Munya (Bryn) Munochiveyi
University of Minnesota
History / Zimbabwe

My name is Munya Munochiveyi and I am a third year PhD candidate in the African History program at the University of Minnesota. I obtained my BA (Hons) degree in Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe, where I subsequently did my M.Phil in Urban Economic History as well. When I applied for graduate school at the University of Minnesota I intended to continue pursuing urban-based historical studies especially focusing on the colonial history of working class political activism and how that informed post-colonial labor politics. As an active member of the labor-based opposition political party in Zimbabwe, i.e. the Movement for Democratic Change, I was committed to documenting the struggles and experiences of workers in both colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. I was all set to pursue this research project until I became fascinated with other hidden struggles over the environment in the rural space whose histories have often been silenced. Whilst there is a copious collection of urban labor-based histories with strong voices of the workers informing such studies, the historical and everyday experiences of ordinary peasants in the rural space have not adequately found their way in African history studies. I was extremely encouraged by the enthusiasm of my supervisor in peasant studies to the extent that I abandoned urban studies and embraced rural social and environmental history.

As a social environmental historian, I am mainly concerned with how people conceive space, and how these conceptions, constructions and imaginings of space and places affect - and in turn affected by - social, economic and political change. With my main focus being colonial environmental histories, I am interested in the conflicts that were generated through a coterie of colonial environmental interventions, and how local African people's construction of landscapes as ritual, therapeutic, symbolic and aesthetic spaces clashed with outside and colonially imposed environmental ideas. My field-work focuses on the forested region of south-east Zimbabwe and one of my central arguments is that forestry in colonial Zimbabwe was not apolitical and neither was it a value-free conservation project. Because colonial environmentalism was based on a set of exclusionary pieces of legislation and extralegal forms of exclusion, Africans in rural Zimbabwe in general have always struggled with the state over access to environmental resources such as forests. In my case study, these struggles have been carried over to the post-colonial period. Through understanding the historical experiences of peasants wit colonial (and post-colonial) forest/environmental interventions, and how these people coped, struggled, and creatively adapted to these interventions, I intend to contribute to the literature and debates on sustainable livelihoods.