Harrison’s self-fashioning narrative erases the coerced black labor his farm depended on
Evidence
The desire to learn compels him to relocate to Angola where he finds work as a tobacco consultant. As he reminisces, working in Angola as a tobacco consultant involved moving from farm to farm, introducing the latest methods of tobacco farming and new seed varieties with the aim of improving Angolan tobacco. He concluded this learning curve by winding up in a model tobacco farm where he conducted field days instead of traveling from farm to farm. By the end of his second year at the model tobacco farm, “Harry was producing great tobacco, much better than they ever thought possible” (Harrison, 2006, p. 51). His performance gave his employers “the necessary injection to realise that he was no longer employable and that he would have to go on his own someday” (Harrison, 2006, p. 51). Soon Harrison found his way back to Rhodesia where he joined Mkwasine Estate and “took up responsibility for a large cotton and wheat project under irrigation while he waited to set his other plans in action” (Harrison, 2006, p. 55). Meanwhile, the subhuman conditions in which Africans lived on all the farms where Harrison cultivated the work ethic that would eventually propel him to ownership of Maioio Estate are not accorded any narrative space in the memoir. Harrison makes reference to taking his meals in the fields and says nothing about the black workers who survived on a dreary diet of beans and dried, heavily salted fish. He writes about having to inspect the tobacco barns at night but has nothing to say about the black workers who were often subjected to brutal treatment when the white commercial farmers “discovered that the tobacco barns’ temperature had fluctuated especially during the night when fatigue caught up with the tobacco barn furnace attendants, thereby compromising the quality of the tobacco” (Masaka, Gwaravanda, & Mukusha, 2012, p. 496). Harrison’s silence on the experiences of black workers who enabled the tobacco farms to thrive is not surprising. Colonial settler colonial values, Rhodesian identities, and Hegelian supremacy emphasized that “the human qua human is the ontological domain of whiteness” (Sithole, 2016, p. 30). This emphasis inspired the colonizers to fail to acknowledge the presence and humanity of the colonized. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists, 51
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: White farmer memoirs undercut their own entitlement claims by clinging to Rhodesian supremacist discourse — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 82; Harrison’s memoir minimizes colonialism’s dependence on coerced black labor — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 54; Reconstruction historiography erased Black agency and labor exploitation (+1 more)
Related
- Harrison’s memoir minimizes colonialism’s dependence on coerced black labor (similarity 0.88)
- Harrison’s memoir frames Rhodesian land acquisition as earned by white work ethic (similarity 0.82)
- White memoirists reduce black identity to colonial caricatures while erasing their own racial privilege (similarity 0.81)
- Settler values made white authors habitually erase black labor and humanity. (similarity 0.80)
- Rhodesian memoirism erases 90 years of black land hunger as legitimate motive (similarity 0.78)