Insurgency after 1972

The occasional guerrilla incursions of the late 1960s were launched from Zambia, across the Zambezi River, which was flanked by inhospitable terrain. By 1972 developments inside Mozambique created further opportunities for Rhodesia's guerrillas. The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) had forced the Portuguese to withdraw from Tete province, which borders northeastern Rhodesia. FRELIMO agreed to allow ZANU's military wing, ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army), to operate within Tete and eventually to open up a second front for the war in Rhodesia. In December 1972, the first incursions from Tete resulted in the killing of white farmers; by mid-1973 ZANLA had established itself in northeastern Rhodesia.

In 1974 the fortunes of the ZANLA guerrillas brightened: a military coup in Portugal in April 1974 precipitated its complete withdrawal from Mozambique in 1975. Almost immediately, guerrilla sanctuaries appeared along the vast eastern border—a frontier impossible for the Rhodesians to secure. By January 1976, several thousand ZANLA guerrillas were encamped in Mozambique, from which they made increasingly frequent sorties into Rhodesia.

The war intensified dramatically after 1976, as official statistics reflected. Between 1972 and 1976, 215 members of the security forces and 1,917 insurgents died; in 1977 alone, the casualties were 197 security personnel and 1,774 rebels. (Official figures tended to underreport casualties of the security forces and inflate those of the insurgents.) The number of guerrillas operating inside the country was another gauge of the temperature of the war. The official (conservative) estimate of 700 in early 1976 grew to 10,000 by early 1979—the majority were members of ZANLA (the wartime role of ZIPRA, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, was much less substantial).^[1] The exodus of whites is another index: in 1971 the country had 9,403 white immigrants; in 1976, 7,072 residents left, and in 1978, 13,709. White flight affected the morale of the remaining settlers and drained scarce human and financial resources from the war effort.

Learning from one of their previous mistakes, the rebels attempted to politicize and convert rural people to the cause. They solicited the active support of village chiefs, headmen, and spirit mediums along the eastern border; with villagers, they aimed at undermining the authority of the regime and capitalizing on peasants' grievances over land. But the twin goals of raising consciousness and cultivating popular support were hard to realize without fully liberated zones, where insurgent forces could operate unabated (as had occurred in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau).^[2] The Rhodesian war machine had a long reach, and the white farming strongholds were distributed throughout the countryside, scattering insurgent operations and preventing rebels from gaining a secure foothold in particular areas.

Though extensive, Rhodesia's military capacities were never as formidable as Pretoria's, and its terrain permitted greater clandestine activity than the South African. The Rhodesian insurgents thus had opportunities for their guerrilla campaign that the African National Congress of South Africa lacks. Yet Rhodesia's insurgents had two weaknesses: they were fragmented into ZANLA and ZIPRA, often antagonistic guerrilla

[1] ZIPRA's forces (which were linked to ZAPU) remained in Zambia for much of the war but fought more on the western front in the late 1970s.

[2] Martin Gregory, "Zimbabwe 1980: Politicisation through Armed Struggle and Electoral Mobilisation," Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 19, no. 1 (March 1981): 63–94; Lewis Gann and Thomas H. Henriksen, The Struggle for Zimbabwe (New York: Praeger, 1981), pp. 66, 119; Paul L. Moorcraft and Peter McLaughlin, Chimurenga: The War in Rhodesia (Marshalltown, South Africa: Sigma and Collins, 1982), p. 90; Thomas Henriksen, "People's War in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau," Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 3 (September 1976): 377–99.

armies, and had few links to urban movements or underground cells, unlike the ANC.^[3]

The linchpin of a successful rural insurgency is often said to be the cultivation of civilian support, through persuasion and politicization. As one observer maintains, civilian support "cannot be obtained at gunpoint."^[4] Yet the use of naked force to achieve civilians' compliance is not uncommon—varying, of course, across time and place, in severity, and in effects.^[5]

The small body of literature on the Rhodesian insurrection disagrees on the extent to which the guerrilla armies used coercion. Some analysts say little about the dark side of the insurgents' campaign and present a romanticized view of the liberation forces, describing their support among rural blacks as voluntary, natural, and unproblematic.^[6] Ranger, for instance, leaves the impression that ZANLA cadres rather easily capitalized on and intensified peasants' discontent over loss of land: the peasants' nationalist consciousness "was highly conducive to mobilization for guerrilla war."^[7] Rarely do these works address guerrilla violence, and it seems to have had no effect on peasant support: "Even if particular guerrilla bands behaved brutally ... peasants continued to back guerrilla war in principle."^[8]

Other accounts center on the difficulties of winning popular support and the rebels' use of force to elicit compliance from uncooperative peasants. Sithole states, "The commandist nature of mobilization and politicization under clandestine circumstances gave rise to the politics of intimidation and fear."^[9] Kriger draws conclusions from fieldwork in one district in Zimbabwe:

[3] ZANU and ZAPU, the political wings of ZANLA and ZIPRA, respectively, merged in 1976 into the Patriotic Front, a tenuous alliance.

[4] Eqbal Ahmad, "Revolutionary Warfare and Counterinsurgency," in National Liberation, ed. N. Miller and R. Aya (New York: Free Press, 1971), p. 159.

[5] Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), chap. 8; Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf, Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Santa Monica: RAND, 1969).

[6] Terence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe (London: Faber and Faber, 1981); Julie Frederikse, None But Ourselves: Masses rs. Media in the Making of Zimbabwe (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1982).

[7] Ranger, Peasant Consciousness, p. 24.

[8] Terence Ranger, "Bandits and Guerrillas: The Case of Zimbabwe," in Banditry, Rebellion, and Social Protest in Africa, ed. D. Crummey (London, 1986), p. 386.

[9] Masipula Sithole, "Zimbabwe: In Search of a Stable Democracy," in Democracy in Developing Countries, vol. 2, Africa, ed. Diamond, Linz, and Lipset (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988), 248.

The ZANU-PF organizations set up by the guerrillas required guerrilla violence and force to function. Consequently, I reject the concept of sustained popular support or voluntary cooperation between guerrillas and peasants or local elites. [The] guerrilla inability to establish "liberated zones" made it inevitable that mobilization would require ongoing violence.... Peasants were unlikely to be enthusiastic supporters over an extended period.^[10]

This stark coercion thesis simply inverts that of persuasion. Drawing on the empirical findings from both approaches, we may conclude that neither coercion nor persuasion was "inevitable" in mobilizing peasants' cooperation in specific instances or their sustained support for armed struggle. There is no logical reason why the absence of liberated zones made violence necessary; it simply made the insurgents' task of cultivating peasants' support more challenging. Likewise, there is no logical reason why peasants' support for the guerrilla cause should be automatic; it had to be won and maintained. A more balanced account seems appropriate.

At first, Rhodesia's guerrillas attempted to gain the political sympathies of rural civilians. When this failed, they, like rebels elsewhere, were not averse to meting out rough justice. For villagers suspected of selling out to the Rhodesian authorities or those who refused aid to guerrilla units from fear of reprisal by the security forces, insurgents resorted to intimidation and violence (threats, beating, rape, mutilation, and killing). In short, as in other rural insurgencies, the guerrillas used a variety of tactics to gain villagers' cooperation, and the balance between coercion and persuasion varied over time and place.