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Summary

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.

Summary

This chapter revisits the debates of the late 1980s on colonial conservation and development within the settler agrarian environment during the first half of the twentieth century in Southern Africa. It uses the debates on conservation to analyse the post-war tobacco boom in Southern Rhodesia and how it altered farming landscapes and ideologies about conservationism amongst white settler farmers. The chapter discusses how production practices and systems in the tobacco farms evolved during the post-war years and how this evolution transformed the settler agricultural environment between 1947 and 1960.

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Introduction

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2 - The Post-War Tobacco Boom and the Development of Conservationism in Southern Rhodesia, 1947–1960

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2 results

Introduction

Summary

2 - The Post-War Tobacco Boom and the Development of Conservationism in Southern Rhodesia, 1947–1960

Summary