REVIEW ESSAYS
RACE, CLASS AND NATIONAL LIBERATION
IN ZIMBABWE AND SOUTHERN AFRICA:
A REVIEW OF RECENT STUDIES*
The landslide victory of the Zimbabwe African
National Union (ZANU) in the March 1980 elections
marking the transjtion from colonial Rhodesia to
an independent Zimbabwe begins a new phase in
the revolutionary process in that country and in
the whole region of Southern Africa. ZANU’s elec-
toral success was only one step in its seventeen
year history of struggle, the last fourteen of which
have been armed struggle. While the winning of
political independence is hardly final victory, it is a
major advance. This turning point in the Zimbab-
wean revolution provides an opportunity to assess
the contending analyses of that society which
have been advanced over the period of the libera-
tion struggle. Such an assessment is an important
task for a number of reasons. Most immediately,
the effectiveness of continuing international sup-
port for the Zimbabwean revolution depends on an
accurate view of the national and class contradic-
tions in that society, and such support will be criti-
cal in light of the formidable forces arrayed
against ZANU. Secondly, understanding what is
happening in Zimbabwe is also necessary in order
to understand the progress of the liberation move-
ments of Namibia and South Africa and the ongo-
ing revolutions in Mozambique and Angola. Third,
and most importantly, there are lessons to be
learned from the debate over Zimbabwe which are
crucial for general questions about the nature of
national liberation movements, the relation of
class, race, and nation within them, and the pit-
falls of trying to analyze them from the perspec-
tives of Europe and the United States.
As a review of the recent literature on Zimbab-
we will show, ZANU has made significant ad-
vances in analyzing the central contradictions of
colonialism in Rhodesia, advances which have al-
lowed the party to lead the liberation movement to
power, to the surprise of even sympathetic observ-
ers. In particular, ZANU has identified the Zimbab-
wean struggle as fundamentally a national libera-
tion struggle, requiring the mobilization of virtual.
97
Rob McBride
ly the entire African population in a protracted war
against the settlers, whose power comes from
their position as the local agents of Western colo-
nialism. In contrast, most observers in the United
States and Europe have a miserable record of mis-
reporting and misinterpreting the struggle, primar-
ily because the class and race model which they
have tried to impose on Zimbabwe misses the na-
tional basis of the liberation movement. The chal-
lenges of throwing off colonial rule, ending en-
trenched white supremacy, and building economic
independence and socialism are hardly unique to
Zimbabwe; the debate over the ongoing liberation
movement there has wide implications for schol-
ars and activists trying to understand national
liberation today.
This essay will take up these questions by ex-
amining, in the first section, the contrasting analy-
ses of Rhodesia put forward by writers with a gen-
eral anti-colonial perspective. The differences in
analyzing colonial society there are reflected in
differences in analyses of the present process of
transition, as reviewed in the second section. Fi-
nally, the same challenges of locating class and
racial conflicts within a process of national libera-
tion can be seen in the case of South Africa, as
shown by Bernard Magubane’s recent Political
Economy of Race and Class in South.Africa, which
is discussed in the third section.
COLONIALISM AND THE ZIMBABWEAN
LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Two basic lines of analysis have been devel-
oped by critics of Rhodesian colonialism. The one
which has predominated in the European and
North American literature is a class-race model
which identifies class struggle within the bounda-
ries of Rhodesia as the central conflict, with ra-
cism complicating some of the dynamics of class
*Books reviewed are listed in the bibliography at the end of the article.
98
conflict. The main opposing analysis is a national
liberation model which identifies the central con-
flict as the national resistance of the great majori-
ty of the Zimbabwean people against colonial rule
as a whole, both the settlers and their overseas
backers. In this analysis, class conflict takes place
on an international scale, and it goes on within the
African population as well as between them and
the settlers and foreign interests. This second line
of analysis has been most deeply developed for
Zimbabwe by ZANU, and it has guided the organi-
zation in its turbulent but so far successful move-
ment to create a free and independent Zimbabwe.
Since ZANU’s development is so little known,
a summary is in order. The National Democratic
Party (NDP) was founded in Rhodesia in 1960 to
demand full majority role as the basis for indepen-
dence of Britain’s &dquo;self-governing colony&dquo; of
Southern Rhodesia. This marked a qualitative
break with the reformist movements which had
constituted African politics in the territory since
the defeat of the great national uprising of 1896-
1897 (known as the First Chimurenga). The NDP
was banned and reborn as the Zimbabwe African
People’s Union, ZAPU, in 1961, still led by Joshua
Nkomo and still limited in its strategy to pressur-
ing the British to grant majority rule and indepen-
dence. The more radical leadership of ZAPU left in
1963 to found ZANU, based on the political princi-
ple that &dquo;We are our own liberators,&dquo; rejecting the
strategy of international pressure in favor of mobil-
izing the Zimbabwean people to win their indepen-
dence with their own actions, including armed
struggle as a central part of the strategy.
The first battle with Rhodesian security
forces was fought at Sinoia in 1966, by ZANU guer-
rillas infiltrated back into the country from out-
side. ZAPU began similar armed actions shortly
thereafter. Although Sinoia heralded the begin-
ning of the liberation war, it cost the lives of all
seven ZANU combatants involved. The party re-
evaluated its military approach and adopted the
strategy of people’s war, integrating its military
strategy into its primary work of political organiz-
ing. By 1972 the political groundwork had been
laid, and the process of driving the Rhodesian se-
curity forces out of successive areas and organiz-
ing local militias to fight with the Zimbabwe Afri-
can National Liberation Army to defend the liber-
ated territory was begun. The political mobiliza-
tion of the peasantry around progressive political
and economic changes was central to this strate-
gy. This political direction was firmly enough es-
tablished that ZANU as a party was able to survive
the defection of some of its early leaders, such as
Ndbaningi Sithole, and the assassination and im-
prisonment of most of its top leadership in 1974-
76 during the Kissinger-initiated &dquo;Detente&dquo; period.
ZAPU continued its strategy of raids from bases in
Zambia with Nkomo resuming negotiations with
Rhodesian Prime Minister tan Smith whenever
Smith sounded conciliatory. By the summer of
1979, ZANU had established liberated or semi-lib-
erated areas over two thirds of the territory. This fi-
nally pushed Britain, with the United States behind
them, to negotiate with ZANU and ZAPU, allied for
this purpose as the Patriotic Front, leading finally
to Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980 under a
coalition government formed by ZANU.
ZANU’s views have only been expressed in
scattered form, primarily in the party organ, Zim-
babwe News.’ Unfortunately, it has not been re-
printed or distributed widely in the United States.
While material from ZANU has been given minimal
circulation, there is little enough from any source
which can explain the advances of the last few
years.2 The publication in 1979 of C.M.B. Utete’s
The Road to Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of
Settler Colonialism, Imperialism and National Lib-
eration is thus very helpful. Utete is a Zimbabwean
s6holar exiled during the liberation struggle for his
opposition to the colonial regime. He is sympa-
thetic to the liberation movement, and his purpose
in writing is to analyze the structure, development,
and international linkages of settler colonialism
and to &dquo;delineate the modes and patterns of Afri-
can resistance&dquo; to it in order to explain the suc-
cess or failure of various opposition strategies,
and to argue the necessity of basic institutional
changes if independence is to be meaningful (pp.
vii, 3). Utete develops his argument more as a po-
lemic against wrong analyses than as a narrative
history. This sharpens the argument but makes
the book difficult to use as an introduction to the
subject.
Utete organizes his argument around two
main theses which have been at the heart of both
the political and academic debates on the nature
of Rhodesian society and the obstacles to African
independence. His first thesis is that &dquo;settler co-
lonialism in Zimbabwe, and by implication else-
where, particularly Southern Africa, took root and
developed as a system of political domination
resting on ...
[an] economic system of deprivation
and exploitation of the majority in favor of an im-
migrant minority which itself formed the visible,
local agent of imperialism&dquo; (p. 3). In other words,
the primary contradiction in Zimbabwe has been
the colonization of the African population as a
whole for the benefit of the settler population as a
whole, in conjunction with the major imperialist
powers.
The second, related thesis is that Rhodesian
society &dquo;never was, nor did it subsequently be-
come, independent of Britain in the first instance
and of South Africa in the second&dquo; (p. 4).
In arguing his first thesis, Utete shows how
the various aspects of colonization-conquest,
forced labor, theft of land and cattle, denial of po-
litical rights and destruction of community-af-

fected the entire native population in ways that
were interlinked. Settler theft of peasant land in-
tensified the exploitation of the Zimbabwean
workers who were forced into wage labor because
of this dispossession; both processes depended
on continued military subjugation of the African
people. This settler colonialism did produce indi-
vidual collaborators, but no sector or stratum ben-
efited as such. When Bishop Muzorewa took his
position in the last settler government, he did so
on his own, not as a leader of some non-existent
African bourgeoisie. His &dquo;party,&dquo; the United Af-
rican National Congress (UANC) was a patronage
and looting machine with no independent eco-
nomic base-many of his armed auxiliaries signed
on as paramilitary guards for South Africa after in-
dependence. Utete further shows that the colonial
state represented a coalition of all white interests,
in which conflicts within the white settler popula-
tion were resolved within the state structure. Gov-
ernmental control of land, jobs, wages, and social
services guaranteed that &dquo;there would be no such
thing as a poor white&dquo; (p. 35).
Utete’s thesis that &dquo;the basic cleavage in the
system, and hence the source of political conflict
in it, was always the distinction between the colo-
nizers and the colonized&dquo; (p. 4) stands in contrast
to the two main previous studies by anti-colonial-
ist authors, Giovanni Arrighi’s The Political Econo-
my of Rhodesia, and Martin Loney’s Rhodesia:
White Racism and Imperial Response. These two
studies are important in themselves because they
have been relatively accessible. They are also im-
portant because they represent the most common
type of error made by writers and activists who try
to adopt a &dquo;Marxist&dquo; approach to colonized socie-
ties while looking only at the actions of the colo-
nizers, missing the resistance of the colonized.
They repeat today in sophisticated form the mis-
takes which have led generations of European and
white U.S. socialists to deny the revolutionary con-
tent of national liberation movements.
Arrighi attempts to explain the development
of Rhodesian society on the basis of five mutually
interacting classes: &dquo;1) the white rural bourgeoisie
...; 2) large-scale international capitalism ...; 3)
white wage workers ...; 4) the white petty bour-
geoisie ... and 5) the African peasantry and wage
earners&dquo; (p. 339). He sees all political and econom-
ic initiative as coming from the settler classes and
dismisses the African masses as &dquo;politically inert,
passive and hence virtually powerless&dquo; (p. 343).
Having adopted an analytic approach which does
not take account of national oppression or any ma-
terial basis for anti-colonial action, Arrighi looks to
class and finds-mistakenly-that the &dquo;only signs
of class struggle were ... within the European sec-
tion of the population&dquo; (p. 343). The bulk of the es-
say is then an overview of the growth of the coloni-
al economy, providing a useful picture of how
99
competition between white farmers, manufactur-
ers, shop owners, workers, and overseas investors
determined the nature and rate of investment, lev-
els of wages, etc. When Arrighi comes to assess
political development of the 1950s and 1960s, the
period of the rise of the nationalist movement and
the beginning of armed struggle, he can only con-
clude that &dquo;unless the [African population] lapses
into resignation, its widespread discontent will be
channeled into terrorist activities,&dquo; with its only
hope being outside intervention (p. 374).
In contrast, Utete succeeds in explaining the
development of the present national liberation
movement not by looking at a later time period, but
by tracing the often indirect but never absent op-
position by the Zimbabwean people to the main
source of their oppression as a people: the settlers
and their backers. Unlike Arrighi, Loney, and oth-
ers who claim to see the dynamics of Rhodesian
history in class conflict alone, Utete examines
concretely the situation, consciousness, and ac-
tions of the Zimbabwean people. Virtually every
family has had to combine some declining sub-
sistence agriculture in the Tribal Trust Lands
(African reservations) with unstable, sub-poverty
wage labor, ever since colonial development got
underway at the turn of the century. Land theft and
apartheid-like labor controls were central to colo-
nial exploitation in both aspects of African life. He
shows that from the 1920s on, increasing protest
over economic and political grievances in both ur-
ban and rural areas laid &dquo;the foundations of an
authentic liberation movement&dquo; by gradually con-
necting different resistance movements woma-
tional basis (p. 42).
Class conflict is indeed fundamental to set-
tler colonialism and its overthrow, but it cannot be
understood by imposing abstract categories of
bourgeois, petty bourgeois, worker, and peasant
onto a single national population seen as artificial-
ly divided by race. The great majority of Zimbabwe-
an people lived as both &dquo;workers&dquo; and &dquo;peasants,&dquo;
and were dispossessed, starved, repressed, and
exploited as a whole. While they struck as work-
ers, demanded the vote as petty bourgeois, and
fought to keep their land as peasants, the central
dynamic of their resistance was national and anti-
colonial. Class differentiation was secondary.
Those Africans who can be said to have benefited
in some way from colonialism in Rhodesia did so
as individual collaborators, accepting positions
created by the settlers; they never had an indepen-
dent social base.
On the opposite side, the colonizers had dif-
ferent economic interests: farm-owners, manufac-
turers, shopkeepers, workers, and overseas invest-
ors. But from the first conquest in 1890 their pri-
mary interaction was collaboration to take the land
and resources from the African people, control
their labor, repress their continuing opposition,
100
and destroy their social cohesion. The settlers do
indeed constitute the &dquo;visible, local agent of impe-
rialism&dquo; rather than white sectors of an autono-
mous local class structure.
Under settler colonialism, race is the immedi-
ate demarcation of national identity, rather than
some irrational ideological construct. Shona and
Ndebele peoples were ruled together as &dquo;black,&dquo;
just as the settlers had to unite as &dquo;white&dquo; rather
than divide as British and Boer, if they were to suc-
ceed as colonizers.
Loney represents a major school of thought
when he argues that racism blinded the white
workers of Rhodesia to the potential strength of
allying with African workers. This is pure idealism
-if white workers had defected to the African
side, the whole structure of the colony would have
come apart and the settler workers would have
lost every privilege they were seeking.
Loney’s error is compounded when he looks
at the relations between the settlers and the impe-
rialist powers, an error manifested in the very sub-
title, &dquo;White Racism and Imperial Response.&dquo; He
dissociates the settlers from imperial Britain com-
pletely, attributing the racism of Rhodesian socie-
ty to the settlers and putting liberal, neocolonial
Britain in the position merely of responding. This
is only one reflection of the disastrously wrong
central thesi the book: that the settlers created
an autonomous state to perpetuate colonial rule in
Rhodesia against the interests and desires of Brit-
ish capitalism, and that Britain’s role has been a
mistaken policy of passive acceptance. Loney
states his purpose in the introduction:
This book is about the historical devel-
opment of [settler] power, the system-
atic use which has been made of it to
build a prosperous white society in Af-
rica, and the consequent impoverish-
ment of the African population. It is
also about the complicity of British
governments, Labour and Conserva-
tive, in this process (p. 1).
While Loney provides the most readable short
account of Rhodesian history, his thesis that the
settlers were autonomous and Britain merely com-
plicit after the fact, distorts his account at many
crucial points. Most importantly, it would misdi-
rect opposition away from the imperialism of Brit-
ain, and the United States, toward the &dquo;racist&dquo; set-
tlers. While there were sometimes differences
with the settlers over tactics, Britain fostered their
colonization, preserved it when threatened, and
actively supported it in the essential enterprise of
exploiting Zimbabwe’s people and their resources.
His distortion of settler-British relations begins
with his account of the conquest in 1893:
The fact that the victory over the Nde-
bele had been achieved largely by a vol-
unteer army rather than by imperial
forces was to have profound conse-
quences for the future 3f Rhodesia.
The nature of the victory [with the pil-
lage and killing of prisoners] was in it-
self indicative of the fact that in Rhode-
sia, unlike the majority of Britain’s Afri-
can colonies, settlers always provided
the major political impetus (p. 40).
While it is true that the colonial officials in London
would have preferred a conquest with a little less
bloodshed, the main action of the British govern-
ment was to charter the British South Africa Com-
pany for the very purpose of conquering and colo-
nizing the territory, and when the settlers did over-
extend themselves militarily in the face of the
First Shimurenga in 1896, the British did not hesi-
tate to send as many soldiers as necessary.
The same relation continued throughout Rho-
desia’s existence. Loney’s own narrative of the
settlers’ Unilateral Declaration of Independence
(UDI) from Britain, declared an act of rebellion by
Parliament, shows that at precisely the time that
Britain made the greatest show of opposition, the
government actually made sure that the settler
state had all the arms and supplies it would need
(Ch. 6).
This quesiton of the relation of the settlers to
Britain and other imperial powers is central to
Rhodesian history, and it is a real contribution of
Utete’s book that it puts the policy differences be-
tween London and the settler state into the frame-
work of their overall commitment to imperialism,
with the settlers very much subordinate. Utete de-
tails this in terms of military, political, and eco-
nomic relations. More importantly, he shows that
the nationalist strategy of pressuring the British to
force the settlers to decolonize, developed in the
late 1950s and continued in essence by the leader-
ship of ZAPU up to the February 1980 elections,
never could have succeeded. Instead, Rhodesia’s
nature as a settler colony necessitated the full
scale war of national liberation which ZANU led.
While Utete is instructive on the settlers’ de-
pendence on more powerful imperialist states, his
analysis loses some clarity when he addresses the
period after UDI and the imposition of interna-
tional economic sanctions on the &dquo;rebel&dquo; govern-
ment of Ian Smith. Utete’s main argument here is
that Rhodesia switched from dependence on Brit-
ain to dependence on South Africa (pp. 112-113).
Although he does show that British and U.S. firms
retained and expanded their interests in Rhodesia
under the much-violated sanctions, he does not in-
tegrate this with his assertion of South Atrica as
Britain’s imperialist successor. What is missing is
an analysis of South Africa as a powerful sub-im-

perialist state, thoroughly integrated into the capi-
talist world economy but junior to the United
States and Britain.
It is especially important to stress the contin-
uing imperialist roles of the United States and Brit-
ain today, given their public stances as neutral me-
diators who organized &dquo;free and fair&dquo; elections for
a &dquo;peaceful settlement.&dquo; While Utete is uneven in
this part of his analysis, two recent publications
go far to document the extensive covert military
role of the United States: U.S. Military Involvement
in Southern Africa, a valuable collection of original
studies edited by the Western Massachusetts As-
sociation of Concerned African Scholars, and
Guns for Hire: How the CIA and the U.S. Army Re-
cruit White Mercenaries for Rhodesia. The exten-
sive military involvement of the United States fol-
lows its deepening economic and geopolitical in-
terests in the region. While Britain retains a major
influence in this area of its old Empire, the U.S.
has replaced it as the ultimate authority. In the
face of ZANU’s overwhelming popularity in the
British-sponsored elections, one can expect Brit-
ain and the U.S. to increase the publicity about
their benevolent interest in &dquo;peaceful change&dquo; in
Namibia and South Africa while escalating their
covert support for the destruction of the liberation
forces.
The strengths and weaknesses of Arrighi, Lo-
ney, and Utete are sharply reflected in their as-
sessments of the liberation movement. We have
noted Arrighi’s dismissal of it, seeing resignation
or terrorism as the only possible options. Al-
though he was writing in the early stages of armed
struggle (1966), ZANU had already begun charting
a politics of national liberation, and even ZAPU
was far from &dquo;terrorism,&dquo; let alone resignation. (Ar-
righi seems to have felt no reason to amend his po-
sition in the 1973 edition or in his 1979 Reviewarti-
cle) One sees here the ultimate logic of the at-
tempt to superimpose a pure &dquo;class&dquo; model, with a
racial demarcation drawn in, on a history of coloni-
al oppression and national resistance. Arrighi the
&dquo;Marxist&dquo; ends up repeating the very charge of
&dquo;terrorism&dquo; used by the Smith regime against its
opponents.
Loney does no better. He dismisses the re-
ports of the early armed actions by ZANU and
ZAPU as so incredible that, in his mind, they only
discredit the liberation organizations. On the very
eve of the victories of the liberation movements in
Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, he sums
up by saying:
The general picture then in Southern
Africa is one of a strong military alli-
ance of South Africa, Rhodesia and
Portugal backed by the Western pow-
ers which in the present circumstances
can be expected to resist the liberation
101
movements for the foreseeable future.
Only in Guinea-Bissau is there any
chance of a liberation victory soon (p.
199).
In fact, thevictory in the Portuguese colonies
came so quickly that Loney had time to add a post-
script welcoming them,- but not reconsidering any
of his analysis. The point of this observation is not
to demonstrate the clarity of hindsight, but to
show that there are grave problems even among
anti-colonial and Marxist analysts in the imperial-
ist countries in exaggerating the power of imperi-
alism. Even more common and more dangerous is
discounting, ignoring, even ridiculing the analysis
of the liberation movements themselves. If there is
a single lesson to be drawn from a review of these
works in light of today’s advances, it is a recogni-
tion that the liberation movements lead in analyz-
ing their own situations as well as in changing
them.
Utete provides a partial guide to the develop-
ment of the Zimbabwean liberation movemer , es-
pecially on the significance of ZANU’s leadership
in transcending the previous strategy of pressur-
ing Britain for simple independence and voting
rights. Nevertheless, Utete is fragmentary, confus-
ing, and possibly wrong on certain key events, in-
cluding the significance of supporting or opposing
the use of revolutionary violence by different &dquo;na-
tionalist&dquo; organizations (some of which were in
fact collaborating with the regime) (pp. 118-119);
the assassination of ZANU leader Herbert Chite-
po, on which he seems to accept the dubious re-
port of the Zambian government, itself implicated;
and the formation of the short-lived Zimbabwe In-
dependence People’s Army (ZIPA), as independent
of ZANU leadership (pp. 117-118). The purpose of
questioning these points is to show how hidden
the history of the movement still is. It will be some
time before the movement is secure enough to
open up some of the more internal conflicts to
scrutiny by a hostile outside world.
largely
Based on his respect for the role of the Zim-
babwean people and the liberation movement,
Utete has written the best analysis yet of colonial-
ism in Zimbabwe and the fight for independence.
A full treatment of the evolution of the liberation
movement will have to be written from deeper in-
side it.
In the meantime, we can learn much from re-
lated movements. One of the outstanding theoreti-
cians of the African revolution is Amilcar Cabral,
founder and leader of the African Party for the In-
dependence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC)
until his assassination in 1973. His adoption and
extension of Marxism to Africa have advanced the
understanding of class formation under colonial-
ism, the creation of the nation through the fight
against colonialism, the role of violence by imperi-
102
alism and its opponents, and related questions
facing the liberation movements. His development
of the theory required for the movement he led has
also extended the ability of Marxists to analyze
pre-capitalist societies under imperialism, to treat
&dquo;National Liberation and Culture&dquo; and &dquo;Identity
and Dignity in the Context of National Liberation
Struggle&dquo;3 and the impact of the liberation
movements on the colonizing countries, among
other basic topics.
This is not the place for a full review of his
writings, but anyone trying to understand the revo-
lutionary process in Zimbabwe and Southern Afri-
ca must welcome the publication of a new selec-
tion of his writings and speeches, Unity and Strug-
gle. The publication of this book is exemplary in
that Monthly Review Press used the selections
made by the PAIGC to constitute the collection. A
brief biography by Mario de Andrade, Cabral’s
long-time comrade and presently Minister of Infor-
mation and Culture of the Republic of Guinea-Bis-
sau, is also included. Although Cabral will always
remain one of the great revolutionary leaders-
and writers-one of his contributions was to help
build a movement with many leaders, in Mozam-
bique and Angola as well as Guinea-Bissau and
Cape Verde. A number are outstanding writers,
even poets. Our understanding in this country of
imperialism and revolution will be seriously dis-
torted until a wide range of texts from the liber-
ation movements is published here. One hopes
that the appearance of Unity and Struggle will lead
to more such collections.
Like Cabral, the leaders of ZANU knew that
the colonialism they faced was weaker than it
looked to Westerners, and that the often &dquo;invisi-
ble&dquo; resistance of the African masses could prove
decisively stronger once properly mobilized and
organized. Following the defeat of the First Chi-
murenga, African resistance to the growing coloni-
al power was sporadic, localized, and reformist.
Peasants and farmers resisted the successive
acts reducing the land available to them; workers
organized strikes, boycotts, and unions; cultural
and religious movements countered and even
damned colonial values. These limited movements
kept the resistance alive, allowed the Zimbabwean
people to learn how the colonial system func-
tioned, and brought forth leaders who would link
up the different elements to form a national and
revolutionary movement in the 1960s.4
ZANU’s success in defeating the open coloni-
alism of the Smith government indicates the
strength of their analysis of the struggle as one
between an oppressed Zimbabwean nation and im-
perialism. Their own decision to wage the armed
struggle for independence as a people’s war in the
full sense of the term shows a deep commitment
to transform the economic and social relations of
colonialism. However, ZANU now faces a harder
phase of the national liberation process: consoli-
dating political control of the government, defend-
ing the security of the new nation, and laying the
bases for an independent, socialist economy.
THE CONTINUING ZIMBABWEAN REVOLUTION:
TRANSFORMING COLONIALISM
The process of transformation was begun
during the war in the liberated areas at the levels
of political mobilization, social transformation,
and economic production.5 ZANU stood alone in
its adoption of the full strategy of people’s war. Its
ally in the Patriotic Front, ZAPU, followed a strate-
gy of guerrilla raids from their bases in Zambia.
ZANU political cadres were the first to enter con-
tested areas, explaining ZANU’s goals and mobil-
izing the people’s opposition to the regime into or-
ganized form, particularly local militia and
people’s (administrative) committees and courts.
Schools and clinics were created as priorities.
Economically, ZANU protected peasant produc-
tion as much as possible and fostered cooperative
herding, farming, and shops. The party led in con-
verting some abandoned settler farms to coopera-
tive, while protecting those settler farmers who
were willing to reach a live-and-let-live agreement
with ZANU. Similar programs were instituted in
the large refugee camps administered by the or-
ganization in Mozambique.
One indicator of the depth of the transforma-
tion begun is the participation of women in all
these areas. Women have participated in many
forms of anti-colonial resistance, but ZANU’s
adoption of people’s war has given fullest scope
to women’s initiative. Two recently published pam-
phlets on this topic- Women’s Liberation in the
Zimbabwean Revolution and Liberation through
Participation- make available invaluable material
on ZANU’s analysis and practice in this area.
Women now participate at all levels of ZANU’s
work: in the people’s institutions, in the army and
militia, in the ZANU Women’s League, in the party
structure, and now in the government. Women are
still under-represented at the top levels (a single
Cabinet Minister, Teurai Ropa, for example), but
the leadership that women have developed and the
party’s commitment to women’s liberation are ba-
sic factors pushing the whole revolution forward.
The challenge now is to extend the changes
begun during the war to the whole economy, which
includes colonial manufacturing, mining, and ex-
port agriculture industries more developed than in
any country on the continent outside South Africa.
Utete does not address strategies for economic
development, but he does devote a short final
chapter to the problems created by the previous
economic structure. His thesis is that &dquo;settler col-
onialism ... constitutes a social system which, in

the measure in which it advances the material in-
terests of the settlers, ’underdevelops’ the native
majority&dquo; (p. 135). This is the necessary starting
point, and it stands in sharp conrast to the writers
following a race-class model. One might expect,
for example, that Arrighi’s attention to class con-
flict might be fruitful when applied to questions of
post-independence development, but the opposite
is the case. Arrighi’s model identifies the settlers
as a &dquo;national bourgeoisie,&dquo; which, &dquo;by promoting
important structural changes in the economies in
question [settler economies] has in fact restrained
that ’development of underdevelopment’ which is
a normal phenomenon in centre-periphery rela-
tions&dquo; (Arrighi and Saul, 1969:147). Actually, the
settlers’ physical development of the economy,
from roads to steel mills, only deepened the social
relations of underdevelopment, as indicated in the
series From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, discussed be-
low. And while independence makes class conflict
all the more important, Arrighi’s model takes ac-
count only of the class distinctions among the set-
tlers and masks differences within the African
population.
Two new publications provided detailed de-
scriptions of the problems of transition: the Catho-
lic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), in
cooperation with the Catholic Justice and Peace
Commission in Rhodesia, began in 1977 a continu-
ing series of booklets under the overall title From
Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, and the Scandinavian In-
stitute of African Studies published Howard Sim-
son’s Zimbabwe: A Country Study 1 n 1979. The
CIIR series provides a wealth of information on
such topics as poverty (#1), land (#2), unemploy-
ment (#3), labor skills and needs (#4), the informal
sector (#5), rural administration (#6), health (#7),
food (#8), and education (#9), with more to come.
The series is aimed primarily at policy makers in a
&dquo;Government of a liberated Zimbabwe ... com-
mitted to providing for the basic needs of the poor-
est sections of that society&dquo; (#1 back cover) and at
humanitarian aid donors.
The editors’ overall thesis is that the poverty
of the majority &dquo;has been perpetuated by the colo-
nial structures of Rhodesian society (CIIR #1, p. 3).
Although the various monographs are uneven, the
series succeeds in thoroughly demonstrating their
thesis, showing in detail the dominant role of Bri-
tish, South African and U.S. firms, the use of land
policy to generate a semi-proletariat working for
starvation wages, the long-run destruction of Afri-
can subsistence production, and settler use of all
institutions of society, including health and educa-
tion, to reinforce the underdevelopment of the
Zimbabwean people. Although the CIIR never pre-
sents a clear theoretical analysis of settler colo-
nialism, its documentation of the colonial struc-
tures of Rhodesian society strongly supports the
argument that a total transformation of the econ-
103
omy is necessary to meet the people’s basic
needs. While these policy papers are rather narrow
and heavily empirical for most classrooms, they
provide invaluable detail for understanding the
problems facing the new government as it formu-
lates a strategy to democratize social and eco-
nomic institutions as a basis for building social-
iSM.6
The CIIR series is adding substantially to the
understanding of colonialism in Rhodesia and
thus making a real contribution to the Zimbabwe-
an revolution. The Smith regime had long recog-
nized this &dquo;danger&dquo; of the honest and humanitar-
ianism of the progressive Catholics-Mambo
Press, the CIIR affiliate in Gwelo, Rhodesia, had
its newspaper, Moto, banned five years ago, and
then suffered a bomb attack during the March
1980 elections which destroyed the printing plant
and killed two persons. But their analysis remains
limited to an anti-colonial perspective. When it
comes to the question of how to overturn the colo-
nial system, the series has little to offer.
The major problem is its omission of the
transformation process already begun by ZANU. In
fact, in what is otherwise the outstanding study of
the series, The Land Question (#2), Roger Riddell
writes that a &dquo;radical restructuring of land in a fu-
ture Zimbabwe has hardly been seriously consid-
ered&dquo; (p. 3) and treats ZANU, ZAPU and even the
discredited Bishop Muzorewa’s UANC as similar
nationalist groupings (p. 29). The series is also lim-
ited by its avoiding the roles of the United States,
Britain, and South Africa. Given the increasing but
obscured involvement of the U.S., this is especial-
ly disappointing.
Howard Simson’s Zimbabwe: A Country Stu-
dy was commissioned to aid &dquo;in the planning of fu-
ture Swedish support for social development in a
free Zimbabwe.&dquo; It is the most comprehensive col-
lection of socio-economic statistics, and is thus
useful as a reference work. The analysis of the
Rhodesian economy is, however, misleading. Sim-
son follows a conventional model of dualism in
which migrant labor forms the only bridge be-
tween a &dquo;modern capitalist economy&dquo; and &dquo;a sub-
sistence peasant economy&dquo; (p. 1). This is exactly
the model which Utete and the CIIR warn against,
for it denies the structural process of underdevel-
opment of the Zimbabwean nation by the totality
of colonial institutions.
This superficial analysis of underdevelop-
ment has potentially disastrous implications for
the strategies it suggests for development. It re-
duces socialism to mass organization of the pea-
santry under central planning and thus equates
the paths of Tanzania and Mozambique (p. 70), ig-
noring the difference between the Tanzanian
&dquo;planned village&dquo; with little or no collective pro-
duction, into which most peasants are forced, and
Mozambique’s &dquo;communal villages&dquo; based on vol-
104
untary cooperation. Following the same reason-
ing, any differences between ZANU and ZAPU are
denied, as are potential class contradictions with-
in a free Zimbabwe (pp. 56, 59, 67, 68).
Even in treating it as a reference book, its ex-
tensive tables must be used with great caution, for
Simson uses only official Rhodesian statistics, de-
spite the falsification which was necessary to hide
the international trade, investment, and military
aid flows which were central to the Rhodesian eco-
nomy at war under international embargoes. Fur-
ther, Simson takes account of the war only to ac-
knowlege that it, &dquo;like all wars, has caused enor-
mous suffering&dquo; (p. 60). As a guide for humanitari-
an aid, this is wildly misleading, for it denies the
genocidal effects of the full-scale counter-insur-
gency was waged by the Rhodesian forces under
South African and U.S. mercenary guidance, which
included defoliation, crop destruction, germ war-
fare, poisoning wells, free fire zones, and &dquo;pro-
tected villages&dquo; (Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1979).
Simson goes so far as to blame the guerrillas for
cattle loss (p. 60), even after noting that the Rho-
desian government followed a war policy of confis-
cating cattle and preventing herding and cultiva-
tion (p. 59). While the social-democratic govern-
ment of Sweden may find it useful to blur the dif-
ferences in strategies for building socialism in
Southern Africa, it is hard to see any justification
for distorting the nature of the wounds of war
which must be healed.
ZANU faces an enormously difficult process
of leading Zimbabwe through the present national
democratic stage of the revolution and towards a
socialist transformations of the old society. No cur-
rently available studies provide a chart of that pro-
cess ; interested observers will have to follow
ZANU’s unfolding program very closely. The
founding of a government newspaper, expected
soon, will be a major new source of information.
For an analysis of the political process now under-
way, Cabral remains the best guide. Especially im-
portant are his observations on how independence
rapidly pushes the development of the African
classes which had been held back under colonial-
ism, discussed in &dquo;The Weapon of Theory,&dquo; among
other essays (pp. 119-137).
IMPERIALISM AND SOUTH AFRICA
One of the major constraints on the pace of
change in Zimbabwe is its giant neighbor, South
Africa, which with the backing of the United
States, Britain, France, and Israel provided the
greatest part of Rhodesia’s military strength since
1965, and which remains ready to intervene at any
time. One might hope that the recent publication
of Bernard Magubane’s Political Economy of Race
and Class in South Africa would shed light on
these Rhodesian-South African relations, and on
similarities and differences between the two set-
tler colonial societies, but this is not the case. A
major omission of the book is any consideration of
South Africa’s crucial role in the whole region of
Southern Africa. South Africa’s colonization of Na-
mibia (&dquo;South West Africa&dquo;) is vital to its military
and economic strategies and links its internal
structure of apartheid to its external relations with
the surrounding states, yet Magubane barely men-
tions it in passing. South Africa’s occupation of
Namibia is being opposed with increasing suc-
cess by the armed struggle there led by South
West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), but
SWAPO and the war are not mentioned once.
Linked to its full scale counter-insurgency war in
Namibia are South Africa’s open bombing raids of
Angola and Zambia and its commando raids into
Mozambique (and soon Zimbabwe?). South Afri-
ca’s military role throughout the region is of major
importance to its own politico-economic develop-
ment, but also to the United States, Britain, and
the NATO powers. Despite tactical differences,
these Western powers, especially the United
States, are completely committed to supporting
South Africa and have provided it with every kind
of military capacity, including nuclear (Western
Mass. Assn. of Concerned African Scholars, 1979).
Magubane makes a good case for his thesis
that &dquo;the interests of the South African ruling
class and those of imperialism coincide; both are
primarily interested in maintaining the status
quo,&dquo; but his identification of that status quo as
&dquo;the inequitable system of apartheid&dquo; and the
South African-Western stakes in it as simply &dquo;the
superexploitation of the African work force&dquo; (p.
220) omits other crucial interests: the land and re-
sources of South Africa and Zimbabwe; continued
neocolonial control of the rest of the region; and
preservation of one of the bastions of world-wide
white supremacy.
Omitting these interests leads to Magubane’s
omission of South Africa’s regional economic and
military role and the West’s critical military sup-
port of the regime. But his economism is equally
disastrous in analyzing . the internal dynamics
which he does address. In effect, Magubane is do-
ing for South Africa which Arrighi and Loney tried
to do with Rhodesia: impose a Eurocentric model
of classes contained within a single capitalist na-
tion-assuming no colonies-onto a settler col-
ony.
For Magubane, there is not national oppres-
sion, nor national liberation, in South Africa; the
contradictions are only of class and race. He
argues that &dquo;racism as an ideological system had
to be cultivated by the politically conscious
classes to subvert class unity between black and
white labor&dquo; (p. 16). Yet try as he might, Magubane
can show no case of the black and white unity
which had to be so subverted. He shows that nine-

teenth century capitalist development created an
indigenous white working class by dispossessing
the Boer farmers. And who were those discontentd
workers, presumably ready to join the semi-prole-
tarianized Africans in rising up against the com-
mon exploiter?
They were mostly people who had lived
near poverty in Holland their mode
...
of production was simple. They could
not build industries; farming was for
subsistence; and they partook in only a
very limited commerce. To build their
subsistence economy, they had to de-
pend on slave labor, and in this spirit
they killed, dispossessed and enslaved
those they found occupying the land
they coveted. They found their identity
in the negation of those they con-
quered and exploited (p. 32).
Racism is certainly a consciously cultivated ideol-
ogy, but it is cultivated to justify and rationalize
colonial conquest, not to divide an originally
united class of black and white workers.
In chapters three through six, Magubane pro-
vides a readable synthesis of recent studies of the
colonial conquest, the creation of &dquo;native re-
serves,&dquo; the development of gold mining and of
the whole system of forced labor controlled by the
pass laws dating back to 1760. But the implica-
tions of this analysis seem to be lost in later chap-
ters. While this history details the enormous privi-
leges guaranteed to all whites by virtue of their
participation in the colonizing society, Magubane
then explains the massive 1922 strike of white
miners for guarantees against African competition
as mistaken chauvinism which could have been
overcome by better leadership from the South Afri-
can Communist Party, which instead hung a ban-
ner over party and strike headquarters reading
&dquo;Workers of the World Unite for a White South Af-
ricai&dquo;
The class-race model adopted by Magubane
is as misleading for understanding the South Afri-
can national liberation movement as it was for un-
derstanding the movement in Zimbabwe. In Magu-
bane’s view, national liberation is reduced to the
fight for independence, but for whom and from
what is no longer clear. Without national oppres-
sion and resistance, peasant uprisings, even those
in Pondoland aimed at the whole &dquo;Bantustan&dquo; sys-
tem (pp. 306, 316), become so insignificant as to
barely merit mention. The often leading role of
women in the resistance movements is ignored
completely. Coloured defense of their shanty-
towns disappears, and the Black Consciousness
Movement, which has shaken the whole of South
Africa, is treated in two paragraphs as a belated
success of the Congress Alliance, the 1950s coali-
tion of the African National Congress and the
105
South African Indian Congress (p. 320). The
Soweto uprising is described as originating in
declining economic conditions and culminating in
the demand for &dquo;abolition of apartheid and equali-
ty in all areas of life&dquo; (p. 324). In fact, it began as an
anti-apartheid protest, growing out of the Black
Consciousness Movement, and quickly went fur-
ther to demand &dquo;Power&dquo; to the African masses
and the destruction of the whole system. The
ultimate extension of this attempt to reduce a na-
tional liberation struggle to a vague ANC &dquo;politics
of mass insurgency&dquo; (p. 296) is Magubane’s hailing
of mass strikes in Namibia, without ever mention-
ing the development of people’s war under the
revolutionary leadership of SWAPO.
Since Magubane views the ANC as the only
African organization which has overcome the
&dquo;chauvinism&dquo; of its &dquo;ethnic&dquo; base (p. 295), the only
resistance movements he describes are those
which it has led. The book is a readable guide to
ANC views, but it cannot help anyone understand
the deep changes going on in South Africa,
changes connected to the victories of the libera-
tion movements in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbab-
we and the progress of people’s war under SWAPO
in Namibia, as well as to the advance of the Black
Consciousness Movement within South Africa.
CONCLUSION
When one reviews today the different analy-
ses of Rhodesian society and the Zimbabwean lib-
eration movement put forward, on the one hand, by
Arrighi and Loney, and on the other by Utete, cer-
tain conclusions emerge. History has put them to
a demanding test. The attempt to explain modern
Zimbabwean history on the basis of a Eurocentric
model of class and race, with the settlers and the
African people together constituting an essential-
ly autonomous class system, has failed to explain
any of the major events of the last fifteen years. It
has failed utterly at explaining the most important
event, the attaining of independence by the libera-
tion movement, led by ZANU. However, the analy-
sis identifying the central contradiction as that be-
tween the Zimbabwean people as a colonized na-
tion and imperialism, with the settlers as the local
extension of the imperialist system, does provide
a useful understanding. It was this analysis which
ZANU developed and applied as the strategy to
win the fourteen year war for independence. This
analysis of colonialism in Rhodesia also makes
clear that ZANU’s coming to power in the new gov-
ernment is only a partial victory. The uprooting of
colonial institutions remains a huge, protracted,
and risky undertaking. However, the revolutionary
process in Southern Africa is deeply rooted, and it
remains of vital significance far beyond the region,
for the economic, military, and political stakes are
high.
106
Although South Africa is a different society
with a different history, it is closely related to Zim-
babwe. No one has succeeded in charting out the
dynamics of imperialism and resistance in South
Africa the way ZANU has done for Zimbabwe. Nev-
ertheless, the attempts to analyze South Africa
solely in terms of class and race, as represented
by Magubane, fails to explain the development of
the African resistance or the dynamics of white
unity across class lines. Where Magubane is most
convincing is where his analysis overlaps Utete’s:
identifying the South African state as inseparably
bound to the major Western powers. In fact, the
United States is even more deeply involved in the
whole regional conflict in Southern Africa, militar-
ily, economically, and politically, than these writ-
ers recognize. Much is required in the way of soli-
darity from people in the U.S. who oppose this
country’s role there: education, opposition to U.S.
&dquo;destabilization&dquo; of the new states and support of
South Africa, political and material aid to the liber-
ation movements and new governments.
The question of which analysis should guide
solidarity activities has serious implications. The
analysis represented by Arrighi and Loney in the
case of Zimbabwe, while identifying the oppres-
sion of the majority, misrepresents what is hap-
pening, mispredicts the course of the struggle,
and can ultimately undermine support for the liber-
ation forces. Effective solidarity as well as accur-
ate scholarship will require recognizing the nation-
al as well as class basis of colonial oppression,
and the totality of the transformation involved in
the liberation struggle. The relevance of such an
understanding is hardly limited to Southern Africa.
The next period of conflict in Southern Africa
will be more complex than the one just ended. Fac-
ing the task of understanding and explaining this
process, both scholars and activists will do well to
remember Cabral’s description (1969:25-31) of a
comparable period in the struggle of Guinea-Bis-
sau, Mozambique, and Angola. He reminds us that
on both the analytical and political levels,
the denunciation of the Portuguese
colonial crime was the work of the peo-
ple of the Portuguese colonies them-
selves, as the result of a systematic
revolutionary plan carried out by Afri-
can patriots in the international field.
Faced with the strongest resistance,
and even hostility, of some Western cir-
cles, these African patriots, aware of
the strategic necessity of isolating the
Portuguese colonialists even from
their own allies, spared no efforts to ac-
complish this historic mission.
We will not achieve a thorough understanding of
national liberation today unless we recognize the
same work being carried on now by African patri-
ots in the international field.
FOOTNOTES
1. Zimbabwe News was published irregularly during the war. Also help-
ful in tracing ZANU’s history are Wilson and Burgess, "ZANU and the Ad-
vance of the Zimbabwean Revolution," Zimbabwe News, v. 10 #4, July-Au-
gust 1978; A.M. Chidoda, Understanding ZANU and the Armed Struggle to
Liberate Zimbabwe (Toronto, Canada: Norman Bethune Institute, 1977); and
Bob Brown and David Komatsu, Introductory History of the Zimbabwe Lib-
eration Struggle, published circa September 1976 by the ZANU Support.
Committee of Chicago, now available for the Southern Africa Anti-Merce-
nary Coalition, POB 14333, San Francisco, CA, 94114.
2. Much of the academic literature can be found through three recent
bibliographies: O’Meara and Gosebrink, 1978; Phimister, 1979; and Dana-
her, 1979.
3. Titles of two of Cabral’s speeches, both in Cabral, 1973, the first of
which is also reprinted in Cabral, 1979.
4. Utete treats this period briefly in chapters 3 and 6. Ranger (1972)
covers the period 1900-1930 in some detail. Phimister reviews more recent
articles in thebibliographic essay in note 2. Dumisani Maraire is one of the
musicians who has led a revival of traditional music in the context of the ris-
ing nationalist movement. His recordings of mbira and marimba are availa-
ble on the Nonesuch Explorer series, Voyager Recordings of Seattle, Wash-
ington, and other labels.
5. Reports on life in the liberated areas are fragmentary; the best sin-
gle report is by Justin Nyoka, a BBC correspondent in Salisbury who fled ar-
rest by the Rhodesian police and travelled through much of the liberated
countryside on his way to Mozambique (Nyoka, 1978). See also Earl Cald-
well’s article on the liberated areas during the elections in the New York
Daily News, March 1, 1980.
6. ZANU’s views democratizing social services as a step towards
on
be seen in the case of health in "Behind and To-
building socialism can
wards a Health Model for Zimbabwe" and "Zimbabwe Health Policy State-
ment," both by Dr. Herbert Ushewokunze, Minister of Health, March 1980
and available from Southern Africa Anti-Mercenary Coalition (see note 1).
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- and Saul, John (1969). "Nationalism and Revolution in
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Cabral, Amilcar (1969). Revolution in Guinea
: Selected Texts by Amilcar Ca-
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#5 Rob Davies, "The informal Sector: A Solution to Unemployment?"
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#6 Michael Bratton, "Beyond Community Development." 1978.
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#8 Vincent Tickner, "The Food Problem." 1979.
#9 Roger Riddell, "Education for Employment." 1980.
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REVIEW ESSAYS 107

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