Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the "Native Mind" in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (review)

Diana Jeater's new book presents an intricate narration of the construction of the relationship between settlers and African people in the first forty years of settler rule in Melsetter/Chimanimani District of the Eastern Highlands of colonial Zimbabwe. One might think that there is little new ground to be surveyed on this topic. But Jeater's work reveals that historians may have relied simply on a set of vague assumptions, if not platitudes, about the early colonial period: "conquest," "defeat," "resistance." This is a closely argued history, not only of what people did, but also of why they behaved as they did. In particular, Jeater is concerned with the ways social understandings and misunderstandings were refracted through the lenses of the many languages swirling around the District. Specifically, how did the settlers develop perceptions of African people's thinking sufficient to declare themselves able to codify conceptualizations of "the native mind"—and then to dub this "science?" To answer this question, she examines interactions in and among African chiefly communities and kingdoms, Christian mission stations, farms and mines, and government bureaucracy and the courts.

To write history that is simultaneously so expansive and finely drawn requires total certainty that court documents and colonial correspondence will allow the historian actually to hear people's thoughts, embalmed for so long in dry feathery piles of archival carbon paper. Jeater does not have new categories of evidence, and her time period is too distant for her to draw on oral history for these topics. But by utilizing a perspective rooted in the dynamics of translation, and a fair amount of grounded imagination, she gives us a rare gift—a new take on the dynamics of the late nineteenth-century African polities of the region and of the early colonial establishment.

The book is divided into three sections: "First Encounters," "Translation," and "Separation." The first is the most methodologically challenging because it gives the foundation of her argument while resting on the most slender evidentiary base of any of the three sections: Jeater's reconstruction of the linguistic, almost psychological, dynamics among African villagers who spoke chiNdau and chiShona, Dutch/Afrikaans-speaking settler farmers, and isiZulu and English-speaking missionaries and proto-officials of the British South Africa Company administration. In hindsight it seems remarkable that these disparate groups managed to communicate with one another at all. Still, of course, they did—which up to now has made Zimbabwean historiography perhaps rather blasé about the precise mechanisms of the communication. This is a question that we all must have wondered about at some point: well, in the beginning, how did they talk to each other?

Jeater's authorial style in the early part of the book is to state her conclusions about the meaning of her material as fact. Thus, for example, in the introduction to part 1 she writes, "people generally expected others to behave in ways that made sense to them" (35). In previous Zimbabwean historiography, "general expectations" were fairly impervious to the probings of historians, since they occurred either fleetingly in people's heads, and/or were expressed in conversations that were aired far from recording devices. Yet if one reads backwards from her evidence, such a statement seems plausible. Reading part 1 thus plunges the reader into ongoing inner debate with the author about how much it is possible, even desirable, to illuminate the unwritten inner lives of her subjects.

The last two sections rely on more conventional historical techniques, yet Jeater continues to make a signal contribution to understanding the dynamics of change in the settler–African relationship. Her exegeses of topics like translations of the Bible, and the differences between settler and African concepts of legality, are marvels of clarity. After reading this book, one sees much more clearly how shifting patterns of contested social...