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- Convenors:
-
Jocelyn Alexander
(University of Oxford)
JoAnn McGregor (University of Sussex)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH112
- Start time:
- 30 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Soldiers who fought in southern Africa's liberation struggles came from extraordinarily varied backgrounds, including rural, urban and a host of others. This panel explores how powerful military identities were nonetheless forged, and their consequences in wartime and after.
Long Abstract:
The Southern African armies that fought on all sides of the region's liberation struggles incorporated soldiers from highly diverse backgrounds. Some were rural herdboys, barely in their teens, caught up by the idea of war; some were urban workers, students, or activists with sophisticated political views; others were conscripts to colonial and settler armies, or volunteers motivated by economic and other forces. Army recruits crossed geographical boundaries as well as boundaries of ethnicity and class, gender and education. They nonetheless often formed powerful new military identities that profoundly shaped their lives and allegiances not only in wartime but subsequently. This panel asks, first, just how these identities were formed, seeking to go beyond simple elisions of identity with nationalism, Cold War binaries, or the condemnatory language of collaboration, to explore soldiers' geographical journeys, experiences of the performative disciplines of military training such as marching and drills, and cultural and political facets of soldiering from song to ideology. Second, it asks what the consequences of these identities were for military institutions and the prosecution of war on the one hand, and for the political and social lives of soldiers in the aftermath of war on the other.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Lennart Bolliger (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
Local/loyalist allies of the same settler or colonial army did not form a coherent whole but different units developed distinct military cultures. This paper compares three units of apartheid South Africa’s security forces and explores the emergence and consequences of their particular cultures.
Paper long abstract:
A growing literature has begun to explore the histories of local allies, often termed loyalists, of settler and colonial security forces in Africa. In nationalist narratives, African members of those forces have commonly been denounced as mercenaries and collaborators. In both discourses, loyalists/collaborators belonging to the same security forces have been often portrayed as a seemingly static and coherent group. This has meant that significant differences between units and their consequences have been neglected. In this paper, I compare three units of apartheid South Africa's security forces - Koevoet, the South West African Territorial Force (SWATF), and 32 Battalion - by drawing on interviews with black Namibians and Angolans who served in them. I argue that these units developed distinct military cultures, particularly in aspects of leadership, enforcement of discipline, and race relations. These aspects not only determined the ways in which these units operated during the war but have profoundly shaped the military and social identities of its members to this day.
Marc Howard (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
The oft-misunderstood history of black veterans of the Rhodesian forces is an important and unheralded narrative, offering fascinating insight into the social, political and military dynamics of the war of independence and subsequent process of forging the state during the early years of Zimbabwe.
Paper long abstract:
Within Zimbabwe, the reductionist "sellout" discourse; prevalent within the post-2000 "Patriotic History" propagated by ZANU(PF), casts its narratives of liberation, authority and legitimacy as sacrosanct and counter-narratives as inherently illegitimate and disloyal. This dichotomisation of Zimbabweans as either patriots or traitors perpetuates the myth that Zimbabwe's liberation war was a binary conflict between blacks and whites, with those blacks members of the Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF) simply labelled "sellouts"; devoid of agency, with no attempt to understand their varied and complex motivations for service. This historical fiction is compounded by the highly partial nature of the vast majority of primary accounts, penned by nationalist Africans or white Rhodesian emigres.
By 1976 black soldiers outnumbered their white counterparts by two to one and by the end of the war, at least 40% of army regulars were black - some 2,500. These veterans of the RSF, unlike many whites who swiftly departed at independence, were integral to forging the security apparatus of the new state and, indeed, ensuring it survived the formative years of the early 1980s. Thus how their fortunes fared, and how they contributed to the development of Zimbabwe, is an important and unheralded narrative.
This paper presents the findings from in-depth interviews with veterans of the Rhodesian African Rifles: both the senior regiment and the most effective of the war. Bhebe and Ranger (1995) posed the question: "How far were the Blacks who fought in the Rhodesian forces conscripts or 'volunteers'?". This paper attempts to provide some formative answers.
Clinarete Victoria Munguambe (Oxford University)
Paper short abstract:
The process of armed struggle in Southern Africa was taken by soldiers who fought for liberation, with the support of ordinary people. The aim of my paper is to explore how Mozambicans in urban areas had supported the ZANLA soldiers in their struggle for independence
Paper long abstract:
The support to ZANLA soldiers can be seen from two angles. On one hand, this support was established from the rural area, where people had interacted more closer with the ZANLA soldiers, providing intelligence on the movements of Rhodesian forces, food and helped transport war materials to the Rhodesian border. At the same time that they were strengthen identity aspects, which tied together both Mozambicans and Zimbabwean (particularly those who live in the border areas). One the other hand, the support to ZANLA soldiers were taken by the urban area, where people showed their support through popular manifestations, songs and poetry. The objective of my paper is to analyse the kind of identities that forged the relationship between the ZANLA soldiers and Mozambicans in urban areas. My argument is that popular manifestations, songs and poetry underline the commitment that Mozambicans had with the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, in part moved by the identification of one cause to other, which was stressed by historical, economic and cultural relationship between Zimbabwean and Mozambican people, but also show the interference that the FRELIMO's ideology had in this process, by reproducing the FRELIMO discourse about the support to ZANU and also by fitting in a "vocabulary of the ready-made ideas" which extols the revolutionary process of building a politically and morally correct new man.
Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford) JoAnn McGregor (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
In the final years of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle over 8,000 guerrillas were trained in Angola by Cuban and Soviet instructors. The paper explores guerrillas' stories of cultural exchange and embodied practices, and the legacies of their military identities.
Paper long abstract:
In the final years of Zimbabwe's war for independence more than 8,000 ZAPU guerrillas were trained in Angola by Cuban and Soviet instructors. This massive effort is little more than a footnote in Cold War histories of the region, and barely features in nationalist accounts. We offer a new view point, through a focus on soldiers' stories of cultural exchange and embodied, performed identity. This identity was expressed in marching styles and forms of address as well as in military attitudes, summed up in the Cuban exhortation 'Adelante!'. These men hailed from diverse backgrounds but came to consider themselves embodiments of a particular kind of military efficacy and radicalism that they contrasted with comrades trained in other times and places. Such distinctions caused violent conflict during the war, and have continued to powerfully shape allegiances into the present. An exploration of these military identities offers an important means of understanding the divisive politics of liberation movements, as well as the ongoing valence of veteran fidelities.