The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

The history of colonial land alienation, the grievances fuelling the liberation war, and post-independence land reforms have all been grist to the mill of recent scholarship on Zimbabwe.

Yet
for all that the country’s white farmers have received considerable
attention from academics and journalists, the fact that they have always
played a dynamic role in cataloguing and representing their own affairs
has gone unremarked.

It is this crucial dimension that Rory Pilossof explores in The Unbearable Whiteness of Being. His examination of farmers’ voices – in The Farmer
magazine, in memoirs, and in recent interviews – reveals continuities
as well as breaks in their relationships with land, belonging and race.

His
focus on the Liberation War, Operation Gukurahundi and the post-2000
land invasions frames a nuanced understanding of how white farmers
engaged with the land and its peoples, and the political changes of the
past 40 years. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being helps to explain why many of the events in the countryside unfolded in the ways they did.