Blessing-Miles Tendi - Böcker

The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues the 2017 coup that ousted long time Zimbabwean president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and the generality of coups, cannot be accurately and rigorously understood without examining the crucial role of gender and women's politics in military seizures of power. Tendi's book shows that gender and women's politics pervade military coup causes, dynamics, justifications, and international responses to coups. Contrary to influential representations of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup and other recent coups as markedly different from past coups, Tendi draws on long gendered histories of military coups in Africa to argue that there are significant continuities in coup characteristics across time. Additionally, Tendi's highly original study of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup identifies the motives, dynamics, and trigger of the coup. Despite the existence of an international anti-coup norm and democracy promotion in Africa by Western states, Zimbabwean coup-makers' direct intervention in politics was largely not publicly condemned or penalized by Western and African diplomats. Tendi uses original interviews with diplomats and politicians involved in external responses to the coup, to address this important puzzle.

Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements offers new perspectives on southern Africa’s wars of national liberation, drawing on extensive oral historical and archival research. Assuming neither the primacy of nationalist loyalties as they exist today nor any single path to liberation, the book unpicks any notion of a straightforward imposition of Cold War ideologies or strategic interests on liberation wars. This approach adds new dimensions to the rich literatures on the Global Cold War and on solidarity movements. The contributors trace the ways that ideas and practices were made, adopted, and circulated through time and space through a focus on African soldiers, politicians and diplomats. The book also asks what motivated the men and women who crossed borders to join liberation movements, how Cold War influences were acted upon, interpreted and used, and why certain moments, venues and relations took on exaggerated importance. The connections among liberation movements, between them and their hosts, and across an extraordinarily diverse set of external actors reveal surprising exchanges and lasting legacies that have too often been obscured by the assertion of monolithic national histories. Tracing an extraordinarily diverse set of interactions and exchanges, Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements will be of great interest to scholars of Southern Africa, Transnational History, the Cold War and African Politics. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements offers new perspectives on southern Africa’s wars of national liberation, drawing on extensive oral historical and archival research. Assuming neither the primacy of nationalist loyalties as they exist today nor any single path to liberation, the book unpicks any notion of a straightforward imposition of Cold War ideologies or strategic interests on liberation wars. This approach adds new dimensions to the rich literatures on the Global Cold War and on solidarity movements. The contributors trace the ways that ideas and practices were made, adopted, and circulated through time and space through a focus on African soldiers, politicians and diplomats. The book also asks what motivated the men and women who crossed borders to join liberation movements, how Cold War influences were acted upon, interpreted and used, and why certain moments, venues and relations took on exaggerated importance. The connections among liberation movements, between them and their hosts, and across an extraordinarily diverse set of external actors reveal surprising exchanges and lasting legacies that have too often been obscured by the assertion of monolithic national histories. Tracing an extraordinarily diverse set of interactions and exchanges, Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements will be of great interest to scholars of Southern Africa, Transnational History, the Cold War and African Politics. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

An illustrious African liberation fighter in the 1970s and, until his suspicious death in 2011, an important figure in Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party in Zimbabwe, this first full-length biography of General Solomon Mujuru or Rex Nhongo throws much needed light onto the opaque elite politics of the 1970s liberation struggle, post-independence army and ZANU PF. Based on the unparalleled primary interviews with informants in the army, intelligence services, police and ZANU PF elites, Blessing-Miles Tendi examines Mujuru's moments of triumph and his shortcomings in equal measure. From his undistinguished youth and poor upbringing in colonial Rhodesia's Chikomba region, his rapid rise to power, and role as the first black commander of independent Zimbabwe's national army, this is an essential record of one of the most controversial figures within the history of African liberation politics.

An illustrious African liberation fighter in the 1970s and, until his suspicious death in 2011, an important figure in Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party in Zimbabwe, this first full-length biography of General Solomon Mujuru or Rex Nhongo throws much needed light onto the opaque elite politics of the 1970s liberation struggle, post-independence army and ZANU PF. Based on the unparalleled primary interviews with informants in the army, intelligence services, police and ZANU PF elites, Blessing-Miles Tendi examines Mujuru's moments of triumph and his shortcomings in equal measure. From his undistinguished youth and poor upbringing in colonial Rhodesia's Chikomba region, his rapid rise to power, and role as the first black commander of independent Zimbabwe's national army, this is an essential record of one of the most controversial figures within the history of African liberation politics.