The educational front: the instrumentalisation of education during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle (1964-1980).
Keywords: Zimbabwe African People's Union
African Independence Movements
Zimbabwe education
Cold War Studies
Zimbabwe liberation Struggle
Decolonial Movements
Zimbabwe War Veterans
African History
education and conflict
Decolonial Theory
Refugee Studies
Rhodesian Bush War
Rhodesian Education
Grounded theory study
Cold War History
ZAPU
Rhodesian History
Education and State Formation
Southern African History

This thesis is a historical study of the role of education in the Zimbabwean Liberation War, also known as the Rhodesian Bush war, from 1964 to 1980. It argues that formal education was instrumentalised by both the Rhodesian Front—the ruling party, and the Zimbabwean African People’s Union (ZAPU)—one of the two foremost nationalist movements, as an ideological, political, and military tool. For ZAPU, a socialist-influenced education was deployed to attempt to build the citizenry and industries of a future state, while for the Rhodesian Front, education was a means of maintaining the status quo of the White minority-governed settler state and buttressing its economy.
In outlining an original narrative of the “educational front” of the war, this research contributes to the educational history of the period, provides insights into the role of education in conflict, and more generally contributes to the history of the liberation war—including the understudied ideological dimensions of these African liberation movements and the transnational networks in which they participated in the context of the Cold War. Through interviews with 41 ZAPU veterans, over 2000 pages of ZAPU publications, school yearbooks, interviews and surveys with Rhodesian students and veterans, this study traces the various functions of formal and political education across the “educational front” of the war. During the conflict, formal schools were used as sites for recruitment and violence, education was used as both an international diplomatic and local bargaining tool, and formal educational knowledge became indispensable to both ZAPU and the Rhodesian Front’s military operations. Arguing that a continuum existed between the classroom and the barracks, this thesis explores the overlap between Rhodesian educational and state censorship and propaganda campaigns, and the political educational curriculum embedded within ZAPU’s refugee camps and military armed wing, the Zimbabwean People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA). The “educational front” therefore cuts across and reveals the important influences and connections amongst propaganda, politics and education during the liberation war.
The impacts of the war on formal education are also explored, offering original insights into the way the war’s effects were mediated by race and class: schools for White students were proactively protected, while African schools widely closed due to attacks by guerrilla fighters, but also as punishment by the Rhodesian government, particularly in rural areas suspected of aiding these fighters. Finally, within the context of the Cold War, this research provides the first academic study of ZAPU’s main institution of political education: the Political Commissariat. I argue that as “organic intellectuals,” ZAPU commissars synthesized divergent socialist, nationalist, and religious ideals in a dynamic, ideologically capacious political education for soldiers and civilians to counter the ideology of the Rhodesian educational system. This study draws upon multiple bodies of literature and primary source material to raise questions about revolution and state building during the Rhodesian War and about the pedagogical and political bases of systems of education, both formal and informal.