Browsing by Author "Doro, Elijah"

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    A socio-enviromental history of commercial tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, c.1893-2000s
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Doro, Elijah; Swart, Sandra S.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the relationship between tobacco farmers (both black and white) and the environment in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe and how this relationship shaped physical landscapes, agricultural ecosystems and affected the human body across time. It examines the changing role of the state in regulating tobacco farming and discusses the shifting production dynamics and agronomic practices and how these transitions constructed new environments and social relations. The thesis demonstrates that extraneous global pressures such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl environmental catastrophe in the USA and the two World Wars also exerted a huge influence on tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia. The thesis uses the broader historiographical theories on the rise of conservation ideologies within white settler agriculture in southern Africa and global discourses on modern environmentalism to interrogate how tobacco farming practices contributed to environmental degradation, contamination or improvement. The thesis further engages with colonial policy on African tobacco production and shows that Africans were systematically excluded from competitive commercial production of tobacco and relegated to the position of labourers in white farms and consumers of European tobacco. Finally, it evaluates the changing contemporary socio-environmental dynamics of tobacco production in Zimbabwe beyond 2000 and the prospects of using the lessons from history for curbing the global tobacco epidemic.