Rhodesian Bush War
The Rhodesian Bush War, also called the Second Chimurenga as well as the Zimbabwean War of Liberation,[13] was a civil conflict from July 1964 to December 1979[n 1] in the unrecognised country of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and now Zimbabwe).[n 2][24]
The conflict pitted three forces against one another: the Rhodesian white minority-led government of Ian Smith (later the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government of Bishop Abel Muzorewa); Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the military wing of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union; and the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union.
The war and its subsequent Internal Settlement, signed in 1978 by Smith and Muzorewa, led to the implementation of universal suffrage in June 1979 and the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia, which was renamed Zimbabwe Rhodesia under a black majority government. However, this new order failed to win international recognition and the war continued. Neither side achieved a military victory and a compromise was later reached.[25]
Negotiations between the government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, the government of the United Kingdom, and Mugabe and Nkomo's united "Patriotic Front" took place at Lancaster House, London in December 1979, and the Lancaster House Agreement was signed. The country returned temporarily to British control and new elections were held under British and Commonwealth supervision in March 1980. ZANU won the election and Mugabe became the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980, when the country achieved internationally recognised independence.
Historiography[edit]
Overview[edit]
Unlike many post-colonial African conflicts, the Second Rhodesian Bush War spawned an extensive written military historiography.[121] Though the territory at the center of the conflict was known by four different names throughout the time of the war, historiographic works tend to call the country "Rhodesia" or "Zimbabwe". Histories that use the former term often focus on the actions of white soldiers without much account of the conflict's political context, while many works that use the latter term frame the event as a victorious guerilla liberation war.[122]
Rhodesian narratives[edit]
Many Rhodesian veterans wrote memoirs about their service after the second Bush War, most of them emanating from soldiers who served in the RLI or Selous Scouts. These works were either self-published, published with vanity presses, or with specialized publishing houses.[123] The memoirs published without editorial oversight often suffered from spelling errors and other mistakes, but tended to focus more on unit culture and non-military activities such as poaching,[124] or "taming" captured African insurgents into domestic servants.[125] Most of these books were released in Africa; few became commercial successes in the United Kingdom or the United States.[126] Grouped together with fictional novels about the war, the memoirs are sometimes placed in a genre of "neo-Rhodesian" literature.[127] Claims involving use of biological and chemical weapons by Rhodesian forces appeared only in post-war literature.[128]
The first major Rhodesian memoir to be released was Reid-Daly's account of the Selous Scouts, Selous Scouts Top Secret War, published by Galago—a publishing house run by Peter Stiff—in 1982. Galago continued to be a major publisher of these works.[129] Publishing of these memoirs accelerated during Zimbabwe's economic decline in the 1990s.[130] These works increasingly incorporated material from other memoirs and some secondary works, though they generally displayed little knowledge of ZANLA's or ZIPRA's version of events. Many also featured direct and indirect criticism of other soldiers and memoirists.[131] Some of these disputes led to lawsuits.[132] Seizures of white-owned farms in the 2000s led to a massive growth in the literature.[130] Revised editions of previous memoirs were also common.[133] Chris Cocks' Fireforce was re-released by Galago and edited by Stiff. Stiff removed all references to drug use in the new edition, since he wanted to portray the RLI as heroes.[134]
Zimbabwean nationalist discourse[edit]
Early literature on nationalist guerillas in Rhodesia tended to focus on ZANLA and ignore ZIPRA.[135] Several autobiographies and memoirs were published by Zimbabwean nationalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Masipule Sithole, the younger brother of Ndabaningi, wrote Zimbabwe: Struggles within the Struggle, which described conflicts between ZANU and ZAPU with an emphasis on ethnic disagreements. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson published The Struggle for Zimbabwe in 1981, which chronicled the formation and development of nationalist movements. It was printed with a favourable foreword by Mugabe and was wielded by the post-independent Zimbabwean government as evidence of the courage and sacrifices of ZANU and ZANLA, including incorporation into secondary school curriculum.[136] The first major academic work covering the nationalist guerilla perspective of the war was Terence Ranger's Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe, published in 1985. It focused on eastern Rhodesia and constituted a largely uncritical account of ZANLA activities in that area. The book did not address violence inflicted by ZANLA on African TTL residents and concluded that rural blacks were "united" in supporting the guerilla movement. Ranger later reflected that his work duplicated ZANU's nationalist rhetoric.[137] Romanticised interpretations of the Zimbwabwean nationalist endeavor fell out of scholarly favour in the mid-1990s.[138] Since then, more critical works of the nationalist movement have predominated, highlighting complexities in the war.[139] More works focusing on ZIPRA have also been published, though the nature of differences between ZANLA and ZIPRA as well as the geographical spread of the two guerrilla forces remains debated.[140]
Critical analysis[edit]
In her 1992 book, Zimbabwe's Guerilla War, political scientist Norma J. Kriger rejected "the existing portrait of ZANU's successful politicisation of the Zimbabwean countryside during the liberation war" and concluded that relations between nationalist guerillas and TTL villagers in Mutoko District were predominantly characterized by violence and coercion.[141] She also wrote that insofar as peasants voluntarily collaborated with ZANLA, it was often in the hopes of using them to settle petty personal scores and protect their local interests.[142] Historian Luise White wrote that the white Rhodesian war accounts did not present a unified and agreed telling of the conflict, and instead "struggled over what being a white Rhodesian meant, and what pasts and futures soldiers brought to the war".[143] Reflecting on their truthfulness, White stated, "Many of the stories and events in these memoirs are not true, or at least not wholly accurate."[132] Reid-Daly later testified during a lawsuit involving an authorship dispute that he had "exaggerated or embellished the true story" several times in Selous Scouts Top Secret War.[144] Many of these works maintained that the Rhodesian Army "won every battle but lost at the negotiating table" at Lancaster House.[145] White criticized this view, writing, "First, there weren't really any battles, and second, while Rhodesian soldiers were not routed anywhere, they did not win any decisive victories either, especially during the mid-1970s when guerrilla forces were in disarray. In terms of strategy in the middle and late 1970s, it is not altogether clear that the Rhodesian state wanted victory more than it wanted a strong position from which to negotiate some kind of transition to majority rule."[134] Academic M. T. Howard wrote that the portrayal of the Rhodesian Army as a nearly-invincible institution served both white Rhodesian and black Zimbabwean nationalist discourses; the former benefitted from showing a capable force which was never defeated in the field while the latter argued that their ultimate success was made more impressive.[127]