:Running After Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe.(Social History of Africa.)

Abstract

Using contraception as the lens through which to study gender, power, and resistance in colonial Zimbabwe, Amy Kaler has written a compelling and insightful book that explores new terrain in African historiography. With African women's fertility as their object, conflicts flared between African elders and juniors, men and women, women and their in‐laws, and Africans and the colonial state. Based on archival research and interviews with former family planning workers as well as ordinary Zimbabweans, the book focuses on the Shona population during the period 1957–1980. African voices and views, highlighted through interview excerpts, shape the book's contours. The radical social transformations sparked by the colonial wage economy, migratory labor, and particularly, the liberation war of the 1970s provide the highly politicized context. Conflicts over African fertility were intrinsically political. Kaler explores the ways in which right‐wing whites warned of the menace of an uncontrolled and growing African population, while “modernizing” liberals decried African reproductive practices as primitive, obsolete, and in need of transformation. The collaboration of the liberal Family Planning Association of Rhodesia with the white minority government provided fuel for the agents of African cultural nationalism, who decried Western family planning techniques as government‐induced genocide.