Maternal Identity and War in Mothers of the Revolution

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate motherhood as it was constructed and practiced by Zimbabwean women in rural villages during the Zimbabwean war of liberation, through the analysis of a collection of thirty personal narratives of the war.' This war shook preexisting social and familial structures, presenting the women of the villages with the task of realigning their perceptions with the new social facts around them. I will concentrate on three interrelated themes: (1) the changes in maternal practice brought about by the war; (2) the disjuncture between the changed social world and the stock of concepts and language available to organize that world; and (3) the mobilization of the mother-child paradigm in order to meet various practical and political needs, and as a way of organizing perceptions of the war situation. The twentieth-century military struggle for Zimbabwe's emancipation from white minority rule began in 1972. It was a rural guerrilla war, characterized by hit-and-run and sabotage attacks by highly decentralized small units that operated in isolation from their commanders often for more than a year. The Rhodesian army had sophisticated armaments and logistical support, while the guerrillas had only their knowledge of the land and, guided by Maoist and Vietnamese tactical theories, the involvement of the peasantry. By the end of the war in 1979, the two liberation movements, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) with its army, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) with its army, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), had infiltrated approximately 28,000 guerrillas into Zimbabwe from Zambia, Mozambique, and Botswana. Both liberation movements relied heavily on the villagers to supply and assist them. Their methods of obtaining support ranged from persuasion to coercion, and had different impacts on their hosts.2 Some welcomed the guerrillas both as children of the village and as liberators, others thought of them as, at best, a lesser evil than government soldiers. ZANU and ZAPU had an uneasy strategic alliance, the tensions of which were unfortunately played out in the villages of Zimbabwe. Their presence, and the