Violence & Memory: One Hundred Years in the "Dark Forests" of Matabeleland

by Jocelyn Alexander, Terence Ranger

Violence has powerfully shaped the history of Matabeleland from the 1890s to the 1980s, and silence has surrounded the history of this region of Zimbabwe, excluding it from national memory. This text aims to break the silence and redress the imbalance of Zimbabwe's national history.

291 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2000

Reviews

[Chase · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intensely researched and exhaustive report of the efforts of three different researchers, including preeminent Zimbabwe historian Terence Ranger, Violence & Memory succeeds in telling the story of the “oft forgotten” side of Zimbabwean society, politics, and history. It combines hundreds of oral and written interviews with archival research from the Shangani, Harare, Bulawayo, and elsewhere. In under three hundred pages, the authors of Violence & Memory detail the political and social history of the Shangani region, an area that forms the heartland of western Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland provinces, through several important periods of violence that came to shape the ethnic and political identity of the region, from initial colonization by European settlers to state oppression in the post-independence era. In doing so, Violence & Memory possesses an impressive historical depth and manages to confront a variety of prominent topics in African historiography such as nationalism, race, religion, environment, and historical memory itself.