BACKGROUND TO CONFLICT: RHODESIA
Hatch, John
Background to Conflict by JOHN HATCH TPwo years ago I was talking to a white building worker in the Chalet Bar in one of Salisbury's artisan districts. The Central African Federation was...
...The Central African Federation was breaking up, leaving Southern Rhodesians to contemplate a lonely future between the African-governed states of Zambia and Malawi to JOHN HATCH is currently the director of the Inter-University African Studies Program at Texas Southern University...
...The fact that Britian retained much of her responsibility for these two territories, even after they became units within the federation, gave the Africans greater freedom to organize than their cousins under the continued settler rule in Southern Rhodesia...
...Moreover, in the negotiations preceding the dismantling of the federation, the Rhodesians had been given most of the federal army and air force...
...With only 220,-000 whites in Southern Rhodesia, and half this number in Kenya and Northern Rhodesia combined, Britain no longer gave political power to white oligarchies...
...One of them said: "But I simply couldn't live in England...
...Smith tried to persuade, first, British Prime Minister Douglas Home, and then Harold Wilson, to give Rhodesians independence on his promise that Africans would slowly be allowed to advance...
...He is the author of "Africa Today—and Tomorrow" and "A History of Postwar Africa...
...Northern Rhodesia proceeded to become the independent state of Zambia and Nyasaland became Malawi...
...First under the leadership of Sir Godfrey Huggins (now Lord Malvern), and then under Sir Roy Welensky, it seemed that a rich new state could be created, preserving all the privileged white life of the diminishing Empire...
...The same evening I listened to a couple of women talking in the hotel's television lounge...
...It might also lead Rhodesians to retaliate against Zambia, whose economy depends heavily on communications and power sources in Rhodesia...
...the Salisbury municipality was paying its African building workers about twenty cents an hour...
...Formerly he was Commonwealth Correspondent of the New Statesman and head of the British Labor Party's Commonwealth Department...
...The British government inherited the company's responsibilities, but had no desire to provide a new colonial administration...
...and about 30,000 police, mostly white...
...From the start it was opposed by African nationalists, who were organizing in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland...
...I only hope it comes without us noticing...
...But Britain kept responsibility for all external and international affairs, and retained ultimate authority...
...the 220,000 whites controlled the other fifty...
...They were substantially helped by the fact that in the Copper Belt many Africans were now being organized in trade unions, and that many Nyasas left their poor country to work in the factories and offices of southern Rhodesia...
...Background to Conflict by JOHN HATCH TPwo years ago I was talking to a white building worker in the Chalet Bar in one of Salisbury's artisan districts...
...I suppose we'll have to accept integration...
...When the first Prime Minister, Winston Field, failed to do so, he was replaced by Ian Smith, who is more extreme...
...The white worker summed up his attitude in blunt, earthy language: "Britain bloody well won't make us live under a bunch of black monkeys...
...They had lost, and in losing had thrown away the chance they might have had of becoming independent on their own in the early Fifties...
...And inevitably, this situation was seen as a trial of strength between African nationalism, now reaching to the Zambia border with Rhodesia, and white supremacy, extending from Rhodesia into South Africa and the Portuguese territories...
...The company completed the conquest of the area by defeating the Matabele and Mashona tribes during the ensuing decade...
...By 1962, the nationalists had won— but only in the north...
...They set about organizing the masses to repulse the advance of the white bourgeoisie...
...Unfortunately for the Africans, nationalism in Rhodesia itself, still harried, banned, and persecuted, was now fatally divided...
...Even when they did attempt to build political parties, they were harassed or banned, and the leaders imprisoned...
...Recognizing that African advances will lower their inflated standard of living in an underdeveloped country, Rhodesian whites closed their ranks behind Smith...
...Under their new constitution they were allowed to elect their own parliament and government, which had powers to legislate for all domestic affairs except that the British government retained a veto over any laws considered discriminatory against the Africans...
...You need a fabulous income to have just one servant...
...Thus Britain did not have the powers of coercion which had enabled her to discipline other colonies where she held control of all military and police forces...
...This provided them with a white army of 11,000 regulars and first-line reservists...
...It is...
...Unfortunately, the Africans in Southern Rhodesia, partly because they were a conquered people, partly because of the stringent laws, never showed much strength of organization...
...Only by invading the colony with armed forces could control be regained...
...When British Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused to remove their colonial status and give them independence, the Rho-desians took the law into their own hands and on November 11 declared themselves a sovereign state...
...On the outcome of this confrontation will depend the future of white-black relations throughout Africa, in the Commonwealth, and in much of the rest of the world...
...Harry Nkumbula and Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodes', with Hastings Banda and his lieutenants in Nyasaland, recognized the danger of the federation becoming a pale reflection of South African apartheid...
...In 1923, the British South Africa Company's charter expired...
...In 1953 the two were federated, along with Nyasaland, another reservoir of cheap labor...
...After World War II many more British came to the Rhodesias, attracted by the affluent life and the opportunity to escape from Labor rule at home...
...For the days of the white settler bourgeoisie in Africa were numbered...
...Wel-ensky's federal policy was to maintain white control, but to neutralize African nationalism by encouraging a small African middle class to emerge, allied to white society...
...the north, and South Africa's apartheid to the south...
...The British Parliament still held jurisdiction over Rhodesia...
...The Southern Rhodesian whites had gambled on gaining independence within an economically powerful federation...
...thus most of the Europeans lived in the two large cities, Salisbury and Bulawayo, or in the smaller towns of the country areas...
...The two leaders, Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole, were in open conflict, their followers pursuing fratricidal war...
...The issue narrowed down to whether Britain could be induced to grant independence to a privileged white oligarchy, or Rhodesian whites could be persuaded to allow a phased advance towards popular democracy...
...Remembering the lesson of South Africa, Home and Wilson refused...
...Only the preservation of racial discrimination can preserve the upper middle-class life of the white workers and farmers...
...There was to be no integration...
...So in 1923, while Southern Rhodesia became self-governing, Northern Rhodesia became a British protectorate, as was her neighbor, Nyasaland...
...a small, but efficient air force...
...By a margin of about four to three the Southern Rhodesian whites decided to govern themselves...
...They found themselves members of a small, privileged community living among the conquered African masses...
...But the British government had no power to enforce its authority...
...The proposal for amalgamation of the two Rhodesias was revived, for now the southerners realized the economic advantages which would accrue from the wealth in the north...
...African nationalism proved too strong for him...
...My building worker informant was paid the equivalent of $1.35 an hour...
...It was diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSA) which brought white rule to the country in 1890...
...The struggle is also one of class...
...They had persuaded the British that they must be allowed to form their own states, under African government, and break away from the white-dominated federation...
...Because Rhodesian whites are British, with many relatives and friends among the British electorate, such an act might be political suicide for any British government...
...In constitutional terms they became a "self-governing colony...
...The collapse of the federation left both the British and the Southern Rhodesians in an awkward position...
...In every case in which Britain gave a colonial territory independence, the will of the people had been expressed through adult suffrage...
...But in Rhodesia (the new name for Southern Rhodesia) the first Africans entered parliament only at the beginning of 1963...
...Their leaders were more successful than previously in their attempts to marry the copper wealth of Northern Rhodesia to the commercial life of Southern Rhodesia...
...Britain consistently refused to allow the merger, largely on the grounds that racial policy in the self-governing south was more discriminatory than that under British colonial rule in the north...
...In making this challenge, the white Rhodesians have thrown down the gauntlet to the whole of black Africa north of their borders, to British power, and to the United Nations...
...The white workers and farmers thus became a privileged aristocracy, able to draw on an unlimited supply of cheap black labor without having to worry about providing any considerable revenues for social security, unemployment benefits, and national education, as they would in Britain...
...By his unilateral declaration of independence on November 11, Ian Smith has proclaimed the determination of white Rhodesians to maintain their racial-class state structure, defying Britain, the Africans, the British Commonwealth, and the world to interfere...
...Europeans had been attracted by the prospects of farming, for half the land had been reserved for white use...
...He included a few Africans in his party and even gave one or two of them minor positions in his government...
...The Southern Rhodesian government was also empowered to establish its own civil service, police, and armed forces...
...At the opening of the new parliament after national elections, Prime Minister Ian Smith's government claimed that it now had a mandate for full independence...
...Their wages were considerably higher and they could afford cheap servants and luxurious houses...
...And as Los Angeles learned in the Watts riots, an amalgam of race and class bitterness is an explosive mixture...
...By that time the number of white settlers had increased to about 35,000, mostly from Britain but some from South Africa...
...But their farming was not particularly successful, and the minerals which Rhodes had hoped to find were never very extensive...
...In Kenya they had succumbed to the African proletariat...
...but this is only half its character...
...The nationalists therefore had an organizational base on which to build their political movements...
...In the midst of the international furor which has followed this declaration of independence, it has been assumed that the conflict within -Rhodesia is a racial battle...
...In Rhodesia, Britishers found life much easier and more comforable than at home...
...So Britain gave the white settlers the alternatives of either joining South Africa or becoming self-governing...
...Visiting Salisbury again last summer I was left in no doubt that it was the building worker's outlook which had prevailed...
...in Northern Rhodesia the same process was occurring...
...And it was the BSA which ruled Rhodesia until 1923...
...This move had been rejected, largely because the Southern Rhodesians feared that progress towards self-government would be retarded if they merged with the less developed northerners...
...The climate was excellent, taxes and the cost of living low, and open-air pleasures abounded...
...And then the four million Africans could only count on fifteen seats...
...Now it was too late...
...But the federal experiment failed...
...From the time of World War I there had been suggestions that the two halves of Rhodesia, Northern and Southern, should be amalgamated...
...They perceived the chance of becoming a new bourgeoisie—replete with servants, cars, clubs, swimming pools—a state which few of them could ever attain at home...
...The federation was broken up...
...only an act of this Parliament could bestow sovereignty on the Rhodesians...
...At the end of 1962, the white Rhodesians elected a Rhodesian Front government to stem the advance of African egalitarianism and to free them from British interference...
...Between the two World Wars, however, the copper deposits in Northern Rhodesia were found to be rich, while the world had begun to demand increasing supplies of the mineral...
...From the beginning the white settlement of Rhodesia was based on commercialism...
Vol. 30 • January 1966 • No. 1
