Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging

Victims of political persecution since 2000, Zimbabwe’s whites have never overcome the problem of belonging. In North America and Australia, Europeans became the majority and “normal” partially through the genocide of native peoples. Settlers to Zimbabwe, however, only comprised a tiny minority. They monopolized the territory but struggled to assimilate culturally. Rather than integrating with African societies, many adopted a strategy of social escape. In this arresting and powerful study, David McDermott Hughes shows how they became emotionally and artistically invested in the non-human environment surrounding them. He traces how writers, artists, and farmers crafted a white identity focused on ecological conservation and how, emerging from state terror, some are now groping toward a whiteness of uncommon humanity and humility.

David McDermott Hughes is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His first book, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier, appeared in 2006.