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Sub-Saharan Africa BEVERLY CAROLEASE GRIER. Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe. (Social History of Africa Series.) Portsmouth: Heinemann. 2006. Pp. xii, 284. $29.95. Most studies of forced labor in colonial Africa have ignored a crucial group of exploited workers: peasant boys and girls. If children appear in these analyses, they are often portrayed simply as subjects of abuse. While acknowledging such past cruelty, Beverly Carolease Grier presents a more insightful view of the lives of Shona and Ndebele children. They were not passive victims, she argues, but determined actors who resisted oppression, particularly from the 1890s to 1960s, as a white settler state advanced capitalist interests in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). This book is informed by the ideas of anthropologist and political economist Claude Meillassoux, who examined the unbalanced reciprocal obligations that subordinated African youths to their elders. Like Philippe Arie`s’s Centuries of Childhood: A social History of Family Life (1965), Meillassoux’s scholarship offered a paradigm that outlined age transitions within agrarian societies. Grier adopts Meillassoux’s framework to explain how Ndebele patriarchs, for example, maintained homestead subsistence by delegating arduous domestic tasks to dependents, mostly sons and daughters in “junior” ranks whose numbers fluctuated with captured boys and pawned girls. At no point does she romanticize African childhood as an idyllic time before white invasion. On the contrary, Grier carefully reconstructs a portrait of contested family hierarchies in nineteenth-century Zimbabwe. She then pinpoints the customary mechanisms mediating household tensions created by strict “senior” control over restive youths seeking to become married adults. Such aspirant older children could challenge authority by escaping from home, though desertion frequently brought insecurity. Grier identifies a dominant source of parental leverage in the right of polygynous fathers, with the consent of wives, to negotiate the passage of their sons’ bridewealth (cattle) and nubile daughters (brides) between households. Following colonial conquests in the 1890s, white settlers would learn what Shona and Ndebele parents long understood: African children knew how to work, but they were not easily manipulated, and they withstood hardship by choosing flight. Grier uses her “thick” descriptions of precolonial gender and generational dynamics as a basis of comparison to assess the effects of materialist processes in Southern Rhodesia. She considers how settler land appropriations, wage employment, and migrant labor, which increased after the British South Africa Company’s (BSAC) suppression of the Shona and Ndebele Risings (1896–1897), redefined childhood for African boys and girls. In so doing, Grier draws on the ideas of Elizabeth Schmidt, Diana Jeater, and others, who examined how the BSAC manipulated homestead relationships to fulfill colonial aims, re-

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inforcing customs, for instance, that benefited white farmers who, as one stated, ordered the “old chaps . . . of the kraals” to make their young “piccanins available for certain kinds of work” (p. 93). Grier demonstrates that “the accumulation of capital” necessitated safeguarding “patriarchal construction[s] of African childhood” that maneuvered youths into serving the colonizer as though they were “under the direction . . . of senior males” (p. 93). Unlike Schmidt and Jeater, whose research highlights strategies of African women, Grier concentrates on boys (and their peer-based socialization), in part because male workers feature prominently in archival records. This focus on formative masculinity shapes her main chapters, which cover nascent state policies that uprooted entire chiefdoms and shunted them onto barren reserves, where they slid into poverty. With drought and depression exacerbating scarcity and the lures of town beckoning, rural children departed in droves for urban areas and mining camps. There they took menial jobs, behaved in “anti-social” ways, and faced persecution as “vagabonds.” Colonial authority sought to stem youth “vagrancy” by enforcing tighter pass restrictions, involuntary labor contracts, and juvenile apprenticeships, which primed boys for “docile” drudgery—and the boss’s whip. African patriarchs, too, were enlisted to punish wayward sons and daughters. Some missionary reformers condemned these penalties as dressed-up slavery. Taken together, the corrective measures achieved few of the desired goals. Shona and Ndebele boys reacted to crackdowns by deserting work and acting out on the streets. In a fascinating chapter titled “Earn While You Learn,” Grier describes the proliferation of “farm schools,” which the state and employers hoped would impose discipline on unruly children and appeal to “respectable” African parents who wanted better prospects for skilled sons and daughters. Of course pupils abandoned this institution when they saw that education revolved around mandatory work for the settler class. But they also stayed in farm school because it provided a space to organize student opposition to white rule, which fueled the rise of guerillas, known in Shona as the “boys,” or vakomana, who fought for the independence of Zimbabwe. The book concentrates so fully on forms of resistance that other sentiments vital to youth socialization—from attitudes to courting and leisure (i.e. competitive sports) to cultural performance (praise song and street theater)—are sometimes overlooked. In sum, Grier has produced an important investigation of the changing social dimensions of African childhood. By placing children at the center of historical analysis, Grier shows, as do recent monographs of generational struggles in twentieth-century South Africa, that young Africans not only used wage labor and urban pursuits “to challenge patriarchal controls” (p. 92). They also reshaped childhood to overturn colonialism itself. BENEDICT CARTON George Mason University

FEBRUARY 2007