'Traditions' of domesticity in 'modern' Zimbabwean politics: Race, gender, and class in the government of commercial farm workers in Hurungwe District

The access of commercial farm workers in Zimbabwe to resources such as wages and land has been strongly influenced by the spatial inscriptions of modernity in state administrative practices that emerged along with the international concerns of "development" in the 1940s. Marginalized by the dominant narratives of modernization within colonial development policies that focused on "African peasants" and "urban African workers," farm workers were officially viewed less as a Government responsibility and more as a domestic responsibility of white farmers. In this thesis, I discuss this form of governance on commercial farms which I call "domestic government"--"domestic" in the double-sense of officially promoting the "private" over "public" domain and of administratively valuing proper paternalistic family and family-like relations between male workers and their families and between commercial farmers and "their" workers. The tobacco farms of Hurungwe District in northwestern Zimbabwe provide the setting to trace the spatially inscribed power relations, strategies, negotiations, and transgressions within what may be called the "traditions" of domesticity in "modern" Zimbabwean politics.