The history of colonial land alienation, the grievances fuelling the liberation war, and post-independence land reforms have all been grist to the mill of recent scholarship on Zimbabwe. Yet for all the attention the country’s white farmers have received from academics and journalists, the fact that they have always played a dynamic role in cataloguing and representing their own affairs has gone unremarked.

It is this crucial dimension that Rory Pilossof explores in The Unbearable Whiteness of Being. His examination of farmers’ voices – in The Farmer magazine, in memoirs, and in recent interviews – reveals continuities as well as breaks in their relationships with land, belonging and race.

 

His focus on the Liberation War, Operation Gukurahundi and the post-2000 land invasions frames a nuanced understanding of how white farmers engaged with the land and its peoples, and the political changes of the last 40 years. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being helps to explain why many of the events in the countryside unfolded in the ways they did.

List of acronyms
List of tables, map and appendices
A note on currency
Foreword

 

Introduction:  Why the Voices of White Farmers?

Chapter 1:  White Farmers and their Representatives, 1890-2000
Chapter 2: No country for White Men: White Farmers, the Fast-Track Land Reforms and Jambanja, 2000-2004
Chapter 3: Discourses of Apoliticism in The Farmer
Chapter 4: Discursive Thresholds and Episodes of Crisis: The Liberation War, Gukurahundi and the Land Occupations
Chapter 5: The Consolidation of Voice: White Farmers’ Autobiographies and the Narration of Experience after 2000
Chapter 6: ‘Orphans of Empire’: Oral Expressions of Displacement and

Trauma

 

Appendices
Bibliography
Index
Epigraph

Academics and students in African History, African Studies, identity studies, and the interested lay reader.

Rory Pilossof is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests include cultural and social history, colonial/post-colonial transitions, land and current politics in Zimbabwe.

‘With honesty, integrity and, above all, without sentimentality, Rory Pilossof meticulously details how the spectre of war was resurrected by the Zimbabwean government and in the minds of white farmers during the violent farmer occupations after 2000’ – Jan-Bart Gewald, Senior Researcher, African Studies Centre, Leiden

 

‘This absorbing account of white farmers’ voices is one of the very best books on land and identities to have appeared for many years’ – Ian Phimister, Professor of International History, University of Sheffield