145 AUTHOR: THE “LOGIC” OF RENAMO CIVIL Wesley Mwatwara1, Postdoctoral Fellow WAR VIOLENCE: TRans-boRDER AFFILIATION: COMMUNITIES AND RENAMO 1Department of Historical and INCURSIONS IN EASTERN Heritage Studies, University of Pretoria ZIMBABWE, 1980s-1992 EMAIL:
[email protected] ABSTRACT DOI: https://dx.doi. This study investigates the dynamics of civil war violence org/10.18820/24150509/ by Renamo forces among trans-border communities in Honde Valley from the early 1980s to 1992 when SJCH45.v1.8 the Mozambican Civil War ended. In its venture to ISSN 0258-2422 (Print) understand reasons given by ordinary people in Honde ISSN 2415-0509 (Online) Valley for forging relationships with Renamo, this article does not seek to dismiss but to make sense Southern Journal for of the violence. The article analyses the targets of Contemporary History violence to determine whether there was a switch 2020 45(1):145-170 from indiscriminate to selective violence or vice versa. Through adding another stratum of analysis to this discussion of wartime relationships, this study discusses PUBLISHED: violence in the context of Renamo’s relations with foreign 14 July 2020 civilians and Mozambican refugees living in a country whose official international policy was anti-Renamo. It concludes that the relationship between the Honde Valley people and Renamo forces was complicated and sometimes qualified as “being with” Renamo, at times “being with” the Zimbabwe security forces and at yet other times as non-aligned. By examining this dimension of the relationship, this article does not seek to sanitise the acts of banditry, looting and killing by the Renamo units, but to expose currently silenced micro-narratives of the incursions in the Honde Valley Keywords: Renamo, borderland, Honde Valley, violence, cross-border trade, Zimbabwe Published by the UFS http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/jch © Creative Commons 1.