ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an aspect in the lives of African women who traveled to urban areas in colonial Zimbabwe: compulsory venereal disease exams. The exams were imposed on mobile and "unattached" black women between roughly 1924 and 1958. The chapter examines the politics of space, of sex, and of memory. It discusses how Zimbabwean women remember these exams and argues that the ambivalence, ambiguity, and contradictions apparent in their memories express the multiple and mobile subject positions of African women under southern Rhodesian colonialism. The similarities between colonial and post-colonial constructions of black women led to the inquiry into Chibheura in particular and how public health measures have been marshaled to regulate African women's sexual mobility in general. Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, like many other African countries referred to sexually transmitted diseases colloquially as "woman's diseases". The inviolability of the black woman was not a battle cry among the lawmakers and politicians in the settler colonial society.
