Focusing on the experiences of African medical auxiliaries belonging to rural colonial Fort Victoria province's sprawling Ndanga Native Medical Unit, this article considers the ambiguous position occupied by this front-line group who pioneered black medical care work in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Although a great deal of work has bee...

This article addresses one of the intriguing paradoxes of colonial Zimbabwe's early twentieth-century medical history, that despite the unusually early interest in rural healthcare showed by the colony's political leadership and senior, non-medical bureaucrats, until the 1930s the colony's rural healthcare infrastructure remained tentative, sporadic and makeshift. ...