‘FOR FARMERS, BY FARMERS’

Abstract

This paper explores the benefits of using in-house periodicals for writing the history of interest groups and unions in southern Africa. In particular, it focuses on using The Farmer magazine as a source to write more nuanced social and cultural histories of white farmers in Zimbabwe. The importance of The Farmer to the white farming community is laid out and it is argued that long-term and detailed readings of this magazine offer the opportunity to explore the evolutions in discourse within the farming community, the processes of transition and the ambiguities of independence for a group like the white farmers. The uses described are ones that have rarely been put into practice in southern Africa, but are also ones that can be easily transposed to other settings and context.

Keywords:

• Zimbabwe
• The Farmer
• white farmers
• Commercial Farmers' Union
• media history
• Africa

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Commercial Farmers' Union of Zimbabwe for providing me with access to The Farmer magazine. I would also like to thank Adrian Bingham, Ian Phimister, Gary Rivett, Kate Reeler, and the two anonymous reviewers for their assistance and helpful comments.

Notes

1. The coverage The Farmer gave Gukurahundi and the land reforms after 2000 presented in this paper are explored in much greater detail in my book, The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices From Zimbabwe (Harare and Cape Town: Weaver and UCT Press, 2012). Plus, other issues such as land reform, farm profitability, labor management, and farm workers health are also discussed in detail. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book show how the many issues affecting the farming community are presented in The Farmer and how the shifting discourses reveal the anxieties and beliefs of the white farming population in Zimbabwe.

2. For a fuller discussion of reports of farming deaths in The Farmer after 1980 (and a full list of all deaths reported, with dates, victims, and location), and reasons why deaths were not reported in the 1970s, see Chapter 4 in my book, The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.