Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the revolutionary visions expressed in ZPRA’s military and diplomatic launch in the early 1970s. Moving beyond usual attributions of Sovietness, it traces diverse influences and their role in restored solidarity, military re-organization and ZPRA’s culture of military training

Paper long abstract:

In 1972, ZAPU launched its revolutionary army ZPRA. It did so at a juncture of rivalrous ideological elaboration among liberation movements. The launch was designed for maximal global visibility - to show potential recruits and the world that ZAPU was now a transformed, revolutionary movement, back on the ‘correct’, ‘authentic’ path and newly capable of fighting after a series of devastating crises that had threatened its military survival. The paper compares two discrete domains where revolutionary political ideas were performed and materialised to different ends– the global diplomatic fora of exchanges to secure external support and ZPRA’s own military training in Morogoro camp, designed to inspire loyal, disciplined cadres. In global diplomacy, ZAPU used its newly released document – ‘the ideological concept’ - as material evidence of maturity and sophistication. The story of the production, vision and circulation of this document sheds new light on the interactions across a globally dispersed network of allies, liberation movement politicians, representatives and students. In ZPRA’s Morogoro training, political ideas also mattered but were detached from the content of the ‘ideological concept’. ZPRA’s military instructors combined older Algerian influences on drill with inspiration from new Soviet training and experiences fighting alongside the PLO in Lebanon. Visions of modern socialist Zimbabwean futures inspired a new cohort of guerrillas, who expressed their imaginaries in a new confidence and pride in their sense of themselves as ZPRA professional soldiers.

Paper short abstract:

Taking the view of the young men who became ZAPU’s first soldiers, this paper traces the transformations enabled by imaginative and literal journeys. It argues that the origins of ZAPU’s army lay in the capacity to imagine new worlds, alongside the terrible costs of state repression.

Paper long abstract:

Thinking of liberation armies as institutions born of imagination allows a fresh exploration of their origins. This paper takes the point of view of the young men who founded ZAPU’s armed wing in the 1960s. It argues that in important ways this military institution drew on their capacity to imagine new worlds, born of African decolonisation, armed struggles around the globe, and Soviet technological prowess. They commonly encountered glimpses of the new worlds as teenagers through interactions with a diverse generation of teachers in primary and secondary schools, print media, and nationalist leaders. These visions appealed because they could be fashioned into tools with which to respond in exciting, novel ways to the failed promises of late colonial reform and expanding state violence. They inspired action and led to extraordinary individual and collective journeys – to newly independent African states, and then much farther afield as Cold War and Pan-African solidarities opened up new possibilities. In the course of these interactions, youthful imaginations of new worlds were increasingly transformed into militarised visions, at times uncomfortably so. By the mid-1960s, the heady dreams of this early cohort of soldiers had been channelled into a military institution and remade by the terrible toll of capture, torture, prison and death.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the memories of those Soviet military interpreters who assisted in the training of Southern African soldiers at the Perevalnoye military camp from 1965 onwards, during the three decades when the USSR's commitment to internationalism shaped and justified Moscow’s foreign policy.

Paper long abstract:

The Military Training Centre in the village of Perevalnoye in Soviet Ukraine was set up in 1965 at a time when the Southern African libration movements were determined to expand their guerrilla armies. During its 25-year existence, around 18 thousand fighters are estimated to have passed through Perevalnoye military hub, including soldiers from the PAIGC, FRELIMO, MPLA, ZAPU, ANC and SWAPO, as well as the liberation movements from Latin America and the Middle East, including the Palestinian PLO. These extremely diverse cohorts of soldiers met each other at this camp, exchanging their ideas about anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and guerrilla warfare, and imagining a very diverse array of socialist futures. By focusing on the interviews and published memoirs of the Soviet military interpreters who had been working in Perevalnoye with ANC, ZAPU, MPLA and FRELIMO fighters, this paper explores the vernacular understandings of internationalism provided by these Soviet men. It demonstrates how their perceptions were influenced and sometimes challenged by the complex reality of the military training in camp and by the highly varied cohorts of Southern African soldiers that arrived for training. It argues that political imaginary of internationalism was grounded on many different levels: on the daily experience of human interaction in military fields and different notions of soldiering, that each army brought to the camp, on the shared histories of the anti-imperialist wars, including Vietnam and Cuba, as well as the Soviet histories of the Great Patriotic War and the October Revolution.

Paper long abstract:

Exile in Southern Africa represented the possibilities of intellectual and cultural exchange among activists, scholars, and surrounding communities. Considering these exchanges one must question, which this research seeks to do, how women activists and soldiers were positioned vis-a-vis how they were positioning themselves. According to Shireen Hassim through privileging the liberation of the nation, women's emancipation was subordinated, but the Women's Section of uMkhonto weSizwe was not silent. It was through the political organizing of the Women's Section, throughout various geographical bases, that there was a social cultural and intellectual reimagining of what liberation would manifest as for not only Southern Africa but more specifically for women. According to Hassim and Suttner the question of gender equality in MK was salient prior to the influx of younger radical people after the 1976 protests. Their arrival marked a change in the manner and language in which women demanded gender equality. At the 1985 Kabwe Conference of the MK, the Women's Section circulated a paper within which they argued that “a women's movement is as decisive as the imperativeness of a working-class movement” Hassim, 2004:447). Taking into account their multiple solidarities and transnational sisterhoods, this paper, as part of a larger project, thus concerns itself with tracing the disjuncture between official ANC policy positions and other documentary and oral sources concerning the position of women in the movement and how their imagined future liberation stood to gain for Southern Africa.

Paper short abstract:

Books and reading were central to the political life of MK trainees. Camp libraries were resourced through transnational networks that I trace in the paper. By looking at what people read, I engage the production and exchange of ideas which shaped MK militants’ political views and imagined futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the role of books and reading in the making of South Africa’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in the late 1970s. This period, which saw a mass influx of recruits into MK and reinvigoration of military struggle following the 1976 Soweto uprising, also coincided with the opening of new military camps in Angola, with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries providing the bulk of provisions. Along with weapons, communication systems, uniforms, food and medical supplies, books and other reading material were viewed as essential to camp logistics, and camp libraries were created and resourced thanks to transnational solidarity networks which are traced in the paper. In order to give meaning to the notion of MK as a political army, meaning the subordination of MK to the political leadership of the ANC, political education was an integral part of military training and books were seen as important for the political life and welfare of trainees. Moreover, books were not just an ideological tool, but also a source of pleasure and enjoyment in an otherwise harsh environment. By looking at what people read and the discussion of these texts in the camps, the paper engages the production and exchange of ideas which shaped MK militants’ political views and imagined socialist futures. Although the latter remain to be achieved post-liberation, the political upbringing of MK cadres has had a lifelong impact on their understanding of the world.

Paper short abstract:

Looking at Frelimo- ZANU military cooperation, this paper analyses the solidarity relationship developed between Frelimo and ZANU fighters on the battlefield. Revealing, thus, the kind of solidarity that shaped the liberation struggle on the battlefield and the exchanges it produced.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the contexts and the mechanisms through which Frelimo supported ZANU’s liberation armed struggle militarily. Solidarity relationships between Frelimo and ZANU were substantial, influential and took many forms. Soon after the proclamation of Mozambique's independence in June 1975, the Frelimo government strengthened the relationship developed with ZANU during its liberation struggle on the Tete Front. It started a process of directly supporting the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, first by allowing the transfer of ZANU headquarters from Zambia to Mozambique, creating ZANLA guerrilla bases inside Mozambique, and setting up Zimbabwean refugee camps on Mozambican soil. Frelimo also established military cooperation with ZANU by covering the movement of soldiers from the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA, the armed wing of ZANU), establishing military forces at the main border with Rhodesia and sending Mozambican soldiers to fight alongside ZANLA inside Rhodesia. The paper aims to explore what happened in the joint military cooperation between Frelimo and ZANLA fighters in the operational areas. It is based on archival material, interviews with Zimbabwean and Mozambican war veterans, and published memoirs.

I contend that although the multitude of military training and ideologies played out in the war, creating frictions between Frelimo soldiers and ZANLA on the battlefield, this had a minimal impact on the development of the war itself, in the sense that more than creating tensions and disrupt the course of the war, these differences allowed military exchanges and shaped specifically military solidarities and legacies.

Paper short abstract:

Our communication is based on an ongoing investigation. It seeks to study youth participation in the nationalist armed struggle in Mozambique between 1964 and 1974 and the paths taken by these militants in the immediately subsequent period, in the new context of independence.

Paper long abstract:

Having as a background the study of the Mozambique Liberation Front, its emergence and action on the ground, but also on other fronts of struggle, we are mainly interested in studying the role played by young combatants, whose ages would be between 15 and 18 years old. It is intended in this way to see, in what molds it was.

Our starting question and the central question that we intend to answer taking into account the initial phase of the investigation was defined as follows, which guides the present work: What is the role of these young people in the armed struggle of liberation and what is its relevance to maintain the operationalization of FRELIMO?

This gave rise to the derived questions: What were its origins? How did the families face the situation? Were they against? Or were they in favor? What are your motivations? How were they seen by FRELIMO? How did they see themselves? Would there be a group identity based on an age group? What are the individual trajectories of young fighters in the post-independence period? Did this segment provide FRELIMO's intermediate cadres in the post-1974 period?

Taking into account our research so far, the following hypotheses can be put forward: their origins were diverse and this activity provided them with a certain social and material status; they were seen by FRELIMO as the “backbone” of their army and they themselves felt their value; some of these elements joined the ranks of FRELIMO after 1974.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to analyse how UNITA produced a narrative of suffering along its trajectory, especially by borrowing elements from the Chinese Communist Party’s Long March. This heroic narrative was explored as an instrument of imagining hope during the last years of the Angolan Civil War.

Paper long abstract:

In 1965 11 members of UNITA were sent to the People’s Republic of China for a military training at the Nanjing Military-Political Academy. Later in that year, they were among the first UNITA’s combatents to enter Angola in order to start the mobilization of the people. In his autobiography, Chiwale, one of the 11 men trained in China, characterizes this event as a "great odyssey". Two years later, UNITA’s operation from Zambia was banned by Kaunda’s government, raising an extensive disorganization in UNITA’s activities inside Angola. Miguel Puna states that for those making that "great march", it was a period of great difficulties. In 1970, UNITA’s information bulletin, Kwacha-Angola, began to display a narrative of suffering, which was gradually combined with an idea of resilience and revival, from which descends UNITA's own version of a Long March of overcoming obstacles. By integrating UNITA’s stock of cultural artifacts, this narrative was used in at least two other critical moments in UNITA's history to promote a sense of community, hope and stability. The first took place between 1976 and 1977, when UNITA was expelled from Huambo by the forces of the MPLA and Cuba, and the second, from 1999, when UNITA was expelled from its bases in the south of Angola, until the end of the Civil War, in 2002. This proposal will analyse this narrative through the biographical writings of UNITA’s former combatents Samuel Chiwale, Miguel Puna and Alcides Sakala, and documents from the Portuguese National Archives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares visions of politics in the South African liberation army Umkhonto weSizwe & the Angolan state army FAPLA that hosted it in the 1970s-80s, revealing ideas and relationships more contingent & contradictory than the official position of solidarity based on a common political cause.

Paper long abstract:

Camps in Angola were crucial training grounds for the South African liberation army Umkhonto weSizwe from the late 1970s , a period when the Angolan state army FAPLA was itself engaged in a civil war. Based on interviews and published memoirs, this paper examines visions of politics within the two allied armies, and the mutual regard of the two forces.

In the MK accounts, politics becomes a way of rationalising the frustration that recruits felt as they waited in camps for years. Politics, specifically socialist politics, was invoked in unifying soldiers from different racial and class backgrounds. But some saw the ideas that inspired them abused by the leadership to suppress dissent.

FAPLA officers' accounts demonstrate they were animated by political ideas but distrusted politicians, while conscripted men had little regard for the politics of the war. FAPLA was united by a belief in a superior military way of doing things that was contrasted with the moral equivocation and ineffectual behaviour of politicians. FAPLA’s self-regard as a liberation army belies the reality that few Angolan anti-colonial fighters ended up in the independent state army, which relied heavily on the expertise of Angolans trained in the colonial army.

Comparing these accounts shows that soldiers were acutely aware of the political ideas that underlay the Angolan war and the South African liberation struggle. But it also reveals ideas and relationships more contingent and perhaps contradictory than the offical ANC’s and Angolan government’s position of solidarity based on a common political cause.