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Paper short abstract:

The paper poses fresh questions about making liberation armies in exile, using the ZAPU/ANC campaigns in 1960s Rhodesia. It explores how shared Soviet influences sat in tension with north African training, a Cuban revolutionary imaginary, and cadres’ ideas about politics and military masculinity.

Paper long abstract:

The foreign training of southern Africa’s liberation movement armies was powerfully shaped by the eastern bloc, but as a new literature has begun to explore, this was a mutually constitutive project that encompassed a great range of contradictory influences and much more wide-ranging networks. Based on oral histories, this paper looks at the making of the joint ZAPU/ANC detachments that fought in the most ambitious military venture (for either movement) of the 1960s, the 1967/68 Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns in Rhodesia. ZAPU and the ANC shared Soviet support and training and enjoyed recognition as ‘authentic’ movements, as well as sharing other political, cultural, and social ties – but neither can be reduced to these shared attributes. The paper explores how, in each of these movements, Soviet instruction and ideas sat in tension with training in a range of north African sites; how training in all these sites was situated in relation to an imaginary of revolutionary warfare based most powerfully on Cuba and the figure of Che Guevara, both of which were encountered in schools, media, books and camps; and how different ideas of military masculinity and bodily power, rendered in relation to politics as well as ethnicity, shaped contrasting ideas of a ‘good soldier’. The debates sparked among and between ANC/ZAPU cadres as they crossed these varied terrains, carrying ideas, experiences, and bodily performances with them, were profoundly significant: they constituted military authority and strategy but also fed mutiny and deep divisions that would devastate both movements.