The critical importance of tobacco to the Zimbabwean economy is reflected by the profoundly flattering epithets deployed over the years to describe the crop: ‘leaf of gold’, ‘most promising weed’, ‘crucible’, ‘lifeblood’, ‘golden lining’. Tobacco is situated at the nerve centre of the body politic, central to the country’s political economy. Zimbabwe is the largest producer of tobacco in Africa, and the fifth largest producer of flue-cured tobacco in the world after China, Brazil, India and the United States.Footnote ¹ The crop is the country’s second largest foreign currency earner after gold and contributed 15 per cent to total national export receipts in 2020.Footnote ² During the 2017/2018 season, Zimbabwe produced what was then a record-breaking flue-cured tobacco crop of 252 million kilograms.Footnote ³ This surpassed the previous record crop of 236 million kilograms harvested in 2000 at the height of the occupation of white-owned commercial farms by landless black peasants during the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP).Footnote ⁴ The 2017/2018 tobacco season was celebrated by the government and the tobacco industry in the country as a milestone and epic achievement crowning the success of the Land Reform Programme and black economic empowerment. It created an ephemeral effervesce of euphoria over the prospects of the crop to improve the economy and boost smallholder agriculture within the new agrarian dispensation. However, in the same year, the international humanitarian watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) cast a dark and ominous shadow on this glorious moment by releasing a damning report that chronicled a litany of human rights abuses and infractions within the tobacco farms in Zimbabwe and exposed the sinister side of the tobacco ‘success story’ narrative.Footnote ⁵ These included the prevalence of child labour, the hazardous chemicalised tobacco work environments, nicotine poisoning, exposure of workers to toxic pesticides and abuse of small-scale farmers by tobacco contracting companies.Footnote ⁶ This report was dismissed by the Zimbabwean government as ‘not factual’ and not ‘independently confirmed’.Footnote ⁷ However, labour exploitation in the tobacco farms and the widespread use of child labour is widely documented and confirmed not only in Zimbabwe but in other tobacco producing countries in the world.Footnote ⁸

The negative impact of tobacco farming in Zimbabwe has also been felt outside the social and individual human body – on the natural environment. Tobacco farming has caused significant deforestation, land degradation, and both air and water pollution. The country’s forestry conservation body, the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe (FCZ) estimates that between 1998 and 2013 15 per cent of tree cover was lost to tobacco farming.Footnote ⁹ It further confirmed in 2016 that 50,000 hectares (ha) of forestry cover were being lost annually to tobacco farming and the crop contributed 20 per cent to total national deforestation.Footnote ¹⁰ Tobacco farmers in Zimbabwe rely almost exclusively on indigenous forestry resources to cure flue-cured tobacco and this has affected forests and woodlands in tobacco farming areas further threatening biodiversity, animal habitats and waters supplies. Environmental experts reckon that 5.3 million trees are hewed every year by tobacco farmers.Footnote ¹¹ In 2013, for instance, an estimated 46,000 ha of forest ( 1.38 million cubic metres of wood) were cleared to cure 127 million kilograms of tobacco.Footnote ¹² Consequently, environmental experts project that with the current rate of wood consumption in the tobacco sector the country will experience devastating desertification by 2048.Footnote ¹³ Ultimately, the biggest challenge faced by tobacco farmers in Zimbabwe has been the development of measures and strategies to ‘maximise use of natural resources while minimising the effect of resource degradation’.Footnote ¹⁴

On a global scale, the socio-environmental panorama presented by tobacco production is no less apocalyptic. In 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report that revealed the causal link between tobacco farming and poverty in low-income countries.Footnote ¹⁵ The report noted that, while the profits of the big tobacco companies soar, the burden of tobacco farming on national economies in the form of the cost to public health facilities, the human toll due to pesticide exposure, the circle of debt by farmers owed to tobacco companies and the pernicious effects on the natural environment creates a ‘vicious cycle of poverty’.Footnote ¹⁶ The ‘Bellagio Statement on Tobacco and Sustainable Development’ also concluded that in the developing world, ‘tobacco poses a major challenge not just to health, but environmental sustainability’.Footnote ¹⁷ Approximate data from the mid-1980s confirmed that tobacco farming depletes between 1 million and 2.5 million hectares of woodlands annually .Footnote ¹⁸ An authoritative study by Fraser in the mid-1980s drew similar results on the negative ecological effects of tobacco production.Footnote ¹⁹ Tobacco farming contributes to siltation of rivers, water reservoirs and the extinction of species due to habitat overexploitation.Footnote ²⁰ Relative to other crops, tobacco facilitates accelerated soil erosion and imposes excessive demands on soil nutrients. Tobacco depletes more than ten times as much nitrogen, twenty-four times as much potassium and thirty times as much phosphorous as cassava, for example.Footnote ²¹ Farmers growing tobacco also use a lot of fertilisers, chemicals and insecticides. Run-off from these fertilisers and pesticides usually contaminate water bodies.Footnote ²² Thus, the exceptionality of tobacco farming relative to other crops is that it depletes soils, causes extensive deforestation, requires a lot of (frequently coerced) labour and uses a lot of agrochemicals and pesticides that contaminate both human and natural environments. The consumption of tobacco is also harmful to human health and is responsible for diseases such as lung cancer which has caused millions of deaths.Footnote ²³

In 2005, WHO came up with a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to restrict ‘the globalisation of the tobacco epidemic’ by limiting tobacco demand and supply through multi-lateral cooperation in reducing consumption and counteracting the tobacco industry’s lobbying and advertising activities.Footnote ²⁴ The convention also recommends the development of sustainable models that ameliorate tobacco production’s social and environmental costs.Footnote ²⁵ However, current global tobacco-control intervention regimes have not been very effective.Footnote ²⁶ The Zimbabwean government has been an outspoken and harsh critic of this convention and of several tobacco-control measures. In 2000, during the WHO public hearings on a global tobacco-control regime in Geneva, the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association (ZTA) criticised the work of the FCTC as arrogant and iniquitous, ‘representing an attack on Zimbabwe’s national sovereignty’.Footnote ²⁷ The country also refused to ratify the Tobacco Control Convention when it entered into force in 2005, declaring that the convention would harm its tobacco industry.Footnote ²⁸ Although Zimbabwe eventually ratified the treaty in December 2014, it has remained highly critical of global tobacco-control initiatives and aloof from much of the efforts to reduce tobacco consumption such as curtailing marketing of tobacco products, illicit trade of cigarettes, limiting tobacco production and searching for alternative crops. This policy negligence raises critical questions about the long-term social and environmental sustainability of tobacco farming in Zimbabwe and the economic prospects for smallholder tobacco farmers within the context of changing global and local pressures such as public health advocacy, falling consumption trends, stochastic market dynamics and socio-ecological factors.

The FTLRP changed the tobacco farming landscape in Zimbabwe as the whole infrastructure of white commercial production that had sustained tobacco production since the colonial days collapsed and black smallholder farmers took over.Footnote ²⁹ Smallholder production has grown exponentially over the years with the number of black smallholder flue-cured tobacco farmers rising from 8,537 in 2000 to 140,895 in 2018.Footnote ³⁰ The production dynamics have also radically shifted in terms of net contribution of smallholder farmers to national output as they have outperformed the commercial sector.Footnote ³¹ While production figures have been impressive and show a growth trajectory, accelerated production of tobacco has generated anxieties amongst environmental experts over the long-term sustainability of tobacco farming based on the current common property resource use models in the resettlement farming areas and the limits imposed by the availability of such resources in the future.Footnote ³² Although palliative measures such as afforestation, using fast-growing exotic trees, has been espoused by the tobacco industry as an alternative, implementation of that policy has been weak. A forest control law was introduced through a statutory instrument in 2012.Footnote ³³ Subsequently, an afforestation levy was imposed on tobacco farmers by the state in 2015.Footnote ³⁴ However, these regulations are yet to be institutionalised. In July 2016, tobacco farmers confronted the government over the allocation of the funds generated under the afforestation levy.Footnote ³⁵ The state had collected US$12 million but had not channelled anything towards supporting afforestation in tobacco-growing areas.Footnote ³⁶ During the presentation of the 2019 budget statement the Minister of Finance ordered the fund to be shared between the Forestry Commission and the Tobacco Industries and Marketing Board (TIMB) and to be invested in afforestation within tobacco farming areas.Footnote ³⁷ Also, more worryingly for tobacco farmers, other alternative energy sources for tobacco curing such as coal and fast-growing Eucalyptus trees have also come under new global environmental scrutiny.Footnote ³⁸

Moreover, the social costs of tobacco to the country are ominous. In 2019, the prevalence of tobacco use in Zimbabwe was estimated to be between 19 per cent and 35 per cent of the population.Footnote ³⁹ A study by WHO in 2016 worryingly revealed that 20 per cent of young people between the ages of 13–15 in Zimbabwe were smokers and 12.5 per cent of children started smoking at the early age of seven.Footnote ⁴⁰ There is also laxity in regulations to reduce demand for tobacco products as well as limited central government investment in tobacco-control agencies and public awareness on the dangers of smoking. The global health body pointed out that existing laws designed to curb smoking amongst school children were not being implemented.Footnote ⁴¹ The long-term public health burden that the escalating use of tobacco might impose on the country’s health sector will be substantial. The financial gains from tobacco farming will not be able to cover these social costs. Even more, farm incomes from tobacco have declined year-on-year, to the point that ‘tobacco success story narratives’ have become contested. The country’s economic decline over the past twenty years or so has also affected tobacco farmers whose earning has significantly dwindled with the result that many are not growing the crop profitably.Footnote ⁴² Between 2000 and 2010, the country experienced an unprecedented inflation rate of 231,000,000 per cent and an unemployment rate of over 90 per cent.Footnote ⁴³ Although the economy significantly improved between 2010 and 2020, the country is still burdened by high inflation rate, cash shortages, arbitrage in forex exchange regulations and high cost of goods and services. Despite selling their crops in United States Dollars, tobacco farmers get part of their incomes in local currency at official exchange rates which are usually undervalued. This has snuffed out the prospects for capital investments in afforestation, agricultural innovation and diversification. In the end, tobacco-growing communities have been caught in the vicious cycle of indebtedness to tobacco contracting companies, while failing to sustain themselves.Footnote ⁴⁴

However, despite these apparent negative socio-environmental effects the expansion of the country’s tobacco sector continues to be framed largely in terms of livelihoods and rural incomes for small-scale tobacco producers.Footnote ⁴⁵ These triumphalist discourses permeate much of the discussions on tobacco production in Zimbabwe where tobacco is a political crop inextricably tied to the successes of the political status quo. These dominant and hegemonic narratives gained traction and momentum after the Land Reform Programme when the state conscripted tobacco farming within the script of national survival, black empowerment, and national sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁶ Within this political landscape responsible environmental policy interventions in tobacco farming have been neither effectively nor robustly articulated.

This book integrates the contemporary narratives on tobacco farming in Zimbabwe into socio-environmental history research as a way towards understanding not only how the present crisis is linked to bigger historical patterns in cultures of predatory agricultural production but also to illuminate on the context and potential of tobacco-control policy within the country. A long durée approach to environmental history is important during the age of the Anthropocene, to connect the past, present and future in understanding the outstanding issues that must shape economic choices and policies in agricultural production during a time of volatile climate, ecological and social uncertainty.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is important to write stories that locate environmental change in historical time and show how contemporary environments and environmental systems have been shaped across history and how these have also shaped humans and human culture. Contemporary environmental crises in Africa and the rest of the world are connected to past human activities and policies that continue to shape the present – with future implications.Footnote ⁴⁸ This study connects with contemporary narratives and historicises the environment, society and commercial tobacco farming in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia).Footnote ⁴⁹ It focuses on the interaction between tobacco farmers and the environment from 1893 onwards and how that relationship shaped socio-economic and political landscapes, physical environments, agrarian ecosystems, and even impacted on the human body.

While scientific approaches to the tobacco-control debate concentrate on contemporary practices in tobacco production systems and the tobacco value chain, this book broadens this understanding by critically historicising tobacco culture and the attendant production institutions and regimes. These were forged over a hundred years from the pioneer settler tobacco farms to the contemporary small-scale producer in the resettlement areas. Tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe always defined the political economy and constructed agricultural landscapes and social relations since the early colonial days. But while farmers grew the crop and made decisions on how to grow it that in turn affected the environment, the tobacco crop itself also exerted a significant amount of subtle agency. Richard Foltz argues that crops and nature also carry agency so much that historians who have focused exclusively on humans have missed the complexity that all human actions take place in an ecosystem that involve other non-human agents.Footnote ⁵⁰ Emily Gorman and Andrea Gaynor emphasised the imperative for historians to tell ‘more than human histories’ and embrace other species to give primacy to the dynamic relations of entities, organisms and multiple voices to uncover novel methodological and theoretical approaches.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, while humans developed the social, economic, political and cultural milieu that dictated how the tobacco crop was to be grown, the crop itself has biological features that determined its requirements for growth and lifespan that in turn influence human choices and the concomitant socio-economic institutions for its production. This book also discusses how crops carry hegemonic symbols of power through their cultivation and production, which reified certain racial ideologies, identities and stereotypes within and beyond the colonial state.

This book illuminates not only on the effects of tobacco farming on the environment, but how the tobacco environment affects the human body. This dimension is important because the interaction between humans and nature is not unidirectional, but a dialectical process, a dialogue in which human and natural systems shape and influence each other.Footnote ⁵² In studying environmental change therefore, it is necessary to understand that human activities have environmental consequences, and change in natural ecosystems, whether induced by humans or not, inevitably affects humans, and the human body.Footnote ⁵³ To this end, farming landscapes must not be viewed as ‘just’ physical spaces of production but also as socio-environmental sites of struggle on which humans and nature interact to produce not only new ecosystems and environmental change but also new relations of society. The dialectical nature of human and landscape interaction is central to historical change and natural landscapes are not neutral external backdrops to human activities.Footnote ⁵⁴ Tim Ingold emphasises the temporality of physical landscapes as they are neither ‘built nor unbuilt but are perpetually under construction’.Footnote ⁵⁵

This book explores how tobacco farming systems, shifts in politics and cultural practices by white settler farmers and African farmers changed landscapes, environments and social relations over time in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. The book shows that this process was complex and shaped by factors outside the domain of the environment such as global economic and political conditions like the Great Depression, the two World Wars and the ‘Dust Bowl’ environmental disasters in the USA and accompanying conservation discourses. The book uses the broader historiographical theories on the rise of conservation ideologies within white settler agriculture in southern Africa and global discourses on modern environmentalism to interrogate how tobacco farming practices contributed to environmental degradation, contamination or improvement.

The political ecology of tobacco farming also involved power relations constructed along lines on race. Africans suffered both as labourers in the white settler tobacco farms and then as tobacco farmers themselves. As labourers, Africans were exploited and exposed to dangerous tobacco chemicals, and as farmers they were marginalised and deprived of access to land and natural resources, capital and markets. But indeed, Africans were not just passive victims under the colonial tobacco economy. Between 1900 and the early 1930s they seized the market opportunities offered by the establishment of mining settlements and towns to produce their ‘indigenous’ tobacco and sell it to earn enough money to pay their taxes and buy goods.Footnote ⁵⁶ During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – at the height of state promotion of Turkish and Burley production in African areas – a few African farmers were also able to benefit and invest some of their tobacco capital in soil and water conservation.

Tobacco in Southern Rhodesian Environmental History

In 1935 the Rhodesia Tobacco Association (RTA) sent out circulars to white settler tobacco growers plaintively imploring them to reduce acreages. This appeal ruefully noted that overproduction by itinerant, peripatetic and speculative tobacco farmers was creating desolate and derelict farming landscapes within the Rhodesian countryside:

The 1937 circular reiterated – in apocalyptical imagery – that ‘miserable derelict farms reminiscent of the Sahara desert’ were now a familiar sight within the tobacco belt in Southern Rhodesia.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1939, the Natural Resources Commission of Enquiry that had been set up by the state to investigate the destruction of the resources of the colony attributed a plethora of environmental infractions to the ‘careless and indifferent’ tobacco farmers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Three years later, the Veterinary Branch raised the alarm on the high mortality of livestock and wildlife due to poisoning caused by tobacco fertilisers and field sprays.Footnote ⁶⁰ During the 1960s medical studies in Southern Rhodesia established a causal relationship between Carcinoma of the Bronchus and smoking and showed that 87.5 per cent of African males with lung cancer were cigarette smokers.Footnote ⁶¹ During the 1970s and 1980s, several incidences of mortality amongst African labourers due to chemical poisoning were reported in the tobacco farms.Footnote ⁶² The Natural Resources Board (NRB) also noted a widespread depletion of fauna on most tobacco farms due to chemical sprays.Footnote ⁶³ These incidences extensively documented in Southern Rhodesia’s agricultural archives shine a critical spotlight on a dimension that is not only shockingly unexplored up until now, but rings a familiar and doleful note to contemporary observers of Zimbabwe’s tobacco industry – that is how tobacco farming plunders natural ecosystems, physical landscapes and human bodies for profit.

There are two distinct scholarly traditions within the historiography of the Southern Rhodesian tobacco industry: the first one – ‘the virgin land’ scholarship valorises and glorifies white settler pioneer tobacco farmers for their entrepreneurship and pioneering endeavour in opening vast ‘untamed bushes’ and establishing thriving tobacco settlements that transformed the ‘wilderness’. This brand of scholarship is more accurately represented by Frank Clements and Edward Harben’s (themselves tobacco farmers) pioneering literature sponsored by the RTA in 1962 as an official history of the industry.Footnote ⁶⁴ The second historiographic school belongs to a more critical tradition that looked past the romanticised façade of individual white male settler tobacco growers’ resilience – to interrogating the role of the state in the growth of the industry and the exploitation of African labour. The latter school offered critical insights into the role of the colonial state’s coercive power in the development of the Rhodesian tobacco industry through the creation of an infrastructure that buttressed the interests of white tobacco growers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Victor Machingaidze trail-blazed this critical tradition by showing how the white settler tobacco farmer (far from being an independent entrepreneur) benefited from the racial infrastructure of the colonial state.Footnote ⁶⁶ Steven Rubert joined the critical tradition with a rich social history of colonial labour narratives that weaves the odyssey of the Rhodesian tobacco industry through the lives of Africans whose bodies became raw materials in producing the ‘golden leaf’.Footnote ⁶⁷ His research exposes the grisly world of child labour in dingy tobacco barns, gangs of labourers toiling in the settler tobacco fields and the festering farm compounds. A more recent addition to this school has been Sibangeni Ncube’s works on the politics of colonial tobacco industry from the watershed 1945 tobacco boom, through the stormy years of isolation and the tobacco embargo when Rhodesian tobacco was placed under international sanctions until independence in 1980.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ncube focuses on the nexus between local and international politics in the development of the Rhodesian tobacco industry and closes a hitherto yawning gap in post–World War II Southern Rhodesian tobacco grower-state relations that had only been addressed by David Rowe’s 2001 publication on state-grower relations during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).Footnote ⁶⁹

However, despite their profundity as texts on the political economy of Rhodesian tobacco, this new critical historiography on colonial tobacco history neglects the fundamental dialectical interaction between political economy, materialities, landscapes and human bodies. The silence of existing tobacco literature in Southern Rhodesia on how physical landscapes were shaped and transformed by agrarian encounters and how the transformation of landscapes in turn affected the political economy of production is very conspicuous and deafening. Much so when juxtaposed within a milieu of historical writing that has come to examine how imperial power and capital restructured indigenous landscapes.Footnote ⁷⁰ Streams of historical literature have sprung up and reconstructed landscapes of the past to tell stories of environment and society.Footnote ⁷¹ That said, Ian Phimister perhaps in a sense pioneered an environmental history of tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia over three decades ago in his 1986 article on conservation.Footnote ⁷² He pointed to the deteriorating soil conditions in tobacco farms that were conspicuous during the inter-war years as a result of speculative farming and limited state conservation intervention. He argued that this pattern continued in the post-war boom years as prices improved and tobacco farms took much-needed capital and resources from other crops, resulting in unbalanced agricultural development and a concomitantly delayed impeded pace of conservationism. This book draws on Phimister’s seminal research but nevertheless diverges from it in two key respects. First, the corpus of tobacco environmental history contained in his article is too thin to constitute a comprehensive environmental history of tobacco farming as it covers a short period, 1938 to 1950. Second, even in that narrow coverage of time, his article neglects the fundamental transitions in the tobacco farm environment and landscapes that were generated by the post–World War II tobacco boom and indeed private capital. Thus, an unintentionally uniform reading of environmental change between 1938 and 1950 was constructed, while this book argues that the tobacco farms were not static, but a fluid set of landscapes being structured and restructured by a plethora of factors.

In contributing to the environmental history of Southern Rhodesia, this book integrates the conservation historiography of southern Africa to show how ideas about the environment and conservation ideologies proliferated into Southern Rhodesia and influenced tobacco farmers and state policy from around the late 1920s.Footnote ⁷³ It further draws from American environmental historiography that locates the origins of environmental degradation within wasteful and predatory capitalist agricultural systems. This book critiques romanticised narratives of pioneer colonial agricultural settlements based on the agrarian myth of progressive tobacco farming. American environmental historians such as Donald Worster, Henry Nash Smith, Richard Hofstadter, Leslie Hewes and Douglas Hurt have all pointed out the severe impacts of colonial farming systems on labour exploitation, class conflict and the environment.Footnote ⁷⁴

Much of the pioneering work on soil conservation in the settler agrarian sector in colonial Zimbabwe offers a rich analysis and an entry point into the debates framed around conservationism in the colonial state and the history of soil conservation in the white settler farms. However, their focus is broad and general extending to a myriad of sectors in agriculture presenting white farmers as a homogenous block.Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, Paul Mosley in his study of the Rhodesian and Kenyan settler economies stressed the importance of zooming in on ‘the settler economics of fault lines’ between economic sectors.Footnote ⁷⁶ He emphasised that the category of white capital must not be seen as one sector, but several if policy is to be understood. This book thus extends Mosley’s contention to include not only differences between economic sectors but the fault lines within an economic sector – the intra sectoral dynamics within the agrarian economy. To this end therefore, merely homogenising state policy on settler agriculture without unpacking the internal heterogeneities that differed from one sector to the other, and from one crop to the other, leads to unfortunate historical generalisations about conservation in white farms. Angus Selby criticises such historical constructions that perceive white farmers as a homogenous rural bourgeoisie since it shrouds their differences when viewed through lenses of land and race.Footnote ⁷⁷ White farmers as an interest group and an economic sector were enduringly divided by their backgrounds, geography, land uses and crop types as Selby Angus and Rory Pilossof have shown.Footnote ⁷⁸ Also, the cultural practices and the production systems of tobacco differed very much from other crops, as this book argues. To this end a general conservation history of the white agrarian environment does not suffice to explore the nuanced socio-environmental attributes of tobacco and its production context, which differed markedly from those of maize and other crops.

Besides being general agrarian conservation historical narratives, most pioneering works on agrarian environmental histories of Southern Rhodesia focused on conservation-based discourses that were fashionable before the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1960s. These discourses looked at the environment through the prism of preservation of the wilderness and conservation of resources such as timber and soil enforced through legislations and regulations on the consumption of nature. Frank Uekotter designates this conservation dispensation as having been born in traditions of nature protection, the establishment of national parks and western conservation efforts that became more discernible from 1900.Footnote ⁷⁹ The rationale for these conservation efforts was to protect space, govern access to ownership of natural resources and limit conflict in a way that conferred power and legitimacy to the state. Charles Maier further adds that these ‘space-based’ conservation efforts were a result of the age of ‘territoriality’ when nation states had to enforce rules in peripheral regions.Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus, in this regard conservation regulations in colonial systems can be seen as one of the ways used to control peripheral spaces, an important tool of colonial intervention into control of people and scarce resources.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, as this book argues, conservation laws such as the Land Apportionment Act (1930) and the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951 became subtle strategies used by colonial officials in Southern Rhodesia to control Africans and contain them in geographic spaces amenable for effective coercive administration.

From the end of the Second World War, with the expansion on the use of agrochemicals, the discourse of environmentalism began to change in fundamental ways to become global, and to emphasise more on environmental degradation and its relationship to human health as problems of pollution and industrial waste became endemic. Post-war environmental activism emphasised global ecological interconnectedness and was given great impetus by the publication of Rachel Carson’s epoch-defining book Silent Spring in 1962.Footnote ⁸² The book birthed modern environmentalism and made the environment a subject for government policy and global governance.Footnote ⁸³ This book draws on, but also challenges and extends, the pioneering agrarian environmental histories of Southern Rhodesia in that it goes beyond conservation discourses to engage with these new insights on the environment generated in the 1960s and to show how the global environmental seismic wave generated by Carson on pesticides use played out in Southern Rhodesia. In engaging with Carson, the book uses Rob Nixon’s twin concepts of ‘slow violence’ and ‘the environmentalism of the poor’, which reflect on how disempowered social groups disproportionally suffer the effects of environmental violence, and how this violence happens slowly and invisibly over time.Footnote ⁸⁴ The concept is used to reflect on the impact of tobacco farming on the human body by pointing to the violence tobacco farming wrought on African labour through rigid labour control, mechanisms, exposure to tobacco chemicals and other unsafe working conditions within which they became victims of ‘slow death’.

The International Tobacco Context

This book similarly engages the global history of tobacco to understand the overarching political, economic, social and environmental forces that shaped the production dynamics in the past and continue to determine contemporary production processes. These global narratives are important because they contextualise the study in broader historiographies to show interconnectedness, historical continuities and change and the construction of farming traditions and socio-environmental change on a global scale. During much of the eighteenth century, tobacco cultivation was attached to colonialism and the establishment of European settlements. Its expansion in the twentieth century as a commercial agricultural commodity to most parts of the world including Asia and Africa was principally a result of the association between European settlement and tobacco culture. The crop went through various transitions in production systems from the planter slave economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the globalised cultures of production in the nineteenth century which saw the rise of dependent producers and huge powerful global tobacco co-operations. Therefore, tobacco is best understood in historical terms, as there is a complex process of cultural accretion associated with changes in its cultivation, production and marketing, and only by such a historical understanding can its amelioration – maybe even eradication – as a harmful socio-environmental product be successful.Footnote ⁸⁵

Peter Benson’s anthropological and ethnographic study looks at tobacco farming through the lens of the globalisation of tobacco capitalism and the changing models of production in tobacco farms, the global tobacco economy and the accompanying social changes.Footnote ⁸⁶ His work explores the evolution of labour regimes in production from the jungle tobacco plantation farms in the Americas to modern mechanised tobacco farm systems that still thrive on conditions of structural violence, endemic poverty, racism, stigma and economic exploitation. He delves into the role of big cigarette manufacturers like Philip Morris in obfuscating the debates on public health and smoking as well as the global tobacco-control initiative in the new millennium and the prospects for the future of tobacco-control. Benson makes the poignant observation that although many people feel they have no relationship with tobacco, the crop has shaped society in so many determinate ways that they do have a relationship – just not of their own choosing.Footnote ⁸⁷

The globalisation of the tobacco epidemic is part of the historical structural changes of the tobacco industry from national to multinational and changes in tobacco consumerism to the cigarette whose revolutionary power transformed the political economy of smoking.Footnote ⁸⁸ The cigarette century revealed the drama of historical change: ‘before the cigarette, there was tobacco’, but the rise of the cigarette technology in the twentieth century popularised Virginia tobacco and flue-curing technology.Footnote ⁸⁹ The cigarette also led to changes in the harvesting techniques from those used before the twentieth century that constructed newer labour regimes and made tobacco farming more labour intensive.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sarah Milov identifies the political dynamic to the cigarette and how its history was significantly shaped by political institutions during the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹¹ The history of the cigarette is the history of the government complex machinery and its levers of power through ‘associational state-making’.Footnote ⁹² Thus, the growth of cigarette technology in the twentieth century resulted in a lot of significant changes in tobacco cultivation and culture – that in turn affected social relations, the environment and the human body.

The ‘cigarette century’ made tobacco the single largest cause of preventable death in the world: killing one hundred million people in the twentieth century, and projected to kill one billion in this century.Footnote ⁹³ WHO estimates that the majority of tobacco deaths will occur in the developing world where the tobacco industry has popularised smoking and is subtly recruiting youths through its commercial and public relations machinery.Footnote ⁹⁴ The popularisation of the cigarette has globalised tobacco consumption and production into the developing world and multinational tobacco companies have gained significant foothold and secured political leverage and government support.Footnote ⁹⁵ The globalisation of tobacco poses significant challenges to developing countries which unlike their peers in the western world are less capable of effectively regulating tobacco companies. In the developing world, illicit cigarettes trade, smuggling of tobacco products and tobacco tax evasion has created a criminal underworld involving government officials and state institutions in corrupt scams benefiting tobacco multi-nationals. In 2015, British American Tobacco (BAT) was accused of bribing civil servants in east Africa to undermine anti-smoking measures.Footnote ⁹⁶ Recent studies have revealed how tobacco companies besmirch law enforcement officials in southern Africa leading to the capture of state institutions and the corruption of politicians, businessmen and ordinary citizens.Footnote ⁹⁷ Independent estimates suggest that South Africa alone loses five billion Rand (approximately US$322,272,000) annually to this illicit tobacco trade.Footnote ⁹⁸ Big tobacco companies like BAT have stimulated intensive contract production of flue-cured tobacco in the third world resulting in a breakdown of ecologies and social relations. In Honduras, flue-cured tobacco production at the behest of BAT between 1952 and 1995 reinforced social inequality and environmental degradation such that when the tobacco industry collapsed it left behind ‘a mess of mud, fallen trees and a crisis in the agricultural economy’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In Kenya, tobacco contract farming disrupted the existing pastoral economies and resulted in ecological disruption, deforestation and a disruptive reordering of social relations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The tobacco industry’s responses to its withering criticism on the harmful impact of their product has always been flexible and creative. These range from sponsoring and funding parallel scientific studies to advancing protectionist arguments and whitewashing the industry’s complicity in socio-environmental violence through its public relations machinery.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Furthermore, the tobacco companies have used political donations to lobby favourable legislative and policy decisions from governments to eschew regulative scrutiny.Footnote ¹⁰² The last chapter of the book engages with how the tobacco industry in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe created a mutual relationship with the state bureaucratic institutions to entrench the tobacco export economy and how this defended it from the global public health scrutiny that arose from the 1950s. The power of ‘big tobacco’ is still visible in Zimbabwe as tobacco corporations influence tobacco-control politics through political donations.Footnote ¹⁰³ In September 2021, BAT was implicated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in a huge financial racket that involved funding the controversial election campaign of Zimbabwe’s ruling party ZANU PF to the tune of between US$300,000 and US$500,000 in 2013.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Structure and Layout of the Book

This book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 begins from 1893 (which is roughly the year tobacco production by white settler farmers in Southern Rhodesia began) and ends in 1945. The chapter explores the early history of settler pioneer tobacco settlements and their interaction with land and natural resources in their production systems. The chapter integrates the tobacco cultural practices of the pioneer farmers in Southern Rhodesia within the global historical narratives of pioneer agricultural settlements to give a dense context and broader perspectives on the construction of new landscapes and ecologies. The chapter also examines the impact of global forces such as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl disaster in the USA on farming landscapes in the colonies and the writ of colonial conservation and production intervention. The chapter argues that tobacco opened new farming frontiers in Southern Rhodesia that led to deforestation and the degradation of soils in the sand veld. The chapter further examines the exploitation of African labour and the various systems of labour recruitment, control and discipline that were used by white settler tobacco farmers. The chapter reflects on how the construction of labour regimes in tobacco farming that accentuates social violence and rigidifies racial and class hierarchies are part of the historical heritage of the crop.

Chapter 2 looks at the post-war tobacco boom and the concomitant changes to tobacco farming environments brought by the huge flow of capital as tobacco overtook gold as the colony’s chief export commodity. Simultaneously, the chapter engages the key historiographical debates on the evolution of colonial conservation in southern Africa and the roots of conservation thinking in Southern Rhodesia.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The debates are situated within the chapter as a theoretical fulcrum to trace the genesis and development of colonial environmental policy and the distinctive characteristics of state-led conservation initiatives. The chapter examines how the post-war tobacco boom and flow of capital changed the landscape of tobacco farms in Southern Rhodesia. The chapter concludes that the impact of the tobacco boom to farming landscapes was more nuanced and transcended degradation narratives. The dynamic of tobacco capital and high production costs was changing farming systems and bringing in biological conservation that integrated cropping systems with dairying and beef production.

Chapter 3 offers an insight into the use of pesticides in tobacco production from 1945 when there was a huge global revolution in pest control technology. The chapter traces the evolution of pest and disease control in Southern Rhodesia’s tobacco farms from 1945 and the attendant socio-environmental challenges. This chapter engages with the global debates on environmentalism that emerged in the global north in the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. It critiques the application of these ideas in the global south by reflecting on how the Rhodesian tobacco industry appropriated the banning of certain pesticides and their controlled use. The chapter shows how the use of pesticides in tobacco farming claimed casualties in the human and natural environment.

Chapter 4 discusses African peasant tobacco producers in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. The chapter discusses the various colonial tools that were employed to curtail the rise of independent African tobacco producers until the 1950s when state policy under the new post-war modernisation thrust changed to begin to actively encourage Africans’ cultivation of Turkish and Burley tobacco in the Native Purchase Areas and Tribal Trust Lands. The chapter concludes that the nature of colonial policy on African tobacco producers was premised on the need to limit African participation in the colonial tobacco economy where their role was supposed to be that of labourers and consumers of European produced tobacco.

Chapter 5 engages with the politics of the UDI from 1965 to 1980, the tobacco embargo and international sanctions and its impact on tobacco farming landscapes in Southern Rhodesia. Unlike previous histories that examined the impact of the UDI in strictly political and economic categories, this chapter extends the historical projection to the impact of economic sanctions on conservation farming and agricultural ecologies. It looks at the impact of resultant agricultural diversification into cotton and other crops on tobacco sand veld ecosystems and how financial constraints compelled tobacco farmers to abandon progressive conservation practices such as ‘contour farming’ that led to massive land degradation. The chapter also examines the environmental impact of the War of Liberation (1972–1980) on tobacco farms, as most of them were abandoned during the worst of the civil conflict.

Chapter 6 focuses on the debates on smoking and public health and the evolution of tobacco-control narratives and how these were articulated in Southern Rhodesia and the post-colonial Zimbabwean state from the 1950s to 2000s. It also looks at the changing dynamics of tobacco farming in post-colonial Zimbabwe from 1980 to the present with the increasing participation of black growers and growth of smallholder production. The chapter discusses the nature of the tobacco lobby in Southern Rhodesia and its activities in protecting tobacco vested interests at the height of the non-smokers’ movement during the 1960s and 1970s. It discusses the transition of this lobby into the post-colonial period and the role of the state in obfuscating the social costs of tobacco and the public health implications in contemporary Zimbabwe. The conclusion sums up the central arguments of the book and discusses the implications of tobacco’s socio-environmental historical legacy on contemporary landscapes and the tobacco-control narrative. It engages current conversations on the globalisation of the tobacco epidemic and offers historicised policy recommendations.

Sources for Reconstructing Socio-environmental Change in the Tobacco Farms

While change in physical landscapes, environmental ecosystems and social conditions is discernible qualitatively, evaluating socio-environmental change in quantitative scientific terms can be difficult. The major methodological challenge in the study, however, was in quantifying the impact, and levels of socio-environmental degradation caused by tobacco farming during the colonial period in quantitative environmental science and epidemiological categories. This study acknowledges and confronts the challenges in coming up with objective scientific data to measure the extent over time. The colonial state concealed certain information for the purposes of constructing flattering narratives, as well as because they lacked more technologically sound means during the period of measuring environmental impact assessments. This problem is aptly captured by Kate Showers who, in her study of colonial Lesotho and the problem of soil erosion noted that the colonial state lacked technical expertise in landscape evaluation and surveys: so much that the records on early development of soil erosion and soil conservation is primarily a collection of incomplete anecdotal observations and perceptions by missionaries and colonial administrators who were untrained in landscape evaluations.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To remedy a similar shortfall, this study relied on qualitative testimonies, reports and evaluations on socio-environmental impacts that captures the historical magnitude of the problem. Moreover, statistical figures on land conservation, contour farming and land use patterns in the tobacco farms are provided in the book to demonstrate environmental and landscape change over time.

Most of the sources are primary archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, official documents, correspondences, reports, statistical data, minutes of meetings, newspapers, agricultural magazines, and journals. These were important in understanding the attitudes of all the major players in the tobacco industry towards the environment, the factors that shaped those attitudes and how these changed over time. Also, the archive offered an official vantage point from which to glean the nature of state intervention in tobacco production and how environmental policy and legislation was crafted and enforced upon tobacco farmers.

The Tobacco Research Board (TRB) in Harare also houses collections of tobacco journals such as the Rhodesian Tobacco Journal (which was a publication of the Rhodesian Tobacco Association (RTA) and launched in 1949), Tobacco Today, The Rhodesian Tobacco Grower and Food Producer, The Tobacco Forum of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which later changed its name to The Tobacco Forum of Rhodesia when the Federation ended in 1963. The tobacco journals contain a huge collection of material on the technical issues on tobacco cultural practices from as early as 1903. The journals provide crucial primary material on production changes and policy shifts across time and the impact on the land and environment. The technical articles contained in the journals shed light on how the tobacco farming shaped the environment through tobacco cultural practices such as the control of eel worm in tobacco, rotation practices, tobacco curing systems, the evolution of mechanisation models on tobacco farms, farm planning and chemical control of pests, diseases and weeds.

Although the archive is a useful source of colonial tobacco history, it does not tell a very objective story of about the experiences of African tobacco producers and African tobacco farm workers. The archive constructs the colonial state and the European tobacco farmer as a benevolent patron dispensing a lot of technical and financial assistance towards African tobacco farmers to develop their areas through promoting cash crop production. These sources ignore the challenges African farmers had to face to compete with white farmers who had the benefit of access to the colonial state’s socio-environmental infrastructure conducive for production such as land, water resources, labour and capital. The archive also ignores the plight of farm workers who were exploited and poisoned in the European tobacco farms. To fill in this gap, I have had to complement archival sources with a range of oral interviews with African tobacco farmers and farm workers to understand their experiences and challenges. Indeed, as Brian Williams and Mark Riley argue, oral sources are important for environmental history research to avoid the pitfalls of the top down biases contained in colonial archival sources.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Unfortunately, but understandably, given the huge lapse of time and geographic displacement of people that has happened across the years within these areas, I could only get a limited number of participants (seven), but their oral testimonies were valuable in understanding the plight of African tobacco producers and farm workers and the levels of socio-environmental challenges they faced. I tried to interview white commercial farmers to get their perspectives, but unfortunately the attempt to approach them through the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) was a failure. However, this was not much of a methodological inconvenience as the voices of the white tobacco farmers are contained in the sources at the archives and the various tobacco journals previously mentioned. Interviews were conducted with smallholder farmers in Muzarabani district most of whom are beneficiaries of the FTLRP and their views helped to construct narratives on post-land-reform tobacco farming.

Embedded ethnography and personal experiences were also used to reflect on the socio-environmental experiences of tobacco farming landscapes. I have had personal lived experiences in a tobacco farming area from the late 1980s. I grew up on a commercial white tobacco farm, lived in a black resettlement where my father grew tobacco on a small-scale basis, and I myself have grown tobacco, when I needed to. The image in Figure I.1 is the author during his time as a tobacco farmer. From 2011–2016, I grew 2–3 hectares of flue-cured tobacco each season in Centenary district northern Zimbabwe, Mashonaland central province. The 12-acre farm is part of land the government parcelled out to African peasant farmers at Jutland farm under Land Resettlement Programme during 1990–1991. My family still grow tobacco on this farm, albeit on a smaller scale. These experiences compose a large body of personal knowledge on conditions of tobacco farm labour and labour practices, cultural practices, relations of production, exploitation of natural resources in tobacco farms and general changes in landscapes and farm environments observable across time. These experiences form a latent body of knowledge that also inspired me to write this history and some of them are contained in this book.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Figure I.1 The author standing in his tobacco field during harvesting in 2016