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POLITICS ON LIBERATION'S FRONTIERS: STUDENT ACTIVIST REFUGEES, INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ZIMBABWE, 1965–79

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2021

Dan Hodgkinson*
Affiliation:
Oxford University

Abstract

During Zimbabwe's struggle for national liberation, thousands of black African students fled Rhodesia to universities across the world on refugee scholarship schemes. To these young people, university student activism had historically provided a stable route into political relevance and nationalist leadership. But at foreign universities, many of which were vibrant centres for student mobilisations in the 1960s and 1970s and located far from Zimbabwean liberation movements’ organising structures, student refugees were confronted with the dilemma of what their role and future in the liberation struggle was. Through the concept of the ‘frontier’, this article compares the experiences of student activists at universities in Uganda, West Africa, and the UK as they figured out who they were as political agents. For these refugees, I show how political geography mattered. Campus frontiers could lead young people both to the military fronts of Mozambique and Zambia as well as to the highest circles of government in independent Zimbabwe. As such, campus frontiers were central to the history of Zimbabwe's liberation movements and the development of the postcolonial state.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article is the result of the generous time and insights shared by, first, my research participants and, second, my colleagues and friends. My thanks to Adrian Browne, Oliver Owen, Jocelyn Alexander, Blessing-Miles Tendi, Hannah Waddilove, and Ian Little for reading earlier versions. This journal's anonymous reviews and editorial guidance have been exceptional and significantly strengthened the article. Lastly, I presented earlier versions of the article at a 2019 Subaltern Geographies conference at Oxford and at a 2016 African Intellectual History workshop at Yale, where I received insightful comments, particularly from Lynn Thomas, who encouraged me to submit to the JAH.

References

1 The white nationalist government in Rhodesia created a segregationist project similar to that in South Africa. In South Africa, the National Party had, by 1959, segregated the entire higher education system after an earlier decision in 1954 to stop admitting all non-South African black students to their universities. Rhodesia, a much weaker state, was never able to segregate the country's multiracial university despite constant threats to do so. See Mlambo, A., ‘Student protest and state reaction in colonial Rhodesia: the 1973 Chimukwembe student demonstration at the university of Rhodesia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21:3 (1995), 473–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hodgkinson, D., ‘Nationalists with no nation: oral history, ZANU(PF) and the meanings of Rhodesian student activism in Zimbabwe’, Africa, 89:S1 (2019), 4064CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Gelfand, A Non-Racial Island of Learning: A History of the University College of Rhodesia from its Inception to 1966 (Salisbury [Harare], Zimbabwe, 1978). For recent histories of Rhodesia's nation building, see White, L., Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kenrick, D., Decolonization, Identity and Nation in Rhodesia (London, 2019)Google Scholar.

2 Mazarire, G., ‘ZANU's external networks 1963–1979: an appraisal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43:1 (2017), 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 L. Tournès and G. Scott-Smith, ‘A world of exchanges: conceptualizing the history of international scholarship programmes (19th to 21st century)’, in L. Tournès and G. Scott-Smith (eds.), Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World (Oxford, 2017), 15.

4 Commonwealth Secretariat Archives, London (CSA) International Affairs Collection 2000/063, minutes of the meeting of Commonwealth Prime Ministers in Lagos, Jan. 1966.

5 By 1979, the Commonwealth programme had disbursed £30 million to support over 4,000 university students abroad. Under the programme, nurses were trained at Banjul in The Gambia, teachers were taught in Fiji, agronomists studied at Georgetown in Guyana, and thousands went to universities in India, Cyprus, Malta, Canada, and New Zealand. CSA International Affairs Collection 2003/053, speech by T. Dormer, the Commonwealth Secretariat's administrator of the Special Programme for the Training of Rhodesian Africans, Mar. 1980.

6 Many of these were administered by agencies such as the Commonwealth Special Programme, the UN Education and Training Programme for Southern Africa, the World Universities Service, and the International University Exchange Fund. For Ghana's scholarship scheme, see M. Grilli, Nkrumaism and African Nationalism: Ghana's Pan-African Foreign Policy in the Age of Decolonization (London, 2018).

7 By the mid-1960s, Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU)-supporting Zimbabweans were studying on Soviet scholarships at institutions in Moscow, Leningrad, Kalinin, Minsk, Prague, Sofia, and Odessa. J. Hessler, ‘Death of an African student in Moscow’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47:1 (2006), 446. According to Vladimir Shubin, ‘in four decades 599 Zimbabweans received Masters degrees and 17 PhD degrees in the USSR/Russia.’ V. Shubin, The Hot Cold War (London, 2008), 294.

8 L. White, ‘Students, ZAPU, and Special Branch in Francistown, 1964–72’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:6 (2014), 1289–303.

9 The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was one of two liberation movements. The other, older movement was ZAPU.

10 Interview with Dzingai Mutumbuka, Washington, DC, 12 Apr. 2016.

11 A. Mazrui, Political Values of the Educated Class in Africa (Oakland, CA, 1978); J. Barkan, An African Dilemma: University Students, Development and Politics in Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda (Nairobi, 1975); R. Balsvik, ‘Student protest—university and state in Africa 1960–1995’, Forum for Development Studies, 2 (1998), 301–25.

12 S. Mukherjee, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned (Oxford, 2010); M. Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, CA, 2015); M. Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge, 2015); P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, 1986); B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2006); N. Owen, ‘The soft heart of the British Empire: Indian radicals in Edwardian London’, Past and Present, 220:1 (2013), 143–84; H. Adi, West Africans in Britain 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Commnuism (London, 1997).

13 D. Hodgkinson and L. Melchiorre, ‘Introduction: student activism in an era of decolonization’, Africa, 89:S1 (2019), 1–14.

14 Tournès and Scott-Smith, Global Exchanges; Hessler, ‘Death of an African student’, 33–63; M. Matusevich, ‘Journeys of hope: African diaspora and the Soviet society’, African Diaspora, 1 (2008), 53–85; D. Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 80; C. Katsakioris, ‘The Soviet-South encounter: tensions in the friendship with Afro-Asian partners, 1945–1965’, in P. Barbiracki and K. Zimmer (eds.), Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (Arlington, VA, 2014); S. Pugach, ‘African students and the politics of race and gender in the German Democratic Republic, 1957–1990’, in Q. Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York, 2015); Q. Slobodian, ‘Dissident guests: Afro-Asian students and transnational activism in the West German protest movement’, in W. Pojmann (ed.), Migration and Activism in Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2008).

15 A. Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, NC, 2011).

16 E. Said, Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London, 2001), 179; P. Monaville, ‘The political life of the dead Lumumba, the Congolese student left, and Cold War histories’, Africa, 89:S1 (2019), 15–39.

17 See S. Pugach, ‘Agents of dissent: African student organisations in the German Democratic Republic’, Africa, 89:S1 (2019), 90–108; M. Schenck, ‘Negotiating the German Democratic Republic: Angolan student migrations during the Cold War, 1979–1990’, Africa, 89:S1 (2019), 144–66; E. Lundin, ‘“Now is the time!”: the importance of international spaces for women's activism within the ANC, 1960–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 45:2 (2019), 323–40; E. Burton, ‘Navigating global socialism: Tanzanian students in and beyond East Germany’, Cold War History, 19:1 (2018), 63–83; E. Zeleke, Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 (Chicago, 2019).

18 D. Branch, ‘Political traffic: Kenyan students in Eastern and Central Europe, 1958–69’, Journal of Contemporary History, 53:4 (2018), 811–31; C. Katsakioris, ‘Nkrumah's elite: Ghanaian students in the Soviet Union in the Cold War’, Paedagogica Historica (2020), https://doig.org/10.1080/00309230.2020.1785516; C. Katsakioris, ‘Students from Portuguese Africa in the Soviet Union, 1960–74: anticolonialism, education, and the socialist alliance’, Journal of Contemporary History, 56:1 (2021), 142–65.

19 For more on this concept, see D. Hodgkinson, ‘Remaking political studenthood: Zimbabwean student activism during the 2000s “crisis”’, in B.-M. Tendi, J. Alexander, and J. McGregor (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Zimbabwean Politics (Oxford, 2019), https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198805472.013.2.

20 Mazarire, ‘ZANU's external networks’, 83–106; J. McGregor, ‘Locating exile: Zimbabwean nationalists and anti-imperial space in Britain, 1965–1980’, Journal of Historical Geography, 57 (2017), 62–75; C. Zembe, Zimbabwean Communities in Britain: Imperial and Postcolonial Identities and Legacies (London, 2018).

21 The Frontline States included Zambia, Tanzania, and after 1975 Mozambique and Angola. Exciting new scholarship on cities as decolonial ‘hubs’ includes J. Ahlman, ‘Road to Ghana: Nkrumah, Southern Africa and the eclipse of a decolonizing Africa’, Kronos, 37:1 (2011), 23–40; E. Burton, ‘Hubs of decolonisation: African liberation movements and “eastern” connections in Cairo, Accra and Dar es Salaam’, in L. Dallywater, H. Fonseca, and C. Saunders (eds.), Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’: Transnational Activism 1960–1990 (Berlin, 2019), 25–56; G. Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–74 (Cambridge, 2021); A. Ivaska, ‘Movement youth in a Global Sixties hub: the everyday lives of transnational activists in postcolonial Dar es Salaam’, in R. Jobs and D. Pomfret (eds.), Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (London, 2015), 188–210.

22 R. Southall, Liberation Movements in Power: Party & State in Southern Africa (Woodbridge, UK, 2013), 4. See also P. Trewhela, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Johannesburg, 2009); T. Cleveland, ‘“We still want the truth”: the ANC's Angolan detention camps and post-apartheid memory’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25:1 (2005), 63–78.

23 J. Alexander, ‘Loyalty and liberation: the political life of Zephaniah Moyo’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 11:1 (2017), 176. See also J. Alexander, J. McGregor, and B.-M. Tendi, ‘The transnational histories of Southern African liberation movements’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43:1 (2017), 1–12; L. White and M. Larmer, ‘Mobile soldiers and the un-national liberation of Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:6 (2014), 1271–4; S. Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile (Oxford, 2013).

24 The reasons behind the various leadership contests in exile have been debated extensively. See L. White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington, IN, 2003); B.-M. Tendi, ‘Transnationalism, contingency and loyalty in African liberation armies: the case of ZANU's 1974–1975 Nhari Mutiny’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43:1 (2017), 143–59; D. Moore, ‘The ideological formation of the Zimbabwean ruling class’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 17:3 (1991), 472–95.

25 M. Panzer, ‘Building a revolutionary constituency: Mozambican refugees and the development of the FRELIMO proto-state, 1964–1968’, Social Dyamics, 39:1 (2013), 5–23. See also A. Lissoni, ‘Transformations in the ANC External Mission and Umkhonto we Sizwe, c. 1960–1969’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35:2 (2009), 287–301; P. Hayes, ‘Nationalism's exile: Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO's sacrifice in southern Angola’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:6 (2014), 1305–24; C. Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps (Cambridge, 2015); C. Williams, ‘Introduction: thinking Southern Africa from “the camp”’, Social Dyamics, 39:1 (2013), 1–4; R. Suttner, ‘Culture(s) of the African National Congress of South Africa: imprint of exile experiences’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 21:2 (2003), 303–20.

26 Alexander, ‘Loyalty and liberation’, 175; J. Alexander and J. McGregor, ‘Adelante! military imaginaries, the Cold War, and Southern Africa's liberation armies’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62:3 (2020), 636; G. Mazarire, ‘Discipline and punishment in ZANLA: 1964–79’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37:3 (2011), 571–91.

27 During ZAPU's internal crisis in 1969–70, young educated soldiers rebelled against the authorities in military camps in Zambia in what became the ‘March 11th Movement’. See O. Tshabangu, The March 11 Movement in ZAPU: Revolution within the Revolution for Zimbabwe (York, 1979); E. M. Sibanda, The Zimbabwe African People's Union, 1961–87: A Political History of Insurgency in Southern Rhodesia (Trenton, NJ, 2005), 141–60.

28 Tendi, ‘Transnationalism, contingency and loyalty’, 143–59.

29 White, Herbert Chitepo.

30 Mazarire, ‘ZANU's external networks’, 83–106.

31 J. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (3rd edn, Cambridge, 2009), 3. See also M. Vaughan, ‘Africa and the birth of the modern world’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), 143–62.

32 P. Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa (Cambridge, 2019), 4.

33 For similar territorial uses, see D. Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (Seattle, 2006), 3; M. Legassick, ‘The frontier tradition in South African historiography’, Institute of Commonwealth Studies Collected Seminar Papers, 2 (1971), 1–33.

34 I. Kopytoff, ‘The political dynamics of the urban frontier’, in I. Kopytoff (ed.), The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 255. For an innovative use of the frontier as a politically constructed space, see H. Schmidt, ‘Love and healing in forced communities: borderlands in Zimbabwe's liberation war’, in A. Asiwaju and P. Nugent (eds.), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (London, 1996), 183–204.

35 My interviewees in this project all waived anonymity. The broader ten-year project involved interviewing over 140 former activists and interlocutors; see D. Hodgkinson, Zimbabwe's Student Activists: An Oral History from Colonial Rule to the Coup (Cambridge, forthcoming). This article is based on interviews with 23 activists from this period that include Arthur Chadzingwa, Tafi Chigudu, Hope Chigudu, Fay Chung, Henri Dzinotyiweyi, Michael Holman, Farai Madzimbamuto, Chris Magadza, Phineas Makhurane, Ian Makoni, Simba Makoni, Teresa Makoni, Ibbo Mandaza, Alois Mlambo, Simpson Mutambanengwe, Joe Mutizwa, Dzingai Mutumbuka, Brian Raftopoulos, Lloyd Sachikonye, Judith Todd, T. G. Zengeni, Kane Zhou, and Ranga Zinyemba.

36 A. Portelli, ‘The peculiarities of oral history’, History Workshop Journal, 21:1 (1981), 99–100.

37 For the specific ways that stories of anticolonial activism were told, see Hodgkinson, ‘Nationalists with no nation’.

38 See M. West, The Rise of the African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 203–35. Since the 1950s, Zimbabwe's nationalist politics has been patriarchally ordered to the disadvantage of women, particularly black women. To this day, female activists can perform only a limited set of political roles and, as Rudo Mudiwa argues, risk being dismissed through the accusation of being a prostitute. R. Mudiwa, ‘“As it was bodily, so it is politically”: prostitutes, wives and political power in Zimbabwe’, in Tendi, Alexander, and McGregor, Handbook of Zimbabwean Politics, https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198805472.013.12. Andrew Ivaska discusses the politics of Eduardo Mondlane's cosmopolitanism in A. Ivaska, ‘Liberation in transit: Eduardo Mondlane and Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam’, in C. Jian et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building (New York, 2017), 27–38.

39 Education had been central to the construction and control of the colonial state since literacy was enshrined as a qualification for political representation in Rhodesia's Legislative Assembly in 1898.

40 P. Makhurane, Phineas Makhurane: An Autobiography, (Gweru, Zimbabwe, 2010), 67.

41 Ibid. 68.

42 J. Nkomo, Nkomo: The Story of My Life (London, 1984), 113.

43 Modern Records Office, Warwick University (MRO) MSS.280/31/4, Zimbabwe Student's Union public pamphlet announcing their formation with S. Mutambanengwe as inaugural president, 1961.

44 J. Alexander, ‘The productivity of political imprisonment: stories from Rhodesia’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47:2 (2019), 300–24.

45 T. Sellstrom, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Volume I: Formation of a Popular Opinion (1950–1970) (Uppsala, 1999), 322.

46 Mazarire, ‘ZANU's external networks’, 99–100.

47 Chitepo studied law at London's Inns of Court, Chidzero did an MA and PhD in Canada, and Chinamano did a post-graduate in Birmingham. Zvogbo was a beneficiary of a US government scholarship and Shamuyarira studied on the Parvin Fellowship. Church and private initiatives also enabled Ndabaningi Sithole and Abel Muzorewa to study at universities or theological colleges. The Salisbury-based Lotus Group founded a scholarship for study in India.

48 The starkest example of this scale of state making in exile was ZAPU's army, which by 1980 was larger and better equipped than the host Zambian armed forces.

49 F. Chung, Re-living the Second Chimurenga: Memories from the Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe (Harare, 2006), 219.

50 Interview with Mutumbuka, 2016.

51 L. Mann, ‘Wasta! the long-term implications of education expansion and economic liberalisation on politics in Sudan’, Review of African Political Economy, 41:142 (2014), 575.

52 Mazarire, ‘ZANU's external networks’, 84.

53 Ibid. 96, 99.

54 B.-M. Tendi, The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker (Cambridge, 2019), 118.

55 Interview with Dzingai Mutumbuka, Harare, 10 Jan. 2015.

56 See D. Hodgkinson ‘Subversive communities and the Rhodesian sixties: an exploration of transnational protests, 1965–1973’, in Jian et al. (eds.), Handbook to the Global Sixties, 39–52; Mlambo, ‘Student protest and state reaction’; Gelfand, A Non-Racial Island of Learning.

57 Cited in Ivaska, ‘Movement youth’, 188. For student activism in Dar es Salaam and Lusaka, see A. Ivaska, ‘Of students, “nizers”, and a struggle over youth: Tanzania's 1966 national service crisis’, Africa Today, 51:3 (2005), 83–107; M. Burawoy, ‘Consciousness and contradiction: a study of student protest in Zambia’, British Journal of Sociology, 27:1 (1976), 78–98; L. Melchiorre, ‘“Under the thumb of the party”: the limits of Tanzanian socialism and the decline of the student left’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 46:4 (2020), 635–54; H. Macmillian, ‘The University of Zambia and the liberation of Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:5 (2014), 943–59.

58 Some nationalist leaders also studied in Zambia, such as Zimbabwe's current president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who gained two law degrees at UNZA in 1974 and 1975.

59 For instance, Craig Williamson, an undercover South African policeman, infiltrated the International University Exchange Fund and rose to become its deputy-director. He was exposed in 1980.

60 Chung, Second Chimurenga, 116, 101.

61 Tendi, ‘Transnationalism, contingency and loyalty’, 143–59.

62 Chung, Second Chimurenga, 96.

63 Mazarire, ‘ZANU's external networks’, 92; interview with Chris Magadza, Harare, 9 Feb. 2015.

64 Mlambo, ‘Student protest and state reaction’, 473–90.

65 D. Mills, ‘Life on the hill: students and the social history of Makerere’, Africa, 76:2 (2006), 149, 262.

66 S. Ryan, ‘Uganda: a balance sheet of the revolution’, Mawaza, 3:1 (1971), 47. For a comparative history of Dar and Makerere, see M. Mamdani, ‘The African university’, The London Review of Books, 19 July 2018, 29–32.

67 Ryan, ‘Uganda’, 57.

68 F. Byaruhanga, Student Power in Africa's Higher Education: A Case of Makerere University (London, 2006), 63.

69 Interview with Hope Chigudu, Harare, 17 Dec. 2014.

70 Interview with Tafi Chigudu, Harare, 25 Mar. 2015.

71 Ibid.

72 Interview with Hope Chigudu.

73 Ibid.

74 As well as hosting students, Amin also helped train hundreds of Zimbabwean soldiers for breakaway ZANU leader Ndabaningi Sithole.

75 Interview with Tafi Chigudu.

76 Interview with Hope Chigudu.

77 Interview with Tafi Chigudu.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Chung, Second Chimurenga, 219.

81 Kaunda had just endorsed ZANU and ZAPU's Patriotic Front agreement to fight together.

82 I. Rashid, ‘Subaltern reactions: lumpens, students and the left’, Africa Development, 22:3/4 (1997), 27; R. Press, Ripples of Hope: How Ordinary People Resist Violent Oppression (Amsterdam, 2015), 49.

83 Gowon ruled Nigeria from the end of the Biafran War in 1970 until he was ousted in a coup in 1975 by Murtala. In 1976, Murtala was assassinated and Obasanjo took over. Under Obasanjo, the country moved towards civilian rule with elections in 1979 that started the Second Republic.

84 T. Abdulraheem and A. Olukoshi, ‘The left in Nigerian politics and the struggle for socialism: 1945–1985’, Review of African Political Economy, 13:3 (1986), 73.

85 A. Black, ‘Reminiscences from Ahmadu Bello University’, in B. Beckman and Y. Ya'u (eds.), Great Nigerian Students: Movement Politics and Radical Politics (Kano, 2005), 73.

86 The MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was one of three liberation movements that fought the civil war. J. Polhemus, ‘Nigeria and Southern Africa: interest, policy, and means’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 11:1 (1977), 60.

87 This commitment was written into the 1979 constitution. See O. Aluko, Necessity and Freedom in Nigerian Foreign Policy (Ife, 1981).

88 J. Illiffe, Obasanjo: Nigeria and the World (Abingdon, UK, 2011), 45–7; Tendi, Army and Politics in Zimbabwe, 77.

89 Black, ‘Reminiscences’, 76.

90 Interview with Lloyd Sachikonye over Skype call from London to Harare, 20 Jan. 2021.

91 P. Wilmot, Nigeria's Southern Africa Policy, 1960–88 (Uppsala, 1989), 8.

92 B. Akintola, ‘The perils of protest: state repression and student mobilization in Nigeria’, in W. Adebanwi and E. Obadare (eds.), Encountering the Nigerian State (New York, 2010), 107.

93 Interview with Kane Zhou, Mberengwa, Zimbabwe, 1 Mar. 2015.

94 Interview with Lloyd Sachikonye.

95 Interview with Kane Zhou.

96 Interview with Lloyd Sachikonye.

97 Chung, Second Chimurenga, 211. Zhou did not go in the end, after hearing about his brother's brutal experiences there.

98 White student migration relied heavily on personal networks. Michael Holman, for instance, was rusticated in 1966. He got into Edinburgh in 1969 through Malcolm Rifkind, a former lecturer in Rhodesia (and later UK foreign secretary). Holman eventually became Africa editor for the Financial Times.

99 J. Rose and S. Sagall, ‘Obituary: Basker Vashee’, The Guardian (London), 4 Aug. 2005 (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/aug/04/guardianobituaries.zimbabwe).

100 P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), 384.

101 ‘Candidate takes stand on race’, The Yorkshire Post, 2 June 1970. For British politics, Makoni's candidature was a minor event. Although he attracted local newspaper coverage, he received 154 votes against over 22,000 for the Conservative incumbent.

102 Mlambo, ‘Student protest and state reaction’, 473–90.

103 C. Hoefferle, British Student Activism in the Long Sixties (Abingdon, UK, 2013), 135–79; interview with Jack Straw, Oxford, 18 Aug. 2019.

104 Interview with Simba Makoni, Harare, 23 Jan. 2015.

105 McGregor, ‘Locating exile’, 74.

106 Interview with Simba Makoni.

107 Interview with Farai Madzimbamuto, Harare, 12 Dec. 2014.

108 As McGregor explains, ZAPU had an office in King's Cross next door to Sinn Féin. ZANU for a time shared an office with South Africa's PAC, Angola's UNITA, and southern Sudanese Anyanya. McGregor, ‘Locating exile’, 69.

109 D. Pasura, African Transnational Diasporas: Fractured Communities and Plural Identities of Zimbabweans in Britain (Basingstoke, UK, 2014), 34.

110 Mazarire, ‘ZANU's external networks’, 93–6.

111 Interview with Simba Makoni.

112 Interview with Ibbo Mandaza, Harare, 10 Dec. 2014.

113 Cited in McGregor, ‘Locating exile’, 73.

114 Political Archive of the German Foreign Office, Berlin MfAA C409, Zambian ZAPU leadership's communiqué to Zimbabwean students in Europe, 1965. My thanks to Sara Pugach for sharing this source.

115 Interview with Dzingai Mutumbuka.

116 Ibid.

117 Moore, D., ‘Democracy, violence and identity in the Zimbabwean War of National Liberation: reflections from the realms of dissent’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 29:3 (1995), 375402Google Scholar.

118 Interview with Arthur Chadzingwa, Harare, 9 Jan. 2015.

119 Ibid.

120 Interview with Joe Mutizwa, Harare, 17 Feb. 2015.

121 Ibid.

122 This is known as Gukurahundi and involved widespread torture and the deaths of thousands of civilians.

123 Mandaza, I. (ed.), The Political Economy of Transition, 1980–86 (Dakar, 1986)Google Scholar.

124 Interview with Ibbo Mandaza.

125 Alexander, J. and McGregor, J., ‘Introduction: politics, patronage and violence in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39:4 (2013), 751CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

126 Interview with B. Raftopoulos, Harare, 22 Oct. 2014. Raftopoulos had been a student activist at the School of Oriental and African Studies supervised by Shula Marks.

127 Interview with Ibbo Mandaza.