Operating from outside their homelands, exile armies have been an understudied phenomenon in history and international politics. From avoiding the fate of being a mere tool for a patron power to facing issues regarding their military efficacy and political legitimacy, exiled armies have found their journey home a tortuous one. This collection of essays covers the experience of exiled forces in the Second World War, principally in Europe, and also covers their activities around the globe during the Cold War and beyond.

An essential biographical record of General Solomon Mujuru, one of the most controversial figures within the history of African liberation politics.

The history of women guerilla fighters in the Zimbabwean National Liberation war (1965-80), this book provides an examination of the many different groups of women who joined the armed struggle and contributes to a feminist understanding of Zimbabwe and African history and politics. Most previously published accounts of this event in history have tended to focus on the feminine' or 'natural' role women played in it, ignoring the experiences of female guerilla fighters. This book redresses the balance, giving voice to a previously unsung group of women.'

This retrospective offers a first hand account on internal conflicts in ZANU during the 1970s, which resulted in the defeat of its left wing. Chung's narratives include her experiences in two guerrilla camps. She recalls her encounters with the charismatic Josiah Tongogara, a legendary military commander during Zimbabwe's liberation war (known as the ©second chimurenga♯), who died at the threshold to Independence. The personal recollection of a transition to national sovereignty concludes with an incisive analysis of developments after Independence. It ends with Chung's vision for the Zimbabwe of the future. Fay Chung served within the Ministry of Education in post-colonial Zimbabwe for a total of fourteen years, at the end as the Minister of Education and Culture. Her autobiographical account has the childhood experiences in colonial Rhodesia as a point of departure. Like many other Zimbabwean intellectuals she joined the liberation struggle. From the mid-1970s she worked within the ZANU-organised educational sphere.

In Fighting and Writing Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, White finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods. In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.

What did the future hold for Rhodesia's white population at the end of a bloody armed conflict fought against settler colonialism? Would there be a place for them in newly independent Zimbabwe? PIONEERS, SETTLERS, ALIENS, EXILES sets out the terms offered by Robert Mugabe in 1980 to whites who opted to stay in the country they thought of as their home. The book traces over the next two decades their changing relationshipwith the country when the post-colonial government revised its symbolic and geographical landscape and reworked codes of membership. Particular attention is paid to colonial memories and white interpellation in the official account of the nation's rebirth and indigene discourses, in view of which their attachment to the place shifted and weakened. As the book describes the whites' trajectory from privileged citizens to persons of disputed membership and contested belonging, it provides valuable background information with regard to the land and governance crises that engulfed Zimbabwe at the start of the twenty-first century.

Zimbabwe's Liberation War started with incursions by tiny guerrilla groups and then built up until the settler regime finally had to negotiate a settlement in 1980. This book looks at the realities of the war and what happened afterwards, rather than at the comfortable myths. Both heroic and terrible deeds are recorded. There are both idealistic hopes and cynical compromises. It is centred on ordinary soldiers and people who sacrificed their lives to achieve advances and victories, and suffered the consequences of retreats and defeats. It is history told and experienced by the soldiers themselves, not the 'official' and 'authorized' account by leaders. This book compares strategies used by all the main players - ZIPRA, ZIPA, ZANLA and the Rhodesian Forces. It discusses the Nhari rebellion and the March 11 Movement, the Fifth Brigade and the 'dissidents'. The volume further examines the integration of the armies after 1980, analyses the politics of creating war heroes and discusses life after the war for ex-combatants.