Event
The early days of the Zimbabwean state were marked with celebratory depictions of the migration and visible presence of black women in cities. Using newspaper and magazine archives, I trace a moral panic about infanticide and abortion, collapsed under the term “baby-dumping,” that soon gripped Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. This panic, which was based on a flimsy number of cases and outright fabrications, positioned teenage girls as menaces and “future prostitutes” who violated the spatial order of the new state. It unfolded in the midst of public debates about legal reforms which sought to bring black women, who had been legal minors under the colonial legal system, into full citizenship. As a result of legal reforms instituted by the new state, norms surrounding marriage, sexual relationships, and reproduction suddenly seemed malleable, maybe dangerously so.