Overview

The undercurrent of women's position as being ‘caught in the middle’ finds its fullest articulation in this chapter. The previous chapter highlighted how important women were to the survival their households and communities throughout the war; it also highlighted the impact revolutionary resistance had on these efforts to live through war. The struggles for survival affected resistance by causing women to become both disaffected with the guerrillas and further angered by the colonial state. The illustration of these tensions culminates in this chapter when I address the Chiweshe women's participation in revolution as food providers to the guerrillas. The interpretation of resistance from these women's testimonies extends revolutionary resistance beyond particular militarised roles to include forms of everyday resistance in the context of the social relations of war; they were enacting local resistance in their dealings with the DAs, the guerrillas and their neighbours as well as enacting revolutionary resistance by feeding the guerrillas. The survival and revolutionary dimensions of food provision reflect how revolutionary resistance and the struggles for survival by women in a revolutionary war, interacted, supported and conflicted or contradicted each other. The dilemmas of food provision demonstrate how localised resistance in practice gave rise to a host of resistances that cannot readily be demarcated as revolutionary versus everyday resistance or political versus non-political agency. These resistances included selfinterested, compliant, resistant and predatory behaviour. The argument is that everyday resistance was part of the war and that it involved risktaking behaviour as well as risk-avoidance.