Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe.
West, Michael O.
By Timothy Burke (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. ix plus 298pp.).
Timothy Burke has set himself an ambitious task in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. "Canonical analyses" of the Zimbabwean past, he informs us, have ignored some basic yet crucial historical questions. These include: "How do new needs develop? What makes a luxury into a necessity? What causes 'tastes' to 'transfer'? What changes the relationships between things and people? How do people acquire deeply felt and expressed desires for things they never had or wanted before?" (pp. 2-3). Burke believes that Zimbabwe, with its post-World War II manufacturing boom, including the development of a "commodity culture" complete with slick advertising campaigns, "is a particularly apt setting for an investigation of these issues" (p. 3). Assuming the role of historical detective, and concentrating on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, he focuses on the increasing popularity of bodily commodities: soaps, lotions, skin lighteners, deodorants, cosmetics and the like.
The reader, however, must wade through much puffery before getting to the essence of this meandering saga. Burke himself admits that the book is padded, tactfully noting that it has "what may seem to some readers to be a disjointed structure" (p. 4). The first four chapters, well over half of the text, form the backdrop against which the central drama of commodification is played out in the remaining two chapters, a digression Burke justifies by claiming that "the consumption of toiletries in Zimbabwe - and their relationship to 'modern' African bodies - cannot be understood without establishing the historical weight of these 'prior meanings'" (p. 12, emphasis original).
Burke's is a story of European imaginings of Africans in the context of a virulently racist settler colonialism. The colonial Zimbabwean landscape, as captured by the European gaze, was littered with diseased, dirty and polluted Africans, a portrait that rationalized the apartheid-style cordon sanitaire erected by the white settlers against the alleged social, moral and hygienic threat posed by the colonized Other. Given this state of affairs, the reclamation project that was the Christian missionary enterprise sought, with the uneven support of the colonial state, to cleanse as well as to cure the Africans, spiritually and physically. The rescuers did not labor in vain, for "Western ideals of cleanliness, appearance, and bodily behavior became increasingly powerful within African communities, even among non-elites, during the 1930s" (p. 43). To the extent that it was an integral part of the emerging commodity culture, however, cleanliness, even if next to godliness, did not come cheaply, certainly not during hard times. In this connection, Burke fails to explain why the 1930s - the lean years of the depression - should have been so auspicious to the rise of commodification, a process he argues was mediated by the school, the church and, not least, various African voluntary organizations, especially women's groups.
The prewar dress rehearsals set the stage, no matter how awkwardly, for the formal opening of the postwar commodification drama that featured Burke's "Lifebuoy men and Lux women." Despite their top billing in the title of the book, however, the Lifebuoy men were not the main characters in the play as it was actually performed. Burke is categorical on this point: "marketers believed fervently that women were the key to changing the material composition of the African home, that women controlled most purchases and most tastes" (p. 136). Burke's leading ladies and their male supporting cast were not, furthermore, mere puppets at the end of a string controlled by colonial manufacturers, advertisers and retailers. Even if "driven by the imperatives of capital and the 'civilizing' projects of state and mission," commodification was also "powerfully determined by the African individuals and communities who were imagined as the subjects of the process" (p. 167). But while celebrating it at various points in his narrative, Burke's commitment to the African agency turns out to be somewhat less than fulsome. The intensification of Zimbabwe's war of national liberation in the 1970s, he adds in another passage that seems to privilege the will of the colonizer over that of the colonized, "disrupted advertising campaigns as well as the hegemony of colonial institutions over African bodies and African manners" (p. 213).
All in all, Burke has produced an imaginative, even thought-provoking, work. The documentation, however, is troubling. In particular, the first four background chapters are suspiciously sourced in some places and not at all in others. And while having a firm command of the theoretical and secondary literature, Burke is often on slippery ground when it comes to the primary sources. Especially dubious is the mode by which he gathered some of the oral evidence, randomly seeking interviews by going door to door in various communities in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. Burke also manages to mangle what should be elementary facts. Thus we read that "Industrialists continued having to defend the growing power of their enterprises from the attacks of much of the [white] settler community, which grew increasingly committed to the crude racial capitalism of Ian Smith and to withdrawal from the federation" (p. 116). Leaving aside the questionable notion of a deep rift between state and capital in Smith's Rhodesia, the fact is that the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which included the modern states of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, had been officially dissolved in 1963, the year before Smith became prime minister. Burke, it transpires, knows more about commodification as a generic phenomenon than he does about Zimbabwe.
Though careless and flawed in many respects, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women remains a lively addition to the historical literature on Zimbabwe and southern Africa more generally. It will no doubt be variously acclaimed and assailed, but it is unlikely to be ignored.
Michael O. West
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
