The Nature of Whiteness
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The Nature of Whiteness

Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe

Yuka Suzuki, K. Sivaramakrishnan

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The Nature of Whiteness

Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe

Yuka Suzuki, K. Sivaramakrishnan

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The Nature of Whiteness explores the intertwining of race and nature in postindependence Zimbabwe. Nature and environment have played prominent roles in white Zimbabwean identity, and when the political tide turned against white farmers after independence, nature was the most powerful resource they had at their disposal. In the 1970s, "Mlilo, " a private conservancy sharing boundaries with Hwange National Park, became the first site in Zimbabwe to experiment with "wildlife production, " and by the 1990s, wildlife tourism had become one of the most lucrative industries in the country. Mlilo attained international notoriety in 2015 as the place where Cecil the Lion was killed by a trophy hunter. Yuka Suzuki provides a balanced study of whiteness, the conservation of nature, and contested belonging in twenty-first-century southern Africa. The Nature of Whiteness is a fascinating account of human-animal relations and the interplay among categories of race and nature in this embattled landscape.

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1

THE LEOPARD’S BLACK AND WHITE SPOTS

Ingwe ikhotha amabala ayo amhlophe lamnyama.
The leopard licks all its spots, black and white.
—Ndebele proverb
JN. Pelling, who authored several textbooks and dictionaries for the Ndebele language in the 1970s, classifies the leopard proverb as “behavior which is commendable.” According to Pelling, the observation that leopards lick all of their spots, regardless of color, upholds the idea that there should be no favoritism on the basis of race. The idiom gained broad currency in 2000 when it appeared in a collection of images and expressions circulated by Zimbabwe’s opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Through an array of media, MDC activists highlighted the state’s many failures, including widespread corruption, the obliteration of a once prosperous economy, and the siphoning of wealth to the ruling party elite at the expense of increasingly impoverished Zimbabweans. They forged dialogue in urban spaces already humming with deep disillusionment: the fiction of democratic nationhood had long since evaporated, and state claims to legitimacy no longer held any validity. At the same time, threats of violence from ruling party supporters were very real. As a result, veiled metaphors and double entendres figured prominently in the opposition campaign. It was in this context that the leopard surfaced as one image of the ideal nation, where favoritism does not exist and basic rights are guaranteed to all, regardless of race, ethnicity, or political affiliation.
To imagine an absence of favoritism in contemporary Zimbabwe is no easy task. When Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980, the newly elected prime minister, Robert Mugabe, appealed for a “new amity between the races, of forgiving and forgetting the past, and building a new nation together.”1 The proposal shocked the country, and white Rhodesians who had seen Mugabe as the devil incarnate until that very morning began to believe that he of all people might represent the best hope for restoring peace and stability to the country.2 The newly formed government instituted a ten-year period during which the security of white property would be guaranteed by law. Top-ranking ex-combatants were then dispatched across the country to visit white farmers and convince them that they would be genuinely welcome in the new Zimbabwe. The logic for national reconciliation clearly lay in economic necessity, but was framed in terms of moral idealism and cross-racial, cross-ethnic collaboration.
By the 1990s, the official rhetoric had changed. A brilliant orator and strategist, Mugabe transformed his bid to retain power into a war over race. Deftly conjuring specters of colonialism, he labeled white Zimbabweans as “enemies of the state,” accused the United Kingdom of neoimperialism, and denounced Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition party leader, as Tony Blair’s “tea boy.” The most spectacular outcome of this shift occurred in 2000, as liberation “war veterans” occupied thousands of white commercial farms across the country over the course of a few months.3 Despite repeated court rulings declaring the invasions constitutionally illegal, they continued to escalate until all but two hundred of the nation’s forty-five hundred white commercial farms were occupied. This marked a calculated gamble on the part of the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), which was widely understood to be the orchestrator of these invasions. By restoring land to the spotlight, the ruling party deployed the most powerful weapon in its artillery; land ownership, symbolizing centuries of racial domination, offered the most direct and incriminating evidence of disproportionate white privilege. The invasions, according to Mugabe, represented “the last round of the liberation struggle, and the final chance to rid the country of all vestiges of colonialism.”4 A majority of Zimbabweans recognized the land invasions as a ploy to divert attention from the country’s real problems, rooted in an economy on the verge of collapse. Nonetheless, the stakes for white farmers were high. Nearly all lost their properties, and dozens were killed through beatings, shootings, and live torchings.
Faced with the extinguishment of a way of life, farmers have fought to retain their place in the country, to assert their individual histories, and to claim the rights of citizenship they feel entitled to after generations of settlement in Africa. This project is by no means a recent undertaking, but one that these Zimbabweans have been consumed by in the three decades since independence. In the context of a rapidly vanishing population, they have drawn on increasingly creative ways through which to redefine and reassert their claims to belonging. The challenge is considerable, for how does one make such claims as a former settler bearing the stigma of history? How does one defend a way of life based on visible inequalities in wealth? And finally, what forms of ideological work are necessary to keep intact a worldview that has become increasingly indefensible?

VISIBLE WHITENESS

To many in southern Africa, white farmers represent an archetype of rural conservatism, resolutely loyal to a pre-independence past and stubbornly persevering in the post-independence present. They are objects of suspicion but also romanticization, subject to intense scrutiny while kept at a distance. As the most publicly recognizable white figures, farmers have been seen as representative of entire white populations in southern Africa, collapsing a diversity of subjectivities and experiences. And while farmers themselves are taken as iconic, relatively few studies until recently have explored their worlds from the point of view of the individuals who inhabit them. Much is assumed about farmers as a category, and it is also often assumed that anything more about them is not worth knowing. This book attempts to complicate such assumptions by exploring the inner workings of rural white worlds in Zimbabwe.
In the global context, images of the “white settler” circulate as a series of stereotypes, including monstrous perpetrators of racial oppression, big game hunters, hefty rugby players, or landowners presiding over vast estates catered to by multitudes of servants. The reality, however, is far more complex. Settlers of European descent have long histories in southern Africa, bearing the mark of some of the most brutal forms of domination the world has ever seen. At the same time, this region was the site of tremendous aspiration, promising settlers fortunes and status impossible to attain elsewhere. For most of the immigrants, these dreams and experiments in social engineering were tied to the color of their skin, which they believed entitled them to superior positions in their new society. At the heart of this reinvention, the stakes of being white took on a new urgency and significance. Whiteness became the very basis on which privilege was conferred, and thus its boundaries were carefully policed, and the meaning of whiteness itself took on unequaled weight and power.
Unlike the vast majority of situations where whiteness is “unmarked,” white privilege in Africa is glaringly conspicuous.5 In a setting where whiteness is out of place—both visually and politically, following independence—racial formations must be attended to explicitly, utilizing conscious, rather than subconscious, forms of articulation. Forced out of its usual concealment, whiteness becomes a matter of visible ideology as opposed to invisible hegemony. People must work hard to keep their identities intact, as well as convince themselves and others of their correctness. Such experiences of whiteness are useful to examine precisely because they bring to the surface processes that are usually hidden. Under a close lens, we can examine how whiteness is constructed and maintained, and its associated privileges justified. Making implicit ideas about racial identity explicit allows us to understand how discourses of whiteness work more generally. At the same time, a close exploration reveals important differences from experiences of whiteness in other parts of the world with distinctive histories, political economies, and social contexts. In both its universalities and specificities, whiteness in Zimbabwe is instructive to think with, particularly when compared with racial dynamics elsewhere.
Race is always fluid, but the rapidly changing postcolonial landscape has a way of telescoping racial transformations in Zimbabwe. Before independence, the distinction between black and white signaled the stark difference between a life of guaranteed comfort and privilege on the one hand, and a life of limited access to inferior education, land, housing, and employment on the other. Not surprisingly, the absolutism of these categories left an indelible mark, as racial constructs after independence continued to be shaped by previous constellations of symbol and meaning. Such effects were perpetuated by the continued presence of whites in the country, who often carried on as if very little had changed at independence. From cashier transactions at the supermarket to the lunch crowd in the tearoom at Meikles, Harare’s oldest department store, much of the visible inequality remained unaltered. In this respect, Zimbabwe was by no means exceptional; many postcolonial countries have had to deal with the conundrum of how to deal with non-native settlers after liberation. What did make Zimbabwe unusual, however, was its staggered transition: the initial ten-year period of national reconciliation, offering the protection of white business and property, followed by a gradual intensification of racially charged discourse and policies working against white interests. The terms of reconciliation were dramatically reversed, and white Zimbabweans found themselves scrambling to justify and retain the privileges they once took for granted, even after independence. For whites, the sudden shift of the ground they stood on spelled certain disaster unless they could quickly and persuasively argue their claims to belonging within the country. The particularities of the country’s transition accelerated and deepened transformations in racial experience, making whiteness in Zimbabwe an especially interesting case to explore.
Over the course of the past sixteen years, what began as a crisis for the nation with the farm invasions has settled into an impasse, with no long-term resolution in sight. However, the Global Political Agreement (GPA) of Zimbabwe, which established a power-sharing arrangement between the ZANU-PF ruling party and the MDC in 2008, did succeed in introducing greater plurality in political arenas.6 White politicians now occupy key ministerial positions and parliamentary seats within the government and form part of the top leadership in the opposition party. Many white Zimbabweans have moved away from the label of “white European” in favor of “white African,” a term that they would have rejected outright in the years immediately following independence. The public meaning of whiteness in Zimbabwe has shifted perceptibly: although their presence continues to be an uneasy one at best, whites have won a degree of inclusion in the national imaginary in recent years. Thus, the stigma of whiteness is no longer as categorically negative as it was ten years ago.
Yet the issue of race remains an explosive one, always close to the surface. Black and white, with their contrasting meanings, still remain inseparable from the experience of everyday life in Zimbabwe, and race is a constant raw nerve, exposing the nation’s deepest vulnerabilities. These dynamics have transnational reverberations as well. When Julius Malema, former president of the South African National Congress Youth League, popularized the Zulu struggle song “Dubula Ibhunu” (Shoot the Boer) in 2010, he ignited deep racial tensions, inviting both intense support and critique in South Africa.7 The South African courts subsequently banned the song as a form of hate speech, but Malema was unrepentant and resumed his trademark performance upon his arrival in Zimbabwe on an official visit with Robert Mugabe. This move was meant to signal alliance with a president infamous for mobilizing race as a dividing practice. For Malema, Zimbabwe presented an opportunity in which the state would not only ignore such explicit threats of violence to Afrikaners, but might in fact welcome them. While referencing the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the song registered its intended effect in Zimbabwe. By assigning accountability exclusively to whites, the song obscures the complex dynamics that give rise to the country’s situation today. Race serves as a powerful tool, and understanding whiteness as a site of cultural politics is key to understanding nationhood itself in southern Africa.

NATURE AND WHITENESS

Whiteness in Zimbabwe has many dimensions; this work specifically engages the ways in which whiteness is articulated in relation to nature. Both nature and environment play a prominent role in white Zimbabwean identity more broadly, based on founding mythologies of the pioneers who settled the country as well as long-standing traditions of leisure activity outdoors. For white farmers whose livelihoods and identities are embedded within rurality, this engagement with nature runs especially deep. In this account, I focus on such connections by exploring the uses of nature in a small white farming community in western Zimbabwe. I refer to this community by the pseudonym “Mlilo” throughout my work to help conceal its identity. My informants’ names and some of their biographical details have been changed as well. Nature has particular significance in this setting because farmers’ economic success has always been tied to the environment—whether in battling its forces or aiding in the proliferation of its flora and fauna. For the greater part of the twentieth century, Mlilo was comprised of vast properties of land devoted to cattle ranching. In the late 1970s, however, Mlilo became one of the first sites in the country where farmers pioneered the concept of wildlife “production.” Throughout the 1980s, they experimented and refined its practice, achieving a complete transformation through which wildlife came to eclipse cattle as the central form of property and medium of accumulation. Despite this shift, the one constant for farmers remained the environment around which their livelihoods revolved. Saturating both their physical and ideological worlds, nature became the currency through which farmers established their places in the world. The value of this currency only grew as wildlife tourism became the second highest foreign income–generating industry in the country in the 1990s. By the end of the twentieth century, when the political tide turned against them, nature had become the most expedient and powerful resource they had at their disposal.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mlilo, this book argues that projects of whiteness are aligned with projects of nature. This connection has been highlighted by scholars working in other contexts, including adventure economies that revolve around “encountering nature,” where identities other than whiteness are not sanctioned (Braun 2003); and “nature loving” students in Indonesia, who position themselves as cosmopolitan, westernized subjects by engaging in environmental conservation efforts (Tsing 2005). This alignment replicates older logics such as those embedded within colonial scientific expeditions, where the act of discovering, hunting, identifying, and naming new species extended the work of empire and reinforced imperial authority over the colonies (Haraway 1989). For individuals like Henry Walter Bates of the Amazon, acquiring a reputation as an intrepid explorer, naturalist, and collector of specimens also secured upward social mobility (Raffles 2003).
Articulations of whiteness in Mlilo thus emerged from long and deep histories of engagements with nature. In contemporary contexts, the most successfully commodified forms of identity linked to the environment are those that make simultaneous claims to indigeneity.8 The ties between whiteness and nature, on the other hand, are less legible because of the ontological distinction between indigenous people who live within nature and those who live outside of it.9 In Mlilo, however, nature was a continual presence in everyday life, as well as a perpetual counterpoint in everyday discourse. The daily rhythm of farmwork revolved around tracking wildlife species and numbers, maintaining boreholes and water pans, organizing photographic and hunting safaris for clients, and importing new species of animals. Because of its pervasiveness in the physical landscape, moreover, nature also operated as metaphor—as in the example of the leopard proverb referenced at the beginning of this chapter. At other historical moments, nature was equated with adversarial wilderness, against which stories of heroic achievement unfolded. White farmers in Mlilo thus have routinely called upon the environment to naturalize and legitimize their claims to belonging.
In sum, nature has served as an essential vehicle and medium for constructions of whiteness. This work specifically addresses four key sites of practice where this connection has been consistently forged: the metaphorical uses of nature in discourses concerning racial difference, the transformation from cattle to wildlife ranching and the development of the safari industry, conservation as a depoliticizing tool in refiguring white identity, and the reinforcement of social hierarchies through animal-based practices and meanings. Within nature more broadly, wildlife has carried particular significance in Mlilo due to the emphasis that the Zimbabwean state has historically placed on conservation policies, as well as existing global political economies of wildlife tourism. The aforementioned dynamics are specific to Mlilo, and one might argue that articulations of whiteness in this context are distinctly contingent upon place. At the same time, they reflect much larger valences of meaning that fuse white identity, nature knowledge, and environmental consciousness. These ties are clearly amplified in Mlilo, but they make sense only because they capitalize on ideas that already have long-standing cultural resonance.

ENCOUNTERING MLILO

In July 1997, at the very first Rural District Council meeting that I attended, I spied a single white person sitting in the room, surrounde...

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