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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Africa@h-net.msu.edu (December, 1998)

Ngwabi Bhebhe and Terence Ranger (eds.) _Society in Zimbabwe's
Liberation War_ . Oxford: James Curry, Portsmouth: Heineman,
Harare: University of Zimbabwe, 1996. vi + 250pp. Notes,
bibliography and index. $37.98 (cloth) ISBN 0-85255-660-8.

Reviewed for H-Africa by David Gordon, Princeton University,
dmgordon@phoenix.princeton.edu,

The Painful Birth of a Nation

"Please bear with me in case some of the details sound strange
and far-fetched...." writes Paulos Matjaka Nare in his
contribution to this volume.  "The fact is that life was strange"
(p. 130). For anyone who has read the several books about
Zimbabwe's War of Liberation, the details do indeed seem bizarre
and at times horrific beyond comprehension. It was a war where
spirit mediums strengthened the ties of marxist guerillas to the
land [1], where a vitriolic settler racism provided the
background for especially brutal counter-insurgency tactics [2],
and where, it cannot be denied, guerillas also used brutality and
terror against those for whom they claimed to be fighting [3].
_Society in Zimbabwe's Liberation War_ is the second in a
two-volume series that emerged out of an international conference
held in July 1991. While the first volume concentrates on
soldiers, the second describes the involvement, willful or not,
of civilians in the war. In this interesting work two renowned
scholar-activists, Ngwabi Bhebhe and Terence Ranger, once again
bring together the conference participants, combatants and
academics, in an effort to spread a better understanding of the
traumatic years of war out of which Zimbabwe arose.

The first section of the book, by far the most interesting and
polished, is an exploration of Christian and African religion
during the war. David Lan's work on spirit mediums, of which
there is no specific discussion in this volume, provides the
background. Lan's research area, the isolated Dande region where
mhondoro mediums were powerful and ZANU/ZANLA guerillas closely
tied to the local peasantry, is often thought to contrast with
other regions where African religion was not as strong in
consolidating a peasant/guerilla alliance [4]. Such was the case,
so the argument goes, in Matebeleland, where the supposedly more
secular, proletarian-based ZAPU/ZIPRA held sway for most of the
war's duration [5]. In the first chapter Ranger and Ncube attempt
to confront this argument. Using oral sources, they convincingly
show that the Mwali cult, associated with resistance to European
conquest and based in southern Matebeleland, witnessed a revival
during and after the war years. While sufficient evidence is
presented for the revival of Mwali shrines, I remained unsure as
to the extent ZIPRA guerillas actively sought legitimacy from the
Mwali cult, as ZANLA guerillas did from the spirit mediums.

The second subject of this section is the collaboration (or its
lack) between guerillas and the Christian church. The
relationship between the guerillas and churches is explained in
terms of the depth of trust between the local community and the
church leaders. Where ties where strong, guerillas and the church
existed in a symbiotic relationship; where weak, guerillas
attacked the church and the church was forced to rely on the
Rhodesian security forces for protection. While this explanatory
framework assumes a strong guerilla/peasantry alliance, which is
often not proved, it remains convincing in the examples given in
this volume. Janice McLaughlin describes Avila mission, where,
under the guidance of the Irish Catholic Bishop Donal Lamont, the
local laity supported the guerillas even when faced with
marxist-inspired ideological opposition: "Spirit mediums were now
joined by Christians as motivators and mobilizers" (p.101). Such
support fractured any previous alliance between the Catholic
church and the settler state, and made way for a new Catholic
church in an independent Zimbabwe. David Maxwell, in his
interesting contribution, blames the horrific Vumba massacre of
nine missionaries and their four children on the displacement of
the missionaries from Elima where they were trusted by the
community to Vumba where they were unknown. Maxwell goes on to
argue that one of the consequences of the dependence of the
church on the local community during the war was the creation of
a new Zimbabwean church, with greater representation and
participation from local members. After the war, a central role
of this church was to remember and heal: "rural Christians found
it easier to theologize their experiences of the war than to
historicize them" (p. 87). Indeed, these three articles combine
to elaborate and underline the importance of religion in
providing a valuable mechanism for civilians to deal with the
traumas engendered by the war.

Unfortunately the rest of the volume does not display the
consistency in subject and quality of the first section. The
second section on ideology and education begins with a lengthy
discourse analysis of a few rather silly white Rhodesian novels.
While this analysis may interest a certain audience, it does
little to penetrate the fears and ideological justifications of
white settlers which led them to wage such a bitter and brutal
war. Indeed, the volume lacks an adequate reflection on settler
society and the war. The discourse analysis is followed by two
short activist accounts of education in ZAPU and ZANU camps. Fay
Chung's account of ZANU schools seems celebratory compared to
Paulos Matjaka Nare's poignant testimony of ZAPU's schools. They
are both worth reading. Yet the lack of critical analysis left me
wondering whether the difference between the accounts reflected
the persuasions of the authors or a substantial difference
between ZANU and ZAPU camps. And if this was the case, what
explains the difference?

The final section deals with the legacy of the war. Ngwabi Bhebhe
turns again to religion and tells the story of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of Zimbabwe (ELCZ) during and after the war. In
this case the consequence of the war on the church was not as
benign as in the examples of McLaughlin and Maxwell. While the
war caused schisms between the head office and local parishes,
this did not lead directly to a more representative locally-based
church, but rather encouraged ethnic divisions within the church.
Instead of unifying and healing, the ELCZ became infected by the
ethnic strife that continued after the nationalist victory. Only
after the National Unity Accord between ZANU and ZAPU did a new
ELCZ emerge, which, Bhebhe hopes, was actually strengthened by
the post-war crisis. The emphasis on religion and healing is
continued in Richard I. Werbner's final contribution to volume.
Werbner writes an account of his return to a community in
south-western Zimbabwe where he first did research in 1961. Here
he listened to the horrors and hardships endured over the last
thirty years and noticed the revival of sangoma mediums in the
area. The sangomas, unlike the mhondoro spirit mediums, were
healers who dealt with the legacy of the war by making "voices of
the past...speak in the present in order to testify...that
certain memories have to be kept alive...memories of suffering
and loss, of lapses from humanity, of the failure of kin, and not
merely their triumphs in success or achievement" (p.205).
Rembrance of those who died cruel deaths along with healing and
purification after the war was, once again, taken up by local
religious leaders. These two articles are a fine conclusion of
the first section on religion, and I was left wondering if the
volume might have been more coherent if it focused solely on the
role of religion in the war and its aftermath.

All the articles examined thus far are not the hagiographic
accounts of the war which first appeared in the 1980s; yet, they
remain within a nationalist narrative that envisages a united and
democratic Zimbabwe as the ultimate outcome of the war. No-one
denies the desirability of such an outcome, but, as rioters take
over Harare and Mugabe struggles to strengthen his grip over the
state, we need to recognize the increasing unlikelihood of its
realization in the near future. To what extent does the
experience and legacy of the war explain the difficulties faced
by Zimbabwe? Only one article, dealing with political change in
Zimbabwe's rural areas, begins to explore such a question.
Jocelyn Alexander points out that the authoritarian Rhodesian
bureaucracy survived the war and simply co-opted the ZANU elite.
Meanwhile, the grassroots local party apparatus was weakened in
favor of this bureaucracy, denying the local peasants input in
the political process. During the war, political mobilization was
subordinated to the military struggle, and without this struggle
the impetus for democratic mobilization fell away. Instead of the
party, traditional chiefs, who were expected to disappear with
their colonial overlords, have become the representatives of the
peasantry. Her analysis is valuable but incomplete in places:
even if there is a seeming continuity in bureaucratic traditions,
surely the fact that the new bureaucracy is manned by ZANU
elites, with their particular support networks, make the new
administration substantially different to its settler-run
predecessor. Has the "passive revolution" and the rapid ascent
of ZANU elites "straddled" public and private capital, as
Jean-Francois Bayart would put it, and begun to entrench the
elite's position as a bourgeoisie enmeshed in several less formal
political and economic networks? [6].  Such an analysis may
indeed go beyond the confines of her article, which at least
begins a critical reflection on the political limitations of
agrarian transformation in Zimbabwe.

The entire collection is accompanied by a valuable introduction
which places the contributions in the context of both the
conference and Zimbabwe's attempts at healing the wounds of war.
Important subjects omitted in the volume -- notably the role of
women -- are briefly dealt with here. What the introduction
lacks, however, is an attempt to place both the historiography
and the history of the war and its legacy in a broader African
context. This is not only of academic interest: Africans
throughout southern and central Africa are currently dealing with
war and its consequences. A regional understanding of these
processes desperately needs to be generated. This seems even more
urgent as Zimbabwe's troops fight their first post-colonial
battle to defend the interests of their leaders in the forests of
the former Zaire.


[1]. David Lan _Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in
Zimbabwe_ (London, James Currey; Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing
House, 1985)

[2]. D. Caute _Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia_
(London, Allen Lane, 1983); Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock
_Rhodesian Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on
White Rhodesia_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993).

[3]. Norma Kriga _Zimbabwe's Guerilla War: Peasant Voices
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). This is not the
central point of Norma Kriga's work; nevertheless the importance
of terror and coercion used by the guerillas does surface in
Kriga's work.

[4]. The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was led by Robert
Mugabe and supported by China. The Zimbabwe African National
Liberation Army (ZANLA) was ZANU's army.

[5]. The Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) was led by Joshua
Nkomo and supported by the former Soviet Union. The Zimbabwe
People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) was ZAPU's army.

[6]. Jean Francois Bayart _The State in Africa: The Politics of
the Belly_ (Longman, London and New York, 1993), pp. 90-98

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