Vadya Phineas? (Did You Eat Phineas?): Tanda Women’s Roles in the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle, 1963–1980

This article examines how Zimbabwe’s liberation war (1963–1980) fractured the spatial and conceptual boundaries between “front” and “rear,” transforming rural landscapes into operational zones. Focusing on Tanda, a guerrilla transit zone in northeastern Zimbabwe, it shows that this collapse enabled rural women to wage economic warfare against Rhodesia’s settler economy through acts of cattle sabotage, such as stealing, slaughtering, and concealing settlers’ livestock. These actions not only sustained guerrilla fighters but also destabilised the economic foundations of white minority rule, striking at cattle breeding programmes and property regimes central to colonial capitalism. The study also shows that these actions were polyvalent, blending survival strategies, revenge for colonial dispossession, and nationalist sentiment, while simultaneously challenging patriarchal control over cattle, a key symbol of wealth and authority in Shona society. It argues that Tanda women’s cattle sabotage constituted a form of economic warfare that disrupted Rhodesia’s settler political economy and temporarily reconfigured gendered power relations, without producing lasting post-independence gender equality. Drawing on oral histories and archival sources, the article reframes Tanda women’s acts of cattle sabotage as a strategic intervention in the political economy of war, linking micro-level acts, such as the killing of Phineas, an imported Brahman bull, to macro-level disruptions in Rhodesia’s political economy. By foregrounding Tanda women’s economic sabotage rather than wartime domestic roles, the article moves beyond recuperative narratives of women’s participation, situating Tanda women as active agents in Rhodesian economic warfare who targeted the settler economy through economic subversion within fractured geographies.