Colonial boom towns: Migration and insecure urban tenure in industrializing Southern Rhodesia

Abstract

This chapter employs a “systems” approach to trace the development of rural-urban labour migration in British colonial Southern Rhodesia during the mid-twentieth century and uncover why black urban labourers struggled to establish permanent roots in burgeoning industrial cities. The economic and institutional characteristics of the colony influenced the socio-economic opportunities of black Africans in both rural and urban areas. As the colony underwent industrialization from the mid-1940s onward, rural men increasingly migrated to industrial urban centres in search of manufacturing wages that far exceeded the perpetually depressed agricultural wages. However, relatively few were able to establish permanent urban tenure together with a family over the ensuing decades, which resulted in cities with extreme gender imbalances among the black community. This was largely a consequence of the broader institutional makeup of colonial Southern Rhodesia, which primarily served the socio-economic interests of a small white settler community, often at the expense of the colony’s black inhabitants.