Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean National Liberation Struggle

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Africa World Press, 2004 - History - 338 pages
Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle is about women guerilla fighters in the Zimbabwean National Liberation war (1965-1980). It provides an examination of the plethora of representations of women who joined the struggle for national independence and contributes to a feminist understanding of Zimbabwe and African history and politics.Most previously published accounts about women's roles in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle have tended to focus on their "feminine" or "natural" roles as mothers or alternatively on the post-independence concerns expressed by women in Zimbabwe. Both of these views have ignored and excluded women's actual experiences of guerilla fighting.Guns and Guerilla Girls is the first text to both challenge the representations of "women as warriors" and provide a space for women ex-combatants in Zimbabwe to re-present their past and their histories. The text is also original in its aim to create a dialogue within postcolonial discourse in order to facilitate understanding and healing vis--vis women's war time experiences.The book deals specifically with the case of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, and provides an in-depth analysis of the different experiences women have of war when they take up arms to fight for their nation and liberation. The text allows women to describe their own history while providing a detailed analysis of the history of the struggle from a gendered perspective.
 

Contents

Dilemmas in Feminist Fieldwork
3
Womens Oral History
9
Women in
19
A Gendersensitive View of the Literature
25
Zimbabwean Nationalism
39
Zimbabwe Womens Perceptions of Emancipation
50
Not Western Feminism Please
56
Gender in the Struggle
67
The problems with women in war
155
The Frontlines
162
The Other View
169
The Differences
175
The Zimbabwe Peoples Army
178
Marriage
192
Women the Nation and the Domestic
213
Crochet
227

The Bus Boycotts
85
Pearce Commission
91
Women in the Second Chimurenga
107
The Fighting
117
White Rhodesian Womens Roles
128
Mothers of the revolution
141
The Telling of History in Zimbabwe
251
Forgive and Forget
268
Conclusion
281
Glossary
299
Index
325
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