Guns and Guerrilla Girls: women in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle (review)

The book is based on the author’s PhD thesis and draws upon 12 months of fieldwork in Harare in 1996–7. Inspired by the field of subaltern and postcolonial studies, Lyons’s aim is to write women back into Zimbabwean liberation war history, thereby ‘reducing’ their subaltern status and making them subjects of history. Her critique is not that women have not been represented in official versions of the history of the struggle; instead, Lyons wishes to problematize dominant representations of ‘heroic African women fighters … carrying babies on their backs and a gun over their shoulders’ (p. xiii) in official accounts of the war. Through eighteen interviews with women ex-combatants, she aims to give a voice both to those who experienced the war as ‘guerrilla girls’ fighting on the frontline or in training in camps in Zambia and Mozambique, and to those who did not leave home for military training but played crucial roles carrying weapons and cooking for the comrades (chimbwido in ChiShona).

As well as focusing on the period of the liberation war (1964–80), the book also makes important connections with the role of women in the first Chimurenga uprising in 1896–7, the early rise of nationalism in the 1950–60s and the position of women ex-combatants in the post-independence period. Lyons argues that, despite the socialist rhetoric of female liberation and emancipation prevalent during the struggle, women ex-combatants were stigmatized after the war as ‘prostitutes’ or ‘mistresses to the male combatants’, and were therefore deemed unsuitable for marriage. On the other hand, attempts were made to reinscribe them into traditional domestic roles as housewives instead of using the skills women gained to groom them for more public roles.

Lyons argues that women’s post-war marginalization should not be seen as a surprise. Contrary to the glorification of women’s roles in official versions of liberation history, she argues, women were not even treated equally during the war. Lyons here wishes to attack the common assumption ‘that women fought side by side with their men in the struggle, but as soon as the war was over they did not receive the sexual equality they had fought for’ (p. xxi). Hence, Lyons maintains, the marginalization of women ex-combatants in independent Zimbabwe emerges logically out of their unequal treatment during the war. Often, women remained behind in training camps rather than being able to join the fighters on the front line. For many women, this was a great disappointment – as Monica, who was trained in ZANU’s Osibisa Camp, recounts: ‘I was appointed to [guard a camp]. As much as I wanted to go to the front, since I had come to fight the enemy, they always wanted people to look after the camps’ (p. 119).

Lyons does not claim to be writing a final women’s history of the war, but she points out that ‘it is essential to get the history of the war told from as many perspectives as possible’ (p. xxiii). She admits that some women ex-combatants have produced their own novels on the struggle and have told their stories in edited book projects. However, she argues, these books have not been readily available to Zimbabweans. Although the book is written in an accessible style that makes it suitable for a wider than strictly academic audience, it remains doubtful that this book – which is published outside Zimbabwe by Africa World Press – will make a great difference in that regard.

The strength of the book lies in its comparison between hegemonic representations and women’s own voices, and its rich historical contextualization. Lyons has done an impressive job in drawing upon a wide range of newspapers, magazines, film, public speeches, public monuments, fiction and literature. The use of a diverse range of sources could also be seen as a weakness, however, as it is not always clear why the material has...