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

Invisible Hands is an incisive analysis of how the labor activities of children and youth were central to strategies of capital accumulation in Colonial Zimbabwe. In demonstrating how important children and youth were to settler capitalists, to the state, and to the transformation of the economy in Colonial Zimbabwe, Grier is claiming that by making children visible in the history of Africa we gain not only a history of childhood but a new perspective on how colonial rule was established.

Children were key to the success of white strategies of capital accumulation because children’s labor was cheap and, relative to adult labor, much easier to access. She claims that, to white settlers, “African children were a ready made source of cheap labor that could be harnessed to the capitalist transformation of the new colony” (34). Children’s labor was the “backbone” of the workforce in pre-colonial Zimbabwe, and yet it is far from obvious that this same labor would be easily made available to white settlers. Grier advances several arguments to resolve this apparent contradiction. Firstly, she contends that since children were accustomed to agricultural work, white farmers could buy children’s labor from their fathers. Secondly, older children took migrant labor as an opportunity to leave rural homesteads where seniors had rights over their work. Thirdly, she suggests that when African farmers lost boys to colonial capitalists, girls’ participation in labor-related activities increased.

It is against this background of a “pre-colonial economy that placed a premium on the acquisition and control of unfree child labor” (62) that Grier argues the struggles over childhood and children’s labor in the colonial period can best be understood. At the start of colonial rule, the wage labor of young Africans in the settler economy was perceived by African seniors as potential source of accumulation. For African youth, Grier claims, wage labor became an opportunity to gain some independence from patriarchal control. She also speculates that the introduction of a Head Tax payable by every African man over eighteen-years-old was received by African youth as an alternative route to senior status, and more generally that children “used the towns, mines, and even mission schools as avenues through which to work out alternative constructions of African childhood” (101).

Despite the apparent willingness of young Africans to work in the wage economy, white settlers wanted to force more Africans into wage labor. They did so by using the state to close down peasant production, and by forcing Africans off of the land and levying Head taxes. In 1926, the government passed the National Juveniles Employment Act to force young Africans to stay with their employers. Debating the bill, the Attorney General commented that “whipping might appear to be a drastic method of treating a juvenile who is merely guilty of a breach of contract; but I think it is justifiable. After all . . . one of the objects of this Bill is to inculcate in them the observance of their word” (132). At the same time that African boys and youth were being encouraged and coerced into work, the children of settlers were being removed from the labor force, from the streets, and from work on family-owned farms. Grier’s point here is that the construction of childhood was racialized and that this racialization was persistently contested by African adults and children.

One of the sites for this contestation was school education. Elementary education was made compulsory for white children in 1929 and this was extended to secondary school in 1935. In contrast, African childhood was a “time for inurement to the habits of labor” (164). Africans “sought to expand their access to more and better quality schooling in the hope that education would help lead them . . . ultimately, [to] the elimination of segregation and white domination” (162). In response to this demand, white settlers, competing for African labor established schools on farms and tea estates.

Grier’s study is based...