In his foreword to The Struggle for Zimbabwe (1985), the then prime minister of Zimbabwe, Robert G. Mugabe commends the authors, David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, for writing a history textbook ‘through ZANU's History’ (Mugabe, 1981: v) but goes on to argue that the main limitation of the book is that it is written by ‘onlookers’, who according to him ‘have the limitation that they are not the actors themselves’ (p. vi). Here, Mugabe implies that those who did not wield the gun and were not necessarily linked to ZANU history cannot write a credible and an ‘authentic’ history of the liberation struggle. Dumiso Dabengwa (1995), writing from the ZAPU side contests the above view and suggests that the definitive history of the war cannot be written without taking into account the ZIPRA war narrative. Dabengwa however, reinforces Mugabe's view that the war can only truthfully be narrated by the ‘actors’, when he, Dabengwa calls for a new breed of ‘historian, political scientist, economist [and] sociologist’ (p. 24) to give Zimbabwe a truthful account of the contradictions of the war of liberation fought between 1972 and 1979. Neither Mugabe nor Dabengwa looks to Zimbabwean fiction for potentially truthful narrative accounts of the war.