Eleanor O'Gorman carried out the research for this book in 1993 and wrote her thesis in 1999. As she writes, ‘revisiting a PhD sounds a warning bell to writer, reader and publisher’. The resulting book might have been bogged down in the problematics of a decade ago, or have curdled or rotted with time. O'Gorman, however, turns the delay to her advantage.
She gains three positives from it. First, it has allowed her to winnow out the preceding literature on women in the Zimbabwean war, a good deal of which was purely rhetorical and no longer needs to be considered. Second, it makes it possible to set the Zimbabwean case in the context of the developing general discussion of gender and violence. Third, it has enabled her to compare and contrast the violence to which Zimbabwean women were subjected in the 1970s with their experience in the 2000s.
This is a book rich in contrasts and comparisons. Its historiographical discussion is all the stronger for focusing on work which has demonstrated a continuing influence and leaving out the ephemeral and fashionable. O'Gorman is the last person to believe that women's participation in war has earned them improved rights. And she finds substantial and controversial continuities between earlier and recent gender violence in rural Zimbabwe.
In this book violence is something which happens to women rather than something they choose. Relatively little attention is paid to female combatants. Violence happens where the great majority of women are, in the villages or in the ‘keeps’ constructed during the guerrilla war, rather than on the battlefield. Women have agency but it allows them to survive violence rather than to embrace or avoid it. And because it is unavoidable, all women are in one way or another involved. The male combatants, whether Rhodesian soldiers or auxiliaries or guerrillas or mujibas, are hard to distinguish from each other in their arbitrary and ruthless demands – for food, for sex, for obedience. Gendered memory calls down a plague on all their houses. Even women who sang liberation songs at guerrilla pungwes remember that they were happy then – and they were terrified. Women whose soldier or camp guard lovers were killed by guerrillas defiantly remember that love was real, unpredictable and should have been spared violence.
O'Gorman's is a ‘traditional’ rural story. We do not know what happened in the townships, once the site of much parentally imagined violence against women. We do not know what happened to women on the commercial farms. (We do unfortunately know what happened to women in refugee camps in Zambia and Mozambique.) Political rhetoric finds little place and when it is cited – like Mugabe's famous promises to revolutionary women – it indicates not so much the hypocrisy of politicians as their irrelevance and impotence. This is a grimly realistic book. If you have time to read only one book on women in the Zimbabwean war then this should be it.
