Whiteness in Zimbabwe February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-i 9780230621435_01_prexx Also by David McDermott Hughes FROM ENSLAVEMENT TO ENVIRONMENTALISM: Politics on a Southern African Frontier, 2006 February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-ii 9780230621435_01_prexx Whiteness in Zimbabwe Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging David McDermott Hughes February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-iii 9780230621435_01_prexx whiteness in zimbabwe Copyright © David McDermott Hughes, 2010 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62143–5 (paperback) ISBN: 978–0–230–62142–8 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hughes, David McDermott. Whiteness in Zimbabwe : race, landscape, and the problem of belonging / by David McDermott Hughes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–62143–5 — ISBN 978–0–230–62142–8 1. Whites—Zimbabwe—History. 2. Whites—Social conditions—Zimbabwe—History. 3. Whites—Race identity— Zimbabwe—History. 4. Land settlement—Social aspects— Zimbabwe. 5. Land tenure—Social aspects—Zimbabwe. 6. Group identity—Zimbabwe—History. 7. Social isolation— Zimbabwe—History. 8. Zimbabwe—Race relations—History. I. Title. DT2913.E87H84 2010 305.80906891—dc22 2009028485 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: April 2010 10987654321 Printed in the United States of America. February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-iv 9780230621435_01_prexx For Melanie February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-v 9780230621435_01_prexx This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures ix Preface xi 1 The Art of Belonging 1 Part 1 The Zambezi 2 Engineering and its Redemption 29 3 Owning Lake Kariba 51 Part 2 The Farms 4 Hydrology of Hope 73 5 Playing the Game 101 6 Belonging Awkwardly 129 Notes 145 References 167 Index 191 February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-vii 9780230621435_01_prexx This page intentionally left blank List of Figures 1.1 Zimbabwe’s savannah, photograph by author, 2007 16 1.2 “Goromonzi bush,” painting by Martin van der Spuy, ca. 1998–99 19 1.3 “Solitary sentinel in Kubu’s shore,” photograph by Michael Main, 1987 22 2.1 Map of Lake Kariba, including national parks and protected areas 30 3.1 Sanyati Gorge, Lake Kariba, photograph by author, 2003 60 4.1 Zimbabwe’s commercial farming areas, including Virginia, 2000 74 4.2 Dams in Virginia, Zimbabwe, 2000 81 4.3 Aggregate capacity of reservoirs in Virginia, Zimbabwe 86 4.4 Aggregate shoreline of reservoirs in Virginia, Zimbabwe 93 4.5 Sketch map of Shiri Dam, by P.J. Ginn, ca. 1995 95 5.1 “The rape of Eden,” drawing by Stephen Pratt, 1998 111 6.1 “Victoria Falls from below,” photograph c Stephen Robinson 136 February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-ix 9780230621435_01_prexx This page intentionally left blank Preface In 2000, President Robert Mugabe and the government of Zimbabwe embarked on a project of social destruction: to extirpate the country’s class of European-descended agriculturalists, known as “commercial farmers.” Equal parts pogrom and land reform, the effort promised to redistribute wealth from an exclusive elite to Zimbabwe’s masses. At that time, almost 4,500 white families (plus a very small num- ber of black commercial farmers) owned 33 percent of the land area of a nation of 12 million overwhelmingly black inhabitants, and few whites showed enthusiasm for changing that state of affairs. Then, paramilitary bands occupied nearly every estate, harassed the owners, and terrorized the workers. By 2002—when the violence subsided but by no means ended—the state had removed roughly 4,000 white families from farming districts and killed ten individ- ual whites. It had also killed large, but unverifiable, numbers of black farm workers and displaced hundreds of thousands of them. In economic terms, this disruption virtually extinguished export agriculture and jeopardized livelihoods nationwide. In psychologi- cal terms, the regime had sown insecurity in every sector of society, not least among whites, whether urban or rural. Others have writ- ten extensively about this immiseration and victimization, largely to denounce it. Mugabe’s regime has defended itself with refer- ence to the long-standing violence of racial inequality and white elitism. This book complements those debates by focusing on the moral lives and imaginations of white Zimbabweans, both on and off commercial farms. How, before and during this period of adver- sity, have they understood their place in Africa, in agriculture, and under Mugabe? As conditions have turned against them, when February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-xi 9780230621435_01_prexx xii P REFACE have they adapted clear-sightedly, and when have they deluded themselves? To what extent do they subscribe to the hate and fear of racism and pigment-based prejudice? Rather little, I suggest in response to the last question. In place of such antagonism, many Zimbabweans have long practiced denial and avoidance. In their own minds, they turned away from native, African people and focused instead on African landscapes. In this nature-obsessed escape, I find commonalities with my own country, the United States, and with other European settler societies. Environmental conser- vation and white identity have produced and shaped each other. Beginning with Zimbabwe, this book seeks to disenthrall one struc- ture of feeling from the other—the better to recover humanism from both. Plan of the Book How have European settler societies established a sense of belong- ing and entitlement outside Europe? Whiteness in Zimbabwe seeks to answer this question in its ethnographic, comparative, and moral dimensions. European colonization, Edward Said writes, depended on “structures of feeling” wherein whites felt at home in the colonies (Said 1993:14). In the “neo-Europes” of North America and the antipodes, Anglophone whites rooted themselves in part through the genocide and expulsion of native peoples. Having attained demographic superiority, Europeans became “normal” Americans, Australians, and so on. Zimbabwe deviates from this forlorn model. After establishing the colony in the 1890s, whites never com- posed more than 5 percent of its population. They monopolized the land but—amid black masses—were never able to make their presence seem natural. Even as a minority, whites still aspired to belong in Africa. They could have done so by grafting them- selves onto local, still vibrant, societies. To some extent, early Portuguese settlers did just that. Anglophone immigrants, by con- trast, tended to adopt a strategy of escape. They avoided blacks, preferring instead to invest themselves emotionally and artistically in the environment. Of course, white farmers, industrialists, and administrators exploited blacks. But many whites chose—almost consciously—to negotiate their identity with land forms rather than social forms. To do so required extraordinary cultural work. If North Americans and Australians used violence to empty their land, Euro-Africans had to imagine the natives away. In what I call February 22, 2010 20:30 MAC-US/DWZ Page-xii 9780230621435_01_prexx P REFACE xiii the “imaginative project of colonization,” white writers, painters, photographers, and even farmers crafted an ideal of settler-as-nature- lover. Whiteness and conservation, in other words, coproduced each other. The book will advance this thesis through two extended case studies: first, literature and photography representing the Zambezi River’s Kariba reservoir, and second, practices of commercial agricul- ture east of Harare. In Chapters 2 and 3, the Kariba study delves into whites’ negotiations with African landscapes. If whites pre- ferred to compromise with the land, rather than with the people, the land still drove a hard, difficult bargain. Zimbabwe’s topog- raphy differed from that of Britain in nearly every respect. Arid and landlocked, Zimbabwe contains no natural lakes and few permanent watercourses. Britain, on the other hand, has an exten- sive coastline and, thanks to glacial scouring, holds abundant sur- face water. British literature and art—epitomized by Wordsworth’s description of the Lake District—values the ubiquitous, intricate boundary of land and water. As children of the glaciers and the sea, how could Anglophone settlers learn to love dry expanses of African savannah? Even the most febrile imagination could not dispel Zimbabwe’s hydrological deficit altogether. If they wanted lakes, white settlers would have to engineer them, and that is pre- cisely what the Rhodesian government did at Kariba. In the late 1950s, it dammed the Zambezi River, creating the second-largest reservoir in the world. Whites responded to the water with joy and relief, but that was not the whole of it. The new reservoir incurred high ecological costs. It flooded an enormous swath of savannah and wildlife habitat. And so, initially, white writers and photographers gave voice to a widespread sense of remorse. In the dam’s second decade, however, guilt yielded gradually to Wordswor- thian rapture. The beauty of the reservoir moved whites. They soon conflated beauty with nature, and, by 1977, one photographer had branded Lake Kariba a “water wilderness” for boating, fishing, and ecotourism. H2O—once understood as the valley’s misplaced molecule—eventually impressed whites as thoroughly pristine. In effect, the Kariba writers—most of whom I have interviewed— reconciled an artificial waterscape with the “myth of wild Africa.” Whites Europeanized the Zambezi without losing credibility as guardians of an authentic, primeval continent.