Dr.  Guy Thompson

(Associate Professor)

Ph.D., University of Minnesota (2000)  
M.A., McGill University (1992)
B.A., McGill University (1987) 

2-12 Tory Building
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB T6G 2H4
Tel. (780) 492-2563

 guy.thompson@ualberta.ca

My teaching focuses on Africa and the Atlantic World. At the lower levels, I teach a survey of precolonial African history, emphasizing the complexity of African social, political and knowledge systems. I also teach a course on the emergence of the Atlantic world, exploring the cultural, human, ideological and economic links and exchanges that emerged around the Atlantic basin primarily during the period of the transatlantic slave trade, while tracing their legacies into the present. At the upper levels, my courses focus on modern southern Africa, illuminating the complex cultural and social dynamics that have reshaped socieites in the region over the last two centuries.

My research focuses on the colonial era in Zimbabwe; I situate my work within the broader fields of African social, cultural, and environmental history. I am particularly interested in how people in southern Africa have understood themsleves in terms of race, gender, and culture, and how those understandings and practices evolved over the twentieth century.

My older research focused on how residents of Madziwa, Zimbabwe reshaped their lives during the twentieth century, mainly in response to the pressures of commodification and the growing power of the colonial state. There are a number of important threads running through this work. One key element is how Madziwans talked about the past, drawing on language sanctioned by the ruling party to construct images of the distant past, more recent events, and the post independence era to assert the dignity and value of indigenous practices while simultaneously highlighting the failures of the Mugabe regime. Another important thread is the value and complexity of indigenous knowledge systems, which colonial authorities disdained as they promoted purpotedly modern and scientifc practices. I also trace how people renegotiated gender roles, generational dynamics, household responsiblities and obligations within the community in the face of growing market opportunities, the lure of commercial goods, and state efforts to redirect productive and social practices. A final major element is looking at how peasants resisted state efforts to intervene in their productive and social lives, through individual acts, collective action, and discourse.

My newer work grows out of the frameworks for understanding the past that the residents of Madziwa introduced me to. Initially I wanted to explore the origins and development of ideas about indigeneity and practices that Zimbabweans adopted from Europeans, but this has grown into a rather different project, in part because of the material that I came across, and in part because of the challenges of doing research in Zimbabwe. I stumbled across an incredibly rich source concerning debates about cultural and social change during the colonial period, which are letters to the editor in the African press. There is a significant subset of the letters that address apparently mundane questions of daily practice and material culture, wherein people debate appropriate manners, clothing, household organization, music, religious observances, leisure activitles and a variety of other elements of life. However, a core element that runs through these letters are questions of indigeneity and the appropriateness of borrowing European ways, so that these letters provide incredible insight into how Zimbabweans in the colonial period understood and debated race, gender, and the implications of daily practice for their social and cultural identities. Moreover, while many of the letters from the 1930s lament the decline of indigenous ways, from the late 1950s onwards, there are frequent assertions not only of the value of African practices, but of the necessity of retaining and defending them.

""Pumpkins just got in there': Gender and Generational Conflict and 'Improved' Agriculture in colonial Zimbabwe", International Review of Social History, 55 (2010 - Supplement), pp, 175 - 201. (Special issue on the intersection of globalization, social and environmental history).

"'Is it lawful for people to have their things taken away by force?' High Modernism and Ungovernability in colonial Zimbabwe." African Studies, 66 (2007), pp. 39 - 79. (Special issue on high modernist development schemes in Africa).

“‘Aiee, our fields will be destroyed.’ Dubious Science and Peasant Environmental Practices in Madziwa, Zimbabwe.” Heather Goodall, Paul Rosier, and Sylvia Washington (eds), Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice (Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2005) pp. 355 - 370.

“Cultivating Conflict: Agricultural ‘Betterment’, the NLHA and Ungovernability in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1951 – 1962” Africa Development, 29 (2004), pp. 1 - 39.

“Complicating the Past: Oral History and Agrarian Change in Colonial Zimbabwe”, Zambezia, 34 (Summer 2003).

“Peasants, Production and the NLHA, 1945 - 1965” in Alois Mlambo and Evelyn Pangetti (eds), The Zimbabwe Economy, 1945 – 1990 (University of Zimbabwe Press, 2001).