International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

Female Combatants and Shifting Gender Perceptions during Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, 1966-79
Ireen Mudeka

Abstract
While mainstream history on the liberation struggle in Africa and Zimbabwe primarily focuses on male initiatives, from the 1990s, new scholarship marked a paradigm shift. Scholars both shifted attention to women’s roles and adopted a gendered perspective of the liberation struggle. The resultant literature primarily argued that the war of liberation did not bring any changes in either oppressive gender relations or women’s status. However, based on oral, autobiographical and archival sources including Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) documents and magazines, this paper argues that while male domination indeed continued, the war inevitably shifted perceptions of women. Their recruitment within ZANLA and in specific leadership roles marked this change in gender perceptions. Even ‘traditionally feminine roles’, normally taken for granted, gained new value in the cut-throat conditions of war. Nationalist leaders and other guerillas came to valorize such roles and the women who undertook them, as central to the war effort. War-time contingencies therefore spurred certain shifts in perceptions of women, at times radical but at others, seemingly imperceptible. This reevaluation of women’s status spilled into the postcolonial era, albeit slowly, due to the centuries-old patriarchal culture that Zimbabweans could not suddenly dismantle.

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