Negotiating identities in guerrilla war names in the Zimbabwean war of liberation

Abstract

The story of guerrilla names in the Zimbabwean liberation war is a story of changing identities in which the war name is another mode of expressing conflict between different social groups and social entities. Guerrilla war names served the functions not only of concealing identities but also of creating new identities. This article examines the processes of concealing and creating identities. It considers how these identities can be viewed as contested spaces in a conflict situation. Various aspects of identity are brought into perspective as the war names are discussed with supporting examples from the data collected through interviews. Among the guerrillas concealing an identity was also a process of creating a new identity. The process of renaming opens up new possibilities, new attributes, new values, reshaping ideologies and creating new concepts of the self as well as redefining the groups within which the self operates. This article explores the complex nature of onomastic erasure and de-erasure and the resuscitation of dormant identities.

Keywords:

• Chimurenga
• contested space
• decolonisation
• de-erasure
• onomastic erasure
• identities
• nicknames
• war names

Notes

1. ZANLA guerrillas borrowed strategies used in Communist China and Indochina (Bhebe 1999, McLaughlin 1998) as many guerrilla leaders had been trained in China, Russia and other communist countries. Hence, Rhodesian forces called the guerrillas ‘communist terrorists’ or ‘Charlie Tangos’ (Pieterse 2003, Daley 1982, Stiff 1985).