BOOK REVIEWS149many Whites who lived through the pre-Independence war years. A newdimension is added to her relationship with her friend Katharine when she at lastleaves to understand the latter's conviction that the war being waged to preserve'White supremacy is intrinsically immoral. The right of every human being tofreedom, both personal and political, becomes obvious to her with the realizationthat Julia, her maid, and increasingly her friend, is exactly like herself in everyrespect and that their mutual interdependence must be based on an equality offact as well as of personal recognition. At the same time, she acknowledges thather children have the right to stand alone, and that emotional independence is asunimportant as physical liberty. Threaded through the story is Deidre's own lateblooming of heart and mind, paradoxically as her physical strength declines.The tale is told in a stream-of-consciousness style which does not alwayssucceed; some judicious pruning might well have sharpened the impact of theever-flowing, sometimes rambling, thoughts, recognizably feminine in theirpreoccupation with home and family. Though the atmosphere of those years, themood of those involved, is well captured, the book would certainly be improvedby careful editing and a sharpening of the focus on the central problems. Finally,Mambo Press must be taken to task for the unacceptably large number ofmisprints and the erratic punctuation, notably as regards the use of the questionmark, which are bound to irritate the reader.University of ZimbabweVERONIQUE WAKERLEYWomen and Law In Southern Africa Edited by A. Armstrong. Harare,Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1987, xiv, 281 pp., Z$5.00, ISBN 0-949225-48-7.Independence is not only for One Sex By K. Bond-Stewart. Harare, ZimbabwePublishing House, 1987, 128 pp., Z$6.50, ISBN 0-949225-50-9.Young Women In the Liberation Struggle, Stories and Poems fromZimbabwe By K. Bond-Stewart. Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1984,67pp., Z$3.00, ISBN 0-949932-85-X.Zimbabwean Women in Industry By P. Made and B. Lagerstrom, Harare,Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985, 60 pp., Z$3.50, ISBN 0-949932-98-1.All of the above books are published in Zimbabwe Publishing House's 'Womenof Africa' series, but they are very different in concept and style. ZimbabweanWomen in Industry irritated me in its bald and somewhat didactic style, andparticularly in the number of uncaptioned photographs which Š to me at leastŠ-were not self-explanatory. Presumably this book is aimed at the 'working class'women's market, to sensitize women workers to their specific disabilities in thelabour market and to organize them rather more effectively than has been the caseto date; in which case, it would be better produced in Shona, Ndebele and Tongathan in English.Young Women in the Liberation Struggle is based on the writings of femaleex-combatants in the course of their English studies at Ranche House College.There is a tendency in some of the pieces to mythologize, in the style of traditional150BOOK REVIEWSoral literature on this continent, but on the whole I found this collection Šespecially the longer accounts Š gripping and very emotive reading. I hope thatsome of these accounts will find their way, in modified form, into school curriculaat both primary and secondary level, and preferably in the indigenous languagesof this country rather than (or at least as well as) English. 1 can think of no betterillustration of alternative female role models for Zimbabwean children to beraised on, in any socialist attempt to create gender equality in our society.Independence is not only for One Sex is in many ways an expanded andperhaps 'up-market' version of Young Women in the Liberation Struggle. Itcovers, disappointingly scantily, the life histories of a number of prominent (andsome not-so-prominent) Zimbabwean women. As such, in my view, it fallsbetween conflicting stools: it will disappoint the serious reader looking for localversions of the biography genre; equally well, it may be seen as a bit too long andcomplicated for those oriented to women's magazines. Perhaps its main appealwould be to the secondary school reader.However, what emerges with crystal clarity as a recurrent theme in all three ofthese publications, is a very important lesson to women in society: it takes strengthto be different, and women grow strong by practising being different! Changewomen's behaviour, and attitudes to women change too.Women and Law in Southern Africa is, in contrast to the three booksconsidered above, primarily an academic collection put together for universityteaching purposes. Its fourteen papers are divided thematically into six parts(women and property, marriage and divorce, women and their children, women'slegal studies, women and health, and women and criminal law). Theirgeographical distribution is uneven: Botswana (3), Mozambique (1), Swaziland(4), Zambia (1) and Zimbabwe (5). Four of the papers, including those dealingwith Mozambique and Zambia and two of the three on Botswana, are reprints ofprior publications elsewhere.The theoretical orientation of the papers is generally concerned with a sober,empirical analysis of the problems generated for women by dual systems of law(with the exception of one orthodox Marxist, Ncube, who insists on attributing itall to feudalism and/or capitalism). What is striking about the problems thatwomen in this region experience with the legal systems of their respectivecountries (apart from the many similarities in legal structures) is that so many ofthem emanate from marriage or its legal absence, reflecting, perhaps, what anthropo-logical Marxists have analysed as the ideological and material trappings of thelineage' mode of production, rather than feudalism articulated with capitalism.Eight of the thirteen authors are themselves women, and all but one arequalified lawyers, most in academic posts. Not surprisingly, then, the focus ofmost of the papers is on legal analysis of the law. Only those by Griffiths (on theway in which effectively single women manipulate both customary and statutorysystems in Botswana in order to obtain assistance in raising their children) andChikanza and Chinamora (on abortion in Zimbabwe), bring empirical data tobear on legal problems. One may argue, of course, that logic is sufficient toanalyse problems in the law, and that case law highlights such problems withoutthe need for empirical investigation. But as an anthropologist who hasapproached legal problems primarily from the angle of people living in societyrather than from the perspective of administering the law, I feel that there isconsiderable room for fruitful collaboration between lawyers and social scientistsBOOK REVIEWS151on these issues. For example, in considering problems of 'dual marriage'(statutory and customary marriages existing simultaneously for a married pair),there is no reference in this book to the extensive work of anthropologists inidentifying and defining the marriage process in the 'traditional' societies inquestion. Nor is the anthropological literature on bridewealth apparently known,with its hard-won distinctions between payments in patrilineal and matrilinealsocieties, and the precise rights that are transacted by bridewealth in each. Greaterclarity in legal understanding might emerge from using this literature.That said, however Š and with no intention of delving into the manyspecifics of the individual arguments Š I found this a serious and usefulcollection, less uneven in the quality of its individual papers than is commonly thecase (though not without some contradictions between individual authors on the'correct' interpretation of specific aspects of Zimbabwean colonial law). It willundoubtedly and deservedly find a place beyond its primary orientation as asource for students reading law.University of ZimbabweANGELA P. CHEATERGuns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe By D. Lan.Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1983, xix, 244 pp., ISBN 0-85255-200-9,Z$ 12.50.It is a performance. The book Guns and Rain is a theatrical event, bothentertaining and absorbing. The author, David Lan, had the wit and courage toenter a remote corner of Zimbabwe, Dande, at Independence to study therelationship between the spirit mediums and the guerrillas. After spending overeighteen months in Dande, Lan wrote his thesis for which he was awarded hisdoctorate by the London School of Economics. This book is based on the thesis. Itis about one aspect of the straggle for Zimbabwe (1966-80) as reported in anoperational zone in the Zambezi valley. It sets out to describe the active supportgiven to the resistance by Shona religious leaders, and to detail the collaborationbetween ancestors and their descendants, the past and the present, the living andthe dead. Using structural analysis, Lan examines the politics of resistance, givesan account of an important historical event, and traces Shona social theory andpractice. His study has been widely praised as a model which shows howanthropology can contribute to politics and history.Lan has a writer's eye for a catchy phrase Š The Lions of Rain' and 'TheSons of the Soil5 are two of his section headings Š and a craftsman's ability tothread themes using carefully chosen words like coloured beads so that the wholeis an intricately worked and pleasing ornament. Yet my copy of Guns and Rain islittered with question marks. How does he know this? I want to ask. Where is hisevidence? How many people told him that? Where is the counter evidence? Forexample, let us see what Lan says about work. In the second chapter, on ThePeople and Land', he describes the Korekore of Dande as living in villages inwhich,Each household has its own fields where the men work in the early morning while