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Government and international relations professor Beverly Grier examines the relationship between childhood, children's labor and the state in Zimbabwe before and after European colonization. |
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Making "invisible hands" visible
Professor Beverly Grier's research
 Concepts of youth and the role of youth in society have varied throughout time and across cultures. In her new book, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1965, government and international relations professor Beverly Grier examines
- the place of African children and adolescents in pre-colonial Zimbabwe
- how European colonists competed for the labor of those children
- how those children struggled to control their own destinies
- and how that struggle shaped government policies and politics.
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In the process, she shows how economic, social, and political change cannot be properly understood without understanding the place of children.
Children in Shona and Ndebele society
Grier shows how the work of children was crucial to the survival of the Shona and Ndebele peoples who inhabited what is now the country of Zimbabwe. These societies were agriculturally based, and depended especially on cattle raising. Crop cultivation, animal tending, hunting, cooking, brewing beer, the making of baskets and pottery, and even mining were just of a few of the areas where children's labor was needed. As children worked, they also learned the skills they would need to be successful, contributing adults.
Children's labor and persons were controlled by high status males to whom they might or might not be related. These men influenced if, when, to whom, and under what conditions these children (and even persons who were chronologically adults), would marry, and who would benefit from their labor. Slave children, acquired in raids on neighboring ethnic groups, and child pawns, exchanged to discharge debts, might also be part of the household. By arranging marriages and lending out the labor of children, high status males could maintain and enhance their power.
European colonists compete for childen's labor
But beginning in the late nineteenth century, European colonists (predominantly British and Afrikaners from South Africa), who needed servants, soldiers, and industrial and agricultural workers, began to compete for the labor of these African children. Even though among certain social classes and parts of Europe the use of child labor was being gradually phased out, white colonists viewed African childhood as "a time for inurement to the habits of labor." Children who were not content with their place in the family or wider social hierarchy might choose instead to work for-and be paid by-European colonists. Sometimes African children left voluntarily; occasionally they were abducted.
Destabilizing society
As the first half of the 20th century progressed, the colonists' increasing demand for cheap labor severely destabilized African families, societies, and economies.
The ability to leave their families and choose, negotiate, or move on to other places of employment provided more assertive African youth with (from the perspectives of European employers, the colonial government and African parents) an undesirable level of power. Youth in search of employment migrated around the countryside and crowded into urban areas where they might-or might not-find work. Not only were families destabilized, but youth themselves were often left without the protection and supervision of parents.
Controlling native youth
In response, the colonial government developed policies and legislation, notably the 1926 Native Juveniles Employment Act, designed to increase the availability of child and adolescent African labor, regulate young workers' mobility and behavior, and control unemployed or informally employed youth in urban areas. This was attempted through the imposition of registration requirements, a pass system, labor contracts, and taxation. Many African youth coveted their registration certificates as they signified that the bearer was chronologically at least, an adult.
Childhood redefined
Grier's research shows how the competition for their labor provided native children with a degree of choice that they might not have had in their traditional societies. By hiring themselves out they might acquire some level of European schooling in return for labor on a mission station or settler's farm. Gradually, African childhood began to take form along a more European model, in which childhood was being redefined as a time to pursue a new kind of education. As employers and colonial officials found that African children were not easy to control in the workforce or in urban areas, they concluded that schooling was a better way to socialize them than was wage labor. Paradoxically, this signaled a redefinition of and deracialization of childhood in colonial Zimbabwe.
Sources of information
For information about children's lives in both pre- and post colonial Zimbabwe, Dr. Grier made use of a variety of written sources, including
- Government documents (including court records), reports, and correspondence
- The papers and reports of missionary societies, commercial companies and other organizations
- Personal papers
- Newspaper articles
She notes the need for caution when utilizing these sources as they were, for the most part, written by white colonists.
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Additional Resources
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Ndebele girls ready to stamp maize, c. 1911. J. O'Neil, "Habits and Customs of the Natives of the Mangwe District, South Matabeleland," Zambesi Mission Record, 4, no. 53 (July 1911), 270. Enlarge
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Girls plucking tea and working for wages on a tea estate in Rhodesia in 1948. Courtesy of National Archives of Zimbabwe. Enlarge
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Two African boys (standing at back) working as servants to a colonial family. From Sheila Macdonald, Sally in Rhodesia, London: Heath Cranton. 1926. Facing p. 150. Enlarge
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