Guns and Guerrilla Girls Women in the Zimbabwean National Liberation Struggle (original) (raw)
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women and the liberation war in zimbabwe
In revolutionary war situations there is often no defined front line and both women and children can come directly under attack: thus the stereotyped image of men going off to war, and women staying at home away from the conflict, has to be radically revised. 1 In such revolutionary conflicts, women are not merely victims but also actively work sideby-side with men in support of the war effort. The position of women in liberation struggles shows that wars have to be judged not just from the position of men, but also from the position of women who incessantly struggle to sustain the force of the revolution. This paper argues, therefore, that the story of a liberation struggle cannot be complete without an analysis of the role women play in guerrilla warfare revolutions.
Identity and Exclusion in the Post–War Era: Zimbabwe's Women Former Freedom Fighters
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 2004
This study examines how demobilisation and reintegration processes affected the roles and status of women ex-combatants after the liberation war in Zimbabwe. The success of post-war demobilisation and reintegration depends on the formulation and implementation of programmes that recognise the contributions of women and treat them as a differentiated mass with specific aspirations. In disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) processes after most wars, the roles of women in the conflicts and their post-war needs are ignored or not adequately addressed. Their critical roles and contributions in the conflict and its resolution are rarely recognised. The vital contribution that women fighters made in Zimbabwe's liberation struggle between 1962 and 1979 has gone largely unsung. Through extensive interviews with female ex-combatants, this article argues that the absence of a gender-sensitive demobilisation and reintegration policy resulted in the marginalisation and exclusio...
African Journals Online (AJOL), 2016
Part of Zimbabwe's socio-political and economic crisis of the past decade can be easily traced back to contestations about the place of Zimbabwe's war of liberation (1966-1979) in constructions of political legitimacy. Since, for obvious reasons, the liberation war and its memory are inseparable from power and hegemonic control in the postcolony, the narrative of the war in Zimbabwe has long been a preserve of powerful and often male political leaders. This means that female narratives of the war are subordinated and with them, women's roles in the war and post-independence power politics. This paper deploys Maria Pia Lara's theory of women's life writings as inherently 'emancipatory' and 'disclosive' to explore Fay Chung's counter-hegemonic attitude in her autobiography Reliving the Second Chimurenga. Our analysis focuses on how Chung centres female experiences of the liberation war to revise prevailing phallocentric representations of the war which border on political misogyny.
The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2015
The subject of sexuality of the liberation fighters during the Zimbabwean independence war has received some attention, largely in studies that have been undertaken by women activists. Nhongo-Simbanegavi has examined how sexuality played out in the interaction between female and male inmates in camps outside Zimbabwe that accommodated the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) forces and refugees from Rhodesia. (1) Her concern is largely the deliberate abuse of women by men in spite of the liberation rhetoric of the time. Lyons attends to the subject of sexuality and stresses the failure of the liberation project to free women cadres from the sexual avarice of fellow male cadres. (2) O' Gorman refers to the sexual abuse of rural African women by District Assistants (DAs) who were tasked by the Rhodesian authorities to monitor residents of Protected Villages (PVs) during the war. (3) She makes the contention that despite suggestions and accounts of sexual relations and...
Zimbabwean women have been a force in the political evolution of the country before and since its independence in 1980. They have affected and been affected by the various political conflicts which the country has witnessed. Their political activism stretches back to the important, albeit insufficiently acknowledged, role as combatants and ‘mothers of the revolution’1 in the Second Chimurenga. In the 1990s, Zimbabwean women mobilized themselves into a strong movement, but their capacity to influence effective collective action towards adoption of a new constitution and other issues was constrained by the combined political and economic meltdown of 2000 to 2008. In the constitutional review process in 2012, Zimbabwe’s women have, once again, demonstrated their ability to join forces on issues of common concern. Throughout the ensuing political transitions in Zimbabwe, women have been engaged in a parallel struggle for equal rights, seeking to overturn the negative effects of a deep-seated colonial and patriarchal order. In addition to fighting colonialism, some women joined the liberation struggle to fight for equality with men to establish a more egalitarian society. The different levels of political, intellectual and ideological maturity the women gained during the liberation struggle prepared them for further struggles for women’s emancipation from oppression with which they were to engage in post-independence Zimbabwe.
Women Peace and Security in Zimbabwe - The case of conflict in non war zones
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is the United Nation's (UN) key policy instrument for addressing gender violence in conflict zones. However, the agenda has been preoccupied with "hot" conflicts, and its application and relevance to sustained, but "low level" conflict situations is poorly conceptualized. This research considers this issue through a case study of Zimbabwe since 2000. I make the case for broadening the understanding of conflict as found in the WPS agenda. This paper addresses the question: 'How does the case of Zimbabwe exemplify the need for a broader understanding of conflict within the WPS agenda as it applies to non-war settings?' I first consider the nature of non-war zones, adopting a feminist international relations theory perspective, incorporating elements of postcolonial feminist theory and critical race theory. We then review Zimbabwe's recent history and situate it as a country in non-war conflict zone. We situate Zimbabwe's recent history clearly within the concept of non-war zones and discuss the nature of gender violence in this setting. My analysis adds to the body of literature and research on non-war zones and argues for broadening the WPS agenda to encompass a broader understanding of conflict, specifically arguing for the centrality of gender-based violence in non-war situations, as exemplified in Zimbabwe's recent history. [Please DO NOT cite this paper without the author's permission as it is still in the publishing process]
Abstract: Women have had active roles as fighters and activists during the armed conflicts of Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as well as they have been mere victims of the widespread sexual violence that characterized those wars. Their situation has been marked by the place they were forced to occupy since colonial times and that was kept after independence; and despite that they managed to operate on this system of subordination during war, that was not enough to keep their gains in the postwar order. A gendered analysis from a feminist perspective contributes to shed light on some of those issues.
In/Visible Girls: “Girl Soldiers”, Gender and Humanitarianism in African Conflicts, c. 1955–2005
Springer eBooks, 2020
DDR [Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration] programmes for children are drastically under-funded. And, because of their invisibility and the discrimination they suffer, it is girls who particularly lose out'. 2 African girl soldiers have historically been subject to a triple invisibility: as females, as children, and as black Africans. Even when child soldiers became a major focus of international humanitarian concern in the late 1980s and 1990s, the stereotypical image of the 'African child soldier' that saturated human rights reports, news media and humanitarian appeals was that of a young boy, in a ragged t-shirt and flip flops, carrying an AK-47, staring dead-eyed at the camera. Girls were conspicuous by their absence in these initial campaigns against the recruitment and use of child soldiers, despite the fact that estimates suggested around thirty to forty per cent, or 120,000, of the 300,000 children associated with armed forces were in fact female. These girls occupied multiple roles ranging from being porters and cooks, to spies, to 'bush wives', and even armed combatants, forming a 'shadow army' that provided invaluable labour to armed groups. 3 When girl soldiers did emerge as objects of humanitarian concern in the later 1990s, attention focused not so much on their active participation in front line combat, as with boys, but in relation to their victimhood, and specifically on their experiences of sexual violence. When it came to 'saving' these girls and rehabilitating them from their traumas in post-conflict environments however, there was a clear failure within international peacebuilding efforts to include girl soldiers in the disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration (DDRR) programmes that were formulated to turn 'soldiers' back into 'civilians'. This chapter seeks to explore why, despite the fact that African girl children figure so prominently in humanitarian imagery and discourses of salvation as 'universal icon(s) of