For Better or Worse?: Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle

This book offers an analysis of women's experiences with the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) during Zimbabwe's war of independence. The book challenges official orthodoxy that a gender revolution occurred in this period and that a generation of liberated women emerged from the struggle. The research instead demonstrates that, while ZANLA extensively mobilized women as porters, nurses, teachers, secretaries and cooks - all crucial to the struggle and glorified in the rhetoric - in substance, the movement perceived these roles as secondary to the activities of men. The author, who has had access to the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) archives, scrutinizes a doctrinal terrain laced with tension between ideology and traditional principles, between the more and less educated cadres, and between the women on the ground and the leadership.