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This Booked is Biased
As a young man, back in the 1970s, I became very interested in the history and current affairs of all things southern African. I felt, as I still do, that I became somewhat of an "expert" about Rhodesia, South Africa, and SWA (Namibia). I read as many of the books that I could that were available in my university library as well as books that I purchased myself. For full disclosure regarding this review, I feel compelled to state that I was sympathetic to the political aims of both South Africa and Rhodesia of the time period. I remember this book being published in the early 80s under the title of Chimurenga, a reference to the African uprisings in Rhodesia during the 1890s. That had me wondering if the authors' point of view was sympathetic to the terrorist organizations that had fought the Rhodesian Army in the 1970s. If so, I had no interest in reading a book that clearly expressed such a bias. Although my interest over the decades waned, I never completely lost my curiosity for southern African. With a plethora of new books, many of which were personal accounts, of the wars and events in southern African being published over the past ten years, my interest renewed. The book, Chimurenga was republished as the Rhodesian War, and viewing the background of the two authors, I took a chance and purchased it, with the hope that it would be a neutral, objective account of the Rhodesian War. Because of military and technical content, I assumed it would be a good book to read before I started on many of the personal war accounts of Rhodesian soldiers. It was a mistake. The name of the book may have changed, but the original bias, that I suspected, in my opinion, did not. The content is totally slanted in favor of the Rhodesian guerrillas/terrorists. Innuendo, such as using inflammatory words to describe the actions of the Rhodesian security forces ("The soldiers mowed down the guerrilla fighters.")abound. Yet for some reason, the authors felt compelled to present a detailed explanation/exposition of a guerrilla/terrorist attack, to somehow soften the reasons as to why the terrorists were using certain tactics against white Rhodesians made me furious. When the Rhodesian Army attacked, it was an atrocity, but somehow the guerrillas, in all their terrorism, and killing of totally innocent men, women, and children, never warranted the term atrocity. I should have realized the bias from the beginning of the book, as I continually kept seeing the term "settlers" describing Rhodesian whites, that this book was going to be a problem. But I kept holding out for more objectivity. The coup de grace of biases of the authors is when they used the single most damaging ploy of comparing some Rhodesian tactics to Nazi tactics. Yet the shooting down of two civilian Rhodesian airliners, one of which resulted in the survivors being massacred by the terrorists, never seemed to get a comparable description for that tactic. I wondered about the bias of the authors, since both had lived in Rhodesia and served in the Rhodesian forces. I use to think that they were perhaps just anti - Ian Smith and Rhodesian Front Party. I am still wondering about it. Regarding the technical aspects of weaponry and Rhodesian Army field tactics, the book reads much like a textbook. The use of acronyms to describe the guerrilla/terrorist organizations of ZANLA, ZIPRA, and ZAPU, with the later addition of the suffix PF, will have most uniformed readers wearing out the pages going back and forth to the glossary. Perhaps that was unavoidable.
July 2011 · Books