Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (review)

Beverly Grier's study is a welcome addition to the historical literature on precolonial society and the settler colonial state of Southern Rhodesia. Covering the period from the colonial rule of the 1890s to the 1950s, her book is also a welcome contribution to the Heinemann Social History of Africa series. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving social and cultural threads within a history of the development of the colonial settler state and the postdepression and post–world war capitalist economic transformation. The book is stimulating, provocative, and careful in its use of primary and secondary sources. Grier points out where the threads of her analysis intersect, where the snags are, and what further stitching is needed to complete the whole cloth. A broader significance of her work is that the themes and research questions that she raises in the context of African colonial history have been replicated by more recent efforts to bring the rights of women and children within the body of international law. Grier's work also points to a longer history than the one generally considered in the study of the phenomenon of "street children" in Africa and elsewhere.

Grier's history of colonial recruitment and control of child labor for state use, which extended beyond Zimbabwe, increases our understanding of the relationships between the development of private and government capital and production, as does her careful explanation of the contradictions that existed between societal and state definitions of "children" and "childhood." While she raises questions regarding a historical methodology (such as her own) that relies solely on the written word and documentation, her mode of inquiry, in summarizing and criticizing the work of other researchers, and her constant raising of questions in regard to historical research, are both informative and directive. The same is true of her references to work documenting the ways in which the reality of the colonial agricultural economy differed from formal and ideal conceptions.

Her attention to detail in discussing differences between Shona and Ndebele social organization, "free" and "bonded" status, control over rights to children, or the pledging of children for debt or gain helps us relate these issues to the persistent use of child labor today in the economies of states repositioning themselves in the global market. And, as in the nineteenth century, such transformation, as she shows, forces the reconstruction of cultural patriarchy in relation to changes in the economy. Equally interesting, the changes she discusses raise similar questions concerning the recruitment and exploitation of the most vulnerable labor pools in today's global labor market. For example, she examines labor reproduction and expansion in the use of commercial sex workers. Similarly, current labor policy issues are reflected in her discussion of state control of the labor migration of preadolescent and adolescent boys. As the boys created a more favorable social status and identity for themselves through their own labor, the state and, in this case, the settler community, struggled to control the "dangerous classes" and to regulate gender and class relationships in the interests of the colonial economy. Grier's comments on the fears of settlers evoke today's concerns over mobile labor forces.

In arguing for her own space in interpreting the history of childhood and child labor in Zimbabwe, Grier may stretch her argument beyond what is necessary in her analysis of "resisters" and "rebels." In her review of the extent and nature of crime, mostly property theft and what was labeled "vagrancy," she makes an argument for linking these two behavioral labels not only to resistance to authority but also to conscious class conflict. This analysis seems less persuasive than the concept of juveniles as employed wage laborers taking measures to confront and manipulate the system in their own interest. Perhaps some further distinction could have been made between resistant behavior during the earlier rural-to-town transformation and the rebel behavior of the later Chimurenga...