Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe

Perspectives on Southern Africa

by David Lan

Almost every anti-colonial struggle this century has been led by an army of guerrillas. No such struggle has succeeded without a very high degree of cooperation between guerrillas and the local peasantry. But what does "cooperation" between peasants and guerrillas really consist of? What effect does it have on the way they view the world for which they fight?

In the struggle for Zimbabwe (1966-80), hundreds of thousands of peasants provided the guerrillas with practical help and support. But they went a good deal further. Throughout the country scores of spirit mediums, the religious leaders of Shona, gave active support to resistance. With their participation, the scale of the war expanded into an astonishing act of collaboration between ancestors and their descendants, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

This book is a detailed study of one key "operational zone" in the Zambezi valley. It shows that to understand the meaning the war and independence have for the people of Zimbabwe themselves, we must take into account not only the nationalist guerrillas and politicians, the bearers of guns, but also the mediums of the spirits of the Shona royal ancestors, the bringers of rain.

Genres: Anthropology, Africa, History, Nonfiction, War, Religion

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1985

Reviews

[Ciro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gonna give it a 5-star rating cause it's the best ethnography of a revolution I've come across so far. Lan shows how the revolutionary process in Zimbabwe didn't dissolve religious 'superstition' in favour of a scientific-socialist view of the world, as people like Fanon thought it would, but rather expressed itself through the logic of ancestor worship and spirit possession. The guerrillas really believed in it and wouldn't have gained mass support if they didn't.

Some of the bits on kinship structure, political organisation and the analysis of myth might be a bit boring or irrelevant to people who aren't interested in anthropology, but most of it flows quite well. Lan includes long quotes by guerrillas and villagers which are absolutely fascinating. Can't wait to read the play he wrote based on his experiences in Dande.

[cindabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Life is good if you live where your ancestors lived before you'

I enjoyed reading this book for the examples it used to describe the relationship between guerillas and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe as the people of Zimbabwe sought independence from British colonial rule, which brought with it the taking of fertile land from the people to be redistributed to European settlers, forced labour, taxation and the destruction of chieftaincies that opposed the colonial regime. All this was achieved with the well equipped army of the British state.

The land that had been taken was the main political weapon in the war for independence

'...you British give us back the land because you never paid for it in the first place. The land belongs to us. It is our inheritance from our forefathers' Mr Mugabe

This book describes how the war was believed to have been won.

It is believed the role the ancestors played in protecting and advising the guerillas, either in dreams or in signs that gave them warnings and instructions assisted them in winning their independence.

'If you were separated from your comrades after a battle, you would find that a hare would guide you straight back to your camp. One time we were sleeping in the bush. During the night a herd of elephants made a circle around our camp. At 3.00am they made a noise and woke us. Then they began to move away. We followed them and when we looked back through binoculars we saw we had been sleeping right next to a camp of security forces'.

The spirit mediums advised the guerillas against sexual intercourse for those on active duty, and for this reason

'The prostitutes were killed because the comrades said: You are holding us back from winning our country'.

The guerillas were also warned by the mediums not to kill the wild animals of the forest as well as avoidance of certain foods so that they may maintain their powers.

The ruling party attempted to make use of the mediums to counteract the influence of the guerillas by using leaflets scattered over the area and broadcasts of the mediums supposedly denouncing the guerrillas. The guerillas were also labelled as 'terrorists' by the state and huge rewards were offered for betrayal.

The book gives a different perspective on war and how other unknown factors can come into play that can't always be foreseen that resulted in the people of Zimbabwe gaining independence from colonial rule. The tactics of the colonial rulers are a bit more predictable as these techniques have been used as a template to oppress people who rebel against their interests throughout history.

For example in 'Afghanistan from Tragedy to Triumph' by Sadhan Muckherjee it describes how a photo montage created by the British of Soraya Tarzi's head which was placed on the body of a near naked dancing girl. Thousands of copies were circulated in the mountains to anger the tribes and create opposition to the reforms that the ruler Amanullah, (Soraya's husband) had made that didn't serve the interests of the British.

I would have liked to have seen more quotes relating to individual experiences of the guerilla fighters and a little less about the structural analysis of the situation by the author.

[luacs · Rating 4 out of 5]

at its best grippingly intresting and deeply informative on a subjectmatter that i would know little about

at its worst overindulgent and overly baroque about subjectmatter that plays little roll in the story being told

[Sibusiso · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master class.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, David Lan gives an insightful structuralist reading of how the interdependence of the religious and political institutions of the Shona people of Dande in present-day Zimbabwe played out over the course of the war of liberation, roughly from 1964 to 1979. Lan shows how the rebel guerrillas were assimilated to localized religio-political structures to which they were initially aliens, but ultimately became vital actors, taking the place of the chiefs who had been co-opted, removed, or otherwise disempowered and delegitimized by the Rhodesian state. The mediums who channel mhondoro, spirits of ancestral chiefs, were essential to both sides of this process, as only they had the power to revoke and confer the authority which derived from the ancestors whom they periodically embody.

Through a detailed analysis of the mythology espoused by the Dande Shona, Lan explains how that ancestral authority entails ownership of territory and responsibility for its fertility and wellbeing. He shows that a territory's native inhabitants are regarded as descendants of its ancestral founder, but that mechanisms exist by which outsiders - like the guerrillas, who were strategically mobilized in operational zones away from their home districts - could become 'naturalized' descendants as well. Implicit within this complex system which balanced chiefs against spirit mediums and spirit mediums against one another, was the recognition that the authority of all these figures - as much as that of the democratic socialist guerrillas - was sustained only so long as it cohered with the will of their people.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

explains with subtlety the amazing success of zanu-pf and the rise of the rhodesian resistance