Economic origins of black townships in Zimbabwe: contradictions of industrial and financial capital in the 1950s and 1960s

The formative years of black townships in colonial Zimbabwe were profoundly influenced by the capital accumulation process. This article contends that, as in the case of advanced capitalist urbanization, the rise of a local financial circuit of capital in the 1950s was instrumental in shifting funds from productive fixed capital investments into the built environment and hence in structuring the urban form of Salisbury, the capital city. This shift had the important difference that it accompanied an emerging overaccumulation crisis in the southern Rhodesian economy, which became severe in the early 1960s. Credit in this context was initially meant to serve both as a spatial and temporal fix to capital overaccumulation and in the process to help cultivate a stable homeowning black working class to assist in a neocolonial political solution. The effort came to naught, under the crisis conditions then prevailing: limited effective demand by black consumers and an increasingly untenable distinction between overvalued financial assets and diminishing underlying production and property values. Uneven urban development was exacerbated in the process, the neocolonial compromise was not achieved, and chronic housing shortages in the black townships were assured. -from Author