Colonial Zimbabwe Research Articles

The Forgotten Narratives: Mobilization, Recruitment and Wartime Experiences of World War Two African Servicemen from Southern Rhodesia, (Colonial Zimbabwe) c.1939–1945

Abstract This article discusses the mobilization, recruitment and wartime experiences of Africans who participated in the Second World War. Centred on the accounts of ex-servicemen, their families, and friends, this article argues that some Africans were either hoodwinked or forced to join the imperial forces. Consequently, they began to question their position as colonial subjects in the war. Their experiences revived anticolonial sentiments and abetted the rise of labour activism and mass nationalism in the colony during the war. The bulk of the material for this article was obtained from written family records, oral histories, and archival sources.

African Entrepreneurship in urban colonial Zimbabwe: The case of Highfield, 1953–1965

Abstract This paper examines the importance of Highfield to the African entrepreneurship history of colonial Zimbabwe, then known as Southern Rhodesia. The Southern Rhodesia colonial state established the township of Highfield in its capital city, Salisbury (now Harare), in 1936 as part of its spatial and racial segregation policy. The policy made Africans temporary residents in the urban areas. However, the post-Second World War industrial growth forced the colonial state to revisit its stance on African urbanisation. Seen as critical for the expanding manufacturing sector, African labour now had to be accommodated in the urban areas, which triggered the colonial state to expand the township of Highfield in 1956. That very year, enterprising Africans responded by taking up the expanded township’s entrepreneurial opportunities. This response and the subsequent evolution of African entrepreneurship in Highfield township are the focus of this paper. The paper provides a historical kaleidoscope of Highfield as a place of African entrepreneurship, which thus far has been occluded and separated from the dominant literature on the township’s role in the rise of African nationalism and anti-colonial struggles. Highfield emerged as a cultural milieu hosting an African Renaissance in food, fashion and lifestyle inspired by a mix of modernity and indigenous ethos. Thus, the paper argues that Highfield was the entrepreneurial centre of various businesses and startups. These colourful stories of African entrepreneurship are gleaned from handwritten business stand applications by African traders, archival documents, and newspapers in piecing together an urban history of African entrepreneurship in the township of Highfield in colonial Zimbabwe.

TRANSNATIONAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT: AN EARLY EPISODE FROM COLONIAL SOUTHERN AFRICA

Cross-border tourism marketing and promotion is a widely endorsed approach for encouraging regional tourism development. The aim in this paper is to uncover an early historical example of regional tourism development which occurred in colonial Southern Africa. Using archival sources the study pinpoints the contributions of publicity material produced by South African Railways for the promotion of tourism in the territories of colonial Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In encouraging international tourism to South Africa during the 1920s and 1930s there was an understanding that South Africa’s leading national tourism assets were best packaged together for ‘transnational tourism development’ with marketing for the iconic attraction of Victoria Falls as well as Lourenço Marques. The destination which was promoted as ‘South Africa’ in tourism guidebooks did not correspond with the geopolitical entity of the Union of South Africa, instead it embraced the attractions of Portuguese-controlled Mozambique and several tourism products in the British-controlled territory of Rhodesia.

Changing Relations Between Chiefs and ‘Subjects’ in Zimbabwe and Botswana

The article historically analyses the changing relations between chiefs, ‘subjects’ and the state in Zimbabwe and Botswana. Entirely qualitative, it reviews published and unpublished sources. The article utilises three interrelated theories: bureaucracy, legal pluralism, and political clientelism. African chieftainship predates the colonial period, although this era has fundamentally altered it. The article argues that in colonial Zimbabwe and Botswana, chiefs were bureaucratised and became state functionaries. This weakened them and compromised the age-old relations with their ‘subjects’. To navigate this intricate situation, chiefs thrived on their clientelistic relations with the colonial state and their ‘subjects’. The colonial state created a legal dual system. The chiefs played a critical role as the intermediaries between their ‘subjects’ and the state in a legal dual system. For instance, they collected taxes and maintained law and order. In postcolonial Zimbabwe and Botswana, chiefs have also become more accountable to the state and ruling parties than their ‘subjects’. In both countries, the state appoints, recognises, de-recognises and can depose a chief. Chiefs often complain of state’s subjugation, but this is understandable given the protection and benefits they receive from the state.

No Body, No Crime? Vicariously Imagining Africa’s Arsenic Century: Bovines, Arsenic Poisoning and Multi-Species Toxic Histories in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–1940s

During the first half of the twentieth century, white settler farmers in colonial Zimbabwe raised incessant complaints and alarm over ‘mysterious’ and inexplicably frequent incidences of cattle mortalities. These mortalities were attributed to poisoning from careless handling of arsenical dips, ingestion of arsenic sprayed grass and grazing in veld impregnated with arsenic trioxide. The arsenic question occupied the attention of experts from the colonial Branch of Chemistry, toxicologists, bacteriologists, veterinary officials and white settler farmers in contested cattle-centred narratives. Within the framing of colonial toxic politics, cattle poisoning disproportionately received more elaborate scrutiny and attention than that of humans and other species. The colonial archive only affords limited and vague visibility to the toxic encounters of humans and non-bovine species. This paper seeks to transcend and interrogate bovine-centric poisoning discourses with which colonial sources are replete and to use existing cattle poisoning records to amplify and construct multi-species toxic histories connecting cattle, humans, landscapes and other species in a co-constituted narrative of arsenic toxicities. The paper employs vicarious imagination of experiences to reframe Africa’s ‘arsenic century’ and colonial toxic histories outside the body-centric script, and examines the intricate and complex chemical relations enmeshing cattle, humans and other species in ecosystems of mutual toxic vulnerabilities and slow chemical violence. The paper uses archival sources, toxicological reports from the Branch of Chemistry and veterinary records of cattle poisoning in colonial Zimbabwe.

“Medical Practice between Two Worlds”: The Work of Samuel Gurney in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1903–1924

This article examines the experiences of the pioneer Methodist medical missionary, Dr Samuel Gurney, who worked for the American Methodist Episcopal Church (United Methodist Church) in Colonial Zimbabwe from 1903 to 1924. Gurney worked with an African assistant named Mr Job Tsiga. Based on archival and secondary sources and informed by the colonial encounter paradigm, this article notes the complex and contested nature of medical missionary work. Punctuated by rejections, acceptances and negotiations, their work demonstrates the fortunes of early medical missionaries. Medical missionaries, such as Gurney, laid the foundation for the present-day Western healthcare system. In the process, they set in motion the terms of debates over biomedicine, Western health practices, and healing amongst Africans in rural areas.

No Body, No Crime? Vicariously Imagining Africa’s Arsenic Century: Bovines, Arsenic Poisoning and Multi-Species Toxic Histories in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–1940s

During the first half of the twentieth century, white settler farmers in colonial Zimbabwe raised incessant complaints and alarm over ‘mysterious’ and inexplicably frequent incidences of cattle mortalities. These mortalities were attributed to poisoning from careless handling of arsenical dips, ingestion of arsenic sprayed grass and grazing in veld impregnated with arsenic trioxide. The arsenic question occupied the attention of experts from the colonial Branch of Chemistry, toxicologists, bacteriologists, veterinary officials and white settler farmers in contested cattle-centred narratives. Within the framing of colonial toxic politics, cattle poisoning disproportionately received more elaborate scrutiny and attention than that of humans and other species. The colonial archive only affords limited and vague visibility to the toxic encounters of humans and non-bovine species. This paper seeks to transcend and interrogate bovine-centric poisoning discourses with which colonial sources are replete and to use existing cattle poisoning records to amplify and construct multi-species toxic histories connecting cattle, humans, landscapes and other species in a co-constituted narrative of arsenic toxicities. The paper employs vicarious imagination of experiences to reframe Africa’s ‘arsenic century’ and colonial toxic histories outside the body-centric script, and examines the intricate and complex chemical relations enmeshing cattle, humans and other species in ecosystems of mutual toxic vulnerabilities and slow chemical violence. The paper uses archival sources, toxicological reports from the Branch of Chemistry and veterinary records of cattle poisoning in colonial Zimbabwe.

Depiction of Shona marriage institution in Zimbabwe local television drama, Wenera Diamonds

Marriage is a highly celebrated phenomenon among the African people. It is one of the important institutions among the Shona and Ndebele people in Zimbabwe as expressed in the saying ‘musha mukadzi’ and ‘umuzingumama’ (home is made by a woman) respectively. However with the coming of colonialism in Zimbabwe, marriage was not given the appropriate respect it deserves. This has given impetus to this paper where the researchers in the study through drama want to bring out the depiction of marriage institution in a post -independence television drama, Wenera Diamonds (2017). This paper therefore, aims to show the impact of neo-colonialism on Shona marriage institution. The neo colonial period is characterised with the perpetuation of Western imperial interests through protocols of diplomatic relations, treaties and existing bilateral agreements which marked a new phase of relationships with former colonisers. The aim of this article therefore is to depict marriage institution in neo colonial Zimbabwe in Wenera Diamonds (2017), a Zimbabwean television drama. Using qualitative research methodology, the research employs content analysis to elucidate the depiction in the said performance. Guided by the Africana womanist perspective, the article argues that the indigenous knowledge needed for African social development is rendered irrelevant by a dysfunctional set of values of the western hegemony. Against that, the paper establishes that the depiction of marriage institution in Wenera diamonds is a reflection of imperialist colonial forces on the black person hence the need to go back to basics and resuscitate their culture.

The Social and Cultural Impact of Post-War Measures on the Zimunya and Bvumba Communities, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1940s–1970s

Abstract This study investigates the social and cultural effects of post-war measures on Zimunya and Bvumba communities of colonial Zimbabwe (then known as Southern Rhodesia). Guided by a combination of primary and secondary sources, the article argues that dispossession and forced relocations of Africans who had continued staying on the so-called European land after the passing of the Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of 1930 became acute in the immediate years after the Second World War. The granting of vast tracts of land in the Zimunya community to veterans of World War II by the colonial government under the Ex-Servicemen Land Resettlement Scheme and the purchasing of land for a timber estate in Bvumba by the Rhodesian Wattle Company (RWC) in the immediate post-Second World War period dispossessed rural residents of their land and curtailed the growth and development of peasant agriculture. People affected were forcibly displaced to “native” reserves where they responded to challenges they faced by resorting to various coping mechanisms such as hunting, foraging, and, attending to riverine gardens.

Personal names and naming theoretical concepts in selected texts of Yvonne Vera and Petina Gappah

This article analyses the ways in which two internationally renowned Zimbabwean women writers, Yvonne Vera and Petina Gappah, show a fascination with names in their novels, and in the process call attention to theories and key concepts about personal names and naming practices. One of the main aims of this article is to complement the isolated discussions of the value of names as narrative strategies in Vera and Gappah’s novels. In particular, this article explores how onomastic statements and contexts highlighted in selected novels by Vera and Gappah could be interpreted as significant contributions to an understanding of personal names and naming practices in a specific socio-politico-cultural context of (post)colonial Zimbabwe. The selected onomastic statements and contexts are analysed in this article as comments on nicknames and nicknaming as a form of othering, and personal names and naming as significant pointers to human co-presence and interdependence.

Human-Animal Relations and Livestock Disease Management in Postcolonial Zimbabwe, c.1980 to 2022

Abstract The history of livestock disease management strategies in colonial Zimbabwe has generally revealed uneven and racialised access to conventional veterinary facilities that favoured white- over black-owned livestock. In light of this context, this article examines the human-animal relationships that emerged in post-colonial Zimbabwe when access to such facilities was liberalised in a new era in which communal livestock owners still had broken interrelations with the state. In articulating this, it also explores factors that precluded communal livestock farmers from raising 'healthy' livestock. Using qualitative methods, it discusses how the postcolonial state failed to provide robust state veterinary services, and demonstrates communal farmers' agency amidst loss to epizootics and enzootics. As this study will show, livestock diseases and the challenges they posed significantly impacted on how humans (communal farmers) determined which animals to raise and how to raise them. It concludes that livestock diseases and the human-animal relationships that emerged out of the quandary posed by the former, had a negative impact on state-communal livestock farmer relationships, and promoted the continued relevance of otherwise officially despised livestock knowledge regimes in Zimbabwe's communal areas.

‘No Human Skeletons, No Shackles’: Revisiting Local Interpretations of Mtumbei Kitambi Site in Matumbi Hills, Southern Tanzania

Gender based violence is a socio-historical phenomenon that affected colonial Indigenous and settler societies in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa. Experiences of indigenous societies have been disproportionately studied by scholars. White settlers’ experiences of violence in domestic spaces remain largely silenced. This article fills this lacuna by illuminating one unexplored dimension of white settler women’s history: their lived experiences with gender-based violence in domestic spaces of colonial Zimbabwe. It draws on archival research carried out in court records, in the form of civil, desertion and divorce cases. The paper deploys the concepts of objective and subjective violence as a prism to reconstruct violence. The article argues that despite their privileged status in the colonial state, white women were dually positioned as survivors and perpetrators of violence. It brings up another angle of perceiving colonial society, allowing for greater understanding of intersecting themes of class, gender, and whiteness.

Fighting in the Shadow of an Apartheid State: Boxing and Colonialism in Zimbabwe

Boxing was arguably the most popular and controversial sport in colonial Zimbabwe. To tame the sport's violence, which was considered too extreme, colonial officials in Zimbabwe sought guidance and advice from South Africa from the mid-1930s on how best to regulate the sport. South Africa occupied a unique position in this regard, not only because of the relationship it had with colonial Zimbabwe as a neighbouring white settler colony, but also because of how sections of its white settler community responded to the triumphs of Black boxers over white opponents around the world. The colony of South Africa played a significant role in shaping the control of boxing in colonial Zimbabwe. The relationship between the two colonies culminated in the passage of the Boxing and Wrestling Control Act of 1956 in colonial Zimbabwe, an identical version to a similarly named law that South Africa had passed just two years prior.

The production of precarity: industrialization and racial inequality in colonial Zimbabwe

During the mid-twentieth century, the colony of Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) underwent a rapid process of industrial development, leading tens of thousands of black African men to leave overcrowded rural Reserves in search of better economic prospects in burgeoning industrial cities. Cities in Southern Rhodesia promised higher wages relative to rural areas, but many urban black labourers found themselves in precarious economic positions. Few black industrial workers earned wages sufficient to support an urban family; meanwhile, white industrial workers secured wage rates ten times higher, afforded by colonial institutions geared primarily toward serving the needs of white European settlers. This study zooms in on the foundations and consequences of racial inequality in industrializing Southern Rhodesia and also considers the settler colony in comparative perspective relative to other sub-Saharan African colonies – both settler and non-settler – to draw attention to the interplay between economic development, institutions, and inequality in a colonial context.

African Boxing, Social Control and "Subversive Culture" in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900–1960

African Boxing, Social Control and "Subversive Culture" in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900–1960

Prelude to Unilateralism: Foreclosed Independence Bids in Pre-Federation Southern Rhodesia, 1948 and 1950

ABSTRACT This article recovers two resolutions, in 1948 and 1950, respectively, by the all-white parliament in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) that expressed support for the colony’s independence within the British Commonwealth. The examination of these post-war pushes for sovereignty illuminate how Rhodesia’s political leadership was sensitive to wider changes in the imperial status quo, well before the broader white electorate became similarly seized by colonial withdrawal. The motions highlight the gulf between the metropole and local settler leadership, even when the latter were ostensibly firmly backed by imperial policy and domestic black political opposition was comparatively muted. Additionally, the two parliamentary debates elucidate domestic interparty differences. The article is primarily informed by verbatim transcripts of the pertinent legislative proceedings. The deliberations have largely disappeared from the colony’s historiography – a significant omission given the considerable scholarly interest surrounding Southern Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. This article shows that nearly two decades before that fateful step, changing international factors motivated Rhodesia’s political class to consider major steps that would ensure the maintenance of white dominance.

Beyond Agency: The African Peasantry, the State, and Tobacco in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–80

AbstractThis paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

Bulawayo Breaks Ranks: Bureaucratic Battles over African Housing and Urban Citizenship in Late Colonial Zimbabwe, 1949–77

By the end of the Second World War, housing for ‘African’ workers in the major urban areas of Southern Rhodesia had become critically congested and inadequate, and ‘European’ settlers’ long-standing primordialist assertion that these ‘tribespeople’ did not really ‘belong’ in urban space had become untenable. Government passed new laws obliging municipalities to increase construction of housing and amenities conducive to long-term African urban settlement and productivity. But when the Rhodesian Front came to power in 1962, it revived the earlier conception of urban areas as essentially ‘white spaces’ and sought to curtail African housing and tenure rights. Social historians have documented how these shifting approaches to post-war housing and urban citizenship were contested by African townspeople ‘from below’, in organised and everyday ways. This article shows how they were also subject to considerable ideological contestation between actors at different levels of the colonial state. It does this by analysing the contested post-war housing programme of the second largest city, Bulawayo, until the dismantling of de jure segregation in 1977. This programme was directed by Dr Hugh Ashton, an anthropologically trained municipal administrator on a paternalistic mission of helping African migrant workers to ‘detribalise’ and become ‘responsible’, propertied citizens within the segregated townships of Bulawayo. Ashton’s modernist vision, backed by councillors and implemented by a cadre of zealous administrative staff, increasingly diverged from that of the central government, whose authority Ashton began to challenge. Tensions heightened when the Rhodesian Front came to power, advancing what Ashton perceived as a ‘thinly veiled form of apartheid’. In the ensuing policy battles, universalist ideas of social change confronted racial essentialism. Bulawayo’s development vision also diverged from the more segregationist vision of the capital, with which some comparisons are made. Finally, the article points out how many of the African officers in Bulawayo’s subtly insubordinate township administration went on to run the city council after independence, which speaks to wider debates about the varied, complex legacies of late colonial urbanism.

'The trees do not belong to Chief Maranke but to the Native Reserves Trust': The politics of timber resource exploitation in African reserves, colonial Zimbabwe, 1924-1948

Contextualised within a settler state characterised by racial discrimination and unequal access to natural resources, this article examines the ideological, environmental and economic considerations surrounding the formation of the Native Reserves Trust (NRT) and the role it played in the exploitation of timber resources in the African reserves of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Cognisant of the fact that the colonial state set aside marginal and less productive reserves for the Africans, the paper uses the NRT as a lens to view the process by which the settler society penetrated African reserves and exploited timber resources that were needed for the white-owned enterprises, while at the same time, Africans were barred from exploiting the same resources in European domains. The study further discusses the significance of timber in the African reserves, analyses the role of the NRT in regulating timber exploitation processes and the relations between the state, timber concessionaire companies and the African communities. Lastly, it assesses the extent to which timber exploitation contributed to environmental destruction, and how this prompted a policy shift, leading to the implementation of state-initiated afforestation programmes in these reserves and how these re-shaped state-African relations. On the whole, we note that the exploitation of timber resources in African areas replicated the larger colonial policy that favoured whites at the expense of Africans.

Neutrality of a special type: George Loft’s abortive racial reconciliation in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1957–1960

In 1957, George Loft, an American Quaker, arrived in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) as the field representative of the American Friends Service Committee. In his effort to help the region navigate a period of intense political change in a peaceful manner, Loft cultivated diverse contacts during three years in southern Africa. His attempts to ostensibly serve as a neutral facilitator generally rebounded to the favor of the white settler establishment. While Loft’s often stumbling efforts to steer the region away from violent political conflict were unsuccessful, his shaky balancing act illuminates how quickly an already marginal space for compromise and cooperation across racial divides evaporated. It became virtually impossible to maintain a perception of neutrality. Beyond the evolution and views of the political characters he encountered, Loft’s tenure offers critical context on the demise of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and the rise of Zimbabwe’s armed liberation struggle.