Historical Studies

This article attempts to contribute to an understanding o f the challenges involved in trying to bring the military under constitutional ride. It analyses Civil-Military relations during Basutoland Congress Party (BCP)ZLesotho Congress o f Democracy (LCD) regimes in Lesotho in 1993-1998. In the aftermath o f the 1994 constitutional crisis the civilian government aided largely by the SADC countries oj Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe on the one hand and British and United States o f America on the other made aggressive effort to bring the military under its authority which until July 1998 appear largely successful. In August/September 1998, however, in the midst o f a very serious political crisis, all these efforts were proved to have been futile.

On the morning of February 19th 1990 three members of Lesotho's Military Council, Colonels Sekhobe, Thaabe Letsie and Khethang Mosoeuyane and a member of the Council of Ministers, Colonel Monyane Mokhantso, were arrested. On the following day, the Chairman of the Military Council and Council of Ministers, His Excellency Major-General Lekhanya, issued a statement saying that he had found it ""imperative"" to remove these four officers, three reasons necessitating his move: first, to put an end to insubordination in the army; second, to prevent possible interference in the conduct of judicial investigations; and third, to improve the conduct and coherence of Lesotho's foreign policy.

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Women have always played a vital role in the environment of pre-colonial Zimbabwe especially as they constituted the backbone of traditional agriculture. Pre-colonial studies have either ignored or understated that fact. This article seeks to demonstrate that pre-colonial Shona politics and even violence have always involved struggles and competition over environmentally productive areas, that although politics were dominated by men, it rested upon the productive and reproductive power of the women. Among other things, women were exchanged to foment political alliances or to conclude peace, while male status in political hierarchies depended on who their mothers were. In most cases, as Chivi history will show, female status was only hailed where it served to buttress male hegemony, which also implied male control of environmental resources.

This article explores the role of the ‘diaspora fleet’ in Harare’s urban commuter system. Imported vehicles in the form of haulage trucks and commuter buses were one of the popular and visible forms of diasporic investment over Zimbabwe’s difficult decade spanning from 2000 to about 2010. The article argues that this diaspora fleet occupies a significant place in the history of commuting in Harare. Diasporic investment introduced a cocktail of European vehicles that quickly became ramshackle and ended up discarded in scrap heaps around the city. These imports and the businesses based on them destroyed the self-regulatory framework existing in the commuting business. This disruption was facilitated by the retreat or undermining of the state and city council regulatory instruments, which in turn created a role for middlemen, who manoeuvred to perpetuate a new and chaotic system known as ‘mshika-shika [faster-faster]’, based on a culture of irresponsible competitive gambling. This chao...

This paper is about a 'place' that effectively no longer exists-in the sense of being a recognisable unit of territory. 'Chishanga' has always been a term of contestation, referring more or less tenuously to a stretch of ground across which struggles for authority, power and identity have taken place. In tracking and examining these struggles using oral history techniques, the paper draws attention to the fallacies of a chiefdom-based approach to pre-colonial African history. At the same time, it emphasises the significance or the real and imagined geographies around which identities revolve.

Discipline is a subject more referred to than examined in the history of Zimbabwe's liberation war. While there are references to the administration of punishment in specific circumstances or, more often, contemptuous remarks by Rhodesian soldiers regarding the unprofessional conduct of guerrillas in general, few studies have investigated the systematic deployment of disciplinary structures in Zimbabwe's guerrilla movements. Drawing on internal sources, this article explores this subject by focusing on the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA), the armed wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), in the 1960s and 1970s. These sources show that there was a thin line between the party and its army. The rules governing both were mutually interchangeable under the principle that the 'vanguard party' should guide the gun. The orthodox view regarding the 'triumph of the military' in ZANU is confirmed, but the article goes further to demonstrate how the ZANU High Command gained the capacity to determine the management of discipline and the administration of punishment such that it was, in practice, the gun that guided the party. With time ZANU became highly militarised. The article identifies three phases of this process. Towards the end of the war, and after ZANU and ZANLA had undergone a series of internal crises, they faced a serious challenge of 'anarchism' in the operational zones. This required ZANU's renewed Central Committee to organise a strategy to restore order. This strategy, spearheaded by the Departments of Defence and of the Commissariat, inadvertently elevated these two units as the party's most influential and powerful organs, a legacy that haunts ZANU to this day.

Defensible settlement patterns are neither a new phenomenon in pre-colonial Zimbabwean history nor are they a development peculiar to the 19 th century Shona alone. Nonetheless the 19 th century in many ways constituted a new status quo altogether for the Shona following the establishment of the Ndebele and Gaza states on the western and eastern edges of the Zimbabwean plateau respectively and this forced the Shona to adapt in many ways to conform to a more defensive and security conscious way of life.

The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) emerged from the smouldering ashes of the intra-party violence that followed its break away from the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in 1963 and the clampdown by Rhodesian authorities. Its structures were barely consolidated when it was banned in 1964, and its efforts in exile suffered a crisis of recognition, as the key sponsors of African liberation movements continued to view it as an 'inauthentic' and 'separatist' movement. This article traces the structures and strategies that ZANU used to manoeuvre through these obstacles to become a fully-fledged liberation movement by the mid 1970s. It pays particular attention to the work of individuals and organisations that facilitated this transformation by tracing a wide range of regional and international networks, including military, financial, humanitarian and diplomatic roles. The main sources are the growing corpus of oral reminiscences and published memoirs of the main players. It argues that ZANU was a beneficiary of the contradictions in the international solidarity movement. As it grew in stature, however, its own internal contradictions as a movement threatened to consume it and render the efforts and sacrifices of its exiles worthless. Yet, as the war escalated, these exile networks were the very basis on which an effective diplomatic offensive was launched, which complemented the successes that ZANU had in the battlefield. This aspect of the ZANU war effort is often conveniently omitted by ZANU itself.

This chapter discusses the events unfolding in Chivi in southern Zimbabwe on the eve of colonisation as they are remembered by the local people. This is placed in the wider context of Chivi’s position as a contested terrain fought over between the British and the Transvaal Boers. Emphasis is placed on the implications of this conflict on the validity of the Rudd Concession that was used by the British South Africa Company to occupy what eventually became Zimbabwe. Because Chivi lay also on the route used by the British occupying force, the Pioneer Column, to enter Mashonaland, much of the memories of this episode and the Anglo-Boer conflict are still embodied in its landscape in the form of roads, graves and forts. It is possible to reconstruct the history of colonial conquest and all its contradictions and ambiguities by analysing the peculiarities written in these local landscapes and oral traditions decades after the Scramble with new insights on the subject.

The Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) established Chibi Mission Station in Chivi (Mashonaland, Rhodesia, present-dayZimbabwe) in 1894, but this station was taken over by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in 1907. This paper argues that the DRC take over of the BMS establishments was a turning point in the missionary history of the Victoria district characterized by a phenomenal expansion of preaching centres and a wide network of 'kraal schools'. However, signs of fatigue in the Christian educated class in Chivi were already creeping in in the mid-1920s, when Andreas Pedzisai Shoko, a product of the DRC mission schools, founded one of the biggest independent churches in Zimbabwe, the Zion Apostolic Faith Mission or Zion yeNdaza. It was a combination of the rise of Independent African Christianity and the growing competition amongst different Christian denominations (particularly the Roman Catholic Church, RCC) seeking to expand that ultimately brought an end to DRC monopoly in t...

Three years after the November 2017 coup in Zimbabwe and the installation of Emmerson Mnangagwa as ruling party and state president, there is growing scholarly interest in identifying the character of the post-coup regime, particularly in comparison to the 37-year reign of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. So far, there are continuities and changes, with increasing concerns about a qualitative shift in the militarization of Zimbabwean state and society under Mnangagwa and the further closing down of civil society space. Perhaps more so than during the first two years of post-coup Zimbabwe, this has become abundantly clear during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.