Bulawayo Breaks Ranks: Bureaucratic Battles over African Housing and Urban Citizenship in Late Colonial Zimbabwe, 1949–1977

By the end of the Second World War, housing for ‘African’ workers in the major urban areas of Southern Rhodesia had become critically congested and inadequate, and ‘European’ settlers’ long-standing primordialist assertion that these ‘tribespeople’ did not really ‘belong’ in urban space had become untenable. Government passed new laws obliging municipalities to increase construction of housing and amenities conducive to long-term African urban settlement and productivity. But when the Rhodesian Front came to power in 1962, it revived the earlier conception of urban areas as essentially ‘white spaces’ and sought to curtail African housing and tenure rights. Social historians have documented how these shifting approaches to post-war housing and urban citizenship were contested by African townspeople ‘from below’, in organised and everyday ways. This article shows how they were also subject to considerable ideological contestation between actors at different levels of the colonial state. It does this by analysing the contested post-war housing programme of the second largest city, Bulawayo, until the dismantling of de jure segregation in 1977. This programme was directed by Dr Hugh Ashton, an anthropologically trained municipal administrator on a paternalistic mission of helping African migrant workers to ‘detribalise’ and become ‘responsible’, propertied citizens within the segregated townships of Bulawayo. Ashton’s modernist vision, backed by councillors and implemented by a cadre of zealous administrative staff, increasingly diverged from that of the central government, whose authority Ashton began to challenge. Tensions heightened when the Rhodesian Front came to power, advancing what Ashton perceived as a thinly veiled form of apartheid. In the ensuing policy battles, universalist ideas of social change confronted racial essentialism. Bulawayo’s development vision also diverged from the more segregationist vision of the capital, with which some comparisons are made. Finally, the article points out how many of the African officers in Bulawayo’s subtly insubordinate township administration went on to run the city council after independence, which speaks to wider debates about the varied, complex legacies of late colonial urbanism.