Paper short abstract:

This paper reorients the narrative of Zimbabwe's conflict away from individual heroes toward a collective peasantry using oral histories of peasant collaborators. I argue that violence was rural, and that all peasants participated, including young women and men, elders, parents, and spirit mediums.

Paper long abstract:

The history of Zimbabwe's liberation war has been extensively studied from two vantage points: 1. The Rhodesian (civilians, politicians, workers, farmers, soldiers), and 2. The guerrilla (ZANU, ZAPU, ZIPRA, ZANLA). However, the dominant actors in the war weren't trained fighters, but African peasants, and the war avoided urban neighborhoods in favor of Native Reserves, the populous rural villages which most Africans farmed, herded, and considered home. In the rich historiography on the liberation war, these peasants are never considered subjects. My goal is to tell a parallel history where peasants are both the narrators and actors, and the wooded agricultural landscape where the war was fought is understood through the language of those who called it home rather than by those who temporarily transformed the landscape into a theater of violence.

This study provides a glimpse of the war in a rural community in southern Zimbabwe occupied by soldiers and guerillas from 1977-1980, using their own oral histories. The interviews cover all living participants: elders and youth, women and men, vachimbwido and vanamujiba, workers and peasants, collaborators and askaris. While these stories complicate the heroism of guerrillas and male politicians, my intention is to emphasize the incredible significance of peasant women and men, and their landscape, not as subjects influenced by ZANLA but as the backbone of the rebellion. As I was often told during interviews with female elders, "There was no war without us."