For Better or Worse? Women and Zanla in Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle

With a foreword by Terence Ranger this book offers a thought provoking analysis of women's experiences with ZANLA during the war of independence. It challenges official orthodoxy that a gende revolution occured in this period and that a generation of liberated women emerged from the struggle. The research demostrates that while ZANLA extensively mobilised women as porters, nurses, teachers, secretaries and cooks - all crucial to the struggle and glorified in the rhetoric, in substance, the movement percieved these roles as secondary to the activities of men. The author who has had access to the ZANU archives, scrutinises a doctrinal terrain laced with tension between ideology and tradition principles, between the more and less educated cadres and between the women on the ground and the leadership.