The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe

In one sense, this is a remarkably old-fashioned political biography of an army general, Solomon Mujuru. Nonetheless, Blessing-Miles Tendi’s book is a fascinating pointer to how the historiography of Zimbabwe’s liberation wars is changing in ways that echo shifts seen elsewhere in African history, as more researchers return to the study of elites. (For instance, see Wale Adebanwi and Rogers Orock, eds, Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa [2021].) What makes Tendi’s biography of Solomon Mujuru particularly interesting is that Zimbabwe’s historians were renowned for the innovative ways in which they did ‘history from below’. The late Terence Ranger (1929–2015) serves as a bellwether of changing approaches. At the height of patriotic fervour during the mid-twentieth century ‘liberation struggles’, he emphasised the ‘Connections between primary resistance movements and modern mass nationalisms in East and Central Africa’ (Journal of African History, ix [1968], pp. 437–53). When the

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Biography · Blessing · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies