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Mafuranhunzi Gumbo, Guerrilla Snuff (Baobab Books, Harare, 1995), xiv + 210 pp., $15.00 pbk, ISBN 0-908311-73-7.
Mafuranhunzi Gumbo is the Shona name given to Martinus Daneel, Zimbabwean-born son of a missionary and himself a lay clergyman, when he lived in Gutu district for his studies of Shona religion and African independent churches in the 1960s. He remained in the country during the war years, but in the 1980s was a faculty member at the University of South Africa. On his frequent trips to Zimbabwe in the 1980s for this study, he became a member of the newly formed Association of Zimbabwe Spirit Mediums (AZSM), later renamed the Association of Traditional Ecologists (AZTREC), which proposes extending the struggle to the field of environmental reform, and director of the Zimbabwe Institute of Religious Research and Conservation Trust (ZIRRCON). Guerrilla Snuff is the story of the relationship between the ancestors' war council, represented by possessed spirit mediums and directed by Mwari (God), and the guerrillas. The ancestors are depicted as protecting the guerrillas from the enemy, assisting them in devising and implementing battle strategy and tactics, aiding in the detection of traitors, providing medicine for the wounded guerrillas, and encouraging them that the war would end in victory. The book's title refers to the guerrillas' war practice of using snuff, part of the ritual of consulting the ancestors. The prophets of African independent churches such as the Apostolics and the Zionists are also depicted as actively involved in supporting the guerrillas.
Daneel describes the book as `neither conventional history nor fiction' but rather `an attempt to popularize history and myth for the benefit of our modern world, as well as for rural men and...