On Renamo ‘war’, entrepreneurial synergies and everyday life in the Honde Valley Borderlands, c.1980s–2020

Abstract

This article examines how Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo) operatives have become part of everyday life in Zimbabwe’s Honde Valley communities since the 1980s. While most studies of civil conflict and insurgency in African borderlands emphasise the predicaments of borderland communities, we examine how socio-economic and political dynamics in the Honde Valley borderlands challenge the dominant characterisations of borderlands as zones of predicament and borderlanders as mere victims of transnational socio-economic and political instability. By centring on borderlands and borderlanders, we argue that the Honde Valley borderland communities share common ethnic, linguistic, cultural, socio-economic and political networks that defy state-centric notions of national boundaries. Using the Honde Valley case study, we articulate how people’s historical ties created various opportunities for trade and self-determination for the local people, Renamo bandits and the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) forces. Drawing from interviews with Honde Valley borderlanders, archival documents and media reports, we provide a ‘bottom-up’ interpretation of the Renamo phenomenon, to contest scholarship that principally emphasises violence and suffering in African borderlands.