ZPRA is an army whose achievements were not recognized purely for the reason that the National Identity question in Rhodesia was not taken seriously. Therefore, on the removal of the Smith regime, the incoming regime made it clear that the people of Mthwakazi had wasted their effort in liberating a country to which they did not belong. Therefore no mention was ever made on the achievements of ZPRA on the battlefront. This book seeks to correct that part. On how the people of Mthwakazi ought to redefine themselves, I leave that for another forum.
Operating from outside their homelands, exile armies have been an understudied phenomenon in history and international politics. From avoiding the fate of being a mere tool for a patron power to facing issues regarding their military efficacy and political legitimacy, exiled armies have found their journey home a tortuous one. This collection of essays covers the experience of exiled forces in the Second World War, principally in Europe, and also covers their activities around the globe during the Cold War and beyond.
The Trials and Tribulations of a ZIPRA Soldier is a riveting spider web story of courage, determination, pursuit of justice and survival against all odds. The reader is taken on a path of unparalleled heroism and determination of a young Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) soldier, Churchill Mpiyesizwe Guduza. Churchill was born in Johannesburg to a Rhodesian father, Makhathini Bhekisizwe Guduza and Amy Poppy Lottering, a South African. After attending Fatima Secondary School in Rhodesia, with his father in continued political detention and his mother merely scrapping a living in the rural hinterlands of Rhodesia, he was compelled to leave for Johannesburg in early 1973 where his already shaped political consciousness led him to participate in the June 1976 Soweto student uprisings. At just under 20 years of age, Churchill escaped South Africa to join ZIPRA in Zambia, just in time before the apartheid net rapidly closed in on him. No sooner had Churchill joined ZIPRA than he experienced similar injustices which he immediately opposed with resolute bravery. Upon completion of military training in Angola, he was immediately deployed to the battlefields of Rhodesia where his unit gallantly fought against the Rhodesian security forces. Churchill's nom de guerre was Taffy Carlos. From Rhodesia, Churchill returned to Zambia to face off ZIPRA's High Command, from where he fled to Angola. After his incarceration in Angola, he returned to independent Zimbabwe, from where he again escaped to the United Kingdom via Botswana and Zambia. Today, he leads the Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF), which seeks to EXIT Zimbabwe, and establish the Federal Republic of Mthwakazi.
This book is an exploration of the political history of insurgency in SOuthern Rhodesia. During the early years of its struggle, ZAPU employed non-violent means to try and achieve its goal for majority rule and a non-racial society. Because of the belligerancy of the White settler regime, ZAPU added the armed resistance to its strategy and went on to build a formidable army. Problems escalated and alliances were built and dissolved until, tired of being hunted down and butchered, the ZAPU leadership decided to merge its party with the ruling party in December 1987.
The Democratic Coup d'État advances a simple, yet controversial, argument: democracy sometimes comes through a military coup. Covering coups that toppled dictators and installed democratic rule in countries as diverse as Guinea-Bissau, Portugal, and Colombia, the book weaves a balanced narrative that challenges everything we knew about military coups.
In Fighting and Writing Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, White finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods. In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.
This book explores the barrack experiences of soldiers in post-independence Zimbabwe, examining the concept of military professionalism within a state in political crisis. Drawing upon interviews with former soldiers of the Zimbabwe National Army, Soldiers and the State in Zimbabwe casts a light on the oppression of soldiers by commanders who sought to repress and control the political thinking of their men. By contextualising the political, economic and material conditions in which Zimbabwean soldiers existed, Godfrey Maringira reveals the everyday victimisation and violence of the barracks. Exploring such events as the imposition of the Defence Act, the desertion of soldiers, and the 2017 military coup in Zimbabwe, the book presents and discusses the politicised nature of the military in post-independence Zimbabwe, and the political consequences of service in a state in deep political crisis. Soldiers and the State in Zimbabwe will be of interest to scholars and students of African Politics, military and security studies, and African studies.
With a foreword by Terence Ranger this book offers a thought provoking analysis of women's experiences with ZANLA during the war of independence.It challenges official orthodoxy that a gende revolution occured in this period and that a generation of liberated women emerged from the struggle.The research demostrates that while ZANLA extensively mobilised women as porters, nurses, teachers, secretaries and cooks - all crucial to the struggle and glorified in the rhetoric, in substance, the movement percieved these roles as secondary to the activities of men. The author who has had access to the ZANU archives, scrutinises a doctrinal terrain laced with tension between ideology and tradition principles, between the more and less educated cadres and between the women on the ground and the leadership.
