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Studies of revolution generally regard peasant popular support as a prerequisite for success. In this study of political mobilization and organization in Zimbabwe's recent rural-based war of independence, Norma Kriger is interested in the extent to which ZANU guerrillas were able to mobilize peasant support, the reasons why peasants participated, and in the links between the post-war outcomes for peasants and the mobilization process. Hers is an unusual study of revolution in that she interviews peasants and other participants about their experiences, and she is able to produce fresh insights into village politics during a revolution. In particular, Zimbabwean peasant accounts direct our attention to the ZANU guerrillas' ultimate political victory despite the lack of peasant popular support, and to the importance that peasants attached to gender, generational and other struggles with one another. Her findings raise questions about theories of revolution. ZIMBABWE'S GUERRILLA WAR AFRICAN STUDIES SERIES 70 GENERAL EDITOR J.M. Lonsdale, Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge ADVISORY EDITORS J.D.Y. Peel, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, with special reference to Africa, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London John Sender, Faculty of Economics and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge PUBLISHED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE AFRICAN STUDIES CENTRE, CAMBRIDGE A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume. ZIMBABWE'S GUERRILLA WAR Peasant Voices NORMA J. KRIGER Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, The Johns Hopkins University Th, tght of he Unt...' V of Cambr-lgc to prt i and sell all mwnn, f bool s He, Vn1tshd hr 14snry' Il s, I.134 The Un-t.s.lq he., printed and jabhshsd o ntnousiy smce 1384. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge NEW YORK PORT CHESTER MELBOURNE SYDNEY Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia D Cambridge University Press 1992 First published 1992 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge British Library cataloguing in publication data Kriger, Norma J. Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. - (African studies series; 0065-406X, 70). 1. Zimbabwe. Guerrilla warfare, history 1. Title II. Series 355.0218 Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Kriger, Norma J. Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. - (African studies series; 0065-406X, 70). 1. Zimbabwe. Guerrilla warfare, history I. Title 11. Series 355.0218 ISBN 0 521 39254 3 hardback Contents List of maps page viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Peasant revolutions: theories and methods 5 2 Inequalities and peasant grievances 51 3 Strategies, goals and appeals: continuity and change 82 4 Guerrilla-civilian relations: the issue of popular support 116 5 Struggles in the struggle 170 6 Legacies of the war for peasants 212 7 Conclusion 237 Appendix: Field research 243 Notes 249 Bibliography 277 Index 296 Maps page 2 Zimbabwe and its neighbours Land divisions in Mutoko and Mudzi districts* Wards in Mutoko Tribal Trust land * After independence, many places that had been named after colonial heroes were given African names. Where the settlers had used African names but misspelled them, the new government corrected the errors. For example, Mtoko district became Mutoko district and Mrewa district became Murewa. Acknowledgements This book grew out of my Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1985, in the Department of Political Science at MIT. I am indebted to my supervisor, Lucian Pve. and Suzanne Berger, Sara Berry, and Myron Weiner for their support and encouragement. Michael Bratton, Gwendolen Carter, Michael Schatzberg, Terence Ranger, and anonymous readers also commented on the dissertation. I have benefited from presenting papers at conferences, of which two stand out. The 'Culture and Consciousness' conference at Manchester University in September 1986 was a consciousness raising experience. I am especially grateful to David Lan, Ken Manungo, Terence Ranger and Richard Werbner for increasing my awareness in different ways. In April 1988, the Humanities Centre at the University of Copenhagen hosted a conference on southern Africa and I appreciate the participants' useful suggestions. Many people read parts of this book in its early stages. I thank Stephen Bunker, David Cohen, Steven David, Toby Ditz, Michael Doyle, Will Moore, Robert Peabody, Laurie Salitan, Michael Schatzberg, Ron Weitzer, and William Zartman. A number of people read and commented on a draft manuscript completed in November 1988 and I thank them too: David Cohen, Matt Crenson, Phil Curtin, Dick Flathman, Germaine Hoston, Preben Kaarsholm, Dick Katz, Michael Schatzberg, and James Scott. I am grateful to John Lonsdale, editor of the African Studies Series, and Jessica Kuper at Cambridge University Press for expeditiously reading it and sending it to other readers. Terence Ranger, Michael Bourdillon, and an anonymous third reader provided helpful suggestions. I feel very fortunate to have studied an event that attracted the research interest of others. Two district-level studies of Zimbabwe's war of independence have been extremely valuable. I owe a special debt to David Lan and his Guns and Rain and Terence Ranger and his Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabive. Their different findings, despite data often remarkably similar to my own, were provocative and helpful. David Caute's Under The Skin was the first book written by someone sympathetic ix Acknowledgements to the guerrilla cause to give so much attention to guerrilla coercion. It allowed me to be bolder. My debt to those social scientists who in the 1960s and 1970s asked why peasants participated in revolutions is obvious in the text. In Zimbabwe, I was affiliated to the Centre for Applied Social Sciences, and I thank its director, Marshall Murphree, and acting director, Joan May, for their help throughout my stay. I thank Marshall Murphree too for suggesting I ask questions in the field about totems which turned out to have a special significance. The people of Mutoko district must remain anonymous because of possible, although not probable, government retribution for the kind of information they gave. There would be no study without their help and support. I am indebted to Bothwell Kowo, my interpreter, and to Bruce Maitland for accommodation in Mutoko. A grant from the Social Science Research Council supported field work for nearly two years. I also thank the Department of Political Science, The Johns Hopkins University, for a semester of leave in fall, 1988 which enabled me to produce the first draft of this book. Bill Huggins generously allowed me to use his laser printer and provided free computer consulting. I thank Dean Pendleton for producing the maps and Stefan Cornelis for proofreading. Evelyn Brodkin and Janet Levine helped in innumerable ways from the outset of this project. Lastly, I pay tribute to Steve Wilson for the special, all-encompassing interest that only an aspirant spouse could show. Introduction Guerrilla wars are the primary form of armed conflict today. They are fought mostly in Africa and Asia and often involve regional and international powers. The far-reaching implications of guerrilla war attract the attention of scholars interested in military issues, international relations, and the relationship between wars and national development. Guerrilla wars have also caught the attention of scholars who work on peasant revolutions. Most anti-colonial and anti-imperial revolutionary wars this century have involved rural-based guerrilla armies. Peasants, widely held to be conservative and parochial, have been prominent in revolutionary guerrilla movements, both as the source of guerrillas' logistical support and as war victims - about 80 per cent of those killed in contemporary guerrilla wars have been civilians. The prominence of peasants in revolutions surprised analysts who had anticipated proletarian revolutions and they turned their attention to trying to understand why peasants participated in these wars. This book is about peasant mobilization by a guerrilla army and internal struggles within the peasantry that motivated peasants to participate in Zimbabwe's anti- colonial war. Zimbabwe takes its name from the most spectacular of its many stone ruins that were built by indigenous people from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century. Bounded by the Zambezi River in the north and the Limpopo River in the south, the country is some 391,000 square kilometres - slightly smaller than the state of California and 60 per cent greater than the United Kingdom. Zambia borders it in the north and northwest, Botswana in the southwest, Mozambique in the east and South Africa in the south (see map 1). In the early 1970s, on the eve of the guerrilla war, the country had about 275,000 whites, mostly from Britain and South Africa, and five million Africans. Africans are composed of two major ethnolinguistic groups: the Shona and Ndebele. Some 80 per cent of all the Africans are Shona, who are themselves made up of geographically concentrated groups who speak different dialects, including Zezuru, Ndau, Karanga, Manyika, and Korekore. Most whites lived in the urban areas, whereas about 80 per cent of Africans resided in the rural areas. From the Zimbahwc'\ Guerrilla War time of white conquest and colonization in 1889 until Africans won their political independence in 1980, the white minority monopolized economic and political power to further its own interests. Map I: Zimbabwe and its neighbours Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs, National Service Research Unit, Resource Survey No. 1, Mrewa-Mtoko-Mudzi, 1979. Zimbabwe has a distinctive constitutional history. From 1889 to 1923 the territory was ruled by the British South Africa Company on the basis of a British royal charter. It then became a British colony - named Southern Rhodesia after its imperialist conqueror, Cecil John Rhodes - and the tiny white minority was given the right to govern itself.