BOOK REVIEWS 103struggle, then I would be saying that I regret having liberated my country.'This is a poignant statement from a man who gave so much but got so littlein return. The feelings expressed by the ex-combatants in Barnes's chaptermake me search for my conscience that has been long lost in the ecstasyof liberation.The work of the Mafela Trust outlined in Brickhill's chapter mentionedearlier, reveals that the traumas of the war are still very much alive forboth the perpetrator and the victim. The work of the Mafela Trust is 'anattempt through field research, to list the names, next-of-kin and places ofburial and the ZIPRA dead'. The pain and grief over the loss of a loved onecan be overcome if there is a burial. The grief is perennial when the lovedone is unaccounted for. Some fighters and peasants who fell in the struggleare still to be located. Everyone knows someone close to them who hasnever been found and this is a painful experience. Thus the effort of theMafela Trust is commendable and should be the basis of a nationwidedocumentation of the fallen heroes, be they the fighters or the civilians.This generation has the duty to record accurately events in theliberation war for the unborn generations. Moreover, as we enjoy thefruits of liberty we can do justice to those who died for us by puttingtogether chronicles of the war. This new book sets us off in that directionand it is a valuable addition to our history of Zimbabwe's bloody road toliberation. The second volume is to be published in the near future. I canhardly wait for it.University of Zimbabwe C. PFUKWAA Zimbabwean Past By D. N. Beach. Gweru, Mambo Press, 1994, xviii,368pp., ISBN 0-6922-52-6, Z$89,18.This book is a very pleasant surprise. We have known for some timethat David Beach intended to follow up his The Shona and Zimbabwe, 900-1850 (Mambo, Gweru, 1984) with a collection of dynastic histories. Theweaker brethren among us have feared that such a collection would bevery difficult reading. And Beach tells us sternly in the introduction to thisnew book that if 'Shona and Zimbabwe was complicated for academic andforeign readers, A Zimbabwean Past will be even more complex'. Thatintimidating rather than reassuring comparison Š the Hapsburg EmpireŠ appears on the first page of the introduction. It looks as though we arein for a necessary but gruelling time.And yet the book's effect is quite different. The dynastic histories arethere, of course, in three chapters which between them cover over 150pages. But each history is introduced in bold print with a paragraphsetting out the moral of the tale. The first of these Š a note on theMarange dynasty of Bocha Š gives their flavour:104 BOOK REVIEWSNewcomers to the world of Shona politics could hardly find a better point at whichto start than the Marange dynasty of Bocha; it offers a neat little case history ofstruggle for political power and land, with the enforced peace of colonial rule onlyjust suppressing the older method of conducting politics in the last century.The effect is almost of a Shona Machiavelli, concerned with powerrather than with principles. Anyone who reads through these stories willnot need persuading that, as Beach concludes on page 269, there was 'nosuch thing as a Shona succession system'. The late colonial attempt tointroduce 'traditional rules' into a dynastic politics which was deniedforce and fraud was an absurdity.Presented in this way, as case studies of Shona political dynamics, thedynastic histories no longer bewilder with their detail. Moreover, they areset in this book in the context of major historiographical essays in whichBeach lays out his methods and his assumptions. The dynastic historiesbecome samples and tests of Beach's historical procedures.These historiographical sections of this book make it required readingnot only for Zimbabweanists but for all those who are introduced in thedevelopment of African history. We are in an introspective time. Thatgreat pre-colonial historian, Jan Vansina, has recently given us anextraordinary frank account of his academic autobiography; Tony Kirk-Green has edited a collection of anecdotal confessions by the founders ofAfrican history in British (and anglophone African) universities, whichconcludes with my own reflections on Southern Rhodesia in the early1960s as an environment for historical production. Now Beach offers anaccount of oral historiography in the Rhodesia of the 1970s which if lessremarkable than Vansina's book is, still nonetheless, a significantcontribution to understanding. Beach argues explicitly that in many ways,Rhodesia in the early 1970s was a surprisingly favourable environment fororal historiography; he also shows implicitly what a very peculiarenvironment it was, and how easily its peculiarities might distort bothcollection and interpretation.The third section of the book is entitled 'The traditions of the Shonastates' and the fourth 'Toward an analysis of Shona traditions'. Both arehistoriographical. The third section contains a reprint of Beach's importantaccount of indigenous historical speculation. 'The Rozvi in search of thepast'. It also contains a definitive demolition of Donald Abraham's work onthe Mutapa dynasty. A suspicious Shona cultural nationalist might noticethat the tendency of all this is to diminish the importance of the 'ShonaEmpires' and to offer instead a mosaic of small dynasties. But Beach is not,of course, denying the existence of the Mutapa and Rozvi states, which areattested in archival sources. He is denying that either modern Rozvitraditions or the work of oral historians like Abraham can tell us anythingabout those states.Indeed, it appears in the fourth section of the book that Beach doesnot believe that any Shona traditions can take us back before 1700. Thismakes astringent reading for someone who, like myself, was reared onideas of the spirit mediums as custodians of ancient truths about medievalempires. Beach comments that mediums are actually worse informantsBOOK REVIEWS 105than most lay people; that the Shona lack creation myths and have notraditions of a common founder; that they are even poor in mythstereotypes. Once again, the Shona cultural nationalist stirs into protest.Yet one gets the sense that Beach would be only too happy if he could usetraditions for a reliable history from the fifteenth century; if there werecreation myths and stories of common founders.All this is challenging and valuable. Beach has lived with this material,as he tell us, for more than 15 years and he knows it more thoroughly thananyone ever has or is ever likely to do. I cannot challenge him on detail,but greatly daring I shall raise a wider challenge. Within African oralhistory as a whole, there has long raged a debate between the 'literalists'and the 'structuralists' Š between Jan Vansina in his earlier incarnationsand scholars like Joseph Miller and Roy Willis. An extreme of 'literalism'was attained by Daniel McCall, who seriously advocated throwing awayeverything in a tradition that could not be believed and focussing merelyon real events. Beach is no McCall. He discusses narrative stereotypes; heallows that Shona traditions 'tell us what lay behind the beliefs and actionsof the people', even if only 'from the coming of colonial rule to the present'.Yet he does tend to make a straightforward, unproblematic contrastbetween 'myth' and 'truth'. Thus on page 245, he remarks thateven very well educated people will tend to resist the notion that what grandfathertold them is mythical. They can take comfort in the fact that if quite a lot ofgrandfather's stories are myths, some are more or less true.There is certainly no sense here that profound truths may lie inmyths. There is equally no sense that a historian may use the mythical andlegendary layers of tradition Š as Miller and Willis argue Š to get at thefounding values of a culture or at its repetitive political processes. Beach'sis a powerful but limited notion of oral historiography.This comes back to the Machiavellian parables of the dynastic histories.They are indeed stories of struggles for power and possession. There isnot much about ideas or beliefs. Beach has long been properly suspiciousof vague invocations of 'religion' or 'ritual' to explain what is otherwisemysterious in Shona political history, rather than in the same way thatarchaeologists often explain any article whose use they cannot guess as a'ritual object'. But in sweeping away illegitimate religiosity, Beach tends tosweep away all ideologies and legitimations. This is very much against thetendency of recent work on pre-colonial African polities, of which perhapsthe supreme example is Tom McCaskie's work on the hegemonic ideologiesof the Asante state. McCaskie uses narrative, myth, ritual to construct hispicture. No Shona polity was like the Asante state. Still, I hope that one dayanother oral historian of the Shona will arise who will ask different questionsof the material so painstakingly accumulated by Beach. I am sure that inhis sense of loneliness, his lament that everyone now works on the twentiethcentury, David Beach hopes so too.Oxford University T. 0. RANGER