Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe Book

In addition to being the first historical treatment of child labor and the construction of childhood in African studies, this book is one of the few studies of child labor that represents children as active agents in the construction of their own childhood. Using a wealth of hitherto misread or neglected official documentation, Grier demonstrates that children and adolescents were a major preoccupation of settlers in the mining and agricultural sectors, and in domestic service, as well as of officials whose task it was to provide conditions favorable to the accumulation of capital. She reads against the grain of the documentation to uncover the resistance of the youngest family members, workers, and migrants to attempts to control their mobility and labor. And she shows how young workers and migrants employed passive and active forms of resistance to assert or maintain their autonomy from patriarchy, capital, and the state.

Grier begins with children and work in the precolonial economy as well as preexisting tensions between generations and genders as the basis for understanding why the young of Zimbabwe fled to urban areas during the early colonial period. The theme of resistance or agency continues as child migrants confront both the financial resources of settlers in mining and agriculture, and the state, whose task it was to establish and maintain conditions for capital accumulation. Whether they were employed in the wage labor force or lived by their wits in town, boys—and, increasingly, girls—presented a threat to the production of the settler economic, social, and political order. Grier prepares the reader for the subsequent salience of African children as anti-apartheid activists, guerrillas, child soldiers, bandits, and street children.