"The Material Culture of Respectability in colonial Zimbabwe, 1945 to 1980"
Guy Thompson
Department of History and Classics
University of Alberta

This project focuses on the cultural life and identities of the small black middle class in what was then Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. It highlights how members of this group distinguished themselves from, and drew links with, the black majority and the ruling white minority through religious life, recreation, employment and material culture, exploring how identity and status were expressed and created through household objects, fashions, possessions and daily practices. Africans intensely debated these choices, revealing the shifting understandings of race, gender, class, and generation in the period and in contemporary Zimbabwe.