David McDermott Hughes. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xx + 204 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $31.00. Paper.

Abstract

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY David McDermott Hughes. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xx + 204 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $31.00. Paper. In Whiteness in Zimbabwe, David McDermott Hughes offers a fascinating analysis of how white farmers have constructed and understood their role in the country before, during, and following the agrarian reforms currendy aimed at them. The work's strengths - its exposition of connections between this group's environmental conservation and its racial identity, as well as its extensive reference to literature and photography - make this ethnographic study required reading for anyone interested in the process of colonization. Hughes refers to J. M. Coetzee' White Writing (Yale University Press, 1988), obviously a major influence, in his allusion to the dream topographies of the country that whites have created through a combination of imagination and engineering. To feel at home, Euro-Africans, these children of the glaciers accustomed to Wordsworthian landscapes, transformed the African vistas: Zimbabwe had no lakes, so they built them. In his second and third chapters, Hughes describes the massive project that spawned the Kariba Dam and its lake. With an incisive exegesis of scientific and fictional works featuring the lake, he shows how this artificial body of water has become the myth of the African wilderness. In chapter 4 he describes how, after independence, investing in major farm projects like irrigation was also an investment in identity, giving the farmers a legitimate role in the new country while they continued their drive to transform its space. In analyzing the geography of farms and wilderness, Hughes might have referred to Raymond Williams's masterful account (in The Country and The City, 1973) of the ways in which large landowners in eighteenth-century England invented natural spaces and lost themselves in their contemplation, making an abstraction of the work and the lives of farmworkers. In its South Rhodesian version, this became what Hughes calls the strategy of social escape (58), which leads him to define white racism as a process of Other disregarding (xviii). In chapter 5 Hughes suggests that white farmers, in view of the current agrarian reforms that threaten their imagined realm, have reinvented their role in the high veld in order to preserve their farms. In his study of the Virginia district, he identifies three strategies - conservation, evangelizing, and agricultural development - that nonetheless failed. Those who were still on their farms in 2003 were playing the game (xiv, 101) by collaborating with the occupants. …