In the introduction to his book, Elijah Doro writes that tobacco farming “depletes soils, causes extensive deforestation, requires a lot of (frequently coerced) labour, and uses a lot of agrochemicals that contaminate both human and natural environments” (5). Yet, tobacco takes on a life of its own in this book. Despite poverty, pests, economic sanctions, poor governance, and war, tobacco farming not only survives, but it also thrives. The main question of the book is why this is so, despite the end of the white-dominated regime that depended on tobacco earnings for its survival. Doro’s answer is, in part, epistemological. He explains that tobacco has an “insidious and ubiquitous grapple hold” on the country and its people because “the tobacco epidemic is a historically constructed leviathan” (264). Building on that insight, Doro seeks to replace the “Golden leaf narratives” that celebrate tobacco with “a very objective and critical history of the Rhodesian and Zimbabwean tobacco industries” that will help undo the grip of tobacco on Zimbabwean lives and livelihoods (265).
Over six core chapters, Doro provides rich empirical evidence and fresh theoretical insights to support his indictment of the tobacco industry and the historical narratives that have supported it. His overview of tobacco farming and its role in Southern Rhodesia’s development (Chapters One and Two), demolishes a central myth about the “golden leaf”: tobacco farming was not self-supporting or uncontroversial among whites; rather, it was heavily subsidized by the state, created social divisions among the settler farming class, and relied on the continuous exploitation of the environment and African laborers. Others have covered this social history previously, but Doro adds devastating details about the deleterious effects of tobacco farming on humans and the environment.
Conceptually and empirically, Chapter Three on pesticides breaks new ground. Doro notes the “strange historical lacuna” (124) around the use of pesticides across the continent. Others have written about the use of pesticides to clear land and control various diseases, but none before Doro has made pesticide use on farms a central concern. Doro charts the “slow violence”—“the ecological violence that unravels itself gradually” (130)—of pesticides in an industry focused on profits, not the welfare of people. While white farmers curtailed the use of DDT because of global market pressures to limit the use of such poisons, there were no such pressures on African farmers in the so-called reserves (157). In plain but graphic language Doro recounts the catastrophic harm of such chemicals on African workers, who bear the brunt of tobacco’s damage (158).
Doro applies John Lonsdale’s idea of “agency in tight corners” to good effect in Chapter Four, which examines the extension of tobacco farming to selected African farmers. Tobacco was a highly racialized crop; it was a symbol of white settlers’ prosperity and belonging in rural central Africa. Until the height of the liberation war, the state kept a tight grip on tobacco production by allowing only a few African farmers to grow the valuable crop. Even then, African farmers only rarely grew Virginia tobacco, the most valuable tobacco in the marketplace. Such small openings did not reflect policies to build an “African bourgeoisie,” but rather the opposite: the structural exclusions created by state policy, not peasant agency, defined who grew tobacco.
Chapter Five traces the changes in the landscape that resulted from three shocks to Rhodesia’s tobacco industry: global health concerns around tobacco use, economic sanctions, and the liberation war. Falling tobacco exports, incomes, and employment led the state to encourage the production of food crops, including cattle raising. In turn, this diversification led to greater use of coal, soil erosion, and the cutting of trees and their replacement by fast-growing Eucalyptus trees. As the war heated up, farmers abandoned their farms and with that, their conservation measures. Doro’s point is that economic and political shocks of sanctions and war had equally dramatic effects on the environment.
Chapter Six turns to the contemporary period. Doro begins the chapter with Robert Mugabe’s full-throttled support for tobacco. A startling 1 in 100 people depended on tobacco production in 1996, while tobacco was the largest employer in the year 2000 (238). Indeed, Doro himself was a tobacco farmer. Under the Fast-Track Resettlement program there are more African tobacco farmers, but they lack title deeds to the land, are capital poor and rely on child labor for the intensive work of tobacco farming. What is more, the main tobacco companies in Zimbabwe have been implicated in notorious smuggling operations in South Africa. Tobacco is as rotten as ever.
Doro’s scholarship is impressive. His sources range widely, from specialized journals and newspaper accounts to niche scholarship on cigarettes, insecticides, and environmental science. He also usefully gestures to the literature on nonhuman actors in history in charting how the tobacco crop and its growth influenced land use and shaped policy decisions. Charts based on government data, photographs, and detailed maps all enhance Doro’s arguments.
Most of Doro’s chapters open with a detailed review of the relevant historiography and its blind spots. Some of the literature Doro reviews, significant for establishing arguments about Zimbabwe’s economic history, has faded in general relevance today (see, for example, pp. 91–92). Nonetheless, this historiography has provided scholars with a just-so story of tobacco that has become as toxic as the plant itself. Each in their own way, the stories of economic triumphalism, the engagement of African farmers in tobacco farming, and the diversification of tobacco farms obscure the economic and social waste of tobacco farming, the constricted agency of African farmers, and long-lasting environmental damage. Doro’s approach is to methodically uproot this historiography and replace it with what he calls his “very objective and critical history” of tobacco farming.
But, even after clearing the way of conceptual debris, the pathway out of tobacco’s grip on Zimbabwe is not clear. In the conclusion, Doro notes new scholarship that is critical of the tobacco story he tells so well in these pages. But that scholarship (which he does not otherwise cite, oddly) “is trapped in short-term apocalyptic paradigms” and so cannot escape the dilemma of tobacco (266). Doro himself slips into confusing and aspirational rhetoric when trying to explain a conceivable way out of this dependence on tobacco (267). That said, Doro’s rigorous and stimulating study has provided a new foundation for those who seek clear-eyed solutions to tobacco’s destructive hold on Zimbabwe.
