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For Better or Worse. Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle
Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi
208 pp
ISBN: 0 7974 2105 X

At the end of the war in 1979, many thought the conflict had given birth to a gender revolution because women had participated in it equally.

In for Better or Worse, Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi disputes the official orthodoxy that a gender revolution took place during the war of liberation. Through investigations she reveals that ZANLA, the ruling ZANU PF's military wing, extensively mobilised women as porters, nurses, secretaries, cooks and teachers. She says although although these women's duties were crucial to the struggle and glorified as such by the politicians' rhetoric, the guerrilla movement perceived their roles as secondary to the activities of men.

"Female fighters were confined to the rear, limiting their participation in what the commanders perceived as the real battles - the engagements with Rhodesian security forces at the front. ZANLA erased women from promotion in the liberation army's hierarchy, from decision-making and from voicing their very real concerns."

The writer, who had access to ZANU PF's archives, scrutinises a doctrinal terrain laced with tension between ideology and tradition, between the more and less educated cadres and between the women on the ground and the party's leadership.

In a vivid manner, she tells the story of women who escaped from fetching water and firewood and cooking for their families, to the more menial work of cooking for the male guerrillas and carrying food and weapons to and from the war front.

"The Zimbabwean nationalist movement was a violent exercise, violating both men and women, but in ways that were specific to their gender," Nhongo-Simbanegavi says, but adds that, "This study does not in any way suggest that women monopolised suffering in the liberation war, neither does it suggest that all men were privileged and that they all benefited from the war."

The author says it was only towards the end of the war in 1977 that ZANLA started slowly recognising the importance of women within its ranks.

In that year Teurai Ropa Nhongo, now Joyce Mujuru, was appointed to the party's decision-making central committee as secretary for women's affairs. A year later, she became the head of the department of women's affairs. But other female cadres largely saw the department as a club for the commanders' wives. Mujuru, married to Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru), the ZANLA commander, was deputised by the late Sally Mugabe, the wife of ZANLA's commander-in-chief Robert Mugabe, and Julia Zvobgo, the wife of Eddison Zvobgo, the party's publicity secretary at the time.

For Better or Worse supports the argument made by other authors that while ZANU PF embraced women within its military wing, it only reinforced women's subjugation by relegating them to "less important" military roles.

It proves why Zimbabwean nationalism is increasingly seen to be of male orientation. 

© The author/publisher

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