On the frontline of caring: a history of African nurses in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe: 1940s -1996.

Abstract

This dissertation puts into focus African women who day and night toiled in hospitals, taking care of the infirm and healing the sick. I examine their hopes and aspirations, their daily work, their struggles and resilience in racialized and oppressive clinical spaces. In this dissertation, I argue that when African women entered colonial healing spaces as State Registered Nurses in the post Second World War period, they used the opportunity to showcase their potential, their expertise, and to contribute to the well being of their people. Using a variety of strategies to adapt to their racial and subaltern positions within clinical spaces, African women played a pivotal role in not only nursing sick bodies, but also nursing the nation, and their struggles within and outside hospitals were part of the larger struggles by ordinary Zimbabweans for self-determination and equality in colonial and post colonial Zimbabwe.