Unpopular Sovereignty

Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization

Luise White

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226235226
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (after 1980 Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to the policies and practices of the end of empire. In Unpopular Sovereignty, Luise White shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa: indeed, this history of Rhodesian political practices reveals some of the commonalities of mid-twentieth-century thinking about place and race and how much government should link the two. White locates Rhodesia's independence in the era of decolonization in Africa, a time of great intellectual ferment in ideas about race, citizenship, and freedom. She shows that racists and reactionaries were just as concerned with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy as African nationalists were and took special care to design voter qualifications that could preserve their version of legal statecraft. Examining how the Rhodesian state managed its own governance and electoral politics, she casts an oblique and revealing light by which to rethink the narratives of decolonization.

One

“The last good white man left”: Rhodesia, Rhonasia, and the Decolonization of British Africa

In November 1965, when almost all British territories in Africa had been granted their independence, Rhodesia’s white minority government made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. This was UDI, an acronym that would serve both to mark the event and to describe the period of Rhodesian independence, which lasted until 1980. Or 1979: Rhodesia, which had been Southern Rhodesia until 1964, became Zimbabwe-Rhodesia in 1979, with a no less independent government with an elected African head of state. It became majority-ruled independent Zimbabwe in 1980. These four names have been collapsed into two—Rhodesia and Zimbabwe—and have produced some discursive flourishes that have generated two histories, a before-and-after that literally makes the past a prologue, an exception to the natural order that was decolonization, an interruption that slowed down the history of what should have happened. These two histories have been routinely deployed as an example of the well-wrought story of a colony becoming an independent nation. In the story of Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe it is one of the success of guerrilla struggle and the valiant triumph of universal rights. But it is a story that even at its best leaves out the peculiarities of local politics and difference, not to mention one or two of the country’s names. The result is a history in which Rhodesia was the racist anomaly, an eager if secondhand imitation of South Africa’s apartheid. Rhodesia—and Southern Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe-Rhodesia—hardly merits any analysis beyond the racism of its renegade independence. It is an example or an occurrence; it has no specific history.

The Country No One Can Name

At the level of popular and academic history and at the level of diplomacy, Rhodesia was the place that no one could even name: for years after the country took its own independence Britain referred to it as Southern Rhodesia while much of the historiography refers to “colonial Zimbabwe,” although Rhodesia had never really been a formal colony in the way that Kenya or Gabon had been. On one hand, not calling Rhodesia Rhodesia was a way to show how illegitimate it really was. On the other, calling Rhodesia colonial Zimbabwe served—as did talk of the decolonization of Algeria—to change its history, to return clumsy governance and messy episodes to the normal, linear story of colony to nation.1

The two names make for a definitive break. This is the literature of The Past Is Another Country, the title of a journalist’s account of the events and negotiations that ended white rule; it is in a genre of crossing a threshold, from oppression to freedom.2 Authors and activists announced, with pride or sadness depending on the circumstance, that they would never return to Rhodesia, only to arrive in Zimbabwe at the start of the next chapter.3 Indeed, once Rhodesia became Zimbabwe it became a commonplace for history texts to begin with a before-and-after list of place names. Obviously a before-and-after list cannot do justice to all the names of the country, but I have dispensed with such a list altogether because of my misgivings about the whole before-and-after enterprise. Place names and how they change are important, to be sure, but all too often the then-and-now lists that show that African names have replaced those chosen by settlers (Harare for Salisbury, for example, but see Mutare for Umtali, or Kadoma for Gatooma) suggest that a new name represents a resolution, a wrong that has now been righted.

Almost as common as the list of place names is a chronology or time line in the front matter of a text. A few begin the country’s history with the building of Great Zimbabwe, but most start the chronology with European contact in 1509 or with the first white settlers in 1890. Even the most African nationalist books have chronologies that begin in 1890. Chronologies may have been required by publishers who thought Central Africa too remote for many readers, but the ways these chronologies begin suggest a desire to historicize the land—even if it cannot be named—and establish a claim to territory whoever the population is and whenever it got there. Rhodesia’s territory was never really contested, but who lived on it, and where they lived, was. One critical argument of this book is that the idea of place—as in “patria” and “locus”—was in flux for much of the 1960s and 1970s. Independent Rhodesia was likened to Britain at its best, or to Britain in the 1940s, or to Sparta, or to the European nations handed to Hitler by Neville Chamberlin, or to Hungary in 1956.4 In the rhetoric of its independence, what located Rhodesians firmly in Africa was not its African population, but its white one. Party hacks called upon the genealogy of brave pioneers who had tamed the land bare-handed. “The Rhodesian was the last good white man left,” recalled P. K. van der Byl, a post–World War II immigrant who was to hold several portfolios in the Rhodesian cabinet.5

But good white men or bad ones, the fact was that the white population of Southern Rhodesia (and Rhodesia) was small, never amounting to as much as 5 percent of the total population of the country. There were fewer than 34,000 Europeans in Southern Rhodesia in 1921 and the numbers gradually increased to about 85,000 in 1946. Within six years the population was almost 140,000; it peaked at 277,000 in 1961. These figures are misleading, however, as they do not show how peripatetic the white population was: of the seven hundred original pioneers who arrived in 1890, only fifteen lived in the country in 1924. Many came and went because of changing opportunities in regional industries, particularly mining, while others used South Africa, Northern Rhodesia, or Britain as a base from which to launch new careers. These were the men called “Good Time Charlies” in the press and “rainbow boys” in parliament. This pattern intensified as the population trebled: there were almost equal numbers of white immigrants and white emigrants for most of the early 1960s. It was only during the boom years of 1966–1971 that white immigration exceeded white emigration by significant amounts. After that, more whites left the country than came to live there.6

This book, then, is a history of Rhodesia’s independence and its place—clumsy governance and messy episodes and all—in what was everywhere else postcolonial Africa. Caroline Elkins has argued that after 1945, white settlers in Africa dug in against the colonial retreat and claimed a popular sovereignty for themselves alone, insisting that they constituted a people who had the legitimacy to trump empire and to make claims equivalent to those independent nations could make.7 This book argues something quite different, that white settlers and white residents and whites who were just passing through utilized a hodgepodge of institutions and laws and practices in Rhodesia to maintain what they refused to call white rule but instead relabeled as responsible government by civilized people. They did not claim to be “the people” worthy of sovereignty but instead proclaimed membership in an empire, or the West, or an anticommunism that had no national boundaries. I am writing against, for want of a better term, the story of Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe, which is itself a version of colonies becoming nation-states: I am writing a history of how Rhodesia and its several names disrupt that narrative and show how awkward and uneven it was.

Southern Rhodesia: A Short History

Southern Rhodesia was founded as a chartered colony of the British South Africa Company in 1890. It was Cecil Rhodes’s attempt to find more gold and to create a buffer against the Dutch in South Africa. Thirty years later a rebellion had been vanquished, South Africa was British, the gold mines were not wholly successful, and a chartered colony did not fit easily with the imperial world after the Treaty of Versailles. Indeed, Jan Smuts, an architect of the mandate system of the League of Nations, wanted Southern Rhodesia to join the Union of South Africa, but a white electorate of less than fifteen thousand, fearing an influx of white Afrikaaners, rejected this in 1922. In 1923, the British government expropriated the British South Africa Company, which then ceased to administer both Northern and Southern Rhodesia. The company maintained some rights in Northern Rhodesia but Southern Rhodesia was annexed to the crown as a colony but would have responsible government. This had a specific and limited meaning in 1923: Britain had the right to make laws for Southern Rhodesia but the colony could legislate its own internal affairs so long as these did not affect African land rights and political rights, such as they were. The assembly was elected, and the cabinet was chosen from ministers all of whom were appointed by the governor, including the prime minister. In a very short time the Southern Rhodesian government presented all draft legislation to Britain and amended or abandoned them if the United Kingdom objected, thus making the limits of responsible government barely visible.8

This version of responsible government did not give Rhodesia dominion status, as many white politicians were to insist forty years later. Dominion status was itself very indistinct: it was an ambiguous term used to convey that some self-governing states—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Union of South Africa after 1910—were to some degree subordinate to Britain. At its most clear-cut it marked a space between internal self-government and full independence, and as such it proved a useful procedural route to the independence of the Indian subcontinent. It was South Africa, and the union Southern Rhodesia rejected, that had dominion status with responsible government. Southern Rhodesia had responsible government without dominion status.9

Throughout the 1920s, commercial agriculture expanded. Even as Britain regarded Southern Rhodesia’s African policies as more progressive than those of South Africa, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930—the cornerstone of settler society, wrote Victor Machingaidze—evicted thousands of Africans from their farms to guarantee that land was available to new white farmers. A few years later the government of Southern Rhodesia created Native Purchase Areas, to compensate Africans not necessarily for their loss of land, but for their loss of the right to purchase land anywhere in the country. The scheme never managed to settle the fifty thousand African farmers Rhodesian officials both hoped and feared would create a propertied African middle class, but the ten thousand Purchase Area farmers who took advantage of the scheme occupied a unique space in how Rhodesians imagined African politics, as chapters 6, 9, and 11 show.10 This pattern, of openings for white immigrants yet to come that closed down opportunities for Africans, was to be repeated for years, especially after World War II, when the white population grew rapidly as commercial agriculture became once again profitable.

In 1951, Southern Rhodesia introduced the Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA). Funded by the World Bank, it marked a significant shift in thinking about Africans, as Jocelyn Alexander has argued: Africans were no longer communal tribesmen, but rational actors operating within an impersonal market. Each man was a yeoman farmer. There would be fewer but more productive farms in the reserves; rural Africans should not be intermittent farmers, nor could they lay claim to land they had not worked for years. Urban Africans were to live in townships and rely exclusively on their wages: The actual implementation of the act was slow, however, and gave chiefs considerable latitude about how to protect their own land and cattle while safeguarding their rights over land redistribution. African opposition to the act was intense.11 The Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC) and its successor, the National Democratic Party (NDP), made land, not voting, the center of their political platforms, and their actions in towns and countryside brought about a range of repressive legislation that was to shape the history of Rhodesia. A state of emergency was declared in early 1959. Many leaders of the SRANC were detained. In prison they founded the NDP and continued to direct party affairs, as we shall see i...