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.