Teresa Barnes' work is one of several recent studies on colonial Africa that places women at the center of history as initiators and actors who carved out opportunities, jobs, and dwelling places in urban areas rather than simply reacting to the impositions and limitations colonial officials and African patriarchs imposed on them (Tripp 1989, Geiger 1997, Bozzoli 1991, White 1990). Where she breaks new ground is in locating African women's urban strategies within a larger framework of social reproduction and nationalist activities. In colonial Zimbabwean society, white settlers sought to reduce Africans to farm and mine laborers, social reproduction often became a political act. She argues that African women in colonial Harare were part of a long-term political movement that had "elements and initiatives in common with political nationalism" but was different enough to warrant separate consideration (p. xviii). In the desire for social reproduction, or "to transmit something African into the future," both African men and women played a role. African women figured prominently, though, by trying to create an environment in which they could live with their families and take advantage of some of the independence urban living had to offer (p. xix). While African men often desired to live with their families, they were much more ambivalent about the increase in women's freedom that often accompanied urban residence.

Drawing on colonial documents and what she terms "substantial excerpts" from oral interviews conducted in 1988-89 with Ms. Everjoice Win, Barnes traces the shifting relations of power during two and a half decades (1930-1956) of women's residence and work in colonial Zimbabwe. She argues that these years are particularly important because by the beginning of the period, colonial officials had clearly demonstrated a desire to restrict Africans' options as wage earners in the urban economy. Over the ensuing decades, however, African women found a way to carry their identities and families into the future within this context.

Barnes' work makes several important contributions to the wider body of literature on the African colonial experience. The first is in defining and describing how some women in colonial Harare differentiated themselves from others. Arguing that Western notions of class do not apply to the area under study, she presents the categories that her interviewees described for her. Those at the top of the social hierarchy lived "properly" or were "well-known" and succeeded within colonial urban society. These women had "material assets that others lacked: a husband, a house, perhaps education" and enjoyed, as a result, "elevated social status" and relative safety and security (p. 23). Access to land and housing in order to engage in a business and raise a family were the most critical element here and by far the hardest to secure. Only a few managed to circumvent laws and gain independent access to land. Usually such access devolved from marriage to a man. In this situation, some women sought to proclaim the validity of lobola (dowry or bride price) and patriarchal control of the family to ensure the health and well-being of their family.

Being officially married, Barnes argues, was the essential ingredient for achieving status and respectability in colonial Harare. The majority of women, though, were not married "properly" and had mapoto (temporary marriages) relationships in which they provided domestic and sexual services to a man in return for accommodation, food, and domestic goods. These liaisons were formed without consent of the families and within them women accumulated their own property and some of the men's as well, challenging African notions of social reproduction. Others opted for independence but paid a price in terms of social marginalization. These women often engaged in activities like prostitution and beer-brewing. At the bottom of the social ladder, prostitutes by the 1950s had lost their own names and used those of famous prostitutes from the 1920s and 1930s; they were anything but "well-known." In Barnes' work, the two activities of beer brewing and prostitution, so salient in other works on urban women (White 1990, Akyeampong 1997, Bujra, 1975, 1977) do not appear front and center, because she is more concerned about the kinds of work that African women viewed as promoting the healthy reproduction of African society

Second, in contrast to Schmidt's work in early colonial Zimbabwean history, the author argues that African and European men were not in alliance against African women during the period under examination. She contends that in the 1930s there was no complicity between the colonial state and African men to control women's movements. There were several reasons for this. Urban African men often benefited from women's residence in town, though rural men complained about the corrupting influence of urban women. Despite rural complaints, colonial officials in the 1930s suspected that very few women were in town without permission of their parents or guardians. Rural parents rarely came to urban centers to claim their daughters because often they shared in their earnings. Older generations of Africans were less concerned about urban residence than they were about controlling wages of the younger generation. In addition, the state was not committed to removing women from urban locations. For example, the colonial government did try to locate and return some urban women in the 1930s, mostly young, recent arrivals. Yet, they ignored many urban women, including prostitutes, who had resided in town for longer periods of time and women who had come from great distances. Settlers feared African resistance to large-scale removal and they feared that, in the absence of African women, African men would turn to white women for their sexual satisfaction.

Finally, placing social reproduction at the center of African political concerns gives the nationalist movement in Zimbabwe greater historical depth and breadth. One of the examples of interest here is the response to the Rhodesian government's enforcement of the 1946 Native (Urban Areas) Accommodation and Registration Act, which disqualified many men and women from urban residence. When the state began removing respectable urban women (wives, widows, and mothers), the Reformed Industrial Commercial Workers' Union took up the cause of men's marital rights and women's township residence rights for the next five years. As a result of the protest, the government ceased night raids and began allowing some men and women to register for residence. In another example of African concern for social reproduction, the 1956 bus boycott turned violent one night as men attacked and raped independent female hostel residents, some of whom had flouted the boycott, saying they had enough money to pay the fare. For many Harare men, independent control of wages was threatening to the African social order.

Barnes' work succeeds in illustrating that long before the armed struggle, African women (and men) were dissatisfied with their lot in Southern Rhodesia and sought ways to change it. The chief omission (due in part, at least, to the original intent of the oral history interviews) is a lack of attention to families (p. xxv). In order for her arguments about social reproduction to be carried to a logical conclusion, stories of colonial Harare's residents' relationships with their rural families, and with the lives of their urban children, need to be told. These additions would enable the reader to see more clearly the rural-urban linkages so vital to women and their families during this period as well as the efficacy of their strategies to recreate viable African families in a new context. This book will be of interest to social historians, women's historians, and urban historians of Africa. The concept of social reproduction is an important avenue for the exploration of African initiatives under colonial rule.

Kathleen R. Smythe
Department of History
Xavier University

References

White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Bozzoli, Belinda, with the assistance of Mmantho Nkotsoe. Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa,
1900-1983. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991.

Tripp, Aili Mari. "Women and the Changing Urban Household Economy in Tanzania," Journal of Modern African Studies 27/4 (1989): 601-623.

Geiger, Susan. TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955-1965. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997.

Akyeampong, Emmanuel. "Sexuality and Prostitution Among the Akan of the Gold Coast c.1650-1950," Past and Present 156 (1997): 144-173.