War Veterans in Zimbabwe's Land Occupations: Challenging Neo-colonialism and Settler and International Capital

Written by a critically positioned participant in Zimbabwe's political history, this book covers more than a generation of eyewitness account and scholarly analysis by a War Veteran academic and activist. It traces the roots of Zimbabwe's well known, but little analysed, revolution of 2000 to the 1970s guerrilla war, revealing the foundational philosophies, cosmologies and experiences that are manifest in the War Veterans-led revolution.

The book is a bold account of an ongoing bottom-up struggle against neocolonialism, settler economy and international capital. It traces the unfolding events of Zimbabwe's war of liberation, revealing little-known facts that help to explain the complexity of current politics, ideology and class conflicts. Based on grounded empirical research this scholarly analysis differs significantly from the standard journalistic accounts of this topic. The book illustrates that the popular land occupations of 2000 were part of a much wider current under the surface that reconfigured industry, mining, finance, commerce and trade. War Veterans led a revolution that challenged the state, ruling ZANU-PF, the MDC, President Robert Mugabe, settler and international capital. Zimbabwe's revolution sets a new agenda and raises anew the intriguing question `what are the people of Africa trying to free themselves from and what are they trying to establish?' Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Zimbabwe