Imperial Investments

This book examines the legacy of a British child migration scheme that relocated British children to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962, with the aim of populating the colony with “fresh white stock”. The selected children were resettled at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school established in a disused RAF airbase outside the town of Bulawayo. This social engineering project sought to “rescue” children from what were predicted as undesirable futures in Britain and offer them a “better life” with prospects of social advancement. Yet, beyond individual salvation, the scheme emigrated the children with the intention that they would help sustain the racially segregated colonial order.

Building on long-term ethnographic research with former Rhodesian child migrants, now living in the UK, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, this book delves into the children’s unique experiences of migration, displacement, and resettlement. By highlighting these enduring emotional, social, and political repercussions, the author critically addresses how colonial histories matter in the present. Through the lens of former child migrants – whose kin relations were ruptured, who were disciplined into silence and suppression, and who have seen scant public recognition of their past – this book sheds light on the formation of memory through its gaps and silences. It contributes to our understanding of memory in relation to forced migration and displaced communities.

Katja Uusihakala is a researcher in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki, Finland.