Girvetz 2320
Jeff Ndimande, a UCSB History Ph.D. Candidate, will be presenting a draft chapter from his dissertation-in-progress. This talk examines the Native Welfare Society (NWS) as a structure of colonial intervention aimed at neutralizing African political radicalism in Southern Rhodesia between 1929 and the 1950s. Emerging in the wake of land dispossession, deteriorating labor conditions, and the suppression of African-led organizing, the NWS functioned as an agenda-setting institution that sought to reshape African urban life through a language of welfare, respectability, and moral order. Football became central to this strategy—not simply as recreation, but as a tool to depoliticize African workers, regulate their bodies, and stabilize colonial rule through leisure. While colonial authorities invested in the game as a mechanism of discipline, African communities reappropriated the game as a space of social affiliation, self-expression, and political presence. By tracing football’s entanglement with the logics of labor, control, and racial governance, this talk argues that the pitch became a contested site—where the colonial effort to diffuse radicalism met with African practices of refusal, improvisation, and quiet subversion.