Youth dreams, state repression and military mobility: tracing the origins of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union’s Liberation Army

Journal article

In early 1960s Southern Rhodesia, a secretive underground of male nationalist youth envisioned a revolutionary army and pressed their political leaders to act. How they came to do so is a dramatic and largely neglected story of youthful political imagination, state violence, and transnational military mobility, told in memoir and oral history. Many of the nationalist youth of this moment had first forged dreams of freedom as students in rural mission schools where they encountered astonishing stories of revolution and African independence. They concluded that educated, young leaders could transform the world and they energetically experimented with means of doing so before themselves joining the nationalist youth in townships. There they were confronted with a violent, intransigent settler state that forced them to reimagine routes to freedom. Evading this state produced the ‘militarised mobilities’ that took these young men into circuits of internationalist solidarity where they began to imagine the making of an army and the waging of war. Unusually among nascent liberation armies, they left Rhodesia as part of tightly organised nationalist youth networks intent on receiving military training and returned to these same networks as saboteurs and soldiers. Though their vision of warfare was not realised in these early years, it was the harsh lessons, personal relationships, and eclectic revolutionary dreams of this moment that laid the foundations for ZAPU’s liberation army.

Authors: Alexander, J

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Journal: Journal of Southern African Studies
• Publication date: 2026-05-13
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-14
• DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2026.2660520
• EISSN: 1465-3893
• ISSN: 0305-7070
• Language: English
• Keywords: youth; nationalism; sabotage; students; soldiers; guerrilla war; revolutionary dreams; ZAPU; ZPRA; liberation army; Zimbabwe