Boys, Brats and Education: Reproducing White Maturity in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1915–1935

Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s, white settlers in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe) achieved responsible government and sought to claim the region as a settlers’ territory but faced a crisis with their own children and youth. Despite subsidised schools and easily available bursaries, too many white boys grew to adulthood without useful education or skills, and with disruptive expectations and demands. These youth faced immediate unemployment and appeared unlikely to be able ever to qualify as civilised breadwinning patriarchs for future generations. Rhodesia’s white elite ironically responded to this problem by invoking models of socially controlled education initially developed to train and contain groups of people expected to be inferior: white girls, whose practical education prepared them for subordinate social roles, and African boys and men, whose schools sought to channel individual ambition into a defined, appropriate form of education that emphasized rural life and community values. Educational initiatives, though, proved incapable of making the racial and communal logic of segregation viable. In this case study of white crisis and administrative policy response it is possible to trace some of the logical and practical problems with the social planning initiatives of one of the most segregationist regimes anywhere.