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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Food Production and War Supplies: Rhodesia's Beef Industry during the Second World War, 1939-1945
Author:Samasuwo, NhamoISNI
Year:2003
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:29
Issue:2
Period:June
Pages:487-502
Language:English
Geographic terms:Zimbabwe
Great Britain
Subjects:colonialism
agricultural policy
meat
World War II
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
Development and Technology
Economics and Trade
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3557374
Abstract:Although it has been almost six decades since the end of the Second World War, the debate on its impact on Southern Rhodesia's (now Zimbabwe) economy rages on. Few historians have investigated the impact of the war on civilian industries involved in the production of food and war supplies. Indeed, most of the literature seems to give only peripheral treatment to this aspect of the war, let alone devoting space to the African response to State pressure aimed at squeezing economic resources such as labour and cattle out of the peasant sector. In contrast, this article makes an attempt to clear some of the undergrowth in this neglected terrain. The article hopes to shift debate from assessments of the colony's war effort in terms of the production of arms, training of air personnel and the dispatching of soldiers to the war front, to the effects of the war on Rhodesia's limited economic resources and civilian life on Rhodesia's own 'home front'. It is hoped that the case of the beef industry will clearly show that the experience of civilians in wartime Rhodesia was perhaps only marginally different from that of the civilian population in Britain. More importantly, the article shows how the State sought to make the African population shoulder the beef industry's wartime economic burden by forcibly requisitioning cattle through de-stocking regulations. This strategy, the article suggests, helped to bring African resistance both in urban and rural areas into sharp relief. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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