Abstract
This paper explores the experiences of Zimbabwean rural women forced to relocate to the city of Harare during the liberation war in the 1970s. Women found themselves squeezed between a repressive colonial government and coercive guerrilla armies. The accompanying war-induced violence from both sides of the combattants led to massive displacements as women and their families fled from the war-torn areas to urban centres like Harare. Within women’s stories of flight are reflections of gender relations in a war fought largely in the rural areas where women were the majority of the dwellers, and a war in which most of the combattants were male. Gender relations thus informed, and were influenced by the war. Women’s narratives also reveal the socio-economic and emotional costs of the war hardly acknowledged in the nationalist discourse about the liberation war. At the centre of these accounts is a revelation of resistance, courage, fear, and above all agency by rural women under very difficult circumstances.
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