View the H-Africa Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Africa's September 2008 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Africa's September 2008 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Africa home page.
<clappertonm@yahoo.com> In reply to Elaine Windrich's Reply In her reply to the enquiry, Windrich says the following: "And why include in this question 'in Mozambique and Zambia' as well as 'in Rhodesia' when the only victims there were the Rhodesian refugees in the ZANU and ZAPU camps killed in the cross border raids by the Rhodesian Security Forces? Ironically, the most notorious of these was the raid on the Nyadzonia camp in Mozambique, with a death toll of more than 600, which was carried out by the Selous Scouts in 1976, the only source for this inquiry". In reply, I wish to point out that this assertion overlooks several nuances and perpetuates a distortion of Zimbabwean history. (1) Refugees were not the only victims of the RSF's hot pursuit operations. That is what Zanu and Zapu SAID, but the more important question is why they said this and what was at stake in claiming so. (2) In a war where guerrillas camouflaged themselves by wearing civilian clothes, where camps were arranged in such a way that refugee camps became reservoirs for recruitment, where parade squares were interspaced with maize fields, it is not a simple matter to say victims were 'refugees'. (3) As I highlighted in my earlier post, there was an advantage in labeling guerrilla deaths as 'refugee casualties': it mobilized the UN, Third World, Africa, and other voices to the cause. It made the RSF attack more callous if one said the air force firebombed innocent children and women, rather than to say they took out legitimate military targets. (4) After 1975, Machel turned much of the Mozambican population, especially on the Rhodesian border, into village-based militia and armed them with AK-47 rifles. How are we to define many RSF raids on these militarized villages, and is it correct to call the casualties simply 'civilian'? I think not. I could go on and on, but I do think that the 1970s war requires us to move away from a bi-polar analysis that looks at what one OR the other side. That is how the history of that era has been written by many and I worry that it puts events in two parallel universes of discourse even as their engagement through gunfire is the story. That means we need to move away from these multiple versions of dichotomy--civilian/military, friend forces/enemy, puppets/nationalists, etc. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga Assistant Professor of Science, Technology & Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) E-mail: clappertonm@yahoo.com
|