Wednesday 12 December 1979 was a momentous day in Zimbabwean history, the date on which the long-postponed constitutional processes of decolonisation that would create Zimbabwe began. Fourteen years and one month after the segregationist Rhodesian Front (RF) party had illegally declared the colony of Southern Rhodesiaâs independence from Britain on 11 November 1965 (known as the Unilateral Declaration of Independence or UDI), British colonial control was, briefly, assumed. After months of negotiations, the British government despatched Lord Soames to the capital, Salisbury, to resume British sovereignty over the rebel republic.1 The countryâs most popular daily newspaper, The Herald, reported that: âThe governor will step onto Zimbabwe Rhodesian soil soon after 2p.m. to bring the country under direct British rule for the first time in its historyâ.2 The next day, the paper reported that the changeover was relatively muted. Upon landing at Salisbury airport on a gloomy afternoon, Soames inspected a small guard of honour provided by the countryâs police force, the British South Africa Police (BSAP), and then drove immediately to Government House, which had lain empty since the resignation of the previous British Governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, in 1969.3 Ian Smith, the man who, as Prime Minister and leader of the RF, had declared independence in 1965, was invited to greet Soames but declined to do so.4
Soamesâ arrival generated mixed reactions among white Rhodesians, reflecting their weariness after years of war and privation. After UDIâs brief honeymoon period between 1965 and 1972, Rhodesians had been at the centre of an expanding and ever-bloodier civil war.5 By 1979, thousands had âgapped itâ, or taken the âchicken runâ, as emigration was derisively known by those who stayed behind.6 In such a small society as white Rhodesia, many of the families that remained had experienced death, disablement or dispossession. The suffering caused by the war that the whites had provoked was inflicted a hundredfold upon the countryâs black African population as thousands of ordinary Africans in rural areas often found themselves targets for horrific, tit-for-tat, violence and intimidation. Uprooted and dumped into protected villages (PVs), tens of thousands of Africans in 1979 were âbehind the wireâ; others were mutilated or killed on a daily basis by guerrillas or Rhodesian special forces posing as guerrillas.7 While whites were the ones complaining about the hardships of conflict, it was mostly black Africans who were victims of a shadow war in which each side sought to attribute the worst atrocities to the other. They were the ones reaping the bloody harvest the whites had sown with UDI.
In this context, in which the country had already been through one ostensible national transition, from white-ruled âRhodesiaâ to purportedly majority-ruled âZimbabwe-Rhodesiaâ in 1978â1979, Soames had arrived to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire and independence elections in which all parties to the conflict could participate. The major externally based nationalist organisations, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African Peopleâs Union (ZAPU), had been proscribed by the government for well over a decade. At Lancaster House in London, they had agreed to instruct their military wings, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army and the Zimbabwe Peopleâs Revolutionary Army (ZANLA and ZIPRA, respectively) to report to holding camps and lay down their arms. Meanwhile, the white-led Rhodesian armed forces were to remain in their barracks. All of this was to be overseen by a small contingent of troops from across the former British Empire known as the Commonwealth Monitoring Force, along with an incongruous contingent of British âbobbiesâ who came out to oversee the elections.8
Soamesâ return, and what it represented, caused resentment among some whites, who expressed their views to The Herald about being âback under the Jackâ in the days after his arrival.9 One such letter, from Miss A. Mitchell on 13 December, observed:
I note with utter amazement the preparations and in many cases the jubilation on the part of many Zimbabwe Rhodesians over the arrival of the British Governor to this country.Have we all been so brainwashed over the last year or two that we have lost all our fight and are now ready to accept anything which is handed out to us by the double-dealing British Government? I sincerely hope our memories are not that short.10
The same day PM Taylor expressed hope that Soames was: ânot going to be accorded pomp and ceremony. Let him know just how greatly his imposition is resentedâ.11 Meanwhile, The Herald reported that a small crowd of supporters had gathered to welcome the governor, singing âGod Save the Queenâ and raising the Union Jack in a display which another letter writer described as ânauseatingâ.12 Some white Rhodesians such as âWonderingâ jokingly asked if they were now eligible for British âbenefitsâ such as the NHS and state pension system.13
Joan Pohl, of Centenary, was more resigned in a Christmas Day letter pointedly titled âInvaded â this city I used to loveâ. She described a remarkably unlucky visit to Salisbury on the same day Soames had arrived. First, Pohlâs favourite dog had died at the vets (âPart of our security goneâ), her car had been broken into, and her drive home involved a large detour due to a âcontactâ (slang for an engagement between armed forces); this was all the fault of the new administration.14 She lamented the arrival of â[t]he others, the ones from outside who have come to record our agony, and who gathered in chattering groups, managing our affairsâŠâ15 Finally, she remained confident in her support of the RF, the popular white settler political party which had ruled Rhodesia since UDI, and what it had stood for: âin spite of all the awful things that have happened to us in the last 14 years I still think Ian Smith is the greatestâ.16 Other writers were fearful of the future. Lynald Pritchard urged readers to âRemember Kenyaâ; Mau Mau had long been a bogeyman of Rhodesiaâs white settler community, warning that: âAfter our independence Britain intends to desert us, even in the face of constant threats that the war will escalateâ.17 Some were more accommodating; D. Dur of Salisbury defended the singing of âGod Save the Queenâ, arguing that âRhodesia is a British colony⊠[the Rhodesian national anthem] is widely regarded as the âRF anthemâ and is eschewed by all who deplore the bloodshed unleashed against our country by the RFâs squalid objectivesâ.18
These white reactions: anger and fear of the war, ânauseaâ at the prospect of majority rule, tired resignation and quiet relief, reflected the complicated status of âRhodesiaâ as an entity in the minds of white settlers. To a few, Rhodesia had always been a British colony, in name if not in administrative minutiae, and the past fourteen years had simply been an unpleasant interlude. For others, UDI was a brave and vigorous experiment in settler rule in post-colonial Africa which had been cruelly and unjustly cut short. Some were simply glad that their privations appeared to be over, whereas others were anxious about what the future would bring. The letters pages of The Herald in 1979 were suffused with notions of loyalty, identity and nationality but they were a rehash of debates which had been taking place in the country for decades, with roots stretching back beyond 11 November 1965. The events that occurred in 1979 and 1980 as the âRhodesiaâ that most whites recognised collapsed demonstrates the messy and unsatisfactory resolution of these earlier debates about what âRhodesiaâ was and what it meant to be âRhodesianâ. In the mid-1960s, the RF embarked upon a remarkable attempt to freeze time in an aspic of white settler rule. It tried to build a new nation but found itself inextricably bound to its British colonial past. Yet, as the letters show, amidst the ruins of the white Rhodesian nationalist dream, something endured. The character of the RFâs nation-building project failed to create a lasting state, it was too narrow and exclusionary for that, but it did create lasting senses of belonging and community. It shaped mentalities that reverberated around the continent, the world, and even back into the imperial metropole and which continue to have resonance in the present day, over half a century later.
This book is about that nationalist endeavour, its successes, failures, inspirations, operations and implications for the viability of a white-ruled Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s. It considers how white Rhodesians held a dialogue with themselves about who they wanted to be and the nation to which they wanted to belong, often in complete disregard of the wishes of the (black) majority of the countryâs population. It looks at a range of key themes to explore the evolution of white nationalism in Rhodesia: the significance of national symbols and the processes by which they are invented, the importance of transnational contexts and relationships to ostensibly national movements, the implicit and explicit operations of strictly policed racial boundaries, and the impact of militarisation upon settler society. These themes emerge repeatedly from the following chapters and are analysed through several main frames of reference, which we shall consider in turn.
Siting Settler Colonialism: Rhodesia in Perspective
Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s was a place profoundly shaped by time, and by regional and global processes of decolonisation and post-colonial nation-building. White-ruled Rhodesia briefly formed a nexus at which these wider phenomena intersected. This book explores how white settlers in Rhodesia (white Rhodesians) responded to the end of the British Empire in Africa and how they tried to build a post-colonial, white-ruled nation on the African continent. The Rhodesian rebellion took place at a time when concepts of post-colonial nationhood in Africa, though gaining pace through formal decolonisation, remained fluid and contested. In 1965, Franceâs bloody war in Algeria, concluded in 1962, remained fresh in the memory, and in the nearby Congo, which had been wracked by conflict since its independence in 1960, Joseph Mobutu seized power, beginning his 32-year reign.19 Closer to home in Southern Africa, when Rhodesia illegally declared its independence, it was almost completely surrounded by friendly states: the Portuguese colonie...