ABSTRACT
Civil wars anywhere involve not only divisive and traumatic violence but also lasting and troubling memories. My subject here is one specific and acute example of such violence: that of the Rhodesians’ covert poisoning of guerrillas in Zimbabwe’s liberation war and the witch-hunts of accused civilians that followed. By exploring different actors’ recollections of the witch-hunts, and the moral and political issues they raise, I hope to convey something of the moral complexity of living through and with the memory of such traumatic events. But I am also concerned with the events themselves, and from the various, often contradictory accounts, I reconstruct a plausible version of what happened in order to illustrate the devastating effects of this counterinsurgency strategy.
