Zimbabwe African People's Union Research Articles

Nazism, Fascism, and Genocide as Themes in ZANU and ZAPU Propaganda during the War against Rhodesia, 1965–1980

Abstract This article considers how the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)—the two main African nationalist groups in the rebel British colony of Rhodesia—sought to undermine the White minority government of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) era in Rhodesia by denouncing it in their propaganda as “Nazi,” “fascist,” and “genocidal.” The author argues that ZANU and ZAPU built on ideas already put forth in the international arena. In doing so, they were able to develop the conception of colonialism as a fascist and genocidal system of government. Charges of fascism and genocide, as well as antiracism and anticolonialism, were central to ZANU’s and ZAPU’s political platform and their historical narrative of colonialism. The White population of Rhodesia, however, was proud of their record during the Second World War, and for African nationalists to equate them with the Nazis was to upend a major aspect of their identity. Through a discussion of these issues, this article studies the important role that these concepts played in one of the most significant anticolonial conflicts of the postwar period.

Goodbye Zimbabwe: Place naming as a cultural arena for symbolic resistance and spatial (in)justice in secessionist politics

This article explores how secessionists in Zimbabwe deploy place naming to subvert, contest, and resist state-consecrated versions of national identity, belonging and citizenship. Zimbabwe has two super-tribes, Shona and Ndebele. Ethnicity is exceedingly entrenched in Zimbabwean politics. This has resulted in the conflation of ethnic and political identities. Since the formative years of African nationalism in the 1960s, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) has been aligned with the Shona ethnic identity, while the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) assumed a Ndebele identity. Ethnicity continued to cause tensions in the Zimbabwean political landscape. This has generated disgruntlement among the ethnic groups from the Ndebele-speaking regions. It eventually resulted in the formation of organisations and political groups advocating for the secession of the Ndebele-speaking areas from the rest of the country. Theoretically, the study deploys the tenets of critical toponomastics to explore how secessionists appropriate place naming in their quest for self-determination. It uses data gathered through semi-structured interviews with the choreographers of secession and cultural and language committees for the different ethnolinguistic groups from Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands. Preliminary findings indicate that secessionists use place names in the symbolic construction of Mthwakazi, an imagined autonomous state.

Cultural politics and cultural violence during Gukurahundi in Matabeleland

This paper examines and analyses the various instances where ‘performances’ of cultural violence by the state and Fifth Brigade were experienced during Gukurahundi in Matabeleland. This paper contends that cultural violence was used to stereotype Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) veterans, as well as Ndebele people. Cultural violence is used here to refer to the purposeful weakening and ultimate destruction of cultural values and practices of the Ndebele people. This paper argues that ZANU-PF created an anti-Ndebele thought collective through the use of emotive language, stylized news in media, and ‘expert opinions’ to block the creation of accurate contextual knowledge for the Shona nonlocals and ZANU-PF members. This paper further submits that this thought collective sits at the base of the disposition, segregation, dehumanization, near annihilation and framing of ZAPU, ex-ZIPRA veterans and the Ndebele people as ‘dissidents’ and ‘cockroaches’, infecting Ndebele language, identity and cultural practices. This paper, thus, argues that the deployment of cultural violence created a fertile ground for direct and structural violence that further undermined ZAPU, ZIPRA and Ndebele resistance against Gukurahundi. In conclusion, this paper proposes public multi-cultural remembrances and cultural cleansing ceremonies (nationally and communally) as possible solutions to diffusing the continuous perpetration of cultures of violence in Zimbabwe.

The Creation and Early Development of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) 1980-93

Given the 2017 coup in Zimbabwe, a rare event in Southern Africa but sadly common in the rest of the continent, this paper discusses the beginnings of the politicization of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) during the 1980s. At the end of the country’s war for independence in 1980, the ZDF formed as an amalgamation of former Rhodesian state military personnel and insurgents from the liberation movements of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Personnel from ZANU came to dominate Zimbabwe’s new military given the lack of a specific agreement over the integration process, their numerical superiority, and ZANU’s electoral success that gave it political power. During the ZDF integration exercise of the early 1980s, British advisors attempted to create a Western-style force but acted pragmatically while North Korean instructors helped create an overtly ZANU affiliated brigade and party militia. In addition, South African destabilization and the rapid departure of former Rhodesian officers gave way to the accelerated promotion of former insurgents mostly affiliated with the ZANU government. Lastly, the further ZANU-ization of the ZDF occurred within the context of operations in southwestern Zimbabwe where it eliminated ZAPU as an opposition political movement and committed atrocities, and in Mozambique where Zimbabwean troops cooperated with allies from overtly politicized armies of neighboring states

Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: An Epistemicide and Genocide

Summary That in political conflict and war the truth becomes a casualty that is sacrificed on the altar of expediency is an observation that is traceable to the ancient Greek tragedian, Aeschylus. It is no accident that it had to be a student of tragedy and the workings of evil who noted how truth and knowledge are the first to be murdered before individuals and populations of human beings are slaughtered in armed operations by those that seek to conquer, dominate and rule others by hook or by crook. The Gukurahundi Genocide of 1983 to 1987 in Zimbabwe began with the desire by Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) political party for oneparty state rule under a life presidency. For that dark goal to be achieved the political opposition in shape of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) had to be eliminated. All manner of political constructions, naming and labelling were conducted to create the conditions for and justification of an armed operation against ZAPU and its leader, Joshua Nkomo. The political and human identities of those that had to be eliminated were changed to enemies, dissidents, snakes and chaff itself. On the Gukurahundi Genocide, scholars have prevalently dwelt on controversies surrounding the numbers of the dead and the enduring effects of the killings. This article is a consideration of the assassinations of the truth and knowledge, the epistemicide, which preceded, accompanied and followed the Gukurahundi Genocide. Truth and knowledge die before, during and after genocide.

The Travelling Toyi-Toyi: Soldiers and the Politics of Drill

The toyi-toyi is commonly described as a high-stepping ‘dance’ and associated above all with the anti-apartheid protests of the mid 1980s in South Africa’s townships. Its origins are, however, some two decades earlier and nearly 5,000 miles to the north, in the military training given to cadres of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) in Algeria. Now, the toyi-toyi is as often used in protest against governments led by the region’s former liberation movements as in displays of support for them. Between its Algerian origins and its current incarnations, the toyi-toyi has carried many meanings. We focus here on how veterans of the Zimbabwean and South African liberation struggles remembered the wartime toyi-toyi in oral histories and memoir. Veterans of ZAPU’s armed wing traced the toyi-toyi’s travels from north to south, in training regimes in the military camps of Algeria, Tanzania and Zambia. They remembered it as a defining feature of their army, able to create powerful bonds of loyalty and the physical toughness necessary to survival on the battlefield. Veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the African National Congress’ armed wing, learned the toyi-toyi from ZAPU cadres in shared camps. They agreed that it was emblematic of ZAPU’s army, but often portrayed it as an expression of an intolerant, macho militarism that had corrupted MK, above all in its Angolan camps. For all these former soldiers, the toyi-toyi became both a symbol and vector of particular kinds of military strategy, political belief and masculinist bodily power that provided a means of talking about influences and tensions between and within liberation movements. Tracing the toyi-toyi’s travels allows us to see how liberation movements’ military cultures were made, moved and revalued over time and across a vast geographical terrain.

Zenzo Nkobi, ZAPU Photographer: Exile, Visibility and the Anteroom of War in Zambia, 1977–1980

Zenzo Nkobi acted as official photographer from 1977 for Joshua Nkomo, president of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). ZAPU was based in Zambia after the banning of the nationalist organisation in Rhodesia in 1963. This article takes up the question of nationalist photography, as it were, and how the modes of documenting presidentialism and pan-African and socialist solidarity in newly independent African states from the 1960s might have shaped Nkobi’s influences. Among the photographs taken by Nkobi are pictures of education camps in Zambia during official visits by Nkomo with accompanying foreign delegations. On such occasions, it appears that the youthful camp recruits prepared ‘cultural performances’ for the visitors. Here, at times, Nkobi’s camera goes beyond ostensible political necessity and offers a sense of the contingent and the incidental. The article directs attention to these aspects of the camp photographs and to the spectral implications of the material damage to and digitisation of Nkobi’s negatives, which now constitute the photographic heritage of a liberation movement marginalised since independence in 1980.

'A last stubborn outpost of a past epoch': The Communist Party of Great Britain, national liberation in Zimbabwe and anti-imperialist solidarity

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had been involved in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist campaigns since the 1920s and in the late 1950s, its members were instrumental in the founding of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). In the 1960s and 1970s, this extended to support for the national liberation movement in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the CPGB threw its support behind the Soviet-backed Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), instead of their rival, the Chinese-backed Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). When both groups entered into a short-term military and political alliance in 1976, the Patriotic Front, this posed a possible problem for the Communist Party and the AAM, but publicly these British organisations proclaimed solidarity with newly created PF. However this expression of solidarity and internationalist links quickly untangled after the 1980 elections, which were convincingly won by ZANU-PF and left the CPGB's traditional allies, ZAPU, with a small share of seats in the national parliament. This article explores the contours of the relationship between the CPGB, the broader Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain and its links with the organisations in Zimbabwe during the war of national liberation, examining the opportunities and limits presented by this campaign of anti-imperial solidarity.

Remembering the past against the grain: an analysis of the reconstructions of the past in The Sunday News's ‘Lest We Forget’ column

AbstractMemories of the nationalist struggle are fervently contested in Zimbabwean public spaces such as the media. This paper examines the emergence of the counter‐hegemonic historical narratives in the state‐controlled media that seek to subvert the dominant nationalist discourses propagated by the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). Focusing on the Sunday News's Lest We Forget newspaper column, the paper analyses the representations of the role played by the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in the liberation struggle, a nationalist movement whose contributions are marginalised and obscured in the official nationalist historiography. Given that in Zimbabwe the state‐owned media are generally viewed as mouthpieces of the ruling party, this paper identifies the tensions in the Sunday News as alternative historical memories are being reproduced and sustained. Drawing upon the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, this article argues that alternative historical imaginations are rekindled in the state media.

African Soldiers in the USSR: Oral Histories of ZAPU Intelligence Cadres’ Soviet Training, 1964–1979

A growing literature has shed new light on interactions between the Soviet Union and Africa, notably through studies of the large numbers of African students who arrived in Moscow from 1960. Scholars have, however, largely ignored the many thousands of African military trainees who arrived in the same period. Here we begin to explore soldiers’ experiences through a focus on intelligence cadres of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). We ask how their Soviet sojourns shaped their lives and ZAPU’s struggle, and consider the strengths and limits of oral histories in going beyond questions of strategy and Cold War binaries. ZAPU trainees depicted themselves as men of education and political sophistication, who were able to shape the content of their training and make efficacious use of it. Their most abiding political lessons came from the understanding they gained of Soviet history – particularly the sacrifices of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ – and their experiences of ‘living socialism’. What these cadres depicted as Soviet egalitarianism, anti-racism, and state provision for basic needs held a powerful appeal due to the dramatic contrast to settler-ruled Rhodesia. Soviet support certainly influenced ZAPU, but these accounts indicate that it did so in negotiated, pragmatic and, at times, surprising ways, which were shaped by interactions with many other foreign hosts, the influence of a specifically Rhodesian history of discrimination and oppression, and ZAPU’s own assessment of its military needs.

ZANU’s External Networks 1963–1979: An Appraisal

The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) emerged from the smouldering ashes of the intra-party violence that followed its break away from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) in 1963 and the clampdown by Rhodesian authorities. Its structures were barely consolidated when it was banned in 1964, and its efforts in exile suffered a crisis of recognition, as the key sponsors of African liberation movements continued to view it as an ‘inauthentic’ and ‘separatist’ movement. This article traces the structures and strategies that ZANU used to manoeuvre through these obstacles to become a fully-fledged liberation movement by the mid 1970s. It pays particular attention to the work of individuals and organisations that facilitated this transformation by tracing a wide range of regional and international networks, including military, financial, humanitarian and diplomatic roles. The main sources are the growing corpus of oral reminiscences and published memoirs of the main players. It argues that ZANU was a beneficiary of the contradictions in the international solidarity movement. As it grew in stature, however, its own internal contradictions as a movement threatened to consume it and render the efforts and sacrifices of its exiles worthless. Yet, as the war escalated, these exile networks were the very basis on which an effective diplomatic offensive was launched, which complemented the successes that ZANU had in the battlefield. This aspect of the ZANU war effort is often conveniently omitted by ZANU itself.

Guerrilla warfare and the environment in Southern Africa: Impediments faced by ZIPRA and Umkhonto Wesizwe.

Zimbabwe Peoples’ Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) was the armed wing of Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) which waged the war to liberate Zimbabwe. It operated from its bases in Zambia between 1964 and 1980. Umkhonto Wesizwe (MK) was ANC’s armed wing which sought to liberate South Africa from minority rule. Both forces (MK and ZIPRA) worked side by side until the attainment of independence by Zimbabwe when ANC guerrillas were sent back to Zambia by the new Zimbabwean government. This paper argues that the failure of ZIPRA and Umkhonto Wesizwe to deploy larger numbers of guerrillas to the war front in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and South Africa was mainly caused by bio-physical challenges. ZAPU and ANC guerrillas faced the difficult task of crossing the Zambezi River and then walking through the sparsely vegetated areas, game reserves and parks until they reached villages deep in the country. Rhodesian and South African Defense Forces found it relatively easy to disrupt guerrilla movements along these routes. Even after entering into Rhodesia, ANC guerrillas had environmental challenges in crossing to South Africa. As such, they could not effectively launch protracted rural guerrilla warfare. Studies on ZIPRA and ANC guerrilla warfare have tended to ignore these environmental problems across inhospitable territories. For the ANC, surveillance along Limpopo River and in Kruger National Park acted more as impediments than conduits. ANC also had to cope with almost all challenges which confronted ZIPRA guerrillas such as the Zambezi, Lake Kariba and various parks which Rhodesians always used as a first line of defense but had a geographically difficult task in South Africa where the environment was not attractive for a guerrilla warfare.

RethinkingChimurengaandGukurahundiin Zimbabwe: A Critique of Partisan National History

Abstract:This article examines how the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to inscribe a nationalist monologic history in Zimbabwe in order prop up its claim to be the progenitor and guardian of the postcolonial nation. Since its formation in 1963, it has worked tirelessly to claim to be the only authentic force with a sacred historic mission to deliver the colonized people from settler colonial rule. To achieve this objective, ZANU-PF has deployed the ideology ofchimurengain combination with the strategy ofgukurahundias well as a politics of memorialization to install a particular nationalist historical monologue of the nation. After attaining power in 1980, it proceeded to claim ownership of the birth of the nation. While the ideology ofchimurengasituates the birth of the nation within a series of nationalist revolutions dating back to the primary resistance of the 1890s, the strategy ofgukurahundientails violent and physical elimination of enemies and opponents. But this hegemonic drive has always encountered an array of problems, including lack of internal unity in ZANU-PF itself, counternarratives deriving from political formations like the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU); labor movements; and critical voices from the Matebeleland region, which fell victim togukurahundistrategy in the 1980s. With the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, which soon deployed democracy and human rights discourse to critique the ideology ofchimurengaand the strategy ofgukurahundi, ZANU-PF hegemony became extremely shaky and it eventually agreed to share power with the MDC in February 2009.

Mugabe, Gramsci, and Zimbabwe at 25

Twenty-five years after Robert Mugabe brought Zimbabwe to independence in 1980, some might interpret the current, apparent reradicalization of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front's (ZANU-PF) political project as a last, leftist, quasi-Gramscian gambit to recapture lost popular legitimacy. Many more, however, see it instead as reflecting the final throes of an increasingly compromised, corrupt, militarized, and unpopular regime. In this article, we will emphasize the extent to which present policies do indeed reflect the material-political consequences (and contradictions) of the historic class compromises Mugabe and ZANU-PF have made in Zimbabwe and the deep-seated confrontation between elite interests and those of the mass of the population that Mugabe now seeks to obfuscate with mere rhetoric and opportunist policies.For Robert Mugabe, arch-strategist and Machiavellian power broker though he may be, has now been forced to confront the material-political consequences of the historic class compromises he has made. The implications of the developing set of tensions and contradictions fostered during Mugabe's 25 years in power are the main focus of this essay. We will assess just what has been produced during that quarter-century in terms of both the opportunities for, and the obstacles to, the resumed transformation of struggle currently claimed by Mugabe to be ZANU-PF's goal.I NATIONALISM AS PRESUMPTIVE HEGEMONYFor those who were active in the international support network for southern African liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, the prospective coming to power of a majority-rule government in Rhodesia (henceforth Zimbabwe) in the late 1970s brought considerable joy, even though it produced a rejoicing that was somewhat qualified. It was not the demise of the despised white-minority regime of Ian Smith that tempered the celebration of blackmajority rule. Rather, it was the nature of the resistance itself that gave observers pause, because the nationalist movement was itself completely divided. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing in the abstract (from the point of view of long-term democratic prospects in a free Zimbabwe, for example). Yet it certainly seemed so in the immediate case of Zimbabwe-given the empty juxtaposition of personal ambitions that polarized the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and ZANU and enflamed hostilities between the two movements, and also the backward-looking and unproductive ethnic ambitions (Ndebele and Shona, to go no further) that hovered just beneath the surface of liberation movement rivalry. Thus, in the 1970s, it could be plausibly argued (as it was by one of the present authors) that the internal rivalries that racked the Zimbabwean nationalist camp smacked more of the same old wasting kind of petty-bourgeois political infighting-centered upon personalities, intrigues, and the mobilization of constituencies around ethnic identifications, all long-time features of a Zimbabwean exile politics untransformed by effective struggle.1The established militarized wings of the nationalist movement ultimately emerged to play a crucial part in the transition to majority rule.2 ZANU-PF (no longer joined at the election with ZAPU-PF in the Patriotic Front as it had briefly been but willing to share a few cabinet posts afterwards) handily won the pre-independence election of March 1980, and stood ready to take power with the coming of independence in April. Faced with such evidence of success, however, some on the left who had been skeptical as to ZANU's claims were tempted to begin to rethink the movement's radical credentials. In doing so, they were encouraged by far more conservative commentators who now also cast Mugabe as a deft man of the left, one prepared to use short-term compromises to tempt the existing (largely white) bourgeoisie into acquiescing to change-while all along harbouring long-term goals of genuinely radical transformation. …

Maternal Identity and War in Mothers of the Revolution

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