DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i03.017

Pages: 701-711

This paper aims to examine the development of roads and road transport network in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1945 to 1965, a period often overlooked by scholars especially considering the fact that an ambitious and comprehensive road construction and maintenance programme was embarked upon soon after the Second World War. This was occasioned by the colonial government’s realisation of the acute need to penetrate further into the interior of the country in an effort to accommodate the increasing numbers of white immigrants inundating the colony for resettlement purposes and to speed up economically extractive endeavours. Although some scholars hint that road construction during this period was intended to make these resettlement areas more accessible, they often gloss over the role played by the Responsible Government which reserved funds for the construction and maintenance of the colony’s trunk roads from as far afield as Beitbridge to Umtali through Bulawayo and Salisbury. The paper argues that such infrastructural developments were a microcosm of bigger reconstruction and developmental projects in post-war Europe and should not be read in isolation. Arguably, by 1965, relative improvement had occurred in the state of roads in the country, especially given that most of the strip roads had been replaced by full-width tarmac highways in addition to all-weather bridges erected over some wide rivers. The main methodology for data collection for this paper is archival based, while interviews will be held with various stakeholders in order to complement the primary data from the archives.