Gendering the Settler State

White Women, Race, Liberalism and Empire in Rhodesia, 1950-1980

Kate Law

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317425359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

White women cut an ambivalent figure in the transnational history of the British Empire. They tend to be remembered as malicious harridans personifying the worst excesses of colonialism, as vacuous fusspots, whose lives were punctuated by a series of frivolous pastimes, or as casualties of patriarchy, constrained by male actions and gendered ideologies. This book, which places itself amongst other "new imperial histories", argues that the reality of the situation, is of course, much more intricate and complex. Focusing on post-war colonial Rhodesia, Gendering the Settler State provides a fine-grained analysis of the role(s) of white women in the colonial enterprise, arguing that they held ambiguous and inconsistent views on a variety of issues including liberalism, gender, race and colonialism.

1
Making Settlers Out of Pioneers

White Women and the Development of Rhodesia, 1890–1940

Though Ireland was the land of my birth I am chiefly and above all things a Rhodesian. Mr Rhodes is mine own familiar friend, his quarrels my quarrels and his country my country. In fact, I belong.

—Cynthia Stockley, Virginia of the Rhodesians (London: Hutchinson, 1903), 235

There is, in my opinion, no part of the British Empire that can look the future in the face with greater confidence than Southern Rhodesia. She has a fertile soil, a salubrious climate, vast underdeveloped mineral resources, and in no part of the British Empire is there a finer population of British stock.

—Sir John Chancellor, retiring governor general of Southern Rhodesia, ‘Progress and Development of Southern Rhodesia’, Journal of the Royal African Society 28.110 (1929): 153

Much has been written about Cecil Rhodes and his dreams of British imperial expansion.¹ In his now (in) famous “confession of faith”, he baldly stated that

Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.²

Using a combination of both his personal fortune and capitalising on his political connections in the Cape Colony and Britain, Rhodes began his campaign for the “far interior” in order to fulfil his ambition of spreading British influence from “Cape to Cairo”.³ His desire to colonise Mashonaland was precipitated by the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef in 1886 in the South African Republic (ZAR), as Paul Kruger’s republic began to supersede the diamond rich British Cape Colony. Increasing contact between the ZAR and the Ndebele King Lobengula Khumalo galvanised Rhodes into action, as he unsuccessfully tried to persuade the governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Hercules Robinson, to declare the area a protectorate.⁴ Unbowed, Rhodes decided that the next best thing was to dispatch missionary, and by this time, assistant commissioner in Bechuanaland, John Moffat to Lobengula’s court, the upshot of which was Lobengula’s signing of what became known as the Moffat Treaty on February 11, 1888.⁵ Evidence of ‘imperial influence without imperial responsibility’,⁶ the treaty sought to make Matabeleland a British sphere of influence.

Returning to Britain to stoke the imperial fires, Rhodes was dismayed to find that other groups were attempting to lobby the Colonial Office in order to gain a royal charter. Spurred into action, he dispatched Charles Rudd, James Rochfort-Maguire and Francis Thompson to meet with Lobengula, which culminated in the signing of the Rudd Concession, a document which furthered Rhodes’s interests and promised Lobengula that no more than ten white men would settle in his lands.⁷ With the Rudd Concession in hand, Rhodes began the complicated process of applying for a royal charter for his British South Africa Company (BSAC), which was granted on October 29, 1889.⁸ The following May, Frank Johnson, working for Rhodes, assembled and dispatched a pioneer column, guided by the explorer Frederick Selous. Regarding the armed column as a ‘knife to cut through the Ndebele crust and obtain a number of juicy plums’, Rhodes intended that members of the column would become settlers in the newly acquired lands.⁹ Under instructions to circumvent Lobengula’s land, but to use force should it be needed, the column hoisted the Union Jack at what would become Fort Salisbury on September 13, 1890.

From Frontier to Settlement: Creating a White Man’s Country

A month after reaching Fort Salisbury, the pioneer column was disbanded with its members free to peg their promised 15 gold claims and claim their three thousand acre farms.¹⁰ Unequivocally convinced of their superiority to indigenous peoples and their entitlement to the newly acquired land, the pioneers nonetheless suffered a number of setbacks, including heavy rainfall, bouts of malaria, shortages of supplies and the fact that the expected gold fields never materialised on a large scale. While Rhodes continued to use his personal fortune to quell dissatisfaction, he tried to convince the pioneers that their trials were ‘the price of creating a new extension to empire’.¹¹ Clashes between white settlers and the Ndebele were avoided until 1893, when Leander Starr Jameson raised an army to attack Lobengula, under the pretext of defending the Shona community near Fort Victoria, which had recently fallen prey to an Ndebele raid.¹² Covetous of the rumoured gold deposits in Matabeleland, Rhodes used the incursion as a pretext to extend the BSAC’s sphere of influence. Despite their reputation as formidable warriors, the Ndebele provided little match for the volunteer army, which used Maxim guns to subdue their opponents. Laying waste to Lobengula’s kingdom, this event ‘paved the way for the full establishment of British colonial rule in the region’, with land being ‘parcelled out to colonial settlers for mining and agricultural purposes’.¹³ For the members of Rhodes’s column, the 1893 war meant that ‘the whisky-soaked frustration and wretchedness of the last few years in Mashonaland’ had not been for nothing.¹⁴

The white settlers, however, soon saw a challenge to their dominance. With approximately five hundred men involved in the Jameson Raid, news spread quickly about the outcome of the ill-fated expedition amongst the Ndebele, with the settlers being ‘vulnerable as never before’.¹⁵ Seizing the moment, Ndebele groups in March 1896, followed by Shona groups in June 1896, attacked and killed members of the white community. Unleashing ‘a spirit of fury’ amongst the whites, reprisals were bloody and sustained, with the ‘crushing of the rebellion reaffirm[ing] the white man’s conquest’.¹⁶ In the course of analysing the war, the scholarship of Terence Ranger has emphasised the importance of spirit mediums in uniting the Ndebele and Shona against white settler rule. In Ranger’s interpretation, the 1896/7 war, or first Chimurenga, was a sign of proto black nationalism, while other authors such as David Beach place less emphasis on the unity of the movement.¹⁷ Alois Mlambo offers a more holistic appraisal, contextualising the war against growing dissatisfaction with white settler rule, including ‘numerous’ taxation demands. These issues were also compounded by a variety of natural disasters, including rinderpest, drought and an infestation of locusts.¹⁸

While the period 1890–1902 has been described as one of ‘speculation and violence’, it also witnessed, as far as whites were concerned, the transformation of a frontier into a nascent settlement.¹⁹ By March 1895, there were 1,329 white men and 208 white women in Bulawayo, roughly six men for every one woman.²⁰ In 1891, white women were permitted to enter the country, often doing so as nurses or teachers, seeking new opportunities that were not afforded to them in the Cape Colony or the British metropole.²¹ As Deborah Kirkwood notes, although the first days of settlement ‘were adventurous and gay they were also very rough and uncomfortable’.²² One such woman, Mrs Mary Blackwood Lewis, depicted the trials, tribulations and rewards of life as an early settler in Mashonaland.²³

In October 1897, Blackwood Lewis was awaiting instruction from her fiancé, David Morall Lewis, regarding the prospect of her travelling from Mooi River in the Colony of Natal to Salisbury, Rhodesia. Wondering what ‘fate awaits me in that new savage country… [as] the rebellion is scarcely over’, she sailed from Durban to Delagoa Bay, following which she caught a train from Beira to Salisbury.²⁴ Feeling ‘like an African explorer already’, the journey took her over five hundred kilometres in which she travelled through ‘the dead flat country seeing no sign of human habitation’. Upon reaching Umtali, ‘a baby town’ that was ‘raw and unfinished’, she encountered Cecil Rhodes.²⁵ Possessing ‘wonderful ice-blue eyes’ yet wearing an ‘odd costume: white flannel trousers shrunk to his ankles, a pair of veldt-schoens [rawhide shoes], and a funny shallow hat’, Rhodes was ‘apparently pleased to see a woman coming to settle and make a home in his country’.²⁶ Immediately after their marriage on November 25, the Blackwood Lewises left for Salisbury where Mary remarked upon the kindness and determined spirit of the white people that she met.²⁷ Finally reaching Salisbury, her letters increasingly begin to comment on the landscape and the domestic setting, particularly her interactions with African servants. Remarking that the extent of the cook’s skills was boiling water and that ‘the house boy [adult male African] has never been in a house before and does not know a plate from a saucer’, Blackwood Lewis began to concern herself with their “improvement”.²⁸ Finding this a demanding task as ‘all the natives are savages except a few from Portuguese territory’, she nonetheless felt that “native improvement” was the duty of the white woman.²⁹ Reflecting on this further, she wrote that while ‘the natives are quick to learn… they must be caught young since they become stupid as they grow older’. African servants, according to Blackwood Lewis, were therefore a necessary evil; beasts of burden who were there to be moulded and recast as productive subordinates.

In particular, Blackwood Lewis hoped that the efforts of white women to “domesticate” their servants would ensure that there would not be another “uprising” (referring to the 1896/7...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Map of Zimbabwe
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Writing White Women, c. 1950–1980
• 1 Making Settlers Out of Pioneers: White Women and the Development of Rhodesia, 1890–1940
• 2 The Politics of Pots and Pans: Miriam Staunton, Gender Norms and the Federation of African Women’s Clubs, 1950–1970
• 3 “Think[ing] Black”: Eileen Haddon, Multiracialism and Majority Rule, 1953–1965
• 4 Struggles within the Struggle: Diana Mitchell, Opposition Politics, Liberalism and Women’s Liberation, 1965–1979
• 5 “Imperialists Stuck in a Time Warp”?: White Women, Memory and the History of Rhodesia
• Conclusion: White Women in Colonial Rhodesia
• Index