Urbanism and Identity in East Africa

Abstract

belief meant keeping silent about mass atrocities and going along with ZANU’s line, as British High Commissioner Robin Byatt did, that it was ‘a Biafra-type situation’, which meant an internal, ‘ethnic’ conflict that Britain could not intervene in no matter how bloody (284). It is challenging to capture the sprawling, opaque messiness of Zimbabwe’s liberation war with its vast list of actors and multitude of rumours, and at times the book suffers for it. Unlike other similar works, which are respectively organised around a particular administration’s decisionmaking or the political intrigue of a city like Dar es Salaam, Scarnecchia’s book jumps across a dizzying number of institutions, locations, and personalities. At times it is hard to follow why diplomats and politicians thought in particular ways or made particular decisions. The book’s scope also leads to difficult choices. There were some notable omissions, including Third World diplomacy, particularly during the 1960s; ZAPU’s institutional and military history; and a clearer sense of how the diplomacy related to the war’s military events. Given the book’s source material is largely from US and UK archives, there’s also a limited engagement with frontline state perspectives — particularly Mozambique’s, which played the critical role in Mugabe’s rise to power and in hosting ZANU’s army-in-exile during the most intense period of the war. Ultimately, Race and Diplomacy provides an important contribution to the historiography of Zimbabwe’s liberation war as a history of Anglo-American diplomatic initiatives. In this regard, although the book’s central argument about race is more contingent than is claimed, by writing about race as an ideational construct Scarnecchia points the way to diplomatic historians of the late twentieth century for how histories of international relations during this era can be significantly enriched.