‘Dairying Is a White Man’s Industry’: The Dairy Produce Act and the Segregation Debate in Colonial Zimbabwe, c.1920–1937

This article explores white-settler notions of hygiene and debates over the subaltern body, by using dairy farming in colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) in the 1920s and 1930s as a lens through which to look into the bio-politics of farming and its effects on the political economy of race and accumulation. Dairy farming is a highly specialised industry: it requires comparatively more capital, organisation and expertise than most agricultural enterprises. Owing to its highly perishable nature, the handling and processing of milk requires specialised care and transport. The system is stacked against new entrants and independent producers. Moreover, in Zimbabwe during the 1920s and 1930s, the 1925 Dairy Produce Act, predicated on the ‘unsuitability’ of Africans for commercial dairy farming and the pathologising of black bodies, was part of a strategy to bar black African producers from the dairy market. Yet, despite the inherent precariousness of the industry and the socio-economic system designed to discriminate against indigenous African agricultural enterprise, black dairying met with surprising success in the early years of the industry. However, for both white and African farmers, there was a terrible cost to the state’s institutionalised racism: crude production methods among white dairy farmers and the efforts to keep African producers out meant that the industry struggled to break into the international market until the late 1930s.