Liberation armies, women soldiers and martial masculinity: gender and training in the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army

Journal article

Scholars of Southern African liberation wars have paid insufficient attention to women’s military training. Training matters because it was a central aspect of women soldiers’ wartime experience and the basis for their varied deployments. It also offers a revealing lens on dominant martial masculinities and their connection to liberation movements’ gendered imaginaries of war and future society. As in armies the world over, the training of women in liberation militaries challenged the merging of martial ideals with those of masculinity. The article enriches wider debates on gender and militaries by illuminating liberation armies’ distinctiveness, challenging assumptions drawn from conventional state forces. Using oral histories, we explore the case of women who trained in the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZPRA), the military wing of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). We trace major shifts in women’s training, from the ‘pioneers’ integrated into male guerrilla units and praised for embodying masculinist ideals, to the later creation of a semi-conventional Women’s Brigade, commanded by women. Although the Brigade was intended for deployment in liberated zones within Zimbabwe, in practice, members served in the ‘rear front’ in Zambia, itself a major combat zone in the late 1970s. We trace the tensions between women’s celebratory stories of achieving equality with men by completing the same military training, and their assertions of gendered difference, often grounded in ZAPU’s idea of women as the ‘seed of the nation’, which emphasised their reproductive role and need for protection. A striking aspect of many ZPRA women’s accounts is their pride in martial expertise, earned through military training, specialisation, and rear front deployments. Training did not deliver gender equality in the army, but it provided the foundation for postindependence professional careers, and underpinned ZPRA women veterans’ quest for recognition of their wartime military service.

Authors: McGregor, J; Alexander, J; Hadebe, MH

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Journal: Journal of Southern African Studies
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-14
• EISSN: 1465-3893
• ISSN: 0305-7070
• Language: English
• Keywords: liberation army; women soldiers; military history; martial masculinity; gender; ZPRA; ZAPU