“Not until Zimbabwe Is Free Can We Stop to Think about It”: The Zimbabwe African National Union and Radical Women's Health Activists in the United States, 1979

This article contributes to the fledgling literature on solidarity with individual African liberation struggles other than the South African antiapartheid movement by focusing on one of several connections made by the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) with radicals in the United States. In 1979, a time of global revolutionary optimism, discussions were held about building solidarity between ZANU and the Federation of Women's Health Centers, a radical wing of the women's health movement. The proposed links held the promise of developing new understandings of gendered embodiment and anticolonial struggle and perhaps even of novel, radical practices of social emancipation in soon-to-be-liberated Zimbabwe and in the United States. But cultural differences, historical ignorance, insensitivities, and conflicting understandings of gendered and political propriety scuttled the efforts, providing early intimations of race and gender fault lines in the two movements that were to become increasingly apparent in the coming decades.