Politics and Shifting Identities

There are two main problems with this period of colonial Zimbabwean history. The first has to do with sources. Although there is a general twenty-five-year embargo on archival material, it has taken much longer, for various reasons, for most of the sources in the Zimbabwean National Archives for the post-1960s years to be made fully accessible. On top of that, geting permission from the depositing government departments is also a challenge; and to complicate matters further, most ZAPU archives, which would have been useful, were destroyed in the early 1980s. Therefore, historians of Matabeleland must rely on oral evidence and a few sources located at various places and in several countries. The second problem is purely historiographical. There are just so many issues to research: from the strategies of the different political movements, which have been exaggerated in the telling by their respective leaders; to the military history of the liberation war, including guerrilla-peasant interactions; to the role of women in the struggle, the contradictions within the rank and file of the nationalist movements, and many more.

The goal of this chapter is not to restate or refine debates within the above issues, but to examine the intersection of these two main evolving identities—ethnicity and nationalism—with particular attention to the ways in which they complemented each other in the early phases of African nationalist development.