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Engineering Respectability: Housing, African Women, and Urban Order in Railway Communities
IRS Seminar by Nicole Elsie Nonhlanhla Sithole
Following the 1945 African Railway Strike, Rhodesia Railways expanded housing schemes for African workers — aiming not merely to provide accommodation, but to engineer disciplined domestic environments shaped by colonial ideals of respectability, family life, and social hierarchy. Yet these efforts remained unstable and subject to ongoing negotiation.
This talk examines African railway living areas as contested urban and domestic spaces, foregrounding the frequently overlooked role of African women. Although largely excluded from formal railway employment, women shaped everyday life through domestic labour, informal economic activity, and their involvement in household and neighbourhood disputes.
Drawing on housing records, labour reports, township planning documents, trade union records, Native Affairs correspondence, and civil court cases, the talk explores how colonial authorities sought to regulate African domesticity — and how African families, and women in particular, inhabited these spaces in ways that exceeded official intentions, continuously contesting gender relations, authority, and urban identity from below.
Nicole Elsie Nonhlanhla Sithole completed her PhD in History at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, in October 2025. Her research examined gender dynamics in African railway communities in colonial Zimbabwe, focusing on labour, domestic life, and social change. She is preparing to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pretoria. Her interests include African labour and urban history, gender and family, infrastructure and everyday life, spatial inequality, and the social histories of colonial institutions.