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Janice McLaughlin, On the Frontline: Catholic Missions in Zimbabwe's Liberation War (Baobab Books, Harare, 1996), xvi + 352 pp., $38 paperback, ISBN 0-908311.
Janice McLaughlin is one of the first writers to be given access to ZANLA guerrillas' field reports. She has used them, along with a wide range of Church sources and the growing literature on Zimbabwe's war of liberation, to produce a well-sourced book on the interaction between guerrillas, civilian populations and religious leadership. It centres on four detailed studies of Catholic rural mission stations: St Albert's Mission in Chinhoyi Diocese, Avila Mission in Mutare Diocese, St Paul's, Musami, in the Archdiocese of Harare and Mutero Mission in Gweru Diocese. Other chapters set the study in historical context, describe the role of bishops and the Justice and Peace Commission, and analyse the new data from a theological and historical perspective.
As a Maryknoll Sister who worked in the Rhodesian Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in 1977, and who was arrested, deported and worked in Mozambique with ZANU, the author is writing a history that she has lived and, in a small way, made. But, with the inevitable occasional lapse, her account of events strives for objectivity and rigour of analysis. This is seen in both the selection of material and its interpretation. Though her own political and theological position is clear, this is not an apologia for those members of the Catholic Church who, like her, supported the liberation struggle, nor a hymn of praise to their names, rather a painstaking attempt to understand how guerrillas and religious leadership, Catholic and 'traditional', thought about and acted towards each other.
Despite a wealth of detail that differentiates the circumstances in each study, a...