| Elderly residents of Madziwa, Zimbabwe, explain the far-reaching changes during their lives as the transition from chivanhu, the way of the people, to chirungu, meaning modern or European ways. I use these concepts to investigate the practice and representation of 'modernism' for peasants in the Madziwa area, concentrating on farming as the key area where peasants' struggles were played out, as they coped with changing household and community dynamics, the opportunities and demands of the market, and the pressures of the colonial state.; My dissertation explores this transition through three distinct periods. Indigenous---chivanhu---farming systems that balanced food security, labor maximization, and environmental management dominated until 1935. Madziwans then began experimenting with chirungu methods, using ploughs to create new hybrid methods of production and produce a surplus for sale. These innovations had profound social impacts, fueling gendered and intergenerational conflicts over the control of land, labor, and produce.; The third period, from 1945 to 1965, was distinguished by intense official interest in controlling peasants, as part of the wider second colonial occupation. State efforts peaked after 1955. Officials used the Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA) as the basis for a massive social engineering scheme designed to establish a new form of white domination rooted in the disciplinary regime by restructuring rural life in accord with the demands of the Rhodesian settler state, capital, and Western models of science, rationality and linear space. Implementation of this law exacerbated ongoing conflicts within rural communities as well as between peasants and the state in three key dimensions of the labor process: production methods, control of labor, and use of the landscape.; Peasants responded to this coercive scheme to impose chirungu by complying with, evading and defying the measure. Rural opposition to the NLHA spread rapidly, creating a state of ungovernability in much of the country that forced the settler government to abandon the law in 1962. I explore the implications of this apparent peasant victory, tying it to the profound sense of cultural loss that rural people express through the bipolar construction of chirungu and chivanhu. |
