Winner of the Southern African Historical Society's Student Essay Prize in 2019: ‘Small Grains, Small Gains’: African Peasant Small Grains Production and Marketing in Zimbabwe during the Colonial Period, c.1890–1980

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of small grains (sorghum, millet, and rapoko) production and marketing in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) over the colonial era from 1890 to the 1970s. Using primary archival and secondary sources, it examines how different factors, including the advent of white settler capitalist agriculture and shifting global food trends, shaped small grains production and marketing over varying economic, environmental, and political periods in the colony. During the early years following settler encroachment in 1890, African producers dominated grain production. Colonial agricultural capital, aiming to establish a monopoly in agriculture, passed various repressive laws to unseat African producers from this position of dominance, shaping the trajectory of small grains development into the future. Revisiting seminal historiography debates on the underdevelopment of the African peasantry, this article argues that small grains show the ways in which African farmers exercised agency in response to the vacillating attitudes towards African agriculture by different colonial authorities over time. This history of small grain offers an appreciation of the different survival strategies Africans used during the colonial period in Zimbabwe to achieve ‘small gains’.