ZPRA Memoir

ZPRA memoirs, together with a growing body of ZPRA oral histories and published interviews, have created distinctive narrative genres and a unique set of historical sources. The memoirs are very different from each other but share concerns and characteristics too. All are by men; all but two were published after 1980 and most after 2000 (see list below). Many are powerfully inflected by ZAPU’s failure to come to power in 1980, and deep anger over the extreme state repression that was almost immediately directed at ZAPU and ZPRA cadres by the newly elected ZANU(PF) government. The 1980s was an embittering, often traumatic time, made more so by the denigration of ZPRA’s contribution to the liberation struggle in official accounts and the charges of treason (never proven) laid against its senior commanders. As a result, post-1980 memoirs are centrally concerned to set the record straight regarding ZPRA’s substantial war contribution and bona fides at independence, and often also to distinguish ZPRA from ZANU’s armed wing, ZANLA, by claiming a greater technical sophistication, better training and discipline, and more orderly relations with civilians. The pre-1980 memoirs tend to focus more on contemporary concerns with challenges to and divisions within the liberation movement and with the prosecution of war.

These memoirs were often collaboratively produced – written in conversation with other veterans, with interviewers and writers, and with historical and other sources. The texts have continued to ‘converse’ after publication too, exciting social media exchanges, objections, and counter-publications. These are signs of the ongoing importance of this history to veterans’ identities and to the politics of the present – and also of the sometimes partisan or partial nature of the accounts. Authors claim authority for their accounts of the past on the basis of their own experience and direct observation, but they often use this history to comment on the present as well. A running theme in the memoirs is the history of ethnic difference and political dis/unity. It is variously used to make a case for unity today, to criticise the perennial failures of leaders to achieve unity, or to hark back to a golden era of unity. These positions reflect the different status of authors. Some write as members of losing wartime factions, sidelined in the 1970s; others as critics in the present. Some are both. None of these memoirs are sanguine about the terrible costs of division, running from the 1960s to the present.

Beyond the (unheroic, sometimes tragic) grand arc of political narrative, the memoirs often share origin stories in accounts of rural life and urban labour. These are stories of ancestors, of the hard but humorous lessons of socialisation among male youth, and of the high value placed on the transformative power of education. Most of the authors who studied in the 1950s and 1960s made their way to mission schools where they mixed with students from across the southern African region and teachers from across the world, providing opportunities for thrilling political debate amidst the ‘winds of change’. This cosmopolitan milieu was reinforced by family and friends who travelled to South Africa or across the Central African Federation. It inspired intense searches for the meaning and means of liberation, as achieved in Ghana or Kenya, Cuba or Algeria. These young men often moved on to urban jobs and with them political activism that would lead to participation in party work and sabotage campaigns.

It is striking in these accounts how travelled and conscious of the wider world, and how experienced with violence and clandestine work, this generation of young men were before they received military training. Authors from the later generations cut these paths short, but often also joined the war armed with political ideas and experience. All the memoirs share an acute sense of the injustice of Rhodesia’s exclusion of black men from its promise of progress and modernity in favour of an ever more violently enforced, racialised inequality. These military memoirists often describe their burning desire to meet the inequities, discrimination and humiliations of white rule with violence, and the hurry they were in to acquire the means of doing so.

These specific Rhodesian pasts inform accounts of foreign lands, ideas and training. The authors keenly note the relative levels of poverty and development in the countries they visit; they place socialist and other ideas amidst an existing set of views; they are sensitive to signs of discrimination that echo Rhodesia; and they are moved by encounters with meritocracy and equality across racial difference, and by white hosts’ and instructors’ willingness to sacrifice for them. The value given to education in their youth often translates into an appreciation of technical training and equipment. Their own past suffering and humiliation leads to empathy for the painful history of their host countries – and respect for those who overcame the odds. They are also unsurprised to encounter other liberation movements wherever they go. The politics of liberation was always about more than the nation – though they are, like members of other movements, quick to make comparisons based on national difference. They often also harshly judge those seen as splinters or ‘inauthentic’ and note their own greater education and sophistication vis a vis other liberation movements, with the exception of South Africa’s MK.

All these factors can be seen in the warmth expressed towards Soviet training and trainers by those authors who travelled to the USSR, even where they harboured an initial distrust of their white hosts. Praise is heaped on their technically advanced training and weaponry, sometimes at great length. Particular guns and kit (from anti-air guns to radios to dinghies) are singled out and catalogued. Soviet society is described as a kind of inverse of Rhodesia: everyone has access to jobs and housing; success is determined by merit. These attributes are seen as indications of a humanity sorely lacking in Rhodesia. Descriptions of other training venues are similarly shaped by the lens of Rhodesia but also by the accumulated experiences of the training sites themselves. The memoirs provide a record of how ZPRA’s many years of war and shifts in military strategy could mean several stints of training over the 1960s and especially in the 1970s in different countries. ZPRA trainees had a wide range of comparators that included African hosts and trainers too: notable towards the end of the war was the conventional training offered by the Zambian army.

The memoirs cover many other topics that are difficult to get at or neglected in accounts of ZPRA’s war, from sexuality and the body, to engagement with film, song, language, and memorials, to frank discussions of emotions and their relation to an at times threatened, often transformed, masculinity. There are meditations on the legacies of loss, the writing of history, and what is owed past and future generations. For historians of the war, there are detailed accounts of episodes and battlefields within Zimbabwe that have hardly been touched upon. The memoirs open out whole new vistas on international exchange, military history and narrative genre.

Jocelyn Alexander

Bibliography

Dube, Tshinga Judge, Tshinga Judge Dube: Quiet Flows the Zambezi (Bulawayo, Amagugu Publishers, 2019).

Guduza, Churchill Mpiyesizwe, The Trials and Tribulations of a ZIPRA Soldier (Bamenda, Cameroon, Langaa Research and Publishing, 2021).

Moyo, Temba (a pseudonym for Dumiso Dabengwa), The Organizer: Story of Temba Moyo, recorded and edited by Ole Gjerstad (Richmond, B.C., LSM Information Centre, 1974).

Mpofu, Joshua Mahlathini, My Life in the Struggle for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (Bloomington, IN, AuthorHouse, 2014).

Mpofu, Obert M., On the Shoulders of Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider (Bulawayo, LAN Readers, 2020).

Ndlovu, Vincent, Seeking Freedom and Justice (Loyal but not Docile) (UK, Michael Terence Publishing, 2021).

Nkomo, Nicholas, Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The autobiography of Nicholas Nkomo (unpublished ms., 1993).

Nyathi, Andrew with John Hoffman, Tomorrow is Built Today: Experiences of war, colonialism and the struggle for collective co-operatives in Zimbabwe (Harare, Anvil Press, 1990).

Sibhona, Irvine K., Nation Born of Violence: ZPRA’s Struggle against Rhodesia in Alliance with ANC’s UmKhonto We Sizwe (Cleveland UK, Bubuya Publishing, 2018).

Tshabangu, Owen, The March 11 Movement in ZAPU: Revolution within the revolution (York, Tiger Papers Publications, (1972) 1979).

Zwangendaba, Ngwana Maseko, ZPRA: Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (Xlibris Corp., USA, 2008).

Also see the collection of interviews with ZPRA combatants in the Sunday News (Bulawayo) and Sunday Mail (Harare) ‘Lest We Forget’ and related series as well as the video recordings of interviews with ZPRA cadres undertaken by Zenzele Ndebele on cite.co.zw. These substantial efforts to record life stories of the liberation struggle are products of the 2000s, and mostly of the last ten years.