Without sanitizing colonialism and settler colonialism, how can Africans (re)think and (re)write critical social and cultural histories about white societies and settler communities? And how can we do so using the colonial archive largely produced by the colonists who controlled the state apparatus? Colonists wielded the scepter of producing knowledge on and about Africans. In the course of their administration, white colonial bureaucrats, politicians, clergymen and their metropolitan counterparts all produced records, archives, manuscripts and state-sanctioned publications. With these power relations evident in the colonial archive, can we write different histories about settler societies—especially as Africans or Africanist scholars based in Africa or in the diaspora? Indeed, can we invert the gaze and use the colonial archive to tell us about the nature of settler societies?

My chapter “Immigration and settlement of ‘undesirable’ whites in Southern Rhodesia,” in the book Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s–1990s, edited by Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, speaks to these very issues. It contributes to new social and cultural histories of Rhodesian white society by showing that, while the colonial state was obsessed with producing knowledge on and about Africans, classifying them into different “tribes,” ethnic groups and so forth, it in fact did the same to some whites. It subjected the lives of those whites, whose behavior was deemed “deviant” from the (shifting) norms of white society, to exceptional levels of state surveillance, attempting to understand why they behaved in the manner they did and to discipline them into social conformity.