Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Teresa A. Barnes's timely study makes an important contribution to Zimbabwean historiography. Until recently, the nationalist paradigm has held enormous sway over scholars, who have accepted too readily supposed nationalism's capacity to articulate and subsume a range of subaltern struggles. Given that the nationalist struggle was rooted in rural areas, scholars initially focused on the clash of a monolithic peasantry with the Rhodesian state. While later studies were more attentive to gender relations and gendered discourses, they remained predominantly rural based and confined to the early decades of the twentieth century. What research was done on class formation tended to be workplace orientated, focusing on relations between male workers on mines and railways to the general exclusion of women. Unlike other African regions, which have a developed urban history, Zimbabwe's urban past is inaccessible to the ordinary student. A rich array of doctoral dissertations on the two major cities, Bulawayo and Salisbury (now Harare), remain unpublished.

1

Thus Barnes's concern to "demonstrate the salience of gendered history to an improved understanding of the urban past of Zimbabwe" (p. xxvi) in the period 1930–1956 advances historical knowledge in two neglected areas. Her overarching theme is social reproduction: "a multilayered effort in the domains of gender and social power . . . waged by men and women of the post-conquest generations to transmit something African into the future . . . a campaign . . . to enable African people to live together as families, to come and go freely, and to make choices according to their own priorities" (pp. xviii-xix). This, she argues, is another important coherence obscured by the force of nationalism.

. . .