Nkiwane; auto-
biography of Sifiso Velani, 16 Jan. 1995.
34 Interview, Robert Zenzo Ncube, Feb. 1995; Janet Moyo, 13 Sept. 1995.
35 Interview, Cohen Tsambani, 17 Feb. 1996. Also see Paulos Matjaka Nare, ‘Education
and the War’, in Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Bhebe and Ranger, p. 130.
36 Interview, Gertrude Moyo, 27 Feb. 1995.
37 Interviews, Fred Moyo, 14 Oct. 1995; Benet Sibanda, 16 Sept. 1995. These networks also
existed to a lesser extent for earlier recruits. E.g., interview, M. L. Sipepa, Feb. 1995.
38 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 8.
39 Autobiography, Maclean Ncube, n.d., p. 15.
40 For example, Autobiography, Ivan Moyo, n.d.
41 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 8.
42 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 8.
43 Interviews, Fred Moyo, 14 Oct. 1995; Bernard Dunjana, 14 June 1995.
44 Interview, Bongani Mpofu, 17 Jan. 1995; Fred Moyo, 14 Oct. 1995.
45 Interviews, Elia Chuma, 7 Feb. 1995; Bongani Mpofu, 17 Jan. 1995.
46 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 8.
47 Interview, Phineas Tapona, 12 Dec. 1994.
48 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 9.
49 Interview, Gertrude Moyo, 27 Feb. 1995.
50 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 9.
51 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 12.
52 See Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe,
Bloomington, 2003, p. 36.
53 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 13.
54 Interview, Patson Mabuza, 28 Feb. 1995.
55 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 16.
56 David Moore, ‘The Zimbabwe People’s Liberation Army: Strategic Innovations or
More of the Same?’, in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Bhebe and Ranger,
pp. 73–86.
57 Interview, Andrew Ndlovu, 28 Oct. 1995.
58 Interview, Davidson Ndlovu, 17 Feb. 1996.
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59 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 17. Also see interview, Josiya Tshuma,
13 Sept. 1995, for a similar experience.
60 Interview, Josiya Tshuma, 13 Sept. 1995. Also see interview, Sifiso Velani, 16 Jan. 1995.
61 Interview, Gertrude Moyo, 17 Feb. 1995. See Brickhill, ‘Daring to Storm the Heavens’,
pp. 62–4; Paul Moorcraft and Peter McLaughlin, Chimurenga! The War in Rhodesia,
1965–1980, Marshalltown, 1982, pp. 182–9, on this and other raids.
62 Autobiographical account, K. Nyathi, n.d., p. 4. Also see Autobiography of Mark
Ndlovu, n.d.
63 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 14.
64 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 18.
65 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 14.
66 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 14.
67 Interview, Davidson Ndlovu, 17 Feb. 1996.
68 Autobiographical account, Mjoni Mkandla, 18 Jan. 1995, p. 14.
69 Nkomo, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’, p. 15.
70 Interview, Melusi Ncube, 5 Dec. 1994, p. 1. The commander who called out ‘no retreat’
was in fact Nicholas Nkomo.
71 Interview, Cohen Tsambani, 17 Feb. 1996.
72 Interview, Patson Sikhumbuzo, 28 Feb. 1995.
73 See JoAnn McGregor, ‘Containing Violence: Poisoning and Guerrilla/Civilian
Relations in Memories of Zimbabwe’s Liberation War’, in Trauma and Life Stories, ed. Rogers
and Leydesdorff; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger, Violence and Memory, chap. 7.
74 The ambiguities of this process are explored at length in Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn
McGregor, ‘Veterans, Violence and Nationalism in Zimbabwe’, paper presented to the
conference on Africa and Violence: Identities, Histories and Representations, Emory
University, Atlanta, 10–14 September 2003.

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