Browsing by Subject "Liberation Struggle"

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    AIM, FOCUS, SHOOT: Photographic Narratives of War, Independence, and Imagination in Mozambique, 1950 to 1993
    (2013-06) Thompson, Drew
    Photography's production and exhibition were important mediums for self-representation, political expression, and economic survival for photographers in Mozambique and their audiences from 1950 to 1993. Furthermore, conversations on race in Mozambique happened in the experiential realm of the visual as state-implemented categories for defining race determined the audiences for specific pictures, the venues in which audiences viewed photographs, and the types of images published versus those relegated to state and personal archives. Few scholars have studied photography in Mozambique along with how questions of race persisted after Portuguese colonialism and shaped post-independence life. In turn, to address these absences, this dissertation looks at Mozambique's history of colonialism, liberation, and economic hardship through the camera's lens and the lives of Mozambican commercial and press photographers, whose careers reflect this history. A reconstruction and historicization of the production, circulation, and appropriation of photographs from the late-colonial period into the present day illuminates the ways in which visual technologies shaped popular perceptions of racial identification and the ways in which independence movements developed. Pictures read against collected oral histories offer a context to recreate the class formations, social activities, and image worlds fashioned by photography. This approach to photography as both the object of study and as methodological approach to historical studies highlights the ways in which popular and government discourses on race, issues silenced by ideologies of racial democracy, co-opted photography's technical and visual languages, and the ways in which photography sometimes contested and contradicted these discourses on race. Ultimately, this study raises new issues about how photography's practice and archiving gave rise to conditions of citizenship and nation and about the nature of artistic resistance movements in colonial and post-independent Mozambique.
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    It was difficult in Zimbabwe: a history of imprisonment, detention and confinement during Zimbabwe’s Liberation struggle, 1960-1980
    (2008-10) Munochiveyi, Munyaradzi Bryn
    Between 1961 and 1979, African nationalists engaged in a protracted guerrilla war which ultimately ended white colonial rule in Rhodesia (Rhodesia was Zimbabwe's colonial name). The settler regime responded by imprisoning a large number of activists and those whom it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. In this thesis, I am particularly interested in the histories and lived experiences of African political detainees and prisoners whose experiences and contributions towards the liberation struggle have been rendered invisible by dominant historical and state narratives. Broadly, this dissertation argues that although political imprisonment in this period was an extreme version of the colonial experience that combined spatial confinement with curtailed freedoms, racialized abuse, racial segregation, and heightened repression, the prison was also a terrain of struggle. By describing the Rhodesian prison as a terrain of struggle, I mean that the prison was doubly a space of repression and subversion, and that political prisoners were capable of challenging and negotiating their incarceration. I therefore seek to establish that although the Rhodesian prisons were centers of brutality, political detainees were not passive recipients of state penal terror as they actively negotiated, challenged, and subverted oppressive penal regulations. The thesis also argues that, as political hostages of the Rhodesian regime, detainees played a crucial role towards dislodging colonial rule both as producers of powerful critiques of the colonial regime from inside the prison confines and as symbols of African resistance. Methodologically, this project relies primarily upon the oral testimonies of ex-political prisoners, and the prison letters that most of them wrote whilst they were in detention. I also make use of little used documentary evidence such as court records and local African and state-controlled newspaper accounts.