The emotions of smell

Smells excite particular emotions. The smell of African places – the rains, wood smoke – could render longing, while the smell of African people could render disgust; disgust because the smell of African people reminded whites that the place is not ‘theirs’, hence their longing for it, the mythical place in which Africans could be absented.¹² Smell is central to intimate knowledge and ideas of proximity and distance. Power was at the heart of the colonial discourse of smell; it was used to foster both physical and psychological distance between whites and Africans. The paradox herein is the proximate nature of smell: it required an intimate familiarity with those marked as ‘other’, even as such stereotypes worked to erase this knowledge, relying on assumptions about social gulfs.¹³ The tension is not only between the necessary proximity to be able to smell and the fact that it is on the basis of smell that otherness is described, but also the fact that the smell of difference gave rise to a particular emotional response – that of disgust. While proximity was central to the ability to be able to ‘know’ a smell, the supposed visceral white reaction of disgust to the ‘smell’ of Africans strikes a note of interest: if that particular smell was always noticeable, it has not been entirely normalized; it evidently retains a sense of novelty despite everyday contact between black Africans and whites. Displaying an act of memory work outside everyday experience, whites re-remembered the associations of blackness with distinct smells, having to provoke an emotional response to what was a routine occurrence.

The smell of Africa is sweat, body odour and smoke.¹⁴

June Rasch, an elderly white Zambian living outside Lusaka, made this comment in late 2016, demonstrating how the colonial discourse which linked race and smell has had striking resilience beyond independence. It also indicates the homogenization of smell that whites have associated with Africa.¹⁵ The notion that Africa has a smell is, in reality, absurd. A continent of over 1.2 billion people and 30.37 million km² cannot be distilled into a series of aromas. However, this false homogenization is instructive nonetheless. The homogenization of Africa into a small group of aromas by whites speaks more to a lingering settler understanding of the supposed ‘simplicity’ of the continent and their knowledge of it than the continent or its indigenous inhabitants. The small number of aromas which are used to invoke this are part of a shared ‘smellscape’ which helped provide an emotionally reassuring sense of shared white experience and homogeneity in the face of the reality of disparate knowledge and identities.¹⁶

The colonial racialization of smell

During the colonial period, smell began to be used within a wider discourse of racial difference in European colonies as visceral ‘evidence’ of the difference between the clean and the unclean; the civilized and the uncivilized. In early twentieth-century colonial Dutch Java, Javanese servants were told to hold their European wards away from their bodies so that they ‘wouldn’t smell of their sweat’.¹⁷ In settler colonial Africa, ‘body racism’, as Timothy Burke termed it, and the politics of smell were further amplified, with the black African body becoming the site of a disciplinary hygiene discourse, in which cleanliness became synonymous with whiteness and dirtiness with blackness.¹⁸ Closely tied to the discourse of hygiene and race was the importance of smell. The supposed ability of Africans to ‘pick up dirt by instinct’ led to complaints about ‘the omnipresent odour which streams from these people’.¹⁹ At the heart of these concerns was a settler fixation upon African sweat.²⁰ In this case, sweat, and connectedly alleged body odour, became both racialized and classed to depict the black worker.²¹

The apparent innateness of different races’ aromas, and the supposed links between diseases, race and smell, became part of a rationale of difference and separation between races.²² In the settler territories of Africa, as in the south of the United States, olfactory-based assumptions of racial difference were used to build and legitimize systems of segregation which policed the arrangement of such ‘different’ bodies in public spaces.²³ Peter Barak, a white anti-colonial activist in his nineties, remembered Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s: ‘Body odour [BO] was a big issue and that applied socially. You couldn’t work in an office with an African next to you. It [BO] became symbolic, a rationale for non-social contact (between races).’²⁴

The notion of Africans smelling different to Europeans became pointedly politicized during the heated atmosphere of the early 1960s with the desegregation of hotels, bars and restaurants. Europeans opposed to desegregation used the apparent ‘smell’ of Africans as a point of justification in keeping the races separated.²⁵ Mr Veliades, the owner of the Rhodes Café in Kitwe who had been accused of racial discrimination in 1962, defended his right to refuse Africans entry to his premises unless they were ‘reasonably dressed’ and this meant ‘clean, tidy and not smelly’.²⁶

The long history of blackness, dirt and sweat being both commodified and naturalized became part of post-colonial whites’ sensory knowledge. It was normalized that black Africans ‘smell’, a fact reinforced by the divergent material conditions of whites in Africa and the domestic staff and agricultural employees whom they most frequently interacted with. Thus, the idea of an innate African aroma has lingered into the post-colonial white imagination but has become more intimately linked to discomfort with the idea of sexual and emotional integration through mixed marriages. The ‘voluntary segregation’ myth of the colonial period morphed into post-colonial thought through the discourse of smell.²⁷ The supposed difference in smell between the races is no longer used to segregate shopping, toilets or swimming pools but instead has been reformulated as a physical manifestation of the unnaturalness of mixed marriages.

Decolonization and fear of African sexuality

While the colonial discourse of unclean African bodies and body odour has remained resilient amongst whites since independence, there has been a growing African middle class conforming to ‘white standards’ of middle-class bourgeois norms, and challenging the older colonial notion of ‘unclean, primitive Africans’.²⁸ Mel Teevan, an Anglo-Irish Zambian resident in her eighties, encapsulated this distinction when asked what the biggest change since independence was: she promptly replied that ‘African women certainly don’t smell in church anymore’.²⁹ The social challenge decolonization posed to whites’ supposed ‘knowledge’ of African smells required the re-entrenchment of such claims but they became even more pointedly gendered, as the real possibility of formal interracial sexual relationships arose through the closer proximities between white and black material existence.

‘Innate’ African smell was supposedly a marker of biological difference and therefore a preclusion to emotional and intimate engagement with Africans. However, for white men, the discourse of disgust evidently did not always prevent sexual interaction, behaviours which undermined any essentialized ‘truth’ in these patterns of emotional regulation. Instead, attempts were made to limit formal romantic arrangements through the structure of marriage. While sexual relationships with Africans had been taking place since the first colonial encounter, they were always at the edge of white society – an inadmissible fact which few wanted to openly broach.³⁰ Fear of relationships developing ‘beyond the physical’ and fostering genuine emotional attachment brought the greatest risks to the European male partner in the colonial period, as romantic affection would blur the supposed boundaries of whiteness.³¹ This reflects Dane Kennedy’s assertion that the function of fears of interracial intimacy, whether legitimate or not, was to enforce racial unity, ‘of compelling white settlers to delineate material and symbolic boundaries between themselves and those people upon whom their livelihoods so heavily depended’.³²

In settler society it was the prospect of white women having any romantic or sexual contact with African men which was the source of greatest white fear, reflecting dominant scholarly reflections upon social reproduction and the role of the white woman as the future of the settler project. The latent threat posed by white women’s intimacy – sexually or otherwise – with African men is of a future of white demographic obliteration. Historically this was articulated through the phenomenon of black peril – white, notably male, fear of black male sexuality. The prospect of physical and sexual contact between white women and black men had long been held up as the harbinger of the end of white rule, and was the reason for the vociferous policing of ‘black peril’ through punitive miscegenation and interracial rape legislation.³³ It was the failure to secure white hegemony in Kenya and Northern Rhodesia which fixed ‘Africa’ as unconquerable, dangerous and untamed; it remained a black space despite settler attempts to make it white, a fact only further reinforced by independence in the early 1960s. Following the desegregation of schools in both territories in the years before independence, white fears developed over the ‘physically developed and sexually more sophisticated’ African students mixing with European girls ‘at tender ages’.³⁴ Similarly, Charles Braithwaite, an elderly rancher in Laikipia, recalled of independence that ‘people [white settlers] with young daughters had nightmares about their daughters being a tiny minority in a black community. It was slightly different for sons’.³⁵ The fear of black male sexuality was evident in his comment, as was the gendered difference in the potential of sexual partners. Charles’s statement that ‘it was slightly different for sons’ indicated that, unlike their female counterparts, who required protection through close regulation of the boundaries of intimacy, men need not fear the sexual advances of African women.³⁶ The lingering British tropes of white women’s sexuality and desire being shaped by love and reproduction, as opposed to male innate sexual ‘needs’, were made sharper and more pointedly racialized in these emotional communities by the widespread preconception, both real and imagined, of the sexual availability of black women for white men.³⁷ This availability was most commonly presumed to occur either through formal sex work, or informal sexual patronage/transactional sex in the racialized socio-economic power dynamics of both countries.³⁸ Contrastingly, the prospect of a liberated black African male sexuality raised specific fears of annihilation in the white male imagination. It was the emotive and sensory strategies of separation, created in the colonial period, which would be reinvigorated in the post-colony as a means of securing the racial and sexual boundaries of white emotional communities and therefore protect some form of a white future in Africa.

‘What a waste of a white skin’: marriage, reproduction and the white family unit

The fear of social censure and ostracization of interracial relationships has remained remarkably strong since independence. In 142 interviews with white Kenyans and Zambians, only two were in open mixed marriages or relationships. Deidre Walton, an elderly female settler in Nanyuki, typified the response to such issues:

My grandson is married now and lives in Dubai [Is he married to an African lady?] Oh no no! [laughs] I say it like that but he’s not, it sounds awful doesn’t it? I don’t think I’d like that. I’ve always thought birds of a feather, frankly … I can’t really think of any [whites] that are [in mixed marriages].³⁹

There was remarkable consensus amongst almost all participants that mixed marriages were a bad idea for both the couple and any children born of the relationship. Charles Braithwaite described his discomfort with mixed marriages.

There’s always a hidden … [pause] I don’t mean it maliciously, but we’ve got several half-caste young friends who are doing very well in Kenya, but they’re quite unusual people already. Because I’m a bloody old colonial I’d be very unhappy [if his grandchildren married an African]. There’s not edge to that, but my instinct goes against it.⁴⁰

It was Charles’s ‘instinct’ which indicated the deeply innate and emotive contours to the regulation of interracial intimacy, despite his attempt to laugh off his visceral reaction as being the preserve of an ‘old colonial’. By stressing the supposedly unnatural nature of mixed-race children, racial categories were reified, and miscegenation vilified, a process which was particularly gendered by the strength of feeling attached to the preoccupation with daughters’ partners, and correspondingly to African men’s sexuality. The prospect of this particular dynamic was one of the few liberalizations of race relations which was repeatedly and vociferously refuted by whites. Mike and Clare Webster, white farmers living outside Kabwe, provided one such striking example. While taking part in a candid and wide-ranging discussion, Mike became sharply defensive as conversation turned to their daughter, Catherine. Catherine was living with a black Zambian man, something which was attributed to her education in a mixed-race school. However, the couple were quick to justify their objections to the arrangement by emphasizing that Clare used to employ her daughter’s housemate, drawing hierarchical class distinctions upon the relationship. When this prompted a question about whether Catherine had a black boyfriend, Clare, her mother, pondered, ‘we’d really struggle with that’. Mike had a more visceral reaction, as he firmly stated, ‘you’re really testing the depths, aren’t you?’⁴¹ This strength of feeling was part of a communal fear and disgust at the idea of white women – often imagined as a white daughter – being sexually or romantically intimate with a black African. This shared emotional norm drew one of the clearest boundaries of a post-colonial white emotional community.

While this chapter has thus far focused upon the significance of olfactory reactions, both discursive and embodied, in shaping the emotional boundaries of white communities in Kenya and Zambia, I would be remiss not to reflect upon the presence of interracial couples in both countries. Independence and the growth of the African middle class have been key to the emergence of formal and public interracial relationships. Leyton Moran was a white farmer in southern Zambia. In many respects he had the upbringing and life of any other colonial white child, yet he decided to marry Gloria, a local woman ‘from the village’ with whom he had fallen in love.⁴²

For me it was hard. My dad was dying of cancer, so I didn’t want to bring it up [his relationship]. The local people loved my dad. But to broach the subject, that I’d found a beautiful young black lady that I wanted to marry, I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. I secretly got married in the village … my family took it quite badly initially. ‘Why didn’t you just got a marry some white woman somewhere?’ It was a hiccup to the family for a bit. Sometimes my kids find it hard, because they aren’t treated the same as the other cousins.⁴³

Leyton reiterated how interracial marriage was ‘the final frontier’ in whites’ emotional and psychological decolonization. Despite his white family’s ‘good relations’ with the local African community, the prospect of marriage would have been out of the question. The severity of the family’s discomfort meant that his father died not knowing his son had married a black Zambian, which caused an angry rupture in the family, which was still ‘not sitting 100 per cent right’.⁴⁴ Leyton recalled the vitriol and disgust he faced in the wider white community when the marriage became public: ‘you must get out of here, you must leave … what a waste of a white skin’, as a neighbouring farmer put it.⁴⁵ Leyton’s traumatic experience demonstrated the ways in which disgust and anger were mobilized by the white emotional community in reaction to his romantic choices. While his actions were not censured, the liminal position he now occupied within that community demonstrated how embarking on a marriage, and the establishment of a family, with a black Zambian were policed. Edward Fisher, a self-declared ‘white African’ living in Nairobi who had no connection to Leyton, put this logic in stark terms: ‘If you want to go and shag one [an African] that’s fine but don’t marry one. You want to associate with people who are the same as you and smell the same. Africans smell different.’⁴⁶

The biological determinism of his statement is striking. In his mind it was the smell of people which binds them: the innate aroma of different individuals was demonstrative of their innate difference.

White women and the ‘black worker’: racializing class through smell

Edward’s statement acknowledged how in the post-colonial period, as in the colonial period, white men have had far greater freedom to pursue sexual relationships with Africans compared to white women as long as they avoided a publicly loving, familial relationship as Leyton had done. This underlines how, despite the strength of the communal emotional language of fear and disgust, desire, lust or love could override the fear of transgression within certain gendered contexts. However, a clear distinction was drawn between casual sexual relationships and relationships thought of as familial, reproductive or affective. It was the latter relationships which brought forth the prospect of white demographic fragility, emotional and social equality with black Africans and therefore remained key sites of social censure. Moreover, the direct challenge white women taking African partners posed to white men’s idea of their cultural and racial superiority, as well as the demographic ‘fading out’ of the white community, added deeply emotive elements to control over white women’s sexuality. These concerns have been made all the sharper by the growth in white expatriate populations, and a gradual increase in social interaction between white and black. White imaginations and emotive responses have been incensed by the apparent presence of ‘half-castes everywhere’, reinforcing a determination amongst whites that such transgressions would not befall ‘my grandchildren’.⁴⁷ This has underpinned attempts to reinforce African difference, thereby safeguarding against the prospect of sex or intermarriage with middle-class Africans. The form that these attempts took drew upon the existing history of olfactory discourse around sweat and body odour, and the emotions of fear and disgust they were supposed to invoke.

The legitimization of this boundary delineation has required the continual intertwining of smell and blackness into the post-colonial period, and has become intimately connected to domestic social hierarchies, a point made clear by the white farmer Deborah Strathern on her farm in Zambia’s southern province:

You associate [blackness] with workers [here] and maybe there is [sic] educated nice [black] people in the UK, but the moment you say that, [mixed marriage] I think of the garden boy, who I like very much but … I suppose it’s not very Christian of me to say … but someone who doesn’t smell.⁴⁸

Deborah foregrounded manual work and sweat – just as colonial settlers and missionaries had done – in a conditioned revulsion to the idea of romantic and sexual intimacy with black Africans. Through this conditioning she indicated the emotional work whites did to deny Africans as full sexual or social beings. This was made easier through the association made between race and class, by redefining sweat as labour, and smell as ‘Africanness’. This worked to homogenize ‘Africans’ into a pastiche of stereotypes attached by whites to their domestic servants, typified by their apparent ‘smell’, a process only made possible by the lack of social interaction between whites and Africans upon an equal social footing, Africans instead being relegated within existing hierarchical constructions to domestic servitude. Thus, when Deborah thought of interracial marriages, she automatically envisaged her daughter marrying the ‘garden boy’, which constituted not only a racial transgression but a class one. Strikingly, Deborah’s discomfort with this imagination was firmly rooted in the ‘smell’ of the ‘garden boy’, a sensorial articulation of her underlying psychological discomfort with the idea of the relationship. In this instance his apparent smell – and the visceral response of disgust – encapsulates all of the reasons why Africans and whites should not marry.

The racialization of class, and the gendered dynamics of interracial relationships, were explained further when Deborah continued:

I would battle, I seriously would battle [against interracial marriage]. Maybe more with my girls than with Andy. I don’t know why that is. Just the thought of a mixed marriage with my daughters … I just think it’s the sexual connotation really. I don’t know why I say that … I don’t know why I can justify this bold statement. It’s just oohhh no no no no. You see some of these [black Zambians] really nicely spoken … speaks better than most of us you know, but just no. We are associating ourselves with a lower-class person. Same as in England.⁴⁹

Deborah openly admitted that it was the thought of sex between ‘her girls’ and Africans which raised such hostility. She attempted to rationalize her emotions in terms of the dynamics of class by appealing to a shared knowledge of the class structure of England. However, the viscerality and jarring racial dynamics contained in her response betrayed the disgust that the imagined scenario invoked. Although Deborah recognized that many Africans are now better educated than whites, there was still a visceral rejection of the idea of mixed-race relationships. Race was asserted despite the language competence of many black Zambians, and class was made to stand in for race in this instance. The well-spoken Africans she described were, in her view, simply masking the underlying inherent difference between the races. She invoked the scepticism of the ‘civilized native’ which had been common colonial discourse since the 1920s, and which Ginsburgh clearly delineates in her chapter in this volume. Her disapproval and outright refusal to contemplate both a black Zambian equal to her or her kin and the prospect of interracial romance failed to recognize the reality of twenty-first-century Zambia, and instead relied on much older discourses of the subterfuge of the ‘well-spoken’, fluent and ‘nicely dressed’ African.⁵⁰

The dissonance between white reliance upon African staff and the continual denial of black African legitimacy as potential romantic partners rested on a continual conceptualization of the imagined ‘African’ as a worker. This was reiterated by Reg Turner and Mel Turnbull, a white Zambian couple living and working in Lusaka. They emphasized that, ‘we have Christmas lunch with our staff. We have no problem with mixing’. Reg went on, ‘but I wouldn’t marry a black girl’.⁵¹ In Kenya, Mark Benson, a retired white hunter living on the shores of Lake Naivasha, was even more explicit in his emphasis upon the class contours to this regulated behaviour.

I’m more educated than 99.9 per cent of the people here, I’ve travelled all over the world, and I’ve employed people here. Now am I racist? Yes, because I would not be happy having my son-in-law be a Sabgi [sic] Singh from Delhi or from here. I would like her to marry an Englishman.⁵²

Mark went on to explain his sense of superiority over the ‘lower-class’ Kenyans he employed: ‘do I feel superior to the man on the street here? Yes, I do quite frankly. He grew up in a mud hut, sitting around a fire eating with his fingers’.⁵³ Mark’s focus upon the manner of eating contained a clear sensory element: Africans’ and South Asians’ culture of eating with their hands marked them out as sensorially unrefined and indulging in a baser culinary experience associated with manual tactility. It was this apparent sensory difference between whites and Africans which marked out their different levels of sophistication, and which, ultimately, defined who Mark could envisage as a future son-in-law. Closely allied to these classed depictions of Africans was the nebulous category of ‘culture’, itself often a byword for race.⁵⁴

Deidre Walton, an elderly retired white farmer living on the outskirts of Nanyuki in Central Kenya, explained:

I wouldn’t be best pleased if one of my grandchildren married an African. Because I think culturally, is that the right word? We’re all different really. But you know I suppose there used to be a lot [of interracial sex], it used to be called the Khaki Highlands (here)! We used to have all these little ‘chocolate drops’, I think they were called, running around.⁵⁵

Deidre repeatedly returned to the idea of mixed marriages during a wide-ranging interview, evidently preoccupied by the thought of it. Deidre herself was unsure about the term ‘culture’, betraying her awareness of its usage to delineate race, which she justified with the suggestion that her black Kenyan staff would feel the same about ‘cultural mixing’. Although she recalled the colonial period as being a time of acknowledged, if illicit, interracial sex, she clearly considered present-day desires to be more closely regulated. It would seem that, for Deidre at least, post-colonial whites’ urges to racially transgress had been restrained through careful observation of emotional norms. While schools have become racially mixed and middle-class Africans take part in the businesses and social activities of whites, informal social segregation in people’s homes and private social clubs has remained strong. At the heart of this continued separation has been the consistent and widespread emotional response of disgust with African bodies and sexuality, an emotional norm regulating white, particularly women’s, behaviour and continuing to reinforce the untenable discourse of African’s biological difference. It remains one of the last colonial mentalities to which whites visibly and vociferously adhere, as interracial marriage, and thus legitimate offspring, most visibly represent the prospect of the physical ‘fading out’ of the last of the white population.

Conclusion

Colonial sensory discourse has died hard in Kenya and Zambia. The white search for legitimacy and racial coherence has led to reinvigorated sensorially justified notions of racial difference. Decolonization, and whites’ associated loss of political power, has prompted a retrenchment of racial difference through the senses as means of consolidating and legitimizing the increasingly unsustainable aloofness of the white population. The senses, in turn, helped to define the boundaries of whites’ emotional communities. The tangible social and physical entities of white communities have often been disparate and fleeting, as decolonization, transnational mobility and ill-health have chipped away at white populations in both countries. In the face of physically transient white communities, emotional norms from the colonial period have retained currency through the formation of post-colonial emotional communities, preoccupied with interracial relationships.⁵⁶ The emotional boundaries of white communities determined the principles regulating interracial intimacy, as well as establishing post-colonial emotional norms, which also stressed deep bonds of belonging and longing to and for African environments.

The way olfactory language, and the emotional norms it conveys, has been used by whites as a means of dividing themselves from Africans while attempting to legitimize their presence in Africa illuminates the contradiction at the heart of post-colonial whiteness. The position of the post-colonial white in Africa is never secure because of their colonial heritage of power, privilege and wealth, of which their conspicuous whiteness marks them out as colonial remnants. Smell, and the emotional norms it was supposed to invoke, legitimized white senses of self through the vilification of Africans and an emphasis upon an ‘inherent connection’ to Africa. The construction of post-colonial emotional communities has been a means for whites to try and mitigate the decline in their own standing over the past sixty years. However, such communities have illuminated the contradictory space which whites continue to occupy between an affective claim to ‘belonging’ to Africa and meaningful integration with African society.

1. *All of the participants in this research have been anonymized, with their names changed and discerning features of employment and/or location changed.

Notes

1. 1.  Interview with Terry Marks, ZI039. For similar arguments, see interviews with Deborah Strathern, Edward Fisher and Sharon Mintram.

2. 2.  B. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

3. 3.  B. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45, at p. 16; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities.

4. 4.  A. Kuntsman, ‘ “With a Shade of Disgust”: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag’, Slavic Review, 68, 2 (2009), 308–28, at p. 308; J. Dollimore, ‘Sexual Disgust’, in T. Dean and C. Lane (eds.), Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 368.

5. 5.  The use of ‘emotional work’ builds upon Hochschild’s conception of ‘emotion-work’; see A. Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85 (1979), 551–75.

6. 6.  This takes instruction from Reddy’s theory of emotives and emotions being brought to life through language; see W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 105–7.

7. 7.  For work on the colonial boundaries of whiteness, see A. Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), 134–61; B. Shadle, The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s–20s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

8. 8.  C. Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012); M. Smith, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History’, Journal of Social History, 40 (2007), 841–58; J. Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2006); H.J. Rindisbacher, ‘A Cultural History of Disgust’, KulturPoetik, 5 (2005), 119–27; C.E. Forth, ‘Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination’, History Workshop Journal, 73 (2012), 211–39.

9. 9.  This methodology was informed by the ‘walking interviews’ which geographers and anthropologists have used. See P. Jones et al., ‘Exploring Space and Place with Walking Interviews’, Journal of Research Practice, 4 (2008), 2; J. Evans and P. Jones, ‘The Walking Interview: Methodology, Mobility and Place’, Applied Geography, 31 (2011), 849–58.

10. 10.  P. Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2018); L. Roper, ‘Beyond Discourse Theory’, Women’s History Review, 19 (2010), 307–19.

11. 11.  S.C. Lubkemann, ‘Unsettling the Metropole: Race and Settler Reincorporation in Postcolonial Portugal’, in C. Elkins and S. Pedersen (eds.), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 257–70; F. Chung, Re-Living the Second Chimurenga: Memories from the Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe (Harare: Weaver Press, 2006).

12. 12.  For the notion of ‘absenting’ the native, see P. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (2006), 387–409. For apparent white attempts to absent Africans from natural environments, see D. Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2010).

13. 13.  H. Dugan and L. Farina, ‘Intimate Senses/Sensing Intimacy’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 3 (2012), 373–9, at p. 375.

14. 14.  Interview with June Rasch, ZI033.

15. 15.  For homogenization, see J.D. Porteous, ‘Smellscape’, Progress in Geography, 9 (1985), 356–78, at pp. 362–3.

16. 16.  For ‘smellscape’, see Porteous.

17. 17.  A.L. Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, The Journal of American History, 88, 3 (2001), 829–65, at p. 832.

18. 18.  T. Burke, ‘Nyamarira That I Loved: Commoditisation, Consumption and the Social History of Soap in Zimbabwe’, in Collected Seminar Papers (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1992), pp. 195–216; T. Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

19. 19.  Burke, ‘Nyamarira That I Loved’, pp. 201–2; D. Kidd, The Essential Kafir (London: Black, 1904). Some ethnic groups were also recognized by early twentieth-century European travellers due to their wearing of imperfectly cured skins and the use of smoked ghee as a skin moisturizer.

20. 20.  It is worth noting that smell is subjective and connectedly notions of body odour are too. Similarly, Africans’ use of soap did increase over the colonial period (in Uganda it was one of the primary products people bought by the 1950s). Deodorant may not have been so effective in the colonial era, or universally used by whites. However, the reality of smell and body odour did not especially matter as social segregation was an irrational matter.

21. 21.  G. Waitt, ‘Bodies That Sweat: The Affective Responses of Young Women in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia’, Gender, Place & Culture, 21 (2014), 666–82; G. Waitt and E. Stanes, ‘Sweating Bodies: Men, Masculinities, Affect, Emotion’, Geoforum, 58 (2015), 30–38; A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 2013); E. Shove, ‘Converging Conventions of Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience’, Journal of Consumer Policy, 26 (2003), 395–418.

22. 22.  For discussions of race, smell and disease, see M. Smith, ‘Transcending, Othering, Detecting: Smell, Premodernity, Modernity’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 3 (2012), 380–90, at p. 386.

23. 23.  Smith, ‘Transcending, Othering, Detecting’, p. 387.

24. 24.  Interview with Peter Barak, ZI028.

25. 25.  ZNA, Cabinet Office, Co-ordination and supervision of Government CO3/01, 6841 008, ‘Race Relations and Discrimination General 1960–63’, Letter from EA Last, Manager of Kachalola Rest House to Mr Goodfellow, PC, Fort Jameson 11/6/1961.

26. 26.  Mr Veliades, the owner of the Rhodes Café in Kitwe who had been accused of racial discrimination in 1962, Zambia National Archives, Local Government and Housing, Native Affairs, LGH 7/9 3777 32 – Racial discrimination 1957–8, Kitwe 1962 Report.

27. 27.  Interviews with Brendon Lang, ZI042; in Kenya, see interviews with Charles Braithwaite, KI069 and Deidre Walton, KI062. For voluntary apartheid, see correspondence with Dom Walker, KI057.

28. 28.  M.O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); N. Cheeseman, ‘ “No Bourgeoisie, No Democracy”? The Political Attitudes of the Kenyan Middle Class’, Journal of International Development, 27 (2015), 647–64.

29. 29.  Interview with Mel Teevan, ZI020.

30. 30.  D. Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Shadle, The Souls of White Folk. See interview with Deidre Walton, KI062.

31. 31.  Kennedy, Islands of White, p. 176.

32. 32.  Kennedy, Islands of White, p. 188.

33. 33.  D. Anderson, ‘Sexual Threat and Settler Society: “Black Perils” in Kenya, c. 1907–30’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38, 1 (2010), 47–74; J. McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); O.C. Phillips, ‘The “Perils” of Sex and the Panics of Race: The Dangers of Inter-Racial Sex in Colonial Southern Rhodesia’, in S. Tamale (ed.), African Sexualities: A Reader (London: Fahamu/Pambazuka, 2011); Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 177–9.

34. 34.  ZNA, Ministry of Education, ED 1/4/812/225, ‘Separation of the Sexes’, in Northern News, 8/8/1963.

35. 35.  Interview with Charles Braithwaite, KI069.

36. 36.  The ideas of intimate boundaries in this chapter draw upon A. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

37. 37.  A. Harris and T. Jones, Love and Romance in Britain, 1918–1970 (New York: Springer, 2014); C. Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); S. Szreter and K. Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. xvi.

38. 38.  R.K. Omondi and C. Ryan, ‘Sex Tourism: Romantic Safaris, Prayers and Witchcraft at the Kenyan Coast’, Tourism Management, 58 (2017), 217–27; R.K. Omondi, ‘Gender and the Political Economy of Sex Tourism in Kenyas Coastal Resorts’, a paper first presented at the International Symposium/Doctorial Course on Feminist Perspective on Global Economic and Political Systems and Women’s Struggle for Global Justice at Sommoroya Hotel, Tromso, Norway, 24–26 September 2003, www.arsrc.org/downloads/features/omondi.pdf (accessed 15 June 2023).

39. 39.  Interview with Deidre Walton, KI062.

40. 40.  Interview with Charles Braithwaite, KI069.

41. 41.  Interview with the Websters, ZI008.

42. 42.  Interview with Leyton Moran, ZI005.

43. 43.  Interview with Leyton Moran, ZI005.

44. 44.  Interview with Leyton Moran, ZI005.

45. 45.  Interview with Leyton Moran, ZI005.

46. 46.  Interview with Edward Fisher, KI037.

47. 47.  Interviews with Sharon Mintram, KI002 and Charles Braithwaite, KI069.

48. 48.  Interview with Deborah Strathern, ZI041.

49. 49.  Interview with Deborah Strathern, ZI041. For other examples of racialized class, see interview with Tony Williams, ZI023; Sharon Mintram, KI002; Deidre Walton, KI062; Charles Braithwaite, KI069; and Trevor Donaldson, KI078.

50. 50.  Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, pp. 99–104; Shadle, The Souls of White Folk, p. 32.

51. 51.  Interview with Reg Turner and Mel Turnbull, ZI027.

52. 52.  Interview with Mark Benson, KI043. This was reiterated by Charles Braithwaite, KI069.

53. 53.  Interview with Mark Benson, KI043.

54. 54.  R.J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Psychology Press, 2005).

55. 55.  Interview with Deidre Walton, KI062.

56. 56.  For arguments about the importance of emotional norms to maintaining the boundaries of settler colonial society in Kenya, see Shadle, The Souls of White Folk.

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