David Hughes

Lake Kariba might be – and often has been – described as beautiful. Some visitors have even used words like “pristine,” or “natural.” In fact, the lake sits behind the Kariba Hydroelectric Dam, built between 1955 and 1960. The gorge, filled between 1959 and 1963, was once home to thousands of people, their homes, farms, crops and livestock. Their families now live, none too prosperously, in communities around the edge of the lake.

For David Hughes, professor of anthropology and human ecology, their story could be replicated wherever Europeans transplanted themselves between 1500 and the mid-20th century. They formed deep attachments to the landscape, plants and animals of places they colonized, but made “almost a conscious decision not to negotiate identity, sense of self or social position, with native or indigenous people,” Hughes said.

In what Hughes calls “the imaginative project of belonging,” native people were less important than landscape. “People and institutions engaged in that effort represented the landscape, and the white people on it, as having a particular right or responsibility to act as stewards of the land and of the wildlife,” he said.

Hughes worked in Zimbabwe after graduating from Princeton University. The same bug that bit colonizers 100 years ago nipped him. “I fell in love with the place,” he said.

Hughes has returned to Zimbabwe many times since, and his research resulted in From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (University of Washington Press, 2006). Africans, unlike native Americans or Australians, were not overwhelmed by numbers of Europeans. But as in Australia and North America, colonialists attached themselves to the landscape while ignoring the very different attachment of native people to the same landscape. Echoes of this attachment, he said, can be heard in the efforts of environmentalists and developers in Africa. “Eastern and southern Africa are among the few places in the world where the government would value a wild animal over the food security of peasants,” he said.

His next book, scheduled for publication next year, looks at the other side of the ethnographic coin. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Conservation, and the Problem of Belonging examines white farmers in Zimbabwe and their struggles to find a place in a country where they have always constituted a tiny minority of the population.

In 1980, when roughly a decade of war between a white-minority government and black insurgents ended with formal independence, white farmers, including many who were descended from the original, 19th-century colonists, had trouble grasping the new political realities. In the 1990s, the government of President Robert Mugabe began to seize white farms and redistribute them to black peasants. The seizures were sometimes violent, resulting in the deaths of some farmers and their black employees.

Hughes carries no brief for such violence, but holds that the farmers shouldn’t have been surprised. “They had practiced a form of social escape, and continued to do so for quite some time (after 1980),” he said.

Many white farmers, driven off their land or threatened with such a fate, left the country. Hughes visited them in South Africa, where many now live. But some made compromises with the new order of things and stayed in the country. These farmers are hard-headed pragmatists, Hughes said, but not models of tolerance.

“They negotiated more with the blacks, but liked them less,” he said. “They ‘played the game.’ Many are first-generation Zimbabweans, people in their 30s whose parents came to Zimbabwe from the Netherlands or Greece, and they don’t have this sense of entitlement more characteristic of people descended from the first colonizers.”

Lake Kariba, whose dam was constructed in a seismically active zone, sits so heavily in its gorge that seismologists believe it has caused earthquakes since it was built. For Hughes, its weight is social and political. The decision to build the dam – and the consequent decisions to move some people out of the way and move others in – continues to cause shifts and rifts among the people, black and white, who live in the area.