Zimbabwe's Liberation War and the Everyday in Honde Valley, 1975 to 1979

This paper examines the wartime history of Zimbabwe's Honde Valley, which is located between Inyanga and Mutare, along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. It covers the period between 1975 and 1979 when ZANU's military wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) opened military bases in Mozambique. We seek to understand how regular or 'everyday' practices such as beer brewing, hunting, and other social solidarities highlight the ways in which Honde Valley society functioned beyond the riveting experiences of war. In doing so, the paper deploys the concepts of 'conviviality' and 'the quotidian' to examine the lives of civilians in wartime. Although Zimbabwe's liberation war transformed the Honde Valley into a new and bitterly contested frontier, characterised by hardships in 'Protected Villages' for instance, civilians were innovative and realigned their lifestyles in response or in opposition to the state's routine controls and guerrilla incursions. The inhabitants of the Honde Valley took advantage of their proximity to the Mozambican border and the existence of relatives and acquaintances in Mozambique to evade the pressures of war in colonial Zimbabwe.