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.