Archival Significance Significant well beyond its modest pamphlet format: this 1965 booklet was banned by the Rhodesian government, largely over a section on race relations written by Philip Warhurst that…
Full Commentary Archive
Long-form catalogue entries and archival commentary, listed in publish order. For faceted search across the full catalogue, use the Collection Explorer. For a curated starting point, see Featured Records.
Archival Significance One of a continuing series of scholarly bulletins issued by the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia (predecessor to today’s Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo) from the 1930s…
Archival Significance A self-published 1979 compilation of contemporary and traditional folk songs of Zimbabwe, produced at the close of the liberation war and on the cusp of independence. Grassroots musical…
Archival Significance A landmark 1985 study of the role of religious specialists in Zimbabwe’s liberation war, published five years after independence and widely cited in the subsequent historiography of the…
Archival Significance An early academic study, published in 1970, of African independent churches (the Zionist movement, unrelated to Jewish Zionism) and their healing practices in Rhodesia. Institutional Context Published by…
Archival Significance Part of Barbara Tyrrell’s body of illustrated ethnographic work, produced during a period when illustrated surveys of this kind were a popular but now critically contested genre, documenting…
Archival Significance Written by D. R. Norman during the same years he served as Zimbabwe’s Minister of Agriculture (1980 to 1985), and previously headed the Commercial Farmers’ Union. A rare…
Archival Significance A detailed 1975 study comparing established and newly resettled peasant farming communities in Karangaland, examining agricultural and social organisation under changing colonial land policy. Institutional Context Published by…
Archival Significance A government-commissioned legal report from the final years of the Rhodesian Front administration, produced during a period when Rhodesia’s post-UDI legal status had already created real complications around…
Archival Significance Part of the International African Institute’s Ethnographic Survey of Africa, edited by Daryll Forde, one of the most influential reference projects in twentieth-century African ethnography. Institutional Context Published…