Before Harare replaced Salisbury as Zimbabwes capital city in 1982, the name belonged to the country's first black township, now called Mbare. How and when did the township come into being? In this pioneering study, Tsuneo Yoshikuni offers a fascinating social history of urban development in the early twentieth century. 172pp, ZIMBABWE. WEAVER PRESS

This book shows how mission-educated Africans negotiated new identities for themselves and their communities within the confines of segregation. It examines strikes by students and parents, struggles over curricula, efforts of African teachers to improve their professional status, and conflicts between colonial officials regarding administrative control over schools and development programmes. A challenging portrayal of the possibilities and limits of African agency within the colonial context. Index, bib, notes, map, 5 photos, 212pp, UK. JAMES CURREY PUBLISHERS.

This reference tool examines administrative policy concerning issues such as land conservation, community development, and land apportionment to Africans. BNS, 264pp, USA. PRAEGER, 0275974065

Asks whether there are democratic legacies from pre-colonial polities and what limitations then existed on human rights. It also asks what colonialism contributed to the discourse of human rights and democracy, despite its obvious denial of both to Africans. Notes, bib, index, xlvii, 169pp, ZIMBABWE. UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE PUBLICATIONS.

Essays assessing some of the ambiguities in the relationship between nationalism and democracy, examining the balance between majoritarian democracy and human rights. Index, bib, notes, 196pp, ZIMBABWE. UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE PUBLICATIONS.

Using knowlege meticulously passed down through oral literature and other sources, the author has created a written record of the people of Zimbabwe in which he tells the stories of migration, empire building and trading civilisations which flourished in the region. He then gives his account of the first rebellions against colonial rule and the slow destruction of tribal ways of life. First published in 1972, this is a classic of African history. Foreword by Doris Lessing. xxiv, 254pp, USA

One of the few studies of child labour that represents children as active agents in the construc-tion of their own childhood. Using a wealth of hitherto misread or neglected official documenta-tion, Grier demonstrates that children and adolescents were a major preoccupation of settlers in the mining and agricultural sectors, and in domestic service, as well as of officials whose task it was to provide conditions favourable to the accumulation of capital. She reads against the grain of the documentation to uncover the resistance of the youngest family members, workers, and migrants to attempts to control their mobility and labour. And she shows how young workers and migrants employed passive and active forms of resistance to assert or maintain their autonomy from patriarchy, capital, and the state. Whether they were employed in the wage labour force or lived by their wits in town, boys - and, increasingly, girls - presented a threat to the production of the settler economic, social, and political order. Grier prepares the reader for the subsequent salience of African children as anti-apartheid activists, guerrillas, child soldiers, bandits, and street children. Index, bib, notes, 284pp, USA. HEINEMANN USA.

A detailed study of translation work in Mt Selinda, an evangelical mission; it also examines formal and informal court hearings, to contrast the perceptions and meanings ascribed to cases by white adjudicators and by African participants. This leads into an initial attempt to map out the birth of ethnography in Southern Rhodesia and to contrast it with anthropology in South Africa. By the 1920s, Africans' expertise in their own languages and culture had been usurped by self-referential white linguists and ethnographers. This account suggests that there is a tendency among archive-oriented historians to overestimate how far white missionaries and administrators really understood what Africans said and did. Index, bib, maps, 296pp, USA. HEINEMANN USA.

Wood's third definitive book on the post-Second World War history of Rhodesia chronicles the impasse between Rhodesia's Ian Smith and Britain's Harold Wilson in the years 1965-1969. It examines the dilemmas of both sides. Smith's problem was how to legitimise his rebellion to secure crucial investment capital, markets, trade and more. His antagonist, the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was determined not to transfer sovereignty until Rhodesia accepted African majority rule in common with the rest of Africa. 82-page separate index. B/w photos, 680pp, CANADA. TRAFFORD PUBLISHING.

First history of the only primarily African military unit from Zimbabwe to fight in the First World War. Recruited from the migrant labour network, most African soldiers in the RNR were originally miners or farm workers from what are now Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi. Like others across the world, they joined the army for a variety of reason, chief among them a desire to escape low pay and horrible working conditions. The RNR participated in some of the key engagements of the German East Africa campaign's later phase, subsisting on extremely meagre rations and suffering from tropical diseases and exhaustion. 188pp, CANADA. WILFRED LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS.

A social history of Zimbabwe focused on the origins and identity of the elite African middle class whose unexpected rise during the colonial period built the foundations of a post colonial democratic state. Michael West has written extensively on Zimbabwean and Southern African history. 324pp, USA. INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Examines how modern contraceptive technologies, such as the pill and the Depo Provera injection, were embroiled in gender and generation conflicts, and in the national liberation struggle in Zimbabwe during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on extensive oral and archival research, the book shows the ways in which fertility and control over reproduction within marriage and the family influenced the development of the imagined community of the nascent Zimbabwean nation. Index, bib, tables, 247pp, USA. GREENWOOD PUBLISHING GROUP.

Argues that, given the headlong rush of the Macmillan government in Britain in 1959 to be rid of its colonies, Rhodesia should have been the first African colony in line for independence. Rhodesia was self-governing, and possessed most powers, including the right of self-defence. Being in the condition of New Zealand before the grant of dominion status, it seemed logical that Rhodesia would become a dominion. However, many obstacles hindered this political progression. Chronicles the British attempts to force white-ruled Rhodesia to accept the inevitability of majority rule, and to deny her independence on any other basis. 544pp, SOUTH AFRICA. 30' SOUTH.

Focusing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum (renamed a mental hospital after 1933), situated near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia, explores the social, cultural, and political history of the colony that became Zimbabwe after gaining its independence in 1980. Argues the asylum in Southern Rhodesia played a significant role in maintaining the colonial social order. Demonstrates how patients were diagnosed, detained, and deemed recovered. Draws on psychiatric case files to analyse the changing economic, social, and environmental conditions of the colonized, the varying needs of the white settlers, and the shifting boundaries between these two communities. Index, notes, maps, b/w illus, 230pp, USA. CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Details a democratic tradition developed in the 1940s and 1950s, and a movement that would fall victim to an increasingly elitist and divisive political culture by the 1960s. Providing biographical sketches of key personalities within the genealogy of nationalist politics, Timothy Scarnecchia weaves an intricate narrative that traces the trajectories of earlier democratic traditions in Zimbabwe, including women's political movements, township organizations, and trade unions. This work suggests that intense rivalries for control of the nationalist leadership after 1960, the 'sell-out' politics of that period, and Cold War funding for rival groups contributed to a unique political impasse, ultimately resulting in the largely autocratic and violent political state today. The author further proposes that this recourse to political violence, 'top-down' nationalism, and the abandonment of urban democratic traditions are all hallmarks of a particular type of nationalism equally unsustainable in Zimbabwe then as it is now. Index, bib, notes, 220pp, USA . UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS.

A study of white immigration into southern Rhodesia from 1890 to the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland looking at discrimination against white ethnic groups in favour of British immigrants and other fault lines in the apparently homogenous society of white Rhodesia. Notes, bib, table, xii, 88pp, ZIMBABWE. UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE PUBLICATIONS.

Analyses the wartime mobilisation of settlers, soldiers and labourers in colonial Zimbabwe, and examines the sacrifices demanded of tens of thousands of Africans who were coerced into settler production as their contribution to the war effort. Notes, bib, index, 179pp, ZIMBABWE. UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE PUBLICATIONS.