Academic literature on the topic 'Southern Rhodesia; Zimbabwe; General 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.

One of the casualties of the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980 was the journal NADA, which came to an end with the breakup of the government ministry that sponsored it. NADA originally stood for Native Affairs Department Annual and ran to 57 issues between 1923 and 1980. Essentially, it was intended to be the Southern Rhodesian equivalent of the Uganda Journal or Tanganyika Notes and Records, and it is not surprising that out of the 912 articles published in it at least 40% were by identifiable officials of the Native Affairs Department or its successor, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Out of another 37% of contributors classifiable as ‘general,’ a considerable number were undoubtedly NAD officials hiding behind uncrackable pseudonyms and initials, while others in this category were policemen, forest and game rangers, education and agricultural officers, and so forth. Consequently, the journal always had a fairly ‘official’ image, in spite of editorial disclaimers, and this image became the more pronounced after the Rhodesian Front gained control of the government, with more official reports and statements filling the pages.

Black Hamlet (1937; reprinted 1996) tells the story of Sachs's association with John Chavafambira, a Manyika nganga (traditional healer and diviner), who had come to Johannesburg from his home in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Sachs's fascination with Chavafambira was initially as a “research subject” of a psychoanalytic investigation into the mind of a sane “native”. Over a period of years Sachs became inextricably drawn into the suffering and de-humanization experienced by Chavafambira as a poor, black man in the urban ghettoes that were the South Africa of the 1930s and 1940s. It is easy these days to want to dismiss Sachs's “project” as the prurient gaze of a white, liberal psychiatrist. This would not only be an ahistorical reading of Black Hamlet, but it would also diminish the possibilities offered by what Said (1994) calls, a contrapuntal reading. I shall present a reading of Black Hamlet, focusing on the three main characters - Sachs, Chavafambira, and Maggie (Chavafambira's wife) - as emblematic of the social relations of the other, racial(ised) bodies, and gender.