Imperial Investments

This book explores the British child migration scheme which shipped and permanently relocated British children to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962, in the name of populating the colony with ‘fresh white stock’. As a project of social engineering, the scheme aspired to rescue children from what were predicted, and constructed, as undesirable futures in Britain and offer them instead a ‘better life’ with prospects of social advancement. The project’s aim, however, was not just the salvaging of individual children. The children were emigrated with the intention that they would also secure the continuity and improvement of the racially segregated colonial order. Removed from their families, the selected children were resettled at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school established in a disused Royal Air force airbase outside the town of Bulawayo, and became wards of the colonial Rhodesian state on arrival. Even though child migration as a form of social policy had lasted from the late-seventeenth century until the 1970s, it has remained largely publicly unrecognized and excluded from the standard narrative of British colonial and post-war history. Katja Uusihakala is a University Researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She is interested in themes related to politics and practices of memory in (post) colonial migrant or displaced communities: in how people imagine, address and attempt to reconcile with pasts, how the past effects and matters in the present, how it is (selectively) memorialized, commemorated and narrated, and how, on the other hand it is also silenced, erased and forcibly forgotten. In her recent projects, she has been interested in the politics and temporalities of reconciliation. She has examined the partial scopes and silences of postcolonial apology, with a specific focus on child migration to late colonial Southern Rhodesia. Her previous research explored colonial and post-colonial white settler communities of mainly British background, analyzing their identity politics and social memory practices in Eastern and Southern Africa.