- Title
- Reconsidering the Rhodesian war through white soldier-writers’ stories
- Creator
- Baines, Gary F
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2021
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450070
- Identifier
- vital:74880
- Identifier
- https://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/hist/v66n2/08.pdf
- Description
- The title of Luise White’s new book recalls the truism that every war is fought twice over: it is waged in the first instance on the battlefield and, thereafter, contested via representations such as books, films and social media. White's focus is on the memoirs and novels of Rhodesia's civil war written and (often self-) published by veterans. These soldier-authors participated in a war of counterinsurgency against guerrillas of the Zimbabwean liberation movements and, subsequently, mounted a rearguard struggle to monopolise the story of the Rhodesian war through their writings. White reflects that their stories of counterinsurgency were “more successful as a story than they were in practice” (p 223). This does not, ipso facto, invalidate their personal experience of war nor the entire corpus of Rhodesian memoirs as evidence. But evidence of what? White reckons that they “reveal soldiers’ ideas about and analysis of wartime practices” (p 31). In other words, memoirs serve not as historical records per se but as experiential evidence of how the war was conducted by soldiers as actors in their own right. Only in this sense can the memoirs be treated as primary sources.
- Format
- 4 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Historia, Baines, G., 2021. Reconsidering the Rhodesian war through white soldier-writers’ stories. Historia vol.66 n.2 Durban Nov. 2021, Historia volume 66 number 2 1 4 2021 2309-8392
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Historia Statement (https://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_serialandpid=0018-229Xandlng=enandnrm=iso)
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Collections
Baines, Gary Fred (Prof Emeritus)
RU Department of History
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Reconsidering the Rhodesian war through white soldier-wstories.pdf | 606 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |