Locusts and Power: Environmental Phenomena, Colonial Injustices and Vernacular Discourse in Early Colonial Zimbabwe, 1895-1935

This talk will think with locusts and droughts about vernacular discourses of power and colonial injustices. Indigenous inhabitants of early colonial Zimbabwe explained the appearance of locust swarms and droughts by reference to the actions of youth, farming men and women, chiefs, spirit mediums, European traders and colonial officials. Finding expression in the statements of religious figures such as spirit mediums and messengers of the Mwari shrine, these discourses produced swift and repressive responses from the colonial state. Vernacular discourse vested power in local behavior, not just in the colonial government. That is, power was understood to derive from cosmology and was often articulated through locally intelligible ideas of social transgression, gender and generation.