Book Review: Clear, Hold, and Destroy: Pacification in Phú Yên and the American War in Vietnam by Robert J. Thompson III

Abstract

Wiriyamu in the future (p.18). The book includes a foreword by Professor Jeanne Penvenne, a preface, an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter brings together a set of interviews addressing a different side of the story. The first chapter, titled ‘The Colonial War and the Wiriyamu Triangle’, deals with the liberation struggle in colonial Mozambique and how this affected the Wiriyamu area. The second chapter, ‘The Anatomy of the Massacres’, includes six witnesses’ accounts of the killings and constitutes the most vivid and compelling part of the book. The third chapter, ‘Gathering and Surveying the Evidence’, gives voice to those who first came to know about the massacre while attending to survivors. The rest of the book deals with the aftermath of the massacre and the subsequent efforts to let the story be known internationally. The fourth chapter, titled ‘The First Public Outing of the Wiriyamu Narrative’, documents early and successful attempts by two priests to secretly transfer written records outside Mozambique. The fifth chapter, ‘The Final Revelation’, reproduces three interviews with members of the London-based Catholic Institute for International Relations, documenting their key role in disclosing details of the Wiriyamu story in the United Kingdom. The sixth and seventh chapters, titled ‘The British Fact-Checkers’ and ‘The Final Act – Witness Protection’ respectively, address a relatively marginal part of the story, namely Western journalists’ attempts to gather more evidence and missionaries’ endeavours to protect a key eyewitness of the massacre. Although related to the broader picture, these last two chapters are more relevant for an understanding of the ways that the late Portuguese colonial regime worked in Mozambique rather than exploring aspects of the massacre itself. Overall, the book’s selection of interviews makes for a very good read, although a ‘tough’ one ‘to absorb in one sitting’ as the author acknowledges (p.69). These stories offer important insights not only into the brutality of the massacre but into everyday life in Wiriyamu before and after the killings. They also contribute to our understanding of the ways people put together, report, and make sense of their memories of traumatic events. A more comprehensive discussion of the contextual setting of late colonial Mozambique would have rendered the stories more accessible for an audience unfamiliar with the topic. This is, nevertheless, a minor fault. The stories collected in this book are a precious gift to be added as teaching materials to modules on colonial history and oral history methods. The Wiriyamu Massacre will certainly be of great interest to students and scholars of modern Africa.