Class, work and whiteness

Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79

Nicola Ginsburgh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526143891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.

CHAPTER ONE

The making of white worker identity

Prior to the First World War white industrial action and labour organisation was largely absent. For white workers conditions in early years of settlement were poor; working twelve hours a day was not uncommon, overtime was unpaid and authoritarian tactics were regularly used by employers to quell dissent and instil discipline.¹ Struggles to establish trade union organisations were met with fierce resistance from management.² Only in the building industry were attempts at organisation successful; the first white trade union was established in 1910 in a bid to secure uniform wages among European employees.³ Notably, this first trade union was formed upon a racially exclusive demand that invoked an imagined standard of living determined by race and gender, which would remain a central rallying cry of white labour organisation throughout minority rule. From the outbreak of the First World War, the position of white workers altered. The cost of living rose by 59 per cent between 1914 and 1920 and an acute shortage of skilled labour put remaining white workers in a strong position to challenge employers.⁴ Under conditions of skilled white labour shortage a lightning strike of firemen at Bulawayo in 1916 saw the men gain an extra shilling a day. The Rhodesia Railway Workers’ Union (RRWU) was established in the same year. In 1917 five hundred men signed resignation letters in protest at their conditions, which ultimately forced the administration into arbitration in 1918. Two successful strikes in 1919 and 1920 saw railway workers secure a 25 per cent raise and an eight-hour day.⁵ Although the RRWU sought to unite European men from all grades it was dominated by lower semi- and unskilled grades such as pumpers, gangers and stewards. A rival craft union, the Amalgamated Engineers Union (AEU), a branch of the South African union eager to spread their influence into Rhodesia, was successfully established in 1916 and proved more attractive to most of the skilled workers on the railways and the mines.⁶ On the mines unionisation occurred at a slower place as organisation was frustrated by the uneven distribution of white miners who worked in more disparate groups and smaller numbers than found on the railway system. In 1918 a strike at the Cam & Motor mine by white employees saw all strikers replaced by new workers. However this was followed by a successful strike of mine workers the following year and the establishment of the Rhodesia Mine and General Workers’ Association (RMGWA). Other unions proliferated across the colony including the Postal Union, the Commercial Employees Association and craft unions of engineers, boilermakers, brickmakers and wood workers.⁷

This chapter explores the political and cultural identity of white workers at the height of this trade union strength and its rapid decline during the 1920s. This period has received the most sustained research into white labour and has generally focused upon questions of political economy, industrial action, trade union and parliamentary organisation and the ways in which white workers struggled to establish a privileged position, both in the labour market and within settler society more generally. Following Jon Lunn, this chapter seeks to move beyond this focus and interrogate the identity, culture and experiences of white workers.⁸ White workers were a heterogeneous formation but nevertheless coagulated around particular imperial, national, ethnic, class and gendered identities. What is explored here is how this ‘white worker’ identity variously encompassed and sometimes excluded or gradated other identities. Lunn has fruitfully used the notion of the bailiwick – the area in which workers could assert their limited authority and independence within wider systems and boundaries – and argued this space should be understood as a fundamental area of expression for white worker identity in which gendered and racial hierarchies were enforced.⁹ Yet while Lunn is attentive to portraying a self-determined culture and highlighting divisions within white labour, a sense of how this identity changed over time is absent from his analysis; the dynamism of white labour identity is lost under a series of reified markers of culture. This chapter seeks to overcome this through outlining some central tenets of white workers’ identity that were variously retained, transformed or discarded as the century progressed.

This chapter is largely based on European mining and railway trade union journals. On the railways a sense of community was fostered through union publications, particularly the RRWU’s Rhodesian Railway Review, which reported local union news, individuals and their successes, deaths, promotions and encouraged letter writing, poetry submissions, as well as boasting an entire page each issue dedicated to jokes and personal anecdotes. It detailed news of football leagues, picnics, dinner dances and social functions organised by railway wives. For the most part, women were absent from the Review. Articles directed at white women usually reaffirmed social norms, addressing cooking skills or giving domestic tips. Like the RRWU, the RMGWA produced a journal during the early 1920s, the Rhodesian Trade Union Review. This chapter also uses parliamentary debates and speeches by Rhodesia Labour Party (RLP) members, which reveal attempts to articulate a coherent white worker identity.

Clearly these views cannot be distilled into a homogenous white worker experience. The fundamental abstractness of class means there is not a singular identifiable and static white labour identity.¹⁰ Any attempt to recreate a singular representation of class is therefore replicating idealised projections rather than grasping the multifarious experiences of diverse social actors. Yet representations can give some insight into how white worker identity was articulated. Trade union journals are inevitably biased towards the voices of the trade union bureaucracy. Nevertheless, letter pages allow insight into the viewpoints of unionised or lay members of the unions and common themes emerge. Notably, these sources reveal how respectability became a key component of the idealised white worker. This respectability was made up of three major planks: a professed relative skill and education; self-sufficiency, which could include the provision for dependants; and productivity in manual labour – the process of creating tangible things – which was imagined as central to the production of civilisation. Yet many white workers failed to attain these signs of respectability.

These trade union journals also show how shame and pride were used to condition workers’ behaviours, and, as expressed emotions, engendered individual and collective self-esteem. Barbara Rosenwein has argued that emotional expression is conditioned and encouraged differently in particular social communities. Emotions result from judgements made whether something will be pleasurable, painful, impact upon us negatively or positively, but are also the product of cultural practices, morals and language. Rosenwein contends that people live and lived in ‘emotional communities’: social communities (whether families, neighbourhoods, churches or trade unions) with their own ‘systems of feeling’ and rules for the expression of emotions.¹¹ She challenges the researcher to unearth ‘what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations they make a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Graphs
• Tables
• Founding Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Terms
• Introduction
• Chapter One The making of white worker identity
• Chapter Two The Great Depression and shifting boundaries of ‘white work’
• Chapter Three The Second World War
• Chapter Four The ‘multiracial’ Central African Federation, 1953–63
• Chapter Five White fights, white flight and the Rhodesian Front, 1962–79
• Conclusion
• Selected bibliography
• Index