A Most Promising Weed: A History of Tobacco Farming and Labor in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1945 (review)

In his ground-breaking study, Steven Rubert argues that the lives of tobacco laborers must be understood in the context of the everyday aspects of their work—a context that ranges from the impact of imperial trade policies on tobacco sales to the types of tasks the laborers performed. Rubert elucidates that context by drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including interviews with retired farm workers and owners. A Most Promising Weed blends a rich and innovative variety of evidence into an elegant, beautifully written book.

A Most Promising Weed is aptly titled, because this "weed" has sprung up in a relatively bare spot in the field of southern African labor history. There are many excellent histories of mineworkers' lives, but little historical work has been done on farm workers' struggles and successes. Rubert's work redresses this lacuna and is, therefore, a valuable addition to the historical literature. But A Most Promising Weed is also important because it provides a new perspective on the central role that white settler farmers played in the creation of colonial oppression in southern Africa. Certainly few people suffered more from that oppression than the farm workers themselves. As Rubert notes in the conclusion, it was not by accident that ZANLA guerrilla forces chose to attack white tobacco farms during the Liberation War in the early 1970s; the farms were the embodiment of settler colonial rule. Understanding what life was like on the tobacco farms is an essential component for understanding what colonialism did to African families in southern Africa.

The first two chapters of the book explain how white settlers' heady enthusiasm for tobacco combined with the government's support for the crop to make tobacco a vital element in the colonial economy. In the third chapter, Rubert discusses the challenges that white farm owners faced. Wages were the only expense that farm owners could control, and that made the struggle between farm owners and workers over wages inevitable. The fourth chapter focuses on the knowledge and skills that workers had to have, ranging from tending young seedlings to curing the mature tobacco leaf. No farm could succeed without the workers' best efforts. The fifth chapter considers how farm owners used a variety of threats, violence, and incentives to try to extract the best effort from workers. The sixth chapter looks at the poor physical conditions, strained social relations, and violence that characterized workers' daily life in the farm compounds. The seventh chapter discusses the roles of women and children on the farms. Farm owners often demanded seasonal work from wives and children at little or no pay, claiming that their work was part of their husbands' contracts. In the eighth chapter, Rubert concludes that by 1945 white owners and African workers had established the beginnings of a moral economy—a limited set of obligations and responsibilities recognized by both parties. Rubert closes by observing that conditions of work on tobacco farms have changed little since the end of the Second World War, and that the lives of the largest segment of the Zimbabwean working class are still grounded in the events that created tobacco farms in the early twentieth century.

As with any elegantly written book, A Most Promising Weed left me wanting more, not because the book was lacking, but because it ended before I was ready to stop reading. For instance, I want to know more about the role of violence in life on the farms and in the workers' compounds. Were the compounds more violent than life in the reserves? Did farm owners turn to violence because their moral economy was rudimentary at best, or was it because they resented being dependent on their workers for their survival and success? Did Rhodesian farm owners lag behind in mechanization because, in part, they wanted to preserve...