More than ‘Somebody’s Wife’: Maternalism, Welfare and Identity among White Farming Women in Zimbabwe c.1970–2000

ANDREW HARTNACK

(University of Johannesburg)

Although the historiography and ethnography of white farmers in Zimbabwe has been growing steadily in recent years, limited attention has been given to the biographies, subjectivities, roles, narratives and identities of white commercial ‘farmers’ wives’. Yet many white ‘farmers’ wives’ played an important but largely ignored role in farm welfare programmes, particularly those which were run between 1980 and 2000 by various non- governmental organisations. This article examines, through detailed case studies, the complex personal and broader motivations that white farming women had for becoming involved in farm welfare endeavours during this era. It demonstrates that for such ‘farmers’ wives’, farm welfare programmes allowed them to transcend societal expectations of domesticity, enabling them to use skills they had given up on in marriage, develop new skills, and contribute to society in ways that built their identities beyond being ‘somebody’s wife’. Yet this maternalistic work in farm welfare also played a crucial political role for the white farming community, allowing these ‘farmer’s wives’ to both challenge ‘settler masculinity’ and yet also help white farmers to manage their precarious position in the independent country.

Keywords: Zimbabwe; whiteness; gender; farmers’ wives; maternalism; identity

Introduction

With a growing contemporary focus on ‘whiteness’, there has been a recent revival of academic interest in the historiography of white society in southern Africa, particularly in hitherto neglected and non-hegemonic groups whose complexities challenge homogeneous notions of whiteness in the region.¹ White women, particularly those north of the Limpopo, make up one constituency that has not yet received as much attention as it should have, even within the more recent studies. ‘Women often get dropped from memory, and then history’, observed Doris Lessing, who grew up on her parents’ farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia.² In this article, I explore one particularly neglected group of women: Zimbabwean white so-called ‘farmers’ wives’ and their important role in farm welfare initiatives in the last few decades of the 20th century.

Although the historiography and ethnography of white farmers in Zimbabwe has been steadily growing, especially since the onset of Robert Mugabe’s controversial ‘fast-track land reform’ in the year 2000, there has been limited attention given by scholars to the complex biographies, subjectivities, roles, narratives and identities of ‘farmers’ wives’ on white-owned commercial farms. Blair Rutherford, in his influential study of white farming labour relations, argues that white male farmers in Zimbabwe told ‘pioneer stories’ about their farms and communities, in which women were absent, ‘excised from commentary as background, private figures in relation to the more public efforts and accomplishments of their husbands’.³ Despite providing this insight, Rutherford concedes that his own analysis of ‘domestic government’ on white-owned farms is based largely on the views and actions of male farmers.⁴ A letter to the editor of The Farmer magazine in 1990, titled ‘Little Woman’ illustrates how these ‘pioneer stories’ and what can be referred to as ‘settler masculinity’⁵ strongly influenced all areas of farmers’ discourse, despite the important role of women on farms.

During the middle and late 1970s [during the war for Zimbabwe’s independence] a great many farms in this country were managed by women. Many farms continue to be managed by women in that they plan the financing, organise labour wages, schedule acquisition of inputs. Many male farmers admit readily – and with no attempt at concealing their heartfelt relief – that ‘the little woman sorts out the money side of things’. Many women also own and manage farms or financially important sections of farms entirely on their own. Why then do you Sir, continually refer to only male farmers in your editorials? – A Little Woman’s Husband, Lomagundi.⁶

The irony, of course, is that the ‘little woman’s’ husband writes here on her behalf. Or perhaps the author adopted her husband’s identity in order to be published.

As with these ‘pioneer stories’ and broader masculine farmer discourses, the growing

body of literature on white Zimbabwean agriculture has shown a marked tendency to go along with the paradigm of settler masculinity, constructing ‘the farmer’ as a male figure and providing overwhelming priority to the views, narratives, actions and strategies of male actors and male-dominated institutions such as the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU). Despite being otherwise insightful and nuanced, the important historical works by Hughes, by Pilossof and by Selby on the white farming community in Zimbabwe have all, to a large extent, focused on the actions and views of white male farmers, and what has emerged is a distinctly male-oriented historiography of the pre-‘fast-track land reform’ era, which tends, like the ‘pioneer stories’, to silence and push the ‘farmers’ wives’ into the background.⁷ In this article, I use the expression ‘farmer’s wives’ in quotation marks to emphasise that this is a discursive category that sought to incorporate farm women into a particular position and set of roles within the patriarchal society and within the logic of domestic government.

More recent work has offered a partial corrective, outlining the important social, economic and even political role of white farm women on individual farms and more broadly, especially through farm welfare initiatives. A monograph by Kufakurinani focuses on white women and domesticity in the colonial period (1890–1979) and discusses ‘farmer’s wives’ in several places, focusing on their role and position within farm households.8

Importantly, he shows that in the context of the Rhodesian white farm, housewifery took on an expanded form, which included running aspects of the farm economy and seeing to the welfare of the workers. He argues that white ‘farmer’s wives’ and the extra income they earned in these endeavours were not simply controlled by their husbands but that their economic activities gave them some choice and independence. Moreover, Kufakurinani shows that the precarious nature of farming in that era meant that the wife was needed as an equal ‘partner’ of the male farmer, and their small economic activities and role in worker welfare (and thus labour retention and stabilisation) were indispensable, becoming even more so during the war for liberation in the 1970s.

My own work has analysed in some detail the evolving role of white women on farms, tracing how this colonial situation became a platform on which a new wave of farm welfarism emerged after 1980.⁹ As I will outline in the next section, this broader farm welfare movement involved hundreds of ‘farmer’s wives’ and played a major part in the white farming community’s efforts to depoliticise its elite status and ownership of most of Zimbabwe’s prime farmland. However, I was unable in this previous work to present or analyse in any great detail the biographies, narratives, motivations or subjectivities of the white farm women themselves. These life histories and narratives, which I focus on in this article, add an important – and hitherto under-explored – layer to the overarching analysis of why farm welfarism became important to this generation of white farm women. I argue that white women’s involvement with farm welfare after independence was not simply about acting in the political interests of the white farming community or even the economic interests of their own families and farms, but involved a range of motivations which spanned the personal, economic and political. I show how white ‘farmer’s wives’ who became involved in farm welfare initiatives were not content to have their lives and identities confined by domesticity, but rather used farm welfare involvement to build a much richer sense of themselves and their contribution to society.

This article is based on in-depth historical–ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe, conducted for a doctoral degree between 2012 and 2014.¹⁰ It draws primarily on taped ethnographic interviews conducted with white women from more than 20 different commercial farms and in-depth taped interviews with 10 development workers – mostly women – who were active in the farm welfare movement in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 2000.¹¹ In addition, it draws on a range of personal archival sources from the farm women themselves.

Domesticity, Incorporated Wives and Maternalism

The colonial-era genealogy of domesticity and maternalism on white farms provided the foundation on which welfare initiatives after Zimbabwe’s independence were built. This genealogy was heavily influenced by older southern African colonial contexts. As Morrell outlines, ‘settler masculinity’ in the Natal colony was reproduced, and became hegemonic, with the aid of several hierarchical institutions such as boys’ schools, organised sports, the military, and professional associations, which replaced private domains as ‘the major sites in which gender relationships were worked out’.¹² Such institutions were a product of the industrial revolution, and their emergence in Victorian Europe (and the colonies) ‘had the effect of converting the power of the male head of household into a social and cultural form which was mirrored through and created in a range of organisations which sprang up to regulate, to unite, to exclude’.¹³ A similar set of settler institutions were introduced in colonial Zimbabwe, particularly by settlers of English origin, which also reinforced settler masculinity in a context quite similar to Natal. Settler masculinity was able to draw on powerful European patriarchal norms of the time such as ‘the ideology of domesticity’¹⁴; ‘… a set of ideas that over the course of nineteenth-century Western history have associated women with family, domestic values, and home, and took for granted a hierarchical distribution of power favouring men’.¹⁵

White Rhodesian society in general promoted domesticity, with even women who entered the professions and public service facing forms of ‘domestication’,¹⁶ although, as Kufakurinani outlines, women in many spheres were able to use their agency and ensure that there was a certain amount of ‘elasticity’ in their domesticity.¹⁷ Girls’ schools such as those established under the auspices of the Anglican Church were also key settler institutions, which, by the 1930s, were inculcating the values of a robust form of domesticity in young settler women, who, it was hoped, could use this ideology to build their homes and, within the limits of their gender, the country. ¹⁸

On white-owned farms, the gendered distinction between ‘the farmer’ and ‘the farmer’s wife’ and their respective roles was clear. Rutherford has shown how early Rhodesian official discourses helped to ensure that the category ‘European farmer’ was gendered as masculine and perceived as holding dominion over ‘his’ wife and ‘his’ workers.¹⁹ Moreover, in such discourses it was held that male European farmers required the nurturing presence of the ‘proper wife’ in the spheres of both ‘work’ and ‘home’ on the farm.²⁰ This gendered hierarchical living and working arrangement was central to what Rutherford calls ‘domestic government’, which came to be the hegemonic form of power relations on white commercial farms in Zimbabwe.²¹ This state-sanctioned system gave the farmer the power to determine the ‘rules of the farm’, but also the responsibility to ‘edify’ ‘his’ workers through various

forms of paternalistic discipline and patronage.²² Within the logic of domestic government, ‘farmers’ wives’ were expected to undertake a number of supporting roles for the male farmer, not only in the domestic sphere but also in certain gendered aspects of the farm economy, including ‘providing the proper nurturing to his workers’ welfare’.²³ Robust domesticity was perfectly suited to the ‘farmer’s wife’ role, playing an important yet subordinate part within the logic of domestic government on the farms.

‘Farmers’ wives’, then, like those of policemen, colonial officials, soldiers, protestant clergymen, business executives and professional scholars,²⁴ can be understood as ‘incorporated wives’, with ‘incorporation’ defined by Callan as ‘the condition of wifehood in a range of settings where the social character ascribed to a woman is an intimate function of her husband’s occupational identity and culture’.²⁵ ‘Farmers’ wives’ were in many ways doubly incorporated, because they faced expectations of this kind of wifehood not only on the level of their husband’s farm but also from the masculinised institutions (particularly farmers’ associations and country clubs) in which many of their husbands played active roles, and from the wider farming community.

It may be tempting to take at face value Pape’s throwaway comment that Rhodesian white women did little else besides ‘organising their social clubs, tyrannising their domestic servants, and occasionally helping out with more productive tasks’.²⁶ Yet, as I have previously shown, white women played a crucial role in applying robust domesticity to the tasks of taming the early ‘frontier masculinity’ of the male-dominated society, ‘civilising’ their own homes, and in maintaining and managing settler identity in the colony.²⁷ The Women’s Institute (WI), first introduced in 1925 in a rural district in Southern Rhodesia, provided major assistance in this regard. Most of the 50 WI branches established by the 1960s were in small rural towns and farming districts, with members increasingly turning their domestic ‘civilising mission’ outwards, particularly to African women in the ‘reserves’, later called ‘Tribal Trust Lands’ (TTLs), and to the growing number of African women found on white commercial farms from the 1950s onwards.²⁸ They did this primarily through the WI’s Homecraft movement and the establishment of African women’s clubs in rural districts (reserves, mines, farms). The national Congress of the Federation of Women’s Institutes in Southern Rhodesia also lobbied the government strongly on a wide range of social issues (many affecting African women, such as health, child welfare, birth control), and, until 1980, the WI employed a liaison officer who, according to one WI office-holder, ‘… would take [the Congress’s] proposal straight to government. And, 99 per cent of the time, it would be accepted and then discussed in parliament and then made law’.²⁹

Thus, following the WI motto ‘For Home and Country’, the hundreds of white women who were members were encouraged not only to apply domesticity in their homes (cooking, cleaning, raising children), but also to adopt maternalism – ‘ideologies that exalted women’s capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values they attached to that role:

care, nurturance and morality’.³⁰ This ethos is well captured by WI member and Native Commissioner’s wife Joy MacLean.

It is impossible to lay too great a stress on the [white] women of this era, for it was they who formed the traditions that are still held dear in Rhodesia, who brought their children to respect and live for God and their country, to value honesty, morality, courage and beauty, and to give unselfishly. It was they who spread these principles, too, outwards towards the Africans, to whom these seemed strange ideas at first but who nevertheless received the benefits of them.³¹

Girls’ schools, along with important bodies such as the WI, were settler institutions which ensured that, while domesticity remained the prevailing ideology informing gender relations in white Rhodesian society, white women could use maternalism in particular to ensure their socially acceptable involvement in broader society.

The fierce war for Zimbabwe’s independence (1973–79) largely put a stop to white farm women’s involvement with Homecraft and associated maternalistic activities. Many white ‘farmer’s wives’ played crucial roles in running and protecting their farms during the war while their husbands were away on active service, a point to which I will return later. Shortly after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, however, new farm welfare initiatives were increasingly introduced, which built on the existing colonial ethos of maternalism and welfarism but also responded to the dire living and working conditions faced by farm workers on commercial farms. By the late 1980s, the emerging HIV crisis on farms spawned the initiation of yet more farm-focused non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which ensured that, by the mid-1990s, hundreds of white ‘farmers’ wives’ became involved with a range of welfare and development activities targeting farm workers and their families. Contrary to the claim by Hughes that ‘… having relinquished that infamous hippo-hide whip, most white farmers did not replace it with another instrument or technique that reached across the color bar’,³² I have shown that farm welfarism, along with valorising their production and modernist technical ability, became a major strategy through which white farmers sought to depoliticise their ownership of most of the prime agricultural land and to justify their position as minority elites within black- majority-rule Zimbabwe.³³

Assisted by international development agencies such as Save the Children (UK) and SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, significant farm welfare initiatives included the Farm Health Worker Programme (FHWP) (and later offshoot the Farm Worker Programme), the Silveira House (Catholic Jesuit development organisation) farm nutrition programme, the Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe (FCTZ) programmes, the CFU Aids Control Project, the Kunzwana Women’s Association (KWA) programmes, the Family AIDS Caring Trust (FACT) and the Farm Orphan Support Trust (FOST). All these initiatives targeted the ‘farmer’s wife’ as the key person in running their programmes at farm level (women’s clubs, pre-schools, farm health workers, nutritional interventions, orphan programmes, domestic competitions and so on). This generation of ‘farmer’s wives’ ‘turned the heads of the farmers towards welfare provision’,³⁴ not only through their use of an established ethos of maternalism but often also using their own various skills and qualifications suited to welfare

provision. The growing HIV/AIDS crisis, which started to hit commercial farms in earnest from the late 1980s, gave such programmes particular relevance, urgency and impetus. The intensive programmatic nature of these initiatives and the fact that hundreds of white farm women were involved ensured that this form of maternalism transcended colonial-era efforts, to become what I have shown might be called ‘biopolitical maternalism’ (following Foucault), concerned with the production of life on commercial farms.³⁵

Entangled Motivations: White ‘Farmers’ Wives’ and Welfare

Involvement

In this section, I present detailed case studies of three white farm women who were involved with farm welfare initiatives between 1980 and 2000.³⁶ These cases examine the reasons they became involved and present their own voices and perspectives on their role in farm welfare endeavours. These women’s stories, and others which I will draw on in the next section, demonstrate the multiple and complex reasons which influenced white ‘farmer’s wives’ to become involved in welfare initiatives after 1980. They demonstrate how farm welfare involvement was often chosen as a way to use and develop their own personal skills, identities and sense of contribution to society, while simultaneously being entangled within expectations of domesticity and incorporation as wives, mothers and ‘farmers’ wives’. Yet these cases also show how white farm women in this era were able to negotiate and even challenge the power of settler masculinity, domestic government and incorporation as ‘farmers’ wives’, using farm welfare involvement and maternalism in particular to meet a range of their personal needs and ambitions while still meeting their obligations at home and in their communities. After presenting the three case studies, I will draw out these themes more fully in the last section.

Kate Deschamps, Middle Sabi

Kate Deschamps was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1943 to a Catholic family. Deschamps’ father died when she was seven months old, and her mother moved the family to live with her father, who was in charge of workers’ welfare at the Hullets Darnall sugar mill at Stanger. After her father died, Deschamps’s mother married the man who took over his job at the mill.

Deschamps was barely out of her teens when she met a young man from an immigrant Franco-Mauritian family that farmed sugar cane in the area. They got married in 1964 and, in 1967, they moved up to Rhodesia, where he became a farm manager. In 1971 they were selected to take up a farm of their own on the irrigation scheme at Middle Sabi, in the south-east lowveld. Those busy early years were spent establishing themselves on the farm and bringing up their children, but Deschamps still found time to be the secretary for several local bodies, including the Intensive Conservation Area (ICA), the Farmers’ Association and the governing Rhodesian Front political party. On this latter role, she comments: ‘… for my sins I was even the Rhodesian Front secretary, but that did not appeal to me at all. But everybody belonged to the Rhodesian

Front in the rural areas because we had no other, we had no academics [laughs] to, to lead us in any other direction!’³⁷

Their early years on the farm were also complicated by the intensification of the war in

1973. Middle Sabi was a small white farming area surrounded by Tribal Trust Lands located between the mountainous borderland in the east and the Save river in the west. Guerrilla activity was high, and Deschamps’s husband was frequently called to perform duty as a police reservist. Needing to take the children to boarding school in Harare, Deschamps had to join military convoys, which were frequently attacked. The family identified flying as one way to avoid such dangers:

most of us took to flying to get out safely because there was no guarantee that we would ever get out of there safely. Because, you know, I was ambushed in that convoy, between Birchenough Bridge and Middle Sabi, so there was always the fear of being ambushed. And then, towards the end of the war, there wasn’t a single convoy which left the Chipinge area that didn’t get taken out … they hit convoys virtually every day, it was a daily feature. So the only safe way to get out was to fly, and so I went and got my pilot’s licence, because [her husband] joined the Manicaland Flying Club, but he was too busy to do his … so I got my licence, and we bought a plane [ … ] We brought it down here and had it rebuilt in Harare … and so we could fly our kids around …

Their most dangerous and traumatic experience, however, occurred after the war had ended. In 1981, they were at their Middle Sabi farm when they were attacked by robbers. Deschamps was shot in the leg, while her husband was shot in the head. They were told by specialists that he would never walk or talk again and had to move to Harare for two years in order for him to undergo rehabilitation. He did partially recover, however, and, in 1983, they moved back to the Middle Sabi farm at his insistence. Because of her husband’s disability, Deschamps had to take on a major role in running the farm: ‘after he was injured, I had to go to all the field days, I had to go to all the Farmers’ Association meetings because he slowly sort of withdrew more and more and more. So I was always there with all the men, as it were’.

It was from this point that Deschamps started to develop more of an interest in the welfare of the farm workers. They built a community hall in their farm village, to which they attached a pre-school and a clinic. Being staunch Catholics, they also held the weekly mass at their farmhouse: ‘the local cathedral was on our front veranda. I always say cathedral because it’s anything but the cathedral! You know, our front veranda was the church for the whole community – African, coloured, whatever … ’, she explained. Deschamps was also a close friend of a woman who introduced her, in the early 1990s, to the Family AIDS Caring Trust (FACT), a Mutare-based NGO that was increasingly working on farms across Manicaland. She agreed to be the FACT representative in Middle Sabi, and she went on to be the local representative for the CFU AIDS Control Project. In both these roles, she recruited other ‘farmers’ wives’ to provide AIDS education and health care and organised events such as World AIDS Day celebrations. Deschamps had some success recruiting other white farm women to these causes, but also faced resistance, as she reflects:

‘I’m afraid to say that, apart from [one particular farmer] and a few of my friends … there were very few who really got involved with their communities, their farm communities – very few’. Deschamps’ assessment of her own impact is modest, but Lynn Walker, who knew her when she was the provincial co-ordinator for FOST in Manicaland was effusive in her judgement:

there was a woman called [Kate Deschamps], who was a very typical farmer’s wife in many ways. But somehow, because of her strong religious convictions, was able to sort of take on that role and, you know, it was Middle Sabi Farmers’ Association, she was very active in that. And, on one hand, I think people sort of treated her as a bit of a kind of soft … you know she was a real soft character and she’d take on things that nobody else wanted to do. And she kind of did a lot of the work on that sort of stuff because nobody else would do it. But, on the other hand, I think there was a level of respect for her there and what she stood for and her role, and a lot of farm women who gravitated towards her and worked with her [ … ] [Kate] did take on a lot more responsibility for the farm, which is partly why she was so respected.³⁸

Kate herself agrees that she has always been the kind of person who wanted to get involved in committees and organised initiatives. Even in retirement in Durban, South Africa, she was heavily involved in committees at her church and on the estate where they lived. She explains: that’s the story of our lives … Somebody said to me, ‘you’ve just got to stop [Kate]’, and I said no! Well, you know with [her husband] being injured … his mental capacity isn’t anywhere near what it used to be, and with age setting in it’s getting even worse, and with deafness setting in it’s getting even worse, so I need to have other interests.

Nancy Guild, Goromonzi

Nancy Guild was born in Scotland in 1932 and raised on her family’s small dairy farm in the uplands of Lanarkshire. She attended school until she was 16 but did not study further, instead helping her parents on the farm in the tough environment after the Second World War. Guild eventually married the son of the neighbouring farming family and, in 1958, they emigrated to Southern Rhodesia, where her husband first found work as a farm manager. After a few years, they were able to buy their own farm in the Mutoko district in the north-east of the country.

As with Kate, Guild was raising young children in these early years of farming and she home-schooled her younger child for the first year, with the help of the ‘School in the Air’ curriculum and weekly radio lessons. Being in an isolated area, the children attended boarding schools once they were older. Guild played a very hands-on role in the farm work, taking charge of the cotton production and small cattle herd on their primarily tobacco and maize farm. As she commented: ‘when we started farming, it was a way of life, but later on it had to be run like a business, which changed things a lot. The farmer’s wives were very involved in the running of the farm; you had to be involved!’³⁹

Yet, in the 1970s, with her children away at school, it is clear that this farm work alone was not stimulating enough for Guild. Unlike other ‘farmer’s wives’, who seemed content to play the domesticated roles prescribed for them, Guild showed interest in the male domain of the Rural Council:⁴⁰ I got involved out of interest because I wondered how it came together. The men used to meet at the club and us women would play tennis while they had their meeting. We would often hear shouting and I thought to myself, ‘is that how the council is run?’ So I decided that women should be involved and I got myself nominated by some farmers who were in

favour. And the shouting stopped because, for those who used to shout, to have shouted in front of a woman would have been a let-down to themselves. So there was debate after that, but it was never abusive.⁴¹

While she may have had this positive impact on the Mutoko Rural Council, Guild says her involvement was ‘not so much about doing good’ as it was about her own personal interest and development:

When we started there were very few women in the country on the Rural Councils. But then women began getting on the health committee – it was a voluntary thing. You got a lot out of it in terms of growth within yourself. I was involved with councils for 20 years. I got involved out of interest. I wondered how it all came together. I met so many interesting people and I got lots of support from the farmers who were so glad I was doing this.⁴²

The 1970s also saw the war hit the Mutoko area particularly hard. By the end of the war, the area was considered a ‘liberated zone’, with most white farmers abandoning their land. The Guild farm was itself attacked, and three workers lost their lives. The war, however, opened up another opportunity for Guild, who became the chairperson of the local Farmers’ Association towards its end because all the men were ‘tied up’ with their duties as police reservists.

The war over, the Guilds moved to a small farm near Bromley (east of Harare) in 1982.

Guild’s husband had broken his leg badly a few years previously, which left him needing to use a Zimmer frame. The new place allowed them to do just enough farming to keep them going, and soon Guild was invited to join the Goromonzi Rural Council, in which she served as chairperson until 1996. It was this position that introduced Guild to farm welfare and the Kunzwana Women’s Association (KWA), a small NGO run by black Zimbabweans that was trying to penetrate the Goromonzi commercial farming area (Mashonaland East) to provide empowerment activities for female farm workers. KWA was unsuccessful in gaining entry until it was suggested by the district commissioner that they talk to Guild. With her influential position and the respect that she enjoyed in the district, Guild was able to introduce KWA to the Goromonzi Farmers’ Association, where they presented their plan to start women’s clubs on the farms. As Guild explained, they slowly made headway.

To begin with, it was a slow process as well [ … ] but these other women who wanted to start this said right, I would know the farmers to approach who would be sympathetic to this cause. So that’s how I got involved, because I knew which farmers would say ‘No way!’, or ‘You don’t go near them!’⁴³

Having obtained support from around 20 farmers, the organisation was able to get more and more ‘farmers’ wives’ involved over the next few years to run their women’s clubs. These focused on health (including HIV prevention), hygiene and income generation. By the end of the 1990s, there were around 120 clubs on farms in Macheke, Marondera, Goromonzi and Arcturus.⁴⁴ Guild also started her own women’s club in 1994, meeting every Saturday, as she explains: ‘we started out doing very basic things because a lot of the [African] women, they grew up being able to knit and to crochet, but that’s as far as it went. And they all wanted to learn to bake and to sew and to do all sorts of things’.⁴⁵ The club thus built an oven, and

Guild brought in some sewing machines to teach them to make clothes. For Guild, the point of the women’s club was:

to help them to become self-sufficient and to give them some self-esteem. Because I saw such a difference in the women on our farm after they had been members for a while, and once they had learnt to bake or sew or whatever. Because before that they were just someone’s mother, or someone’s wife or someone’s chattel. And they became people in their own right.⁴⁶

Eventually, she argues, the women became empowered. ‘As time went on they would voice their opinions. They would even oppose what you said, which was good! Whereas at one time it was “yes, yes, yes, yes” kind of thing’.⁴⁷

Guild went on to become the chairperson of the KWA board from 1996 until 2001, when she and her husband moved into Harare. She played a major role in ensuring that the organisation professionalised its structures and processes. Guild’s husband died in 2002, but she continued with an active life of service as an Elder in her local Presbyterian Church in Harare until her death in 2021.

Fiona Pierce, Bindura

Fiona Pierce was born in 1951 and brought up on the highveld, where she also attended school. Her father was a former British army officer who had been based in various Asian countries before settling in Southern Rhodesia. Fiona describes her father as ‘the perfect English gentleman’ whose attitudes heavily influenced her.

He always brought us up to be very open-minded. So when he left the British Army and moved into Southern Rhodesia, it was then he found the attitudes [of farmers around his Marondera smallholding] were very narrow-minded, whatever that means, and he brought us up to be very open-minded about creed, colour, and we didn’t see a great difference – our family – in people’s colours.⁴⁸

Having done well at school, Fiona obtained a place to study teaching at the University College of Rhodesia, where she enrolled in 1969. As Fiona recalls, being at university with students of all races influenced her outlook further:

I was one of the very few people who went there and was educated on a tertiary level with Africans … and, you see, I think I was fortunate because it was a very different society then. Um, it wasn’t apartheid, you know, but it kind of fell into that category without it being legislated [ … ] I was lucky, but I couldn’t go anywhere with my African friends and non-white friends. We had to stay on campus, or we had to go to the Queens Hotel, we could go to the Elizabeth Hotel, which was the only place we could really comfortably mingle …

Fiona had already met her future husband when she was 17. He was studying agriculture at Gwebi College before taking up a position as assistant manager on a farm in the Mazowe valley. Upon graduation, Fiona taught for two years at a high school in Salisbury before getting married in 1974 and moving out to the farm that her husband was managing. She found it difficult to fit into the farming community because of her more liberal outlook, especially as the war was steadily escalating by that point.

Fiona had her five children in quick succession; she commented, ‘as a woman you become very tied up with your day-to-day bringing up your family’. This domestic focus was intensified by the fact that one of their children had special needs: ‘it was the war days and our oldest little girl was mentally and physically retarded. So we had … I used to go in and out to town with my Uzzi over my shoulder, and I already had two other children by then’. Although Fiona already had an interest in starting a women’s club, she says it would not have been a good time to do so: ‘we were scared, we were scared, and our farm was attacked. I don’t think I was in the mood for running those kinds of situations …’

In 1983, the Pierces obtained finance to buy their own farm near Bindura (north ofHarare). The farm they purchased had a ‘magnificent’ two-storey farmhouse and stables, but there was not a single brick house for the workers, and no toilets whatsoever. Disgusted and embarrassed by this situation, the Pierces invested heavily in worker housing over the next

20 years, building 55 electrified three-bedroomed brick houses for the permanent workers and installing outside ‘Blair toilets’ ⁴⁹ for each family. They also built a community hall and started a pre-school, and they paid for workers’ children to attend the local primary school. Every year they also paid for a child’s full secondary education: ‘being a bit of a women’s libber in my time, I chose a girl’, Fiona confided.

Fiona also soon started a women’s club on the farm, and gradually became heavily involved with the various NGO programmes which were targeting the Mashonaland Central commercial farming districts. By the 1990s, she became active in hosting field days and providing other forms of support to the Farm Health Worker Programme, the Silveira House nutrition programme, the CFU AIDS programme, and the Farm Orphan Support Trust. In a magazine article, their farm was called a ‘model for farm community development’.⁵⁰

While Fiona says that she has never been an activist, there was clearly a very strong sense of what she saw as right driving her involvement in farm welfare. Indeed, she reflected that sometimes she may have been too forceful in her attempts to help or ‘improve’ workers, as when the government was planning to repatriate foreign workers (that is, those of Malawian, Zambian or Mozambican origin).

My reaction was to break my back to try and get them IDs [identity documents], because most of them had married local men or women. That was one of my thrusts. I spent a lot of time in government offices – out of choice – to try and help those who didn’t have a birth certificate, and I became almost a bit dictator-like when children were born on the farm. You’d get me stomping down within a week saying, you know [laughs] … I did smile at myself because I’m now not being very pleasant at all but for the good of the folk I’d go down and say ‘You have to register your baby. You need an ID’.

The same applied to the plots of land, along with seed and fertiliser that they provided the workers to encourage household food security.

Again, I was a bit of a Hitler. I would ride my – we had thoroughbred horses – I would ride them round and I’d say: ‘Your place needs weeding’. You know I felt I had that kind of right because we had provided the land and the seed and the fertilisers, so it was rather like if I saw a junior school kid playing at home, rather than at school, I’d say ‘Tendai, what’s wrong with you?’

It is clear, from these confessions, that Fiona’s army officer father influenced her not only in her political outlook but also in her self-confessed direct and commanding approach to leadership within these farm welfare endeavours. Yet these forms of welfarism and

engagement with the workers left Fiona feeling that she had done her best to raise their position by the time their farm was taken over in the early 2000s:

I’m not at all bitter, and I’m not ashamed of … You know we had horses, we’d go to the shows and we had our own lifestyle. But we put everything we could back. So I could quite happily ride past people working in the fields, doing their piecework, and not feel that I was taking advantage [ … ] To this day I never feel guilty about my past on the farm. I mean when we were evicted from the farm I wept for everybody I was leaving. Not just, you know

… because we were an integral part and although maybe our workers didn’t show it … I know they missed us terribly, because they had – within the system that was – we couldn’t have done very much more.

Desperate Housewives and ‘Good Mzungus’

As I have outlined, there were broad political factors that influenced the white farming community in Zimbabwe to start participating in farm welfare initiatives between 1980 and 2000.⁵¹ Helping us to understand some of the more subtle of these factors is Stoler’s concept of ‘external’ and ‘interior frontiers’, which she developed in her study of the colonial Dutch East Indies.⁵² These ‘external’ and ‘interior frontiers’, argues Stoler, were formed by population groups in colonial/post-colonial contexts against whom white settlers came to define themselves. In the context of Stoler’s research, south-east Asians were an ‘external frontier’ against which Dutch settlers measured their identity, while mixed-race groups formed an equally important ‘interior frontier’ that influenced Dutch settler identity. Notions of superiority and racial purity featured prominently in the construction and policing of these frontiers.

Similarly, in colonial Zimbabwe, Africans in general came to constitute a racially ‘other’ external frontier against which white settlers constructed their (supposedly superior) identity. Perhaps more subtly, other groups such as mixed-race ‘coloureds’ and ‘poor whites’ (often of Afrikaans heritage) also came to constitute an ‘interior frontier’ against which white society defined itself. Rutherford presciently extends this analysis, suggesting that black farm workers have ‘marked such an interior frontier for the public identity of white farmers/ settlers, reinforcing and disrupting the more powerful and pervasive social divide between European and African in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe’.⁵³ This interior frontier role played by farm workers became especially significant for white farmers when political discourses portrayed them as European settlers, big landowners, racists or exploitative abusers, as was increasingly the case by the 1990s. To deflect such discourses, white farmers and their institutions, such as the CFU, drew not only on their seemingly indispensable role as producers, technical experts and foreign currency earners but also on narratives about their ‘care’ and trusteeship over ‘their’ workers, bolstering such narratives with evidence of their welfarism on the farms.⁵⁴

Thus, for many white farm women involved with welfare, the ‘interior frontier’ role played by farm workers was an important factor – their need to see themselves, as one male farmer put it, as ‘good mzungus’⁵⁵ in relation to farm workers and their contribution to

Zimbabwe. The last quote from Fiona Pierce (above) is particularly illustrative of this motivation – the need Pierce has to see herself as a leader and a liberal, fair-minded provider, guilt-free despite the obvious disparities in wealth and position starkly illustrated by the image of her riding among the workers on a thoroughbred. It is also interesting to note how Pierce portrays her dragooning of the workers to ensure that their children applied for Zimbabwean birth certificates. The official registration of workers – many of whom would have been of foreign origin⁵⁶ – was undoubtedly an important aspect of stabilising the workforce and mitigating the risk of deportation, yet Pierce emphasises her ‘good’ maternalistic role in this endeavour.

Kate Deschamps, in the following quote, also demonstrates the extent to which such white women saw themselves as ‘good’ in relation to others within their own community, owing to their outlook and welfare endeavours:

the night we got shot I thought why are you not down the road shooting the racists who need to get shot? Why are you shooting us? And so I asked a priest that. I said ‘Why did we get shot, when we were known as the liberals of the area – why did we get shot?’ And he said

‘Well, you know, that’s how God works. If he’d taken a racist, this community would have become even more racial in their approach to life. Whereas it hasn’t affected you in the least, in fact it’s turned you the other way, it’s made you more … outgoing’ … Ja, it did … ⁵⁷

Meanwhile, Edone Anne Logan, a ‘farmer’s wife’ from Shamva who was heavily involved with the WI and Homecraft, illustrates how sharing her skills with black women on her farm not only affirmed her sense of doing good, but was also a thrilling and fulfilling experience:

the Homecraft clubs were absolutely wonderful. They grew and grew so quickly because they were so keen to learn. And I got excited because people on our farm knew very few skills – a lot of them could crochet and knit, by the time I had time, really, to get involved. But they wanted to know how to cook simple meals, they wanted to know hygiene, they wanted to know everything to do with running a home [ … ] they were so willing to learn – anything. I mean that was the thrilling part, you’d teach them to make scrambled egg … you know their cooking is still very, very basic and boring, you know – the normal lady, I mean … But of course we had to teach them without ovens to evolve recipes that just used a piece of metal, you know, over a fire, because so many didn’t have any sort of an oven. But then we would get people out to show them how to build a little oven … ⁵⁸

However, Logan freely and without guilt concedes that her role, and that of similar ‘farmers’ wives’ in these endeavours, was paternalistic, her words illustrating how the unavoidable and, to Logan, seemingly natural hierarchy of the relationships played out:

… it started off definitely as a paternalistic and maternalistic relationship, because they did look up to the farmer and his wife as mother and father. And it didn’t matter what age they were, they would come to you with their problems. And I mean a farmer’s wife’s life was extremely busy – whether she liked being involved or not, she was involved. And you would find yourself first thing in the morning coping with health problems … the farmer’s wife would start the morning off always with the sick and lame and lazy, you know [laughing],

whichever they were, at the back door, and whether you knew nursing or not … I had no nursing upbringing but you quickly learnt. And often it was babies, children, you dealt with and, you know, you coped and you were a long way from hospital … and of course you’d take them to have babies delivered and so you were involved very much in the health, you were involved often in domestic problems, and they would come to you as a mother, so you were a maternal figure – you had that image.⁵⁹

Black farm workers were thus imbricated in the identity projects of white farm women and their narratives about who they were and their belonging in Zimbabwe. While there were genuine engagements between these white women and black farm workers, a level of trusteeship and ‘sympathy’ clearly played an important role, ‘[conferring] distance, [and requiring] inequalities of position and possibility’.⁶⁰ Many of the ‘empowerment’ activities driven by the white ‘farmer’s wives’ – and indeed farm-focused NGOs – were also rooted in European gender norms and played into these paternalistic, hierarchical relationships, despite ‘farmer’s wives’ such as Nancy Guild and Edone Logan emphasising the benefits they saw for their women’s club members. Welfare initiatives therefore allowed white farm women to feed into their own and the broader farming community’s need to cultivate an identity in which being ‘good’ and ‘caring’ towards workers was valorised, yet, at the same time, they reinforced the race and class boundaries and hierarchies of domestic government. The narratives of the women in this article – all recorded many years after they last occupied their farms – demonstrate varying levels of awareness of their problematic positionality in relation to farm workers, but the dominant sentiment is how important it still was to these women to be seen as ‘good’ and ‘caring’ and to have contributed positively through their efforts.

This overarching context is crucial in understanding the reasons for involvement with farm welfare by white farming women in the independence era. Yet the biographies presented above, while not representative of all white farming women, show clearly that these broader factors were intimately entangled with much more personal factors, which differed from woman to woman. The biographies also complicate the notion that white ‘farmers’ wives’ of this era were merely ‘incorporated’ in a way that confined their roles to domesticity alone and to meeting the expectations of settler masculinity and domestic government, for their husbands, homes and ‘communities’.

One of the clearest of these more personal motivations is the need for individual development, self-actualisation and the ability to contribute not just to the family, or even the farm, but, more ambitiously, to a wider cause. All the above women were heavily involved with raising their children, to the extent of home-schooling them for a year or two. But then, in all cases, the children went off by the age of nine to boarding school, leaving a void after what must have been a highly intense and perhaps rewarding period for these women. The presence of servants in most white farming households (at least one domestic worker and commonly a cook) meant that many white women of this era were spared the most tedious forms of domestic drudgery, although they would still have run the household. But, in the cases above, the maternalistic turn towards farm welfare followed an intense period of maternal input in the home.

Quite a large number of white farm women of this era were qualified but had forgone a career in favour of marrying a farmer, as was the case with Fiona Pierce. As Lynette Mudekunye, manager of the FHWP (1991–96) and founding member of the FCTZ, explained: ‘[it was] very very important [to get them involved] because very often they were teachers or qualified in more of a social side and they weren’t necessarily using that training,

and this gave them an opportunity to become involved’.⁶¹ Edone Anne Logan put her very active role down to her natural love of teaching and her strong belief that she had something to share with African women:

I am a trained teacher, which always helps with any sort of leadership [ … ] I used my teacher training a lot. I mean right through my life I have used it and I’m so grateful that I had it. But a lot of it was for teaching African women … I taught my own children … two of them for the first two years, and the third one was three years, and so that was good.⁶²

Logan, despite being a ‘farmer’s wife’, was thus able to use her teaching background, not only with her children and in her WI Homecraft club, but later as the archivist for the National Federation of Women’s Institutes of Zimbabwe, which she then used as a springboard for publishing historical pieces and curating historical exhibitions. Logan’s life clearly revolved around making a contribution to both home and country, in line with the WI motto. Similarly, Sue Parry, who founded FOST, was a medical doctor who married a farmer. The HIV crisis on commercial farms gave her a context in which to use her expertise, building a response to orphan care that became recognised by international agencies as ‘best practice’. Having had this experience in the development sector, Parry later went on to take up a high-level job with the World Council of Churches, even moving to their Geneva headquarters for a number of years. As Lynn Walker, who succeeded Parry as director of FOST, commented:

for somebody like Kerry Kay [of CFU AIDS Control Project], you know, it was a real opportunity for her to develop skills. The same for Sue. I mean my reading of Sue was that, yes, she was a doctor, and I’m sure she was more than just the ‘little woman on the farm’, but very much the farm was Ben’s business. And for Sue this was an opportunity to develop her skills and to become … to realise her own potential as well and to do something that meant a lot to her in terms of her sort of religious and social values.⁶³

In these cases, farm welfare enabled some women to develop the career they gave up when they became ‘farmers’ wives’.

Others, such as Nancy Guild, were not qualified in any area, but farm welfare also gave them an opportunity to stave off boredom, to develop new skills and relationships, to contribute more broadly than in the domestic realm and even to leave a mark on the world. Emmie Wade, director of KWA, put it thus: ‘there was definitely a convergence in terms of black women sitting in compounds and white women sitting in the farm house. So Kunzwana said “we can give you a role”, and they took it’.⁶⁴

In Guild’s case, while she was proud of taking charge of and developing the cotton and cattle side-businesses on the farm, once her children were at school, she was not content with simply playing tennis at the club with other ‘farmers’ wives’. She clearly had ambitions to contribute and lead in the wider community, actions firmly in the realm of men. In so doing she also skilfully challenged settler masculinity and used its own gendered code of chivalry (for example, no shouting in front of women) to carve out a successful career on district councils and farmers’ associations. Although Guild saw her women’s club allowing farm working women to become more than just ‘somebody’s wife’, welfare initiatives played a similar role in her life. It was similar with Kate Deschamps, and, tellingly, both women also became more involved with farm welfare after their husbands suffered incapacitating injuries, resulting in their needing to develop ‘other interests’, as Deschamps

commented. Diana Auret is another example of a ‘farmer’s wife’ whose religious and social justice interests led her to become involved in farm welfare. She went on not only to play a leading role in the FHWP and FOST but also to study social anthropology and to write several books on socio-economic issues in Zimbabwe.

In terms of farm women’s ability to use farm welfare and maternalism to develop

themselves and contribute to society, the organised, programmatic nature of the interventions after 1980 was crucial, as Lynn Walker explains:

I think … for many farm women, it was their first opportunity to get involved in something that was a little more than just the housewife, and asking the husband for a few dollars so you can do a project for the women. And it was a structured programme with specific aims and objectives. It was dealing with a problem that was affecting not only social issues on the farm but production. You know, farmers recognised it as an issue that needed to be addressed [ … ] So for once there was a way of getting involved in a structured programme that was recognised as more than just window dressing and more than just, you know,

‘keeping the little woman occupied and happy’, which I think many farmers did.⁶⁵

A final, more personal factor that influenced welfare involvement was the role of the war and personal tragedy in the lives of these women. With their husbands away on active military service, ‘farmers’ wives’ often had to run their farms and ensure that their families were protected. As Logan explains, the government’s provision of a soldier to protect each farm did not always work as envisaged, with the ‘farmer’s wife’ still having to play a leading role in defending her farmstead.

For the farmers, you know, everyone was on call-up … and they were sent to another area and then that’s when the ‘Bright Lights’ [young soldiers from town] were sent out. They were supposed to protect us but because they were townies they had no idea of what to do. There were holes in our ceiling from the ‘Bright Lights’ where they would shoot because they were terrified – terrified! It was quite often the farmer’s wife who had to make a brave stand! But anyway … so apart from keeping your labour force happy and safe and by then your clubs were gone but you still had all your health problems and possibly more … you ran the farm as well. We all learnt how to fertilise, how to do absolutely everything.⁶⁶

‘Farmers’ wives’ therefore gained skills and often a level of self-confidence, experience and toughness during the war that they would not have gained in merely a domestic role. Some, like Nancy Guild, took on important roles vacated by men, such as the leadership of the local farmers’ association. Most of the above women suffered traumatic attacks and ambushes during the war, while Deschamps also suffered attempted murder after independence, which had a significant impact on her life and outlook. In addition, the Pierces lost their handicapped child at an early age. Having to cope with these traumas perhaps also prepared these women for a later role outside the home in farm welfare endeavours, combining with their other personal and broader reasons for becoming involved.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to go beyond merely inserting white ‘farmers’ wives’ more firmly into the historiography and ethnography of white commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe. Through an examination, presented in their own voices, of their personal histories, their roles in farm welfare initiatives and their motivations for such involvement, this article seeks to bring them out of the background, where both ‘pioneer stories’ and scholarship has largely kept them. Yet these voices, histories and motivations also clearly show that the ‘farmers’ wives’ who became involved in farm welfare endeavours between 1980 and 2000 were not content to be confined by the expectations of domesticity and settler masculinity, and aimed to be much more than just ‘somebody’s wife’. They had their own dreams, skills and identities to cultivate, and farm welfare allowed them to do this to a large extent.

Although none of the women whose voices are presented in this article could fully escape the discursive category of ‘farmer’s wife’ and the roles and expectations that came with it, they were able to manipulate it and, in some cases, transcend the stereotypical aspects of the label, often using farm welfarism as one means through which to do so. The women discussed in this article were clearly at the ‘highly involved’, if not more socially ‘liberal’ end of the spectrum, and do not represent all white Zimbabwean farm women in the independence era. Yet their stories and narratives point to common factors influencing the several hundred white farm women who similarly became voluntarily involved in organised farm welfare initiatives by the 1990s. As I have argued, NGOs were able to involve this significant number of white women because farm welfare, and the maternalism that was at its heart, offered such women ways of realising ambitions that they had to shelve when they married farmers, and access to new opportunities for self-actualisation, skills development and use, and broader relationships. Such women were able to escape, to some extent, the expectations of domestic government and incorporation as wives in what remained a highly masculine society still influenced by settler institutions. Yet such welfarism simultaneously allowed these women to maintain gendered race identities and roles that had been sculpted since their schooldays.

Thus, despite being able to find some escape from domesticity, white farm women were nevertheless also able to play an acceptable and important role in their communities and the white Zimbabwean community more broadly, using maternalism to feed into the strategic management of their precarious position within the black majority nation and the interior frontier formed by farm workers, which became increasingly important in the 1990s. Welfare involvement was therefore influenced by a complex mix of personal and wider political factors peculiar to that moment in Zimbabwe’s history. As has been documented, this context was changed fundamentally at the turn of the 21st century, with the displacement of domestic government and such forms of maternalism as a result of the fast- track land reform programme.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article is based was funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town. My gratitude goes to Fiona Ross, Blair Rutherford and two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments improved this article greatly. The views expressed here are nevertheless my own, as are any flaws that remain.

ANDREW HARTNACK

Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, PO Box 524, Auckland Park, 2006, South Africa. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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1 See D. Money and D. van Zyl-Hermann (eds), Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa 1930s–1990s

(Abingdon, Routledge, 2020).

2 D. Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (London, Harper Collins, 1994), p. 12.

© 2022 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies

3 B.A. Rutherford, Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe

(Harare, Weaver Press, 2001), p. 83.

4 Ibid. In later work, however, Rutherford does provide an illuminating discussion of the role of ‘farmers’ wives’ in welfare and development activities: B.A. Rutherford. ‘Desired Publics, Domestic Government, and Entangled Fears: On the Anthropology of Civil Society, Farm Workers, and White Farmers in Zimbabwe’, Cultural Anthropology, 19, 1 (2004), pp. 122–53.

5 Robert Morrell outlines the establishment of settler masculinity among farmers in the Natal midlands, South Africa, assisted by various settler institutions: R. Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal 1880–1920 (Pretoria, University of South Africa, 2001). A similar form of settler masculinity was established among English-origin farmers in Rhodesia by 1950: A.M.C. Hartnack, Ordered Estates: Welfare, Power and Maternalism on Zimbabwe’s (Once White) Highveld (Harare, Weaver Press, 2016), pp. 7–13.

6 Letter to the editor, The Farmer (Harare), 6, 32 (31 May 1990).

7 D.M. Hughes. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); R. Pilossof, The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from Zimbabwe (Harare, Weaver Press, 2012); A. Selby, ‘Commercial Farmers and the State: Interest Group Politics and Land Reform in Zimbabwe’ (D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 2006). Selby, for example, mentions white farm women, only in passing, twice in his thesis. Pilossof does briefly discuss some writings by a prominent white farm woman on her experiences and views of the land takeovers.

8 U. Kufakurinani, Elasticity in Domesticity: White Women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890–1979 (Leiden, Brill, 2018).

9 Hartnack, Ordered Estates.

10 A. Hartnack, ‘Cultivations on the Frontiers of Modernity: Power, Welfare and Belonging on Commercial Farms before and after “Fast-Track Land Reform” in Zimbabwe’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 2015).

11 The taped interviews with white farm women were only partially used in the writing of the thesis, owing to the limitations of space and the focus of the thesis. The recordings of these interviews, along with detailed ethnographic notes and field diary entries, are held by the author.

22 Ibid.

23 Rutherford, ‘“Traditions” of Domesticity’, p. 79.

24 Particularly in the last century, before such professions became more accessible to women.

25 H. Callan, ‘Introduction’, in H. Callan and S. Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife (London, Croom Helm,

1984), p. 1 (emphasis in original).

26 J. Pape, ‘Black and White: The “Perils of Sex” in Colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies,

16, 4 (1990), p. 720.

27 Hartnack, Ordered Estates, pp. 39–44, 63.

28 Ibid., pp. 62–70.

29 Taped interview with Edone Ann Logan, Juliasdale, 18 March 2013.

30 S. Koven and S. Michel, ‘Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920’, American Historical Review, 95, 4 (1990), p. 1079.

31 J. MacLean, The Guardians: A Story of Rhodesia’s Outposts – and of the Men and Women Who Served in

Them (Bulawayo, Books of Rhodesia, 1974), pp. 198.

32 Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe, p. 98.

33 Hartnack, Ordered Estates, Chapter 3.

34 Interview with Emmie Wade, Director of Kunzwana Women’s Association, Harare, 21 June 2012.

35 See Hartnack, Ordered Estates, pp. 87–107. M. Foucault, ‘17 March 1976’, in M. Bertani and A. Fontana (eds), Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, trans. D. Macey (New York, Picador, 1997).

36 I use the real names of Edone Ann Logan and Nancy Guild, with their permission, because they played a significant role in specific welfare endeavours that is in the public record. Similarly, I name Sue Parry, Diana Auret and all other interviewees who played key roles in welfare organisations. I provide pseudonyms, however, for the other two women whose stories are recorded in this section.

37 Taped interview with Kate Deschamps, Durban, 11 August 2013. All subsequent quotes from Deschamps are taken from the same interview.

38 Taped interview with Lynn Walker, Harare, 30 May 2012.

39 Taped interview with Nancy Guild, Harare, 15 June 2012.

40 Rural Councils were local government bodies in white commercial farming areas that oversaw various developmental issues in farming districts, such as road maintenance, water issues and social issues such as health.

41 Taped interview with Nancy Guild, Harare, 15 June 2012.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Taped interview with Nancy Guild, Harare, 5 July 2013.

45 Taped interview with Nancy Guild, Harare, 15 June 2012.

46 Ibid.

47 Taped interview with Nancy Guild, Harare, 5 July 2013.

48 Taped interview with Fiona Pierce, Harare, 31 March 2014. All subsequent quotes from Pierce are from the same interview.

49 A popular design of low-cost and hygienic toilet developed in Zimbabwe by the Blair Research Laboratory.

50 See ‘A Model for Farm Community Development’, Zimbabwe Tobacco, Harare (n.d. 1997). The Pierces also showed me letters of thanks from a number of NGOs for their support in the 1990s.

51 See Hartnack, Ordered Estates, pp. 72–107.

52 A.L. Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 3 (1992), p. 516.

53 B.A. Rutherford, ‘“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics, Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms during a Time of Crisis’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11, 4 (2004), p. 546.

54 Ibid., pp. 552–4; Hartnack, Ordered Estates, pp. 76–7.

55 Personal communication with Marc Carrie-Wilson, CFU deputy director, 13 June 2013. The word mzungu is the Swahili version of the Shona murungu, a word commonly used for a white person.

56 A large proportion of the farm labour force came from neighbouring Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique during the colonial era. Many of these migrant workers living on farms remained undocumented and were continually portrayed as foreigners in the state media after independence, and threatened with deportation. See A. Hartnack, ‘Transcending Global and National (Mis)Representations through Local Responses to Displacement: The Case of Zimbabwean (ex-)Farm Workers’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 22, 3 (2009), p. 362.

57 Taped interview with Kate Deschamps, Durban, 11 August 2013.

58 Taped interview with Edone Ann Logan, Juliasdale, 18 March 2013.

59 Ibid.

60 A.L. Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture, 18, 1 (2006), p. 134.

61 Recorded interview with Lynette Mudekunye, via Skype, 12 November 2013.

62 Taped interview with Edone Ann Logan, Juliasdale, 18 March 2013.

63 Taped interview with Lynn Walker, Harare, 30 May 2012.

64 Interview with Emmie Wade, Harare, 21 June 2012.

65 Taped interview with Lynn Walker, Harare, 30 May 2012.

66 Taped interview with Edone Ann Logan, Juliasdale, 18 March 2013.