Colonial Zimbabwe Research Articles

Book review: Mhoze Chikowero, African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe

Book review: Mhoze Chikowero, <i>African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe</i>

Sic utere tuo ut alienam non laedas . From Wanton Destruction of Timber Forests to Environmentalism: The Rise of Colonial Environmental and 'Sustainability' Practices in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1938-1961

Abstract This article examines the roots of colonial Zimbabwe's culture of environmentalism - described, here, as increasing social awareness of the rapid deterioration of the environment and the pressing need to take decisive action to counteract it. It argues that only a one-sided story - namely colonial conservationist discourses and practices especially as they pertained to African reserves in colonial Zimbabwe and other parts of Southern and Eastern Africa - has been the object of myriad historical analyses. Yet, there is a corresponding story that seems to have fallen between the seams of history as it is rarely articulated in Zimbabwean historiography in a systematic and comprehensive way, i.e. the origins of a colonial environmentalism - one focused more on reinforcing white settlers' sustainable uses of natural resources and less on Africans. It chronicles how the once verdant landscapes of colonial Zimbabwe were transformed into near waste in the first four decades of colonial occupation from 1890; highlights how the diverse voices of environmental concern that appeared at the time compelled the colonial Zimbabwean state finally to institute the Commission of Inquiry into the Preservation of the Natural Resources of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1938; and examines how this Commission's recommendations became the basis for the establishment of a number of institutional regulatory systems to initiate an efficiency-oriented approach to the management of the colony's natural resources. It highlights how the notion of 'sustainability' was infused into the Commission's Report and became such a powerful trope that it laid the basis for subsequent institutional and legal environmental resource management in colonial Zimbabwe, surviving intact into the first two decades of postcolonial rule. The article further explores how the farmer-miner conflict unfolded beyond the McIlwaine Commission and how the Natural Resources Board finally led to a successful resolution of the conflict in 1961. The McIlwaine Commission Report attests to rising social and environmental concern at the ongoing ecological decline of the colony's resources, resulting in the realisation of a resolute response in order to guarantee the sustainability and welfare of white settler society.

African Education in Zimbabwe: The Colonial Inheritance of the New State, 1899–1979

Historially two salient features characterized the educational system. It was racially segregated and education for the African majority was largely for exploitation. In this paper, I will review the main features of the educational system in colonial Zimbabwe; the legacy of that system and what the new African Government proposes to do to change it to fit the needs of the new Zimbabwe. The 1899 Education Ordinance had set up two separate systems of education, one for Whites and the other for Blacks. The Ordinance left African education entirely in the hands of Christian missionaries with the government giving small grants to mission schools, provided that these schools were kept open for a minimum of four hours a day, of which not less than two hours were to be devoted to industrial training.

Migrating with Colonial and Post-Colonial Memories: Dynamics of Racial Interactions within Zimbabwe’s Minority Communities in Britain

Upon attaining independence on 18 April 1980, the Zimbabwean government was faced with the challenge of eradicating prejudices, which had been constructed during the colonial era. Whilst it is correct to accept that colonial Zimbabwe was beset with racial prejudices, which inhibited interracial interactions, it is also essential to recognise that post-colonial events triggered socialisation processes devoid of nation building. Therefore, by exploring the dynamics of interactions within Zimbabwe’s minority communities in Britain, the paper will unravel the impact of memories constructed during the different phases of Zimbabwe’s history. By focusing exclusively on Whites, Coloureds (mixed-race) and Asians, it will demonstrate that the Zimbabwean immigrant community in Britain is not a monolithic group of Blacks, but a racially diverse community. Analysing the diaspora interactions of communities considered more privileged than Blacks during the colonial era provides a perspective on the complexities of eradicating historically constructed racial prejudices.

Salisbury Stakes: Twentieth Century-Fox, Segregated Cinemas, and the Making of an International Crisis in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1959–1961

Examinations of Hollywood’s influence overseas often center on its film distribution and marketing operations in foreign markets. There is, however, scant research analyzing the influence of the hundreds of cinemas Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, MGM, and Warner Bros. operated around the world between 1925 and 2013. This article examines Fox’s ownership of the largest cinema circuit in Africa, its enforcement of racial segregation, and the diplomatic crisis it created for the Eisenhower administration. Focusing on the 1959 opening of the Royal Cinema in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, this article examines how Hollywood’s exhibition practices in Africa undermined the State Department’s public relations mission.

A Zambian Town in Colonial Zimbabwe: The 1964 “Wangi Kolia” Strike

AbstractIn March 1964 the entire African labour force at Wankie Colliery, “Wangi Kolia”, in Southern Rhodesia went on strike. Situated about eighty miles south-east of the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, central Africa’s only large coalmine played a pivotal role in the region’s political economy. Described byDrum, the famous South African magazine, as a “bitter underpaid place”, the colliery’s black labour force was largely drawn from outside colonial Zimbabwe. While some workers came from Angola, Tanganyika (Tanzania), and Nyasaland (Malawi), the great majority were from Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Less than one-quarter came from Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) itself. Although poor-quality food rations in lieu of wages played an important role in precipitating female-led industrial action, it also occurred against a backdrop of intense struggle against exploitation over an extended period of time. As significant was the fact that it happened within a context of regional instability and sweeping political changes, with the independence of Zambia already impending. This late colonial conjuncture sheds light on the region’s entangled dynamics of gender, race, and class.

Law, expertise, and settler conflicts over land in early colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1923

Using archival sources, this paper examines the uses of law and expert knowledge in conflicts over land among officials and settlers in early colonial Zimbabwe. Land settlement laws, together with European colonists’ relations with Africans resident on their farms, became a focal point of the British South Africa Company’s (BSAC) engagements with settlers leading to conflicts over what constituted proper land utilization and the boundaries of authority. These conflicts emerged out of the Company’s position as private entity and a colonial governing authority. Seeking to meet the profit expectations of its shareholders, the BSAC inserted, in its land settlement laws, a “beneficial occupation clause,” which stipulated that farmers could only retain their land if they continuously occupied it and invested in farming. This conflicted with settler efforts to engage in other economic activities such as mining in order to eke out a living in the new colony. Company imperatives to make profits for its shareholders also led it to formulate policies that favored mining over agriculture, leading to conflicts between colonial mining and agrarian capital. Settler farmers fighting to exclude miners, other settler farmers and Africans from their lands appropriated experts’ arguments over environmental change evidenced by soil erosion and the spread of cattle diseases such as East Coast Fever. Conflicts among settlers and colonial officials not only reveal the contradictions of colonial rule and capitalist development but also contributed to the making of the land question in Zimbabwe. Settlers’ disaffection with the BSAC’s land policies, among other factors, led many of them to question its claims to ownership of the land and to campaign for the end of Company rule. The settler state that emerged out of this campaign was dominated by farming interests and went on to enact policies that favored settler farmers at the expense of Africans, sowing the seeds of discontent, which exploded with the post-2000 farm invasions and the country’s Fast Track Land Reform program.

Ideology, race and place in historical constructions of belonging: the case of Zimbabwe

This article explores the ways in which constructions of identities of place are embedded in the ideology of race and social orientation in Zimbabwe. Using newspaper reports, memoirs, speeches, advertisements, fiction, interviews and ephemera produced around key discursive thresholds, it examines the production of multiple meanings of key terms within competing discourses to generate co-existing parallel lexicons. Crucially, labels like ‘settler’, ‘African’ and ‘Zimbabwean’, labels that are inextricably linked to access to and association with the land in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, shift their reference and connotations for different speakers in different settings and periods. For example, the term ‘settler’, used to refer to white colonists of British origin who occupied vast agricultural lands in colonial Zimbabwe, is appropriated in post-independent Zimbabwe to designate blacks settled on the land in the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. The analysis of semantic pragmatic change in relation to key discursive thresholds yields a complex story of changing identities conditioned by different experiences of a raced national biography.

‘In the Border Regions of the Territory of Rhodesia, There Is the Greatest Scourge …’: The Border and East Coast Fever Control in Central Mozambique and Eastern Zimbabwe, 1901–1942

This article examines the implications of the border on the control of East Coast Fever in colonial Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The outbreak of the disease in Rhodesia in 1901 caused much anxiety among Portuguese veterinary officials, who were concerned that the disease could cross the border into their territory and destroy their livestock industry. Resultant efforts to control this and other livestock diseases in these colonies were often accompanied by racial application of veterinary policies which benefited Europeans at the expense of Africans. East Coast Fever, together with the 1896–97 Rinderpest epidemic, thus contributed immensely to the development of veterinary science, the burgeoning functions of the colonial state, and the relations between state and subject in rural areas. Hence, through an examination of English and Portuguese colonial documents, this paper argues that the existence of East Coast Fever in Zimbabwe, and the impossibility of sealing the border to prevent cattle mobility, raised alarm, and contributed to the expansion of veterinary services in central Mozambique. This article contributes to debates on the significance of borders in shaping historical processes, but complicates border studies by demonstrating that the border was powerful not because it was restrictive but because it was porous.

English

Underdevelopment and modernization theorists have long agreed that peasant agriculture was not universally damaged and curtailed, but the two schools remain very much at odds over the general trajectory of peasant agriculture during the colonial period. This dichotomy, however, is unwarranted. In the canonical literature there is a pervasive ambiguity surrounding the term “peasant,” an ambiguity that allows for contradictory assessments of the same historical process. An historical approach that “disaggregates” the peasantry along ethnic, geographic, gender, and class lines demonstrates that there was not a homogeneous Zimbabwean peasant experience during the colonial period, but several. Thus, there need not be any formal contradiction between the observations of the underdevelopment and modernization schools. Theorists from both sides have approached the peasant question with differing ideological precepts, and therefore assessed the same phenomenon in completely divergent ways. In short, Zimbabwean peasants experienced both penury and prosperity in the course of colonial rule. Key words: Modernization, dependency, underdevelopment, colonial Zimbabwe, peasantry.

A Vision of the Past and Present; a Case Study for Initiation Schooling among the Lemba in Mberengwa District Zimbabwe

This study examines a vision of the past to the present in schooling through the eyes of the Lemba people in Zimbabwe. The authors argue and puncture the myth that there was no schooling before the coming of the whites in colonial Zimbabwe. A Case Study of the Lemba in Mberengwa is used. The focus is on the Lemba initiation schooling for boys. The curriculum included the goals, content, methodology, circumcision and graduation. An historical method is used through interviews and a critical examination of oral literature on colonial schooling to the present. The authors grew up among the Lemba people and are therefore able to bring their own intimate knowledge of Lemba tradition to bear on the study. Their experiences, observations and interaction with the people in Mberengwa is an added advantage in the investigation and analysis of this project. It is hoped that new insights would contribute towards the largely untapped wealth of indigenous knowledge and how these findings could be adapted to Zimbabwean context.

Land, Gender and Inheritance Disputes Among the Basotho in the Dewure Purchase Areas, Colonial Zimbabwe

This article explores Basotho struggles for land and belonging in colonial Zimbabwe from the 1930s to the 1950s. It argues that as non-indigenous Africans in colonial Zimbabwe with no claim to land in reserves the Basotho saw ownership of freehold land as a key strategy in their construction of a sense of belonging. The centrality of land among the Basotho had a great impact on inheritance disputes within the members of the community. Drawing on archival files and court cases dealing with inheritance (including disputes involving land) in the Basotho community, the article argues that, through seeking further legal recourse in colonial courts, individual members of the community were able to challenge accepted customary laws and contest gender inequalities as well as to negotiate space within the community and the colonial state at large. This impacted on other inheritance disputes involving land as some of the Basotho inheritance cases set legal precedencies – thus illuminating the complex struggles among Purchase Areas farmers. The article feeds into the growing literature on land and inheritance during the colonial period. It also uses court cases as a prism through which women's struggles against patriarchy and the colonial state can be unravelled.

African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923-80

African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923-80

Barriers to Democratic Governance: The Case of Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe (1999-2013)

The article is mainly concerned with the challenges facing Movement for Democratic Change in its quest for democratic governance in post colonial Zimbabwe in the 21 st century. Among these challenges they include ideological, problems of political acceptance, rejection from continental institutions, political violence and security problems among others. Therefore, each challenge is analysed with the sole intention of exposing how this has become a challenge to MDC’s quest for power.

TIMOTHY STAPLETON, African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923–80. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press (hb $90 – 978 1 58046 380 5). 2011, 313 pp.

TIMOTHY STAPLETON, African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923–80. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press (hb $90 – 978 1 58046 380 5). 2011, 313 pp.

The Third World in the global 1960s

Forward Arif Dirlik Introduction Samantha Christiansen and Zachary Scarlett Part I: Crossing Borders: The Idea of the and the Global 1960s Chapter 1. Shared Space of Imagination, Communication, and Action: Perspectives on the History of the Third World Christoph Kalter Chapter 2. China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Imagination of the Zachary Scarlett Chapter 3. Politics and Periodicals in 1960s India: The Naxalite Movement Avishek Ganguly Chapter 4. Liberation Struggle and Humanitarian Aid - International Solidarity Movements and the Third World in the 1960s Konrad Kuhn Part II: Fresh Battles in Old Struggles: New Voices and Modes of Expression Chapter 5. A More Systemic Fight for Reform: University Reform, Student Movements, Society, and the State in Brazil, 1957-1968 Colin Snider Chapter 6. Speaking the Language of Protest: African Student Rebellions at the Catholic Major Seminary in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1965-1979 Nicholas Creary Chapter 7. 1968 and the Context of Apartheid: Students, Race, and Politics in South Africa Chris Saunders Chapter 8. Brother Wally and De Burnin' of Babylon: Walter Rodney's Impact on the Reawakening of Black Power, the Birth of Reggae, and Resistance to Global Imperialism James Bradford Part III: Unfinished Business: Challenging the State's Revolution Chapter 9. June 4th 1969: Violence, Political Imagination, and the Student Movement in the Congo Pedro Monaville Chapter 10. Revolution on the National Stage: Mexico, the PRI, and the Student Movement in 1968 Julia Sloan Chapter 11. Students, Identity and Strategic Alliance Building: The Emergence of University Students as a Political Opposition Force in Indonesia in the 1960s Stephanie Sapiie Chapter 12. Putting up a United Front: MAN in the Rebellious Sixties in the Philippines Erwin Fernandez

African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1923–80 by Timothy Stapleton (review)

African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1923–80 by Timothy Stapleton (review)

African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923-80 by Timothy Stapleton

African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923-80 by Timothy Stapleton

‘The Problem of the Health of the Native’: Colonial Rule and the Rural African Healthcare Question in Zimbabwe, 1890s–1930

This article addresses one of the intriguing paradoxes of colonial Zimbabwe's early twentieth-century medical history, that despite the unusually early interest in rural healthcare showed by the colony's political leadership and senior, non-medical bureaucrats, until the 1930s the colony's rural healthcare infrastructure remained tentative, sporadic and makeshift. The article endeavours to solve this puzzle by seeking for answers in the divergent visions held by the medical and non-medical policymakers and the intractable debates about African healthcare. By tracing these protracted debates to the turn of the century, the article revises the popular depiction of colonial rural healthcare reform as an essentially post-World War I phenomenon. Moreover, it also argues that the collage of reasons, including the colonists’ enlightened self-interest, which have been proffered by historians to explain healthcare reform in other colonies were, in colonial Zimbabwe, neither self-evident nor uncontested.

Failing to Yield? Ploughs, Conservation Agriculture and the Problem of Agricultural Intensification: An Example from the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe

Agricultural intensification, or increasing yield, has been a persistent theme in policy interventions in African smallholder agriculture. This article focuses on two hegemonic policy models of such intensification: (1) the ‘Alvord model’ of plough-based, integrated crop-livestock farming promoted in colonial Zimbabwe; and (2) minimum-tillage mulch-based, Conservation Agriculture, as currently preached by a wide range of international agricultural research and development agencies. An analysis of smallholder farming practices in Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley, reveals the limited inherent understanding of farmer practices in these models. It shows why many smallholder farmers in southern Africa are predisposed towards extensification rather than intensification, and suggests that widespread Conservation Agriculture adoption is unlikely.