Reviews
Scarnecchia lays down a challenge to those who would have us believe that contemporary Zimbabwe was forged in the struggle between African nationalists and white supremacists. With painstaking research, Scarnecchia shows how the troubled politics of Zimbabwe have their roots in the African politics of the 1940s and beyond, when Africans were able to manipulate, and be manipulated by, the imperial retreat, decolonization, and Cold War rivalries. Scarnecchia recuperates the politics and struggles within the townships of Southern Rhodesia, where trade unionists and politicians, youth leagues and women's organizations, created democratic spaces for themselves, and, almost as often, deployed violence to destroy the populist spaces of their rivals. --Luise White, Professor of History, University of Florida

Tim Scarnecchia's study of the urban roots of Zimbabwean nationalism offers an important and original exploration of the ways in which violence, generation, and gender shape political mobilization and political culture. He traces the carefully negotiated rise of demands for "imperial citizenship" among working class men and women of the 1950s, and their displacement in the 1960s by a violent politics in which the quest for power and loyalty placed the language of the sell-out and young men center stage. This latter version of nationalism won out, and continues powerfully to shape Zimbabwe today. --Jocelyn Alexander, University Lecturer in Commonwealth Studies, University of Oxford