Securing Africa

Local Crises and Foreign Interventions

Toyin Falola, Charles Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415817677
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136662652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Africa has been and currently is the site of numerous conflicts and crises. Authors previously wrote of these as specifically African problems or the problems of Europeans in Africa, but newer scholarship on other aspects of Africa has come to stress the interconnectness of Africa and the wider world. Still, it has often been limited to studies of isolated instances within African countries, with little-to-no connection to greater patterns of international power and violence. This volume explores the historical and present local and international dimensions of the myriad security crises in Africa, from the role of international relations during liberation to multination efforts against piracy.

Part I
Historical Interventions, the Local to the Global

1 The External Military Operations of Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe (1895-2005)

Timothy Stapleton

Although Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) is a landlocked, relatively small, and poor southern African country, it has developed a long history of military operations outside its borders which dates back to the foundation of the state in colonial times. During the “Scramble” period of the 1890s the British South Africa Company (BSAC), a business entity controlled by mining magnate and imperialist dreamer Cecil Rhodes with a charter to administer territory on behalf of Britain, conquered the Ndebele and Shona people and established the colony of Southern Rhodesia. BSAC military forces invaded and subjugated the Ndebele Kingdom in 1893 and suppressed uprisings by Ndebele and Shona communities from 1896 to 1897. Anticipation of vast gold reserves that had motivated the occupation were soon disappointed and the territory’s economy became based on white settler commercial agriculture and limited mining with dispossessed Africans, compelled to pay tax by the coercive power of the colonial regime, providing cheap labor. After the BSAC withdrew from administration in 1922, Southern Rhodesia’s mostly white minority electorate voted to assume responsible government (internal self-government) from Britain instead of a potential merger with the neighboring, Afrikaner dominated Union of South Africa which was a quasi-autonomous British dominion. The granting of responsible government to Southern Rhodesia in 1923 gave the small settler minority, which numbered only 30,000 in 1914 and reached a high of 250,000 in the mid-1970s, political power, which it used to solidify control of the territory and exploitation of the indigenous majority. Various laws undercut African land ownership and agricultural production and supported the development of large scale European commercial farming.

From the conquest period of the 1890s up to the late 1940s, Southern Rhodesia did not have a regular military establishment and its internal security and defense was the responsibility of the British South Africa Police (BSAP), an amalgamation of several earlier BSAC police forces, which evolved from an occupation force into a law enforcement organization. Settler volunteer forces had been organized since the 1890s and conventional military units were created for service in World War I and II, but then disbanded at the end of hostilities. It was only with the rise of the Cold War in the late 1940s that defense duties were removed from the BSAP and a permanent full-time military structure, enhanced by white conscripts and part-time volunteers, was founded.

As in the rest of Africa, African nationalist protest emerged during the 1950s and early 1960s but was violently repressed by the settler state. At this time Southern Rhodesia was part of a white dominated federation with the neighboring British colonies of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland which, given rising African protest and the changing international political climate, were granted independence in 1964 as Zambia and Malawi, respectively. After the bush war of the late 1960s and 1970s—in which African nationalist insurgents based in adjacent African-ruled countries like Zambia and Mozambique fought the security forces of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime that had unilaterally broken with Britain in 1965—a negotiated settlement led to the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980 with a majority rule political system. Former Rhodesian security force members and Zimbabwe liberation movement insurgents were integrated into a new Zimbabwe Defence Force and Zimbabwe Republic Police. The post-independence government of the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) led by Robert Mugabe was initially praised for advances in education and its stand against apartheid South Africa during the 1980s. However, at the same time the ZANU-PF state became increasingly authoritarian and terrorized predominantly Ndebele communities in the southwest region, which had supported another nationalist organization called the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) led by Joshua Nkomo. After the 1987 Unity Accord in which ZANU-PF absorbed ZAPU leaders, Zimbabwe functioned as a de facto one-party state until 2000, when the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a new opposition party backed primarily by organized labor, academics, human rights activists, and white commercial farmers, emerged to challenge ZANU-PF in the context of worsening economic crisis and a chaotic land redistribution scheme. This chapter examines the changing local and international political context of Southern Rhodesia’s and Zimbabwe’s foreign military operations and shows that in terms of motivations there was a great deal of continuity from the colonial to post-independence regimes, which both sought to pursue internal goals by the external projection of coercive power.

The BSAC administration sent its military forces into neighboring territories even before the conquest of Southern Rhodesia’s indigenous people was complete. In the mid-1890s Rhodes, also the premier of the British Cape Colony, conspired to overthrow the Boer regime of Paul Kruger in the neighboring and gold rich Transvaal and replace it with a government more friendly to British mining interests. The 1886 discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand area of the Transvaal had prompted a rush of prospectors and miners to the republic which heavily taxed and restricted the emerging mining industry. Rhodes and others hatched a plot that involved an uprising by disgruntled foreign mine workers (uitlanders), who were denied the vote under Transvaal law, in Johannesburg supported by a simultaneous armed BSAC incursion across the Bechuanaland (today’s Botswana) border. Originating from Southern Rhodesia, this force consisted of six hundred white horsemen, including four hundred from the BSAC’s Matabeleland Mounted Police, armed with rifles and around a dozen Maxim guns (early machine guns). It was led by Leander Starr Jameson, the BSAC administrator of Matabeleland and a close associate of Rhodes. Although the uitlander uprising failed to get off the ground, Jameson’s raiders crossed into the Transvaal in late December 1895 and were subsequently captured by the Boers. Enflaming already strained Anglo-Boer relations and prompting the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boer republics to buy modern weapons from Germany, the Jameson Raid is widely seen by historians as leading directly to the outbreak of the South African War in 1899.¹ The Jameson Raid also ended Rhodes’ political career in the Cape. Within Rhodesia, the absence of so many white police provided an opportunity for oppressed, exploited, and recently taxed African communities to rebel against the colonial state; some Ndebele rose up in March 1896 and were later joined by some Shona in June of the same year. While the 1896–97 rebellion was eventually crushed, it became central to the memory of African resistance and European fear within the colony.²

As a British territory just north of the Transvaal, Southern Rhodesia quickly became involved in the South African War (1899–1902), which began with a pre-emptive Boer strike into the British territories of the Cape and Natal. In 1899 several British officers were sent to Bulawayo to raise the Rhodesian Frontier Force, which consisted of white volunteers from the local area and the Cape. It was divided into two contingents each with five hundred mounted infantry along with limited artillery support. One contingent under R. S. S. Baden-Powell, who went on to found the Boy Scouts, went south to defend the railway center of Mafeking which would endure a long and eventually storied siege by the Boers. The second contingent under H. C. O. Plumer went to Tuli in Bechuanaland to defend Rhodesia’s southern border from a possible Boer invasion that never took place. In November 1899, responding to Boer threats from the western Transvaal, three hundred fifty armed BSAP and volunteers were sent to secure Palapye and Mochudi on the Bulawayo-Mafeking rail line in Bechuanaland. After some skirmishes with the Tuli force, the Boers retired south from the Limpopo River frontier, which prompted Plumer to lead most of his men (about a thousand at this point) south in January 1900 with the intention of relieving Mafeking. From mid-January to the end of February Plumer’s force was engaged in a running battle with German led Boer forces for control of a strategically important section of railway near Gaborone (now the capital of Botswana). Plumer captured Lobatse in early March but ten days later was driven back by Boers sent from Mafeking. Plumer’s contingent then moved west to Kanye from where it sent patrols toward Mafeking in the southeast and waited for a larger British relief force coming up from the south. In mid-May Plumer linked up with Col. Bryan Mahon’s column from Kimberley and relieved Makeking.³ The experience of fighting in the South African War almost certainly contributed to some white Rhodesians’ reluctance to join the Union of South Africa in the 1920s as they saw themselves as a distinctly British community and did not want to be dominated by the Boers of the south.

At the outbreak of World War I many white Rhodesians were extremely eager to prove their loyalty to Britain, their mother country, and there was some discontent with the slow movement of the BSAC to make a military contribution. Participation in the conflict was seen by settlers as central to the development of white Rhodesia as a nation that was imagined as a future self-governing dominion along the lines of Canada or Australia. Many whites paid their own way to Britain where they enlisted in the Royal Rifle Corps which maintained a “Rhodesian Platoon”—distinguished by a national shoulder patch—until the end of the war. Fighting in the trenches of Western Europe and Salonika in the Balkans, this small sub-unit took heavy casualties and was re-formed many times. By 1915, an entirely white first battalion of the Rhodesia Regiment had been formed in the colony and was sent to South Africa where it provided security as Union forces suppressed a rebellion by Afrikaner soldiers and civilians who saw the broader conflict as an opportunity to regain their independence. The Rhodesia Regiment then took part in the South African led invasion of German Southwest Africa which Britain feared would be used as a base for German naval raiders and Pretoria saw as a territorial acquisition.

After this unit returned home and was disbanded in 1916, a second battalion of the Rhodesia Regiment was formed, which fought in the grueling bush campaign of German East Africa, another sanctuary for German warships and a target for Allied colonial expansion, where German forces fought a long series of delaying actions to tie down Allied resources. By 1917 tropical disease and exhaustion had led to the disbanding of this unit. Anxiety over a possible resurgence of African resistance prompted the BSAC administration to announce, at the beginning of the conflict, that this would be a white man’s war in which blacks would simply produce resources. However, by mid-1916 it had become obvious that Rhodesia did not have enough white males to continue direct military ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Changing Conception of African Security
• Part I Historical Interventions, the Local to the Global
• Part II Historical Interventions, the Global to the Local
• Part III Current and Ongoing Crises in Africa
• Part IV The International Dimension of Current African Security
• Contributors
• Index