In 1941, Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins of Southern Rhodesia presented a prescription for his colony's survival under white stewardship. ‘It is essential for the preservation of the European civilization,’ he wrote, ‘that the African should be advanced’. A decade later, the variables in this explicitly racial equation had been fleshed out, and black Southern Rhodesians were subjected to a revised and actively interventionist regime of governance – a regime that we would immediately recognize today as one of ‘development’. As such, it had much in common with the forms and strategies through which ‘development’ was pursued elsewhere in the late colonial world: its local theorists sought justification in the sciences of nature and society, while its political apologists claimed to be twinning moral uplift with the material improvement of those ‘natives’ supposedly entrusted to their civilized care.