“Pumpkins Just Got in There”: Gender and Generational Conflict and “Improved” Agriculture in Colonial Zimbabwe

Summary

Summary: This essay explores how gender and generational dynamics in peasant communities in colonial Zimbabwe were reshaped between 1930 and 1965 by factors introduced by colonization. British rule brought dramatically greater market opportunities and access to new agricultural tools. Some peasants readily adopted ploughs, combining these new tools with indigenous methods of production and environmental management to increase output and market sales while developing new hybrid ways of working the land. These options allowed some young men to evade the demands of, and obligations to, their fathers, while the new methods often increased women's workloads, exacerbating gender tensions. In the wake of World War II, Rhodesian state agricultural programmes sought to reshape African farming practices dramatically, initiatives that were justified as protecting the environment and modernizing the peasant sector. These measures permanently allocated and demarcated peasant land, imposed onerous environmental protection measures, and encouraged peasants to follow labour-intensive production methods based on European techniques. These conditions restricted young men's access to land and imposed intense demands on women of all ages; in practice, however, these changes led to a renegotiation of gender and generational dynamics, most obviously in a wave of protests that threatened state control of the countryside.

VaJonga and Amai Jonga built their homestead in Madziwa, Zimbabwe, in the late 1950s, on a ridge overlooking a small river. Many years later I interviewed them in the shade of a mango tree along the edge of that ridge, mainly to ask how they had changed their farming practices over their lives, and what they recalled of the methods their parents used in the 1930s.