The fieldwork situation

Southern Rhodesia in the first half of the 1960s was the scene of many confrontations. African nationalism which had got under way towards the end of the 1950s had been met with a strong white nationalism which swept the polls with the election to power of Mr Smith's Rhodesia Front party. In 1963 the African Nationalist movement split into two bitterly opposed parties, the People's Caretaker Council (PCC) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) who fought with one another for the right to represent the mass of the people. During my fieldwork in Chiota Tribal Trust Land, ZANU and the PCC were banned, Mr Smith declared unilaterial independence from Britain, and the world reacted with economic sanctions against Rhodesia. African leaders were rounded up and put either in detention or in restriction in camps miles out in the bush and the situation returned to an uneasy peace maintained by a constantly renewed State of Emergency under which the minority white government used its extra-ordinary powers to thwart any kind of overt opposition on the part of the Africans.

The task of the fieldworker, which is not easy in any situation, was therefore daunting. Anthropologists fall into none of ‘the known and accepted categories, neither missionary nor preacher, trader nor administrator’ (van Velsen 1964 : xix) and there was plenty of scope for both the people of Chiota and the government to imagine what my purposes could be. To begin work in Chiota required the permission of the District Commissioner in Marandellas and of the African council which met in Mahusekwa, the central township of the area.