This is the first edition of The Frontline, a monthly newsletter dedicated to recovering, documenting and interrogating the history of Southern Africa’s liberation struggles.
We are launching it with a simple conviction: too much of our history still lives in people’s memories, forgotten boxes of photographs, old letters, military records, family stories and graves whose histories are disappearing with every passing year.
The Frontline intends to find those stories before they are lost.
Our focus will stretch across the region. We will follow the histories of liberation movements such as ZPRA, ZANLA, Umkhonto we Sizwe, SWAPO, FRELIMO and MPLA, as well as the countries that hosted them.
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Today’s national borders do not confine the history of the liberation struggle. Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Botswana, Angola and other countries became training grounds, transit routes, refugee centres, political headquarters and, at times, battlefields.
Behind the familiar names and celebrated events are thousands of lesser-known stories: fighters who never came home; families who still do not know where their relatives were buried; and civilians who played crucial roles in the struggle.
They hid guerrillas, fed them, clothed them and treated them when they were sick, often at great risk to their own lives.
Our journalism will combine oral history, archival research, interviews, photographs, documents and visits to the places where history happened.
We will return to battlefields, assembly points, training camps, border crossings and graves. We will speak to veterans, historians, families and witnesses while they can still tell their stories.
But this will not be a newsletter devoted to nostalgia.
Liberation history deserves the same journalistic scrutiny that we bring to contemporary affairs. We want to record courage and sacrifice, but also disagreements, mistakes, contradictions and uncomfortable memories.
History becomes less useful when it is reduced to official speeches or stories in which everyone remembers themselves as a hero.
We want the complicated history.
And we need our readers to help us find it.
If you have photographs sitting in an album, letters written from exile, military documents, diaries, newspaper cuttings or recordings, tell us about them.
If your father, mother, grandfather, grandmother or neighbour participated in the struggle, introduce us.
If there is a forgotten grave, battlefield or story in your community, send us a lead.
And when we get something wrong, challenge us with evidence.
The Frontline should become a conversation between journalists, veterans, researchers, families, students and ordinary people interested in understanding how Southern Africa became what it is today.
Most importantly, we hope younger readers will discover that liberation history does not belong only in museums. Its consequences surround us.
Questions about land, borders, identity, inequality, democracy, regional solidarity and political power cannot be fully understood without understanding the struggles that preceded independence.
Welcome to The Frontline.
There is still much to find.
There is still much to question.
And there are many witnesses with stories that must be recorded while we still can.
You can email us at zenzele@cite.org.zw.
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