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Research ArticleArticle

Gendered Exclusion and Contestation

Malawian Women’s Migration and Work in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930s to 1963

IREEN MUDEKA
African Economic History, January 2016, 44 (1) 18-43; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/aeh.44.1.18
IREEN MUDEKA
Dr. Ireen Mudeka () is currently a lecturer at Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. She earned a BA Honors Degree in Economic History and a Masters Degree in African Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe. After 2000, she obtained a Compton and MacArthur Foundation scholarship to pursue a PhD in African History at the University of Minnesota, where she earned a PhD in 2011 for a thesis on Malawian women’s migration. She has also conducted research into the role of women in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and the failure of Zimbabweans to mentally demobilize after the liberation war.
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Abstract

States, industrialists and African authorities in colonial southern Africa generally perceived migrant work in masculine terms—especially inter-territorial mobility, the complexities of which fueled the assumption that inter-colonial migration was predominantly undertaken by men. The biases of colonial actors, in turn, brought about later scholars’ obliviousness to women’s experiences, leading them to perpetuate representations of migrant work as a male phenomenon. This article challenges this masculinist understanding of migrant work by focusing on Malawian women’s migration and work in colonial Harare between the 1930s and 1963. It particularly highlights the complexities of these migrations, examining women’s encounters with different territorial regimes, gendered legislation, and transnational controls stretching from Malawi to Zimbabwe. It argues that the colonial states of Malawi and Zimbabwe, urban authorities, and Zimbabwean employers all joined together to exclude women from the legal migrant work stream. However, Malawian women defied the conventional notion of women as sedentary dependents of migrant husbands by migrating to Harare. In Harare, they further contested their exclusion by undertaking various forms of work for survival. This article traces these women’s experiences through discourse analysis of colonial records and oral accounts of two generations of Malawian women and men.

  • © 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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African Economic History: 44 (1)
African Economic History
Vol. 44, Issue 1
1 Jan 2016
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Gendered Exclusion and Contestation
IREEN MUDEKA
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 18-43; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.18

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Gendered Exclusion and Contestation
IREEN MUDEKA
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 18-43; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.18
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