The Mobilization of Labour and the Production of Knowledge: The Antiquarian Tradition in Rhodesia

Abstract

One of the advantages of looking at white society in Southern Rhodesia is that it was a very simple society by contrast to South Africa and that its essential structures show up very clearly. This was certainly true of the business of producing models of African societies, customs and conduct. In South Africa there grew up a cluster of intellectual ‘experts’ on Africans – including a distinguished group of anthropologists. In South Africa, therefore, the connexion between the requirements of the white economy and the most influential models of African societies was complex and indirect. In Rhodesia there was no such tradition of indigenous social science. As a contributor to theNative Affairs Department Annualadmitted in 1956, ‘of all areas in Africa Southern Rhodesia was the most backward in anthropological knowledge of its own indigenous peoples’. In Southern Rhodesia the men who administered Africans, mobilized them for employment and kept them working were also the men who produced the authorized versions of the African past, of African customs and of African ‘personality’.