Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Postwar. By Luise White

Over the past several decades, historians of Africa have worked hard to understand messy wars. Luise White, in Fighting and Writing, takes this to a new level, drawing on an archive of white men’s writing to depict the storytelling, fantasies, and imagined world of the armed struggles of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. She describes her methodology as one of finding a “body of evidence” and subjecting it to meticulous reading and examination. This produces both frustrating and fascinating results. By the end of the book the reader may know less about the war than they did when they began, pulled into uncertainty by a vivid discussion that sows doubt on basics such as what the war should be called, how it was fought, what it was about and who fought in it. Despite such disconcerting effects, Fighting and Writing offers a model for how to work with profoundly and deliberately unreliable sources. It documents complicated arguments and fantasies of race and cultural identity. It looks closely at how participants in the conflict wrote their own “fables” (109) on topics such as tracking and “bush” skills, racial passing, poisons, and mercenary adventurism. Overall, this is a book best read alongside at least some of the classic historiography of the war, such as Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock’s Rhodesians Never Die (1993), Norma Kriger’s Zimbabwe’s Guerilla War (1993) and many others. Fighting and Writing opens with an overview of what the “bush war” meant to the white men whose writings are central to this study. This is not a depiction of Rhodesia, its segregationist state, or why Federation and peaceful transition to majority rule failed. Instead, it foregrounds white soldiers, sketching out a war over meaning by highlighting white thinking about land and people in a conflict labeled the “bush war” and noting underlying demographic realities that led to discussions over “manpower”. This brief introduction to the intersection between perception and material realities provides a backdrop for a chapter that looks at the genre of the war writings central to this study. The war memoirs are difficult texts, written retrospectively as a dense collection of these men’s “words of war” – and self promotion—with contributions from ghostwriters, collaborators and editors. In chapters three and four, White moves to the core of this exploration, looking at Rhodesian men’s depictions of race and “bush” knowledge in