AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Book chapter |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | 'Sunlight soap has changed my life': hygiene, commodification, and the body in colonial Zimbabwe |
| Author: | Burke, Timothy |
| Book title: | Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Pages: | 189-212 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Zimbabwe United Kingdom |
| Subjects: | colonialism hygiene beauty culture industry |
| Abstract: | This chapter analyses 19th and 20th-century commodity exchange in colonial Zimbabwe, tracing the development of ideas about the body, hygiene, and race that structured colonial relations. The author investigates how colonial bureaucrats, missionaries, travellers and mercantilists linked order and rationality with cleanliness, defining African bodies - and African people in the process - as unclean, disorderly, depraved, and polluting. He argues that these conceptions played an important part in the development of colonial policy. Hygiene was taken as a discipline through which the bodies and minds of Africans could be improved. Women's bodies in particular were scrutinized, and women's domestic practice became the subject of bureaucratic and mercantilist concern. However, there was a disjunction between the imagination of needs, the manufacturers' projection of 'official' meanings and uses of goods through advertising, and the heterogeneous practices that have actually made use of toiletries in various Zimbabwean communities over the last five decades. Zimbabwean consumers used and symbolically constructed skin products in their own culturally idiosyncratic ways, which were never fully understood by capitalist producers. The study is based on research carried out in Zimbabwe in 1990-1991. Notes, ref. |
