THE LAWRENCE F. BREWSTER
LECTURE IN HISTORY
The Ending of Apartheid in Zimbabwe
Presented by Ronald Robinson
November 1988
EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
GREENVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA 27858-4353
Foreward
The Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History series was established in 1981, and bears the name
of an esteemed professor in the Department of History. It has four goals: to provide students,
faculty, and members of the larger community with an opportunity to hear distinguished
historians share their knowledge and mastery of the discipline; to stimulate an exchange of
ideas and a continuing dialogue about issues of fundamental importance to mankind; to
illuminate the present state of human affairs through the reflective prism of the past, and to
support a critical requirement of modern times, the continuing process of education.
The first Brewster Lecture was presented in 1982, as part of East Carolina University's
seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. On that occasion Professor Arthur S. Link of Princeton
University lectured on Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World. The next year,
Fantasy and Reality in the West's Response to Asia was presented by Dr. Donald F. Lach of
the University of Chicago. The third lecture in the series, and the first to be published, was
The First Year of the Nazi Era: A Schoolboy's Perspective, presented in 1984 by
Professor Hans Schmitt of the University of Virginia. Professor David B. Quinn's Theory
and Practice: Roanoke and Jamestown followed in 1985. Central America: Historical
Perspectives on Revolution and Reaction, the fifth lecture in the series, was delivered in
1986 by Dr. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. of Tulane University. Dr. Milton M. Klein, Alumni
Distinguished Service Professor of History Emeritus of the University of Tennessee, presented
The Constitution in the Public Imagination in 1987, the Bicentennial of the United
States Constitution.
The East Carolina University Department of History is proud to publish the 1988 Brewster
Lecture, The Ending of Apartheid in Zimbabwe, by Dr. Ronald Robinson, Emeritus Beit
Professor of British Empire and Commonwealth History in Oxford University.
Charles W. Calhoun, Chairman
Department of History
Introduction of Professor Ronald Robinson
Clio, the muse of history, has bequeathed us a rare honor for the 1988 Brewster Lecturer.
Professor Ronald Robinson has trekked through thousands of documents and decades of analysis,
flown through the horror of war to land in the exhilaration of peace, and shared his wisdom
with forty years of enthusiastic students--all of this with his humor intact.
Professor Robinson is unusually Oxbridge; that is, part Oxford and part Cambridge. From 1971
to 1987 his duties and digs were in Oxford while his home, family, and alma mater remained in
Cambridge some seventy miles away. Each Friday evening during term after Oxford's Commonwealth
History Seminar, our lecturer rode the Oxbridge express through the cool English night to join
his family in Cambridge for another all too brief weekend.
A particularly strong influence on Professor Robinson was his old friend and Oxbridge
collaborator, John Gallagher, who was always close at hand with steady, warm advice from the
heart, and a cool pint from the wood. Noted for daring scholarship and public amusement, the
partnership of Robinson and Gallagher was in spirit the combined offspring of two other famous
teams: Charles and Mary Beard and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In a posthumous tribute
honoring Professor Gallagher, the noted historian Richard Cobb recalled the first time "Big
Jack" Gallagher introduced Cobb to Ronald "Robbie" Robinson in 1962. Cobb wrote:
When I first met Robbie Robinson--sliding down Staircase XXII, with a bowler hat
over his eyes--Jack introduced him as a bookie friend of his, warning me at the same time to
keep a firm hold on my wallet. ... If Robbie was--and is--in the habit of dividing the world
between "the sort of chap I would not mind flying with" and "not the sort of chap I would go
flying with," Jack loved to tease Robbie about a flight they had once taken. Robbie, an
experienced pilot, and Jack decided to fly from Cambridge to nearby Colchester in order to eat
oysters. Flying over a town, Robbie said: "Look, that is Colchester." But, once they landed,
it turned out to be Peterborough.
Their unexpected destination, the equivalent of flying from Greenville to New Bern, but
landing in Wilson, symbolized their surprising conclusions about imperialism.
Prior to the 1950s, historians described imperialism as if rulers had no subjects and as if
Europe had annexed African countries without reference to important events in Africa. In 1953
Robinson and Gallagher offered a new interpretation in their article, "The Imperialism of Free
Trade," published in the Economic History Review. This provocative essay explored what
they called "the informal empire of influence." Either through collaborators in Africa or in
consequence of African resistance movements, British and European imperialism advanced in the
birthplace of humanity. The crucial factors, Robinson and Gallagher argued, were local
circumstances in overseas societies. Their ideas have been articulated in numerous scholarly
articles and most fully in their classic book, Africa and the Victorians.
More recently, Professor Robinson has extended the periphery of his thesis in what he
metaphorically calls the "excentric" view. Essentially, Professor Robinson has written, the
"excentric" view sees imperialism as a
"set of reflex actions between European and... [African] components. From Europe
stemmed the economic drive and strategic imperative to secure its gains against rivals in
world politics. [From Africa came] . . . indigenous collaboration and resistance. [Empire was
created] . . . only when [these forces] operated at cross purposes.
Ronald Edward Robinson was born in London on 3 September 1920 to Ada Theresa and William
Edward Robinson. Our Brewster Lecturer's undergraduate studies were interrupted by world war.
Flight Lieutenant Robinson, after receiving flight training in southern Africa, flew for the
58th Bomber Squadron of the Royal Air Force. In recognition of his bravery and patriotism, he
received the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1944. After the war he completed work on his B.A.
at St. John's College, Cambridge. Graduate school and employment as a Research Officer in the
African Studies Branch of the Colonial Office followed. Then, on an unusually lovely London
day, while visiting the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, Ronald Edward Robinson met
Alice Josephine Denny of Washington, D. C. Anglo-American parents of two sons and two
daughters since, and more recently, proud grandparents on two continents and in three
countries, the Robinson family is truly international, perhaps even imperial! In 1971
Professor Robinson succeeded Professor Gallagher as Beit Professor of British Empire and
Commonwealth History in Oxford University. Professor Robinson has also held visiting
professorships at Princeton University and the University of South Carolina.
Because of his expertise in African affairs, the British Government sent Professor Robinson to
southern Africa in 1980 to observe the elections and the transfer of power from Rhodesia and
Ian Smith to Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe. Professor Robinson will share with us his experience
and interpretation of recent events in Zimbabwe and southern Africa.
The Department of History of East Carolina University is pleased to have this distinguished
scholar speak on "The Ending of Apartheid in Zimbabwe" for the 1988 Lawrence F. Brewster
Lecture in History.
Kenneth E. Wilburn
Assistant Professor
Department of History
The Ending of Apartheid in Zimbabwe
Ronald
Robinson
Chancellor Eakin, Ladies, and Gentlemen,
Thank you at the outset for the privilege, if not the honor of giving this year's Lawrence F.
Brewster Lecture; the honor is due to the name of a distinguished professor who, remembering
his own difficulties as a student and teacher, generously provides better opportunities of
study for those of today.
The rubric for the Brewster series sets the lecturer a delicate task. He has to explain his
personal approach to history, which is not easy to do without talking too much about himself.
He must demonstrate it by dealing on this occasion with a topic in recent African history,
which is hard to do without confessing it was wide of the mark. Excuses will be made in
advance on account of the peculiarities of the field.
The course of modern history in the continent, though comparatively brief, has changed
abruptly over time, especially in the age of decolonization, and approaches have shifted
rapidly at the turn of events. After European invaders had rough-hewn a thousand indigenous
regimes with countless peoples into forty-eight colonial states a century or so ago, they
seemed destined to rule forever. Hence, up to the Second World War, African history was
written largely in terms of European imperialism and colonization; that of the Africans was
not only unknown, but seemingly abolished, until within the next two decades African
nationalists swiftly took over most of the colonies. Now the Europeans were to be discounted.
Historians and social scientists wrote of black nations emerging heroically from pre-colonial
times to join the march of modern man to democracy and economic growth. It soon appeared,
however, that not even black Africa, the traditional repository for the Edens of European
romance, could leap into Utopia at a bound. As one by one the liberated states fell under
military rule or one party dictatorship, and the Cold War spread across the continent, the new
nationalist historiography in turn was thrown into disarray. Views of the post-colonial period
have become less enchanted, more confused. It is an age of political decolonization and
independence; it is an era of intensifying economic dependence and recolonization; it is a
period when some Africans are advancing to modernity; it is a time when others seem to be
slipping back. While powerful processes of state building and class formation are reshaping
indigenous organizations deeply, the historic character of modern Africa has yet to appear.
However scientific the approach, it is difficult to write a true short story without knowing
the ending or the moral.
Three events in particular, have altered perspective almost overnight. One was the British
grant of a power-sharing constitution to the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1951, which unexpectedly
opened the age of decolonization, and set West Africa irrevocably on the road to independence.
Another was the military coup that toppled Kwame Nkrumah, which with the civil wars in Zaire
and Nigeria in the sixties shattered the illusion of united, democratic national movements at
work in the newly independent states. The third took place in southern Africa a decade later,
where black and white freedom fighters were still struggling to decide the frontier between
the European and the black nationalist versions of African history. The outcome in Rhodesia,
with the revolutionary overthrow of Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique, shattered the
illusion of white invincibility in southern Africa.
In 1980 the small minority of white Rhodesians who had ruled for three quarters of a century,
handed over "their country" to a government elected by the majority of their former black
subjects. Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe; the past was a different country.1 Black Africa had annexed the northern salient of South African
Apartheid. This portentous event fascinates me personally not only as a historian but also as
one involved in policy studies of the region since 1947 in obscure official and unofficial
capacities. 2 On my earlier reading of long
historical trends this event ought not to have happened. Indeed, as I saw at first hand, it
very nearly did not happen in 1980. Those who went out with the governor, Christopher Soames,
knew that miracles would be required to bring about a cease fire and a free election in the
middle of a race war. When all was done, it seemed Providence had intervened to snatch a
relatively hopeful multi-racial settlement out of impending chaos. The first part of the
lecture reflects on the historical odds against an end to white rule, while setting the event
in perspective; the second part defines the more mundane shapes that Providence took in 1980.
How then are the historical odds in the long run to be assessed? A good way is to make use of
the official computer in the minds of the decision takers,
3 whose profession it is to gamble in futures on behalf of the public. From
experience stored in bureaucratic memory, they appreciate present disturbances in past trends,
calculate possible courses of action or inaction, and place their bets. They often do the
wrong thing for the right reason, occasionally, the right thing for the wrong reason. They
rarely confess their errors in public, but privately they do revise their official
historiography whenever blunders indicate the analysis has missed a vital part of the reality.
To view Africa through the eyes of policy makers, though unfashionable, has the advantages of
a kind of experimental, instant history, in a field where predictive models borrowed from
other continents, whether liberal or Marxist, tend to clatter into unreality. Historians
practicing the humbler art of chronology also link events into continuous movements with the
aid of hindsight, so that everything seems pre- determined. Yet, when a single event is
studied as a unique moment, the actors, blissfully unaware of the presumed continuum, appear
to be acting on quite other aims and motives toward an outcome they neither foresaw or
intended. Policy makers are specialists in the study of this disturbing hiatus between
instance and movement. Few approaches can match the official computer when it comes to
recalling the contemporary moment and exploring the shadow that falls between the
historiographic idea and the reality. Following this approach, let us look at the official
calculations which gave Rhodesia to the white settlers.
When in 1889, Lord Salisbury blessed and Cecil Rhodes undertook the planting of an English
colony north of the Limpopo River, they were speculating in imperial and mining futures.
Rhodes, founder of De Beers diamond syndicate in Kimberley, about to become premier of Cape
Colony, had a genius for making empire out of capital and capital out of empire.4 The financier needed the imperial flag in Zambesia to
legitimize his mineral claims to an imagined El Dorado; Salisbury annexed the country to
contain the expansion of the Transvaal republicans. A colony of empire loyalists was designed
to join a South African federation and reinforce its allegiance to the empire against
Afrikaner republicanism.5 The bargain was struck.
In return for a virtual monopoly of the country's real estate, Rhodes's South Africa Company
administered the colony at its own expense and linked it by rail to Kimberley and Cape Town.
In 1890 the pioneer column reached the site of Salisbury (Harare), where they laid out
boulevards wide enough to reverse their eight-span ox wagons. But, the auriferous reefs on
which Rhodes and Salisbury had relied did not materialize. Without a gold rush, few colonists
were attracted and these met fierce resistance from indigenous empire builders. After an
expensive war with Lobengula's impis and a widespread guerilla uprising6 centered on the shrines of Shona spirit mediums, only a few thousand
settlers had been planted on five or ten thousand acre farms and ranches. In South African
style, the defeated were driven by taxes to provide cheap labor. There was no self-financing,
self-governing colony of loyalists ready to join the Union of South Africa in 1909.7 The combined speculations of imperial strategists and
capitalist imperialists had created what looked like a white elephant.
Whitehall had to find other ways of transferring the financial liability for the colony in
1923, when the Company, which had never paid a dividend, insisted upon giving up the
administration. Judges had found that the mineral rights south of the Zambesi River belonged
not to the Company but to the Crown; where upon the directors sued the imperial government for
five million pounds of administrative deficits. Whoever else paid the debt Parliament was
promised, the British tax payer would not.8 For
financial no less than imperial reasons, Winston Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, decided it
was high time to carry out the original plan and bundle the colony into the South African
Union. His Boer War foe and World War I friend, General Smuts, the South African premier,
agreed: the Rhodesians would reinforce his loyalist party at the polls and strengthen the
imperial connection. In return, he would pay the debt to the company. Accordingly the two
imperial statesmen set about rigging the referendum in which the Southern Rhodesians were to
choose between the Union and self government.9
While Smuts offered generous bonuses for joining the Union, Churchill imposed punitive
financial terms on self government. Even so, the colonists rejected the Union alternative and
opted for "responsible government" by two thousand votes. Thirty thousand settlers had made
sport of a chimerical imperial strategy of thirty years standing. In pursuing it, the British
government had incidentally given administrative control over a million Africans to a handful
of colonists. If Churchill had had his way in 1923, there would have been no chance of black
majority rule for his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, to preside over in 1980.
The fiasco of British policy that led to a self-governing Southern Rhodesia left London in
effect with residual responsibility for a dependency of South Africa. The colony was financed,
owned, and developed largely by South African interests, its railways were part of the Union
system; most of its settlers came from the south, and its color bars in practice, if not in
law, followed the southern pattern. In spite of self government, subject to certain paper
safeguards for "native interests" reserved to London, Southern Rhodesia economically and
socially remained, as it was meant to be from the start, part of South Africa.
Northern Rhodesia, the Company's domain across the Zambesi River, was similarly dependent on
the south; indeed had the Southern Rhodesians entered the Union in 1923, the Northern
Rhodesians, as Smuts desired, might soon have followed. As it was, the northern territory,
without enough settlers for self government, was brought under the rule of the Colonial Office
in London. In the financial settlement, the Company's mining monopoly was confirmed, though
law officers advised the minerals rightly belonged to the Africans. The Company in turn
conveniently gave up its claim on the British Treasury for past administrative deficits.
10 From this curious accounting, when the rich copper
mines developed along the railway belt in the late nineteen twenties, the Company and its
subsidiaries owned and administered the colony's chief financial assets, leaving its official
administrators with a pittance to look after their black labor reserves in the countryside.
The fallacy of the old South African strategy finally ended when it had to be put in reverse.
From 1924 Afrikaner nationalists with little sympathy for the empire commonwealth ruled South
Africa during inter-war years. Hence, London stopped pushing the Rhodesians into the Union and
did its best to keep them out, with the idea of attaching them to the British dependencies in
East and Central Africa, and barring the northward advance of Afrikanerdom.
Moral eyebrows will be raised at the absence so far of imperial trusteeship for the Africans
in these calculations. They are a far cry from "the duty to protect native tribes from the
cupidity and crimes of that adventurous class of Europeans who lead the way in penetrating the
territories of uncivilised man,"11 accepted by
Parliament in 1837. The official computer did in fact take ethics into account, in so far as
they were practical politics. In southern Africa as elsewhere, the empire insisted on generous
"native reserves," and vetoed discriminatory laws, if only to avoid "native wars" and secure
cheap administration. But, ethics are expensive. Conscience was rarely acted upon unless
principle coincided with more profitable interests, able to meet the philanthropic charges. In
transferring imperial costs to colonial ministries in South Africa, the imperial authorities
had given up their power to act as trustee. Nor was this regarded as immoral at the time. The
ethic which prevailed up to the First World War assumed that an empire devoted to the benefit
of the Anglo-Saxon race would inevitably benefit other races most. As imperialists in clubs
put it, one Englishman was worth a thousand natives. In their anglocentric world picture, it
seemed unquestionably right that the ethic of trusteeship should be subsumed in the higher
morality of imperial kith and kin.
During the inter-war years advocates of equal rights for all the empire's subjects challenged
the racial imperialists, with the rise of Indian nationalism, British anti-imperialism, and
the League of Nations mandates. The values fed into the official computer began to change. In
1923 the Colonial Office noted the "struggle between two rival ideals--the one tending towards
equality of races, the other insisting on white supremacy."12 The struggle involved the future of British dependencies
throughout east and central Africa, while Parliament debated the issues as if they were simply
problems in applied ethics. Should Colonal Office rule be maintained until the African
majority could take a full part in the self government of these colonies? Or, should the
settler minority be allowed to take them over on the South African pattern? The debate began
in 1922, when the British Indian government pressed for equal rights with Europeans for the
Indian minority in Kenya. Treating Indians as third class citizens in Kenya, the Viceroy in
Delhi protested, was fueling Gandhi's agitation for independence in India.13 Churchill at the Colonial Office replied that the idea of putting
"a low caste of coolies" on an equal footing with Europeans was revolting to every white man
in British Africa.14 The settlers though few, he
warned the cabinet, were organizing a military coup against any attempt at equalization. To
use African troops against them was unthinkable, to send British troops to shoot their own
kith and kin was not practical politics; any Party rash enough to offend the racial sympathies
of the British public in this way would be punished at the next election. An imbroglio with
settlers for the sake of other races, he added, would also alienate white Rhodesians and South
Africans from the empire.15 The cabinet decided,
as on six subsequent occasions, to avoid the risk of a settler revolt at all cost; the Indians
in Kenya were denied "their rights;" the Europeans' exclusive voting privileges, with their
monopoly of land in the "White Highlands" were confirmed. British imperialists in London did
not want to turn the colony into another Ulster. To sugar the pill for progressive British and
Indian opinion, however, they justified their decision in terms of the overriding "paramountcy
of native interests."16 Kenya had been treated
hitherto as a white man's country, like Natal. Now the British government proclaimed it was
"primarily an African territory;" "the interests of the African natives must be paramount and
that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict,
the former should prevail."17 Paradoxically, the
new morality had won its first victory on paper when it was required to justify white color
bars to Indian nationalists and British liberals.
The declaration of the paramountcy principle, nonetheless, agitated the colonists from Kenya
to Rhodesia. To the bronzed settlers making sun-stricken lands green, it seemed to imply a
reversal of policy; the promotion of African peasant production instead of white farming;
Colonial Office rule until African majorities could take over, in place of white self
government. Four years later, the settlers made their bolt to escape from imperial
trusteeship, aided and abetted by white empire loyalist officials. Lord Delamere, leader of
the Kenya colonists, and Edward Grigg, the governor, set out to bring Uganda and Tanganyika
under a settler dominated government in Nairobi. At the same time the premier in Salisbury
planned with the governor in Livingstone to amalgamate Northern Rhodesia into self-governing
Southern Rhodesia. To forestall native paramountcy, settler supremacy was to be consolidated
eventually in a white dominion of east and central Africa. It might seem that this scheme for
riveting the rule of a few thousand settlers on millions of Bantu-speakers was a pipe dream,
but it hit upon the British politicians' craven fear of settler uprisings. The Africans were
not yet organized politically. Recalling the threatened revolt in Kenya, Leopold Amery, the
Colonial Minister, who could see no reason why real imperial interests should be endangered
for the sake of native paramountcy, recommended the plan to the cabinet. "It has been
increasingly demonstrated," he advised, "that government can only be carried on with the co-
operation of the [settlers], that pressure to extend their power will undoubtedly increase,
and that such an extension will ultimately have to be conceded."18 The sooner, the better. Imperial trusteeship, he announced, must
be shared with the settlers.
Powerful forces, however, rallied in defense of the new imperial ethic. West African governors
and the Indian viceroy joined churchmen and missionaries in protest while British businessmen
looked to African peasant farming rather than settlers to expand their interest. Since Amery's
proposals proved intensely controversial in Parliament and India and were strongly opposed in
West Africa,19 the Cabinet shelved them pending
a royal commission report. In 1930, Lord Passfield, the Labour Colonial Minister, reiterated
the native paramountcy principle in no uncertain terms. The dependencies were to be developed
through African producers who must therefore take priority over Europeans and Asiatics in the
distribution of land, investment, and social services. European immigration was to be
discouraged. Colonial Office rule was to continue until the African majority could take their
due share in central government. Meanwhile, assemblies of chiefs would counteract the
disproportionate influence of settler minorities in colonial administration. The exclusive
European franchise for seats in the legislative councils was to be abolished in favor of a
colorblind voting roll.20 In London at least,
the multi-racialists appeared to have won. It was otherwise in Africa. Southern Rhodesian
ministers protested officially, hinting at secession into the Union, while settlers in
Northern Rhodesia and Kenya ranted against a mother country unnaturally bent on betraying her
colonial sons. The governor in Nairobi openly attacked his masters in London; his colleague in
Livingstone calmed irate settlers with assurances that Passfield's declaration was tactlessly
phrased, academic, and meant no change in existing policy.
21 The Colonial Minister in London had to go back and tell the Cabinet that the
common roll could not be introduced without fighting the settlers, and as in 1923 and 1927, a
settler revolt could not be risked.22 Once again
the issues were remitted to a committee, which carefully fudged an ambiguous compromise
between the racial and multi-racial principles.
The forces converging on the destiny of East Africa from Britain and India, South and West
Africa had reached stalemate. The old racial ethic of empire had been vetoed by the new
imperial conscience; but the new multi-racial morality was still vetoed in practice by the
old. Under threats of settler revolt, the policy of native paramountcy remained largely an
aspiration on paper. Color bars in Kenya and Rhodesia were hardly dented.23Settler representation in colonial administration increased slowly
but inexorably. By 1942 it was still too risky to override the settlers for the sake of
advancing African interests. "The lesson of 1923 is always there," Arthur Dawe of the Colonial
Office noted, "It seems unthinkable now as then that any British government would bring
military force to bear upon a community of our own blood, who have supported the British cause
splendidly in this and the last war."24 British
ministers for the Colonies were still planning to transfer their meager authority to settler
leaders, and so "resolve the conflict between them and the advocates of a pro-native policy in
Great Britain,"25 which threatened to break up
the African empire. The imperial government might preach multi-racialism, the Colonial Office
might plan utopias in other peoples' countries, but the vision could not be translated to
Africa in the face of settler resistance. Since the colonists could not be coerced, they had
to be appeased. The empire had retained a measure of colonial control at the expense of
aborting its avowed native paramountcy policy. It was white freedom fighters, not black, who
were eroding imperial power in East and Central Africa during the inter-war years. Far from
the imperial dog wagging its white colonial tail, the white colonial tail was wagging the
imperial dog. Such were the historical odds in favor of the colonists taking Kenya and the
Rhodesias to independence under white minority rule, as calculated in a Colonial Office policy
study in 1948.26 They were to prove only too
realistic when the white favorite raced to win a Federation of Central Africa in 1953.
The Second World War revolutionized the relationship between Britain and the colonies in many
ways. While converting from arms to peace time production aided by American loans, the British
economy had little to export to the colonies, except constitutions. The colonial
administrations carried on the war time arrangements for expropriating their subjects' export
production on credit, to earn dollars, support Sterling, and reconstruct the British economy.
The imperial power as a result was heavily in debt to, and dependent on, the colonies. Full of
economic discontent with their rulers, the dependencies were vulnerable to nationalist
agitators. As early as 1942 the Colonial Office foresaw that "the present decade will see
changes in Africa greater than those achieved during the past in the passage of centuries.
Forces released by the war are gathering great velocity; the immigrant and indigenous
populations are rapidly becoming imbued with a sense of their own political rights, destiny
and power. How are these inexorable African forces to be reconciled with British interests
after the war?"27 The war weary empire was no
longer prepared to suppress them by force. A dwindling conscript army, already overstretched
guarding much of strategic Middle East and Asia, was responsible for half of Britain's fearful
balance of payments deficit. In the post-war euphoria for making all things new, the British
dreamed of developing the African colonies into new nations allied with the Commonwealth and
the Sterling area. There was only one way of keeping colonial control in Africa--to admit
subjects to an ever increasing share in colonial government. From 1947 onward, the Colonial
Office under Arthur Creech Jones began democratizing colonial administration first in the Gold
Coast, then in Nigeria, in order to win over African nationalists. After two decades self-
governing nations bound to the empire were expected to emerge.28 The introduction of the ballot box enabled the nationalists in
West Africa to win their independence outright in half that time. But in Central Africa, where
African nationalists had yet to organize popular support, no such advance to black majority
rule was possible. Before the imperial trustees ever thought of turning Northern Rhodesia into
another Gold Coast (Ghana), the Rhodesian colonists made their final bid to throw off Colonial
rule and establish white supremacy once and for all. An ingenious mixture of bluff and
"blackmail" brought things to a head between 1948 and 1951. The Southern Rhodesian premier,
Godfrey Huggins, an urbane surgeon, had won so many elections by promising amalgamation with
northern Rhodesia that he risked losing the next to the pro-South Africa party if he did not
bring it about soon. In Northern Rhodesia, Roy Welensky, trade union leader of the white
miners and railway workers on the Copper Belt, and political representative of the thirty
thousand Europeans, was determined to escape Colonial Office control by federating with the
hundred and thirty thousand whites in Southern Rhodesia. It was essential to consolidate the
economic and political color bars against competition from two million Africans, on which his
constituency's standard of living depended. Since Britain was in the throes of a prolonged
Sterling crisis, the two leaders held strong economic cards. If Welensky's white mine workers
went on strike as they had in 1946, they would cut off the only source of copper available for
reconstructing the British economy. In addition, dollar earnings from American contracts for
over four thousand tons a month would be lost. Just as the copper mines depended on coal from
Southern Rhodesia, the export of the metal depended on the supply of wagons on its railways.
With these economic aces, the colonists' leaders played for their political prizes. Huggins,
slowing the supply of coal and wagons, threatened to withdraw his economic cooperation, while
Welensky announced that the whites in the North would tolerate Colonial Office rule no longer,
unless the governor acted on his advice on all major issues. Without notice to London, at the
Victoria Falls conference in 1949, they concocted a constitution for amalgamating the
Rhodesias with Nyasaland under white minority rule. Bluff or not, it seemed the British
government was to be presented with a fait accompli.
At first Clement Attlee's Labour government in London found the colonists' demand utterly
unacceptable. To give a hundred and seventy thousand whites control over five and a half
million blacks was anathema to the Labour Party and liberal opinion. But, the issue could no
longer be stalled as it had been since the thirties, by saying "no" at present and "possibly"
in future. The whites in Northern Rhodesia in any event were within sight of self government.
Large British economic and strategic interests were involved. Andrew Cohen of the Colonial
Office, a lifelong enemy of Rhodesian amalgamation and racial discrimination, with Baxter of
the Commonwealth Office, persuaded ministers to take the initiative and negotiate some form of
loose federation not yet invented. His reasons were cogent. To rebuff the colonists outright
would surely be to put an end to cooperation with the empire in both Rhodesias. They would be
thrown into the orbit of South Africa, where Dr. Malan's anti-British Afrikaner nationalists
were initiating Apartheid. Huggins played skillfully on this imperial neurosis. Afrikaners
from South Africa, he reported, were pouring across his unpoliced border and strengthening the
pro-South Africa party. A large percentage of white trade unionists in Northern Rhodesia were
also Afrikaners affiliated with South African unions. Urgent measures for restricting
Afrikaner immigration were taken. Dismissed at first as moonshine, the Afrikaner scare seemed
real enough to Baxter and Cohen. They feared that unless a federation was worked out, Huggins
and Welensky, who after all were empire loyalists given their own terms, would be voted out of
office. They would be replaced by their more extreme Afrikaner opponents. In this fashion
Huggins warned London, the Rhodesians would ally with the Union before they would allow the
Colonial Office to turn the two northern dependencies into "communist" native states at Gold
Coast speed.
The economic case for federation fitted into the argument of imperial strategy. The American
and South African mining syndicates operating in the Rhodesias with the banks were backing
federation. A federal authority to coordinate railway operations and investment throughout the
region and plan its development as a whole, Cohen believed, was of major importance to the
Sterling area. It might take the form of a regional common services association; the three
territorial governments might delegate the necessary authority, but the federation must be
such as to retain control of native policy in the two northern territories in Colonial Office
hands. How African interests were to be thus separated from economic policy was not at all
clear, but somehow the circle had to be squared before it was too late.29 The Africans everywhere bitterly opposed federation. The first
thought of the imperial trustees was that there should be no federation without their consent,
but the second was that they did not know what was good for them. Cohen saw the nemesis of
Apartheid falling over the Africans. In an increasingly decolonized situation it was
unrealistic to expect Colonial Office rule to continue in Northern Rhodesia until black
majority rule became possible. It seemed better to obtain a quarter of a loaf for the Africans
from the settlers now, than to wait until they took over the imperial bakery. Then, the
Africans would get no bread at all. While the colonists' leaders made sure of a federation to
secure white supremacy, they were diplomatic enough to accept the necessity of taking educated
Africans into "junior political partnership" by way of a common roll and minor representation
in the Federal Parliament. Special institutions were written into the federal constitution
which the Colonial Office hoped would not only safeguard African interests but also liberalize
Southern Rhodesian native policy and break down industrial color bars. Such were the motives
that brought the imperial trustees to take part in setting up the ill-fated Central African
Federation in 1953, and the greatest of these was the idea of repelling Afrikaner republican
Apartheid and saving the region for the empire.30
Some of these calculations at least turned out to be correct in unexpected ways, when the
federation broke up in the early sixties. One of the British objectives had been to get a
better deal for Africans from the settlers. The Federation achieved this, paradoxically, by
provoking such powerful African national movements that black majority leaders were able to
wreck it and take power in Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).31 Another imperial calculation also came to pass,
though the Federation was intended to prevent it. In reaction to its collapse, Mr. Smith took
Southern Rhodesia out of the empire with his unilateral declaration of independence. As Cohen
had feared, the rebellion threw the country into the arms of the South African Republic,
32 which had left the Commonwealth in 1961. The
Nemesis of Apartheid did in deed fall on the Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Now, as for
decades past, the racial sympathy with the colonists among British voters at Home ruled out
imperial military intervention against the Rhodesian rebels. It took fifteen years of African
freedom fighting and international intervention to roll Apartheid back33 and bring Rhodesia under black majority rule.
Passing over the many fruitless efforts to bring about a Rhodesian settlement from 1963
onward, let us consider the providential deliverance of 1980 as some of the participants saw
it. In December 1979 Lord Soames landed in the rebel colony in the fictitious guise of a
colonial governor, with a handful of British troops, one hundred election supervisors from
English town halls, and--a Gilbertian touch--three hundred British "Bobbies" in their helmets.
His troops were ordered on no account to shoot. British military intervention had been ruled
out from the start, as it had been since 1923. When Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary who
chaired the Lancaster House Conference, proposed the return of a British colonial governor for
the sake of legitimacy, the European and African leaders, who had long been fighting against
colonial rule of one kind or another, were expected to break off negotiations. "There was dead
silence," Carrington recalled; "It lasted a long time. It was broken by Joshua Nkomo [leader
of ZAPU]." "'Really?' he said. 'Will he have plumes and a horse?' The whole conference
dissolved in laughter. The day was saved.'34
When Carrington casually asked Soames to go out to Rhodesia, he replied, "Yes of course I
will." "Being an old hand at politics, of course, he made it clear to me that I was sending
him out at the wrong time!"35 They both knew
that the agreement reached on paper at Lancaster House was little more than a starting point.
Many such agreements had been reached before, only to come unstuck when it came to carrying
them out. As the Foreign Secretary put it in steeple-chasing terms, "None of us had any
illusions." "The horses and jockeys, against all probability, had agreed to come under
starter's orders but there were plenty of fences to jump. Nasty ones."36 Soames's mission was to run up the British flag, monitor a cease-
fire, hold an election in the middle of a race war, install the victors, and strike the flag
within six months. He had no actual power. His so-called colonial administration had to be
conducted through the apparatus of the rebel white state, with the cooperation of its various
black assailants. The mission looked like another imperial forlorn hope.
The war of attrition, which no side was in sight of winning, was still being fought in
February 1980, though the level of fighting abated. There were five different forces in the
field--a covert force of South African military police, General Wall's powerful Rhodesian army
and air force, allied with Bishop Muzerewa's Auxiliaries, Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA army, and
Robert Mugabe's rival ZANLA guerrillas. All of them broke terms for a cease fire agreed at
Lancaster House in one way or another. By the first "miracle" the British monitoring troops
enticed twenty thousand guerillas from the bush into assembly camps. They refused to lay down
their arms and dug in with mortars and automatic weapons trained on their hosts. Ten thousand
mostly ZANLA soldiers remained at large in the bush, operating in the "no go areas" among the
African peasantry in the "Tribal Trust lands" of the Midland and Eastern provinces. Many
thousands more were poised in their bases in Mozambique and Zambia, while the Rhodesian army,
which should have gone back to barracks, deployed to re-conquer the lost districts from the
guerillas, under the guise of establishing order for the election. Each side had given the
others every reason to tear up the Lancaster House agreement. Either the Rhodesian army would
seize the opportunity of destroying the guerillas in the assembly camps in hopes of winning
the war, or the ZANLA army might resume its struggle for a Leninist revolution. The swords of
General Walls and "Comrade" Mugabe hung over the settlement. As Soames saw it, the question
was not whether the election would be free and fair, but whether polling day would ever
come.
Meanwhile political parties were campaigning with the aid of their various forces. One hundred
international observers flew around the country listening to complaints of intimidation--in
several instances of beatings, kidnapping, arson, exceptionally of assassination, and live
burials. A few bombs went off in post offices and hotels. In the circumstances, the observers
reporting on the fairness of the election decided that "fair" meant "not entirely unfair,"
"free" meant "not altogether unfree," and "foul" meant exactly what it said. In several
districts ZANLA guerillas excluded rival parties and eventually herded voters to the polls.
Walls and Muzerewa pressed Soames to disfranchise these districts; Mugabe in response
threatened to resume the war; had Soames done so, any chance of an election would have gone up
in smoke. Leaders of the Front Line black states very likely would have refused to accept the
result. Although ZANLA also threatened to go on fighting unless the South African troops were
sent home, Soames wisely held his hand. Only eight of the eighty African seats in the
projected hundred seat parliament were at stake in the guerilla dominated areas. There was no
contest either in Matabeleland, where ethnic loyalty rather than intimidation gave Joshua
Nkomo his twenty seats. If the Rhodesian officials who ran the election under British
supervision also bent the rules in favor of Bishop Muzerewa's party less spectacularly, they
rarely broke them. Over most of the country, in spite of some gross irregularities, voters
sported their party's tee shirts fearlessly, and political rallies drummed and danced in good
humored rivalry. Before the result was known, the observers agreed that the majority of voters
had had a free choice, confident in the carefully guarded secrecy of the ballot.
In the final week of the election campaign another "miracle" was required to avert a Rhodesian
army coup. Every white military and police reservist was called up; the army, one hundred
thousand strong, set up road blocks, took charge of broadcasting stations, public utilities,
and guarded the polling booths. Was General Walls merely ensuring a free and orderly election,
or was he about to stage the military coup that his gung-ho brigadiers favored? The issue
remained in doubt until suddenly the Rhodesian commander flew to Mozambique for talks with
President Samora Machel. At the same time Soames's chief adviser flew to Pretoria, while
Mugabe missed his party's final rally to consult Nyerere in Tanzania. At the peak of the
campaigning several leading contestants had left the country. We can only speculate as to
their reasons. Before authorizing the mobilization of the white forces, Soames perhaps had
asked Walls for his word that the army would accept the result of the coming election. The
general may have agreed to do so, provided Machel agreed to deny Mugabe the bases in
Mozambique, which he required to renew the war should the election result go against him.
Pretoria, already putting economic pressure on Machel to deny guerilla bases for attacks on
South Africa, could help persuade him to do the same for Rhodesia. The South Africans,
moreover, could withdraw their reluctant support from the Rhodesians and leave Walls with no
alternative but to accept the election result, just as Machel could force Mugabe to do so.
What is certain is that all the various external backers of the white and black freedom
fighters in Rhodesia were finally prodding their clients into gambling their future on the
election result.
Yet a third deliverance was required before this improbable concatenation of white South
African and black African expediencies produced a settlement. The white Rhodesians and their
South African backers were confident they knew what the verdict of the polls would be: twenty-
one seats for Muzerewa, twenty for Nkomo, which combined with the twenty seats reserved for
the whites, would ensure a moderate, multi-racial coalition government. Mugabe's revolutionary
socialist party would be left with thirty-nine seats in opposition. Had the South Africans
foreseen his absolute majority, they might easily have called off the election. If Mugabe had
not won at the polls on the other hand, some black African Front Line States would have called
"foul" on the election and refused to recognize the successor regime. Nyerere, for example,
had gone so far as to declare in advance that the election was a fraud unless Mugabe won it.
Neither the ZANU leader nor his backers anticipated his victory. After electoral
miscalculations on all sides, without which white and black strategists could not have agreed,
white Rhodesia succumbed to black majority rule by a whisker. The swords of Wall, Nkomo, and
Mugabe were sheathed. Lucky Lord Soames struck the last British imperial flag in Africa and
handed over the government to Mugabe, with a smile of relief.
Another deliverance was yet to come, from the realism of the new prime minister and the
economic power of South Africa. His guerillas had been indoctrinated abroad in various brands
of communism. His party was committed not only to collectivizing the African peasants, but
also to expropriating the whites and the capitalist companies.37 Once in power, his popularity enabled him to do otherwise. Much
was done to keep European farmers, managers, and capitalists from fleeing the country. They
were indispensable for the revival of its war-stricken economy. Machel.38 had learned this lesson in Mozambique, where collectivism and the
expropriation of the Portuguese had already ruined prosperity and attracted South African
destabilization. Despite the transfer of political power, the Zimbabwean economy, like the
Zambian, remained a satellite of industrialized South Africa. Its reconstruction depended
largely on reasonably good relations with Pretoria. So constrained, the revolutionary black
nationalist returned to his earlier Gandhian beliefs to swing his party into paths of multi-
racial moderation. As Robert Mugabe explained, "We did not win a military victory, otherwise
we would have carried out our revolutionary program."
39 He had reached a political settlement--a compromise. As a result, Zimbabwe so far
has escaped the African civil wars of succession, exacerbated from Pretoria, that wracked
Angola and Mozambique.
In conclusion, it is suggested that "Providence" intervened to bring about this fortuitous
settlement in the mundane shape of regional Realpolitik. After several previous
attempts at last South Africa and the Front Line States had managed to pull the rugs from
under their white and black clients in Rhodesia together at the same time. So long as Mugabe's
ZANU persisted in aiming at a revolution through victory in the war, Kaunda and Nyerere could
not deliver their clients to any peace agreement on terms acceptable to the white Rhodesians
and their backers in South Africa. Machel had forced Mugabe to negotiate and submit his claims
to an election along with the moderate parties, otherwise his bases in Mozambique would be
shut down and his war ended in any event. The economies of Zambia and Mozambique had suffered
great damage from blockades and military strikes in the struggle over Rhodesia. It had become
essential for them to restore their normal economic links with the South African center of the
regional economy, if Kaunda and Machel were not to lose their grip on their own internal
politics. It made no sense for the guerilla leaders either, to go on wrecking the
sophisticated Rhodesian economy that they were within sight of inheriting.
The South Africans had several reasons by this time for liquidating their limited commitment
to the white Rhodesians. Pretoria had largely financed, supplied, and armed the rebel colony
as a buffer against black Africa, but once the coup d'etat in Lisbon delivered
Mozambique and Angola to the African nationalists and exposed the colony's flanks to guerilla
invasion, Mr. Smith's regime became an embarrassing liability. The bulk of South African
troops were needed to defend Apartheid at home. If the Rhodesian imbroglio went on much
longer, a new American president might apply effective, instead of token, oil sanctions, or
the Soviet Union might intervene more seriously at second hand by sending Cuban forces and
turn Rhodesia into another Angola. It was clearly safer for South Africa to concede Rhodesia
to a moderate black state and rely on economic power and military threat to dissuade it from
harboring bases for guerilla attacks on South Africa. All the calculations inspiring
Pretoria's deliverance of Rhodesia to black majority rule amounted to one thing--the defense
of Apartheid in South Africa. Since the South African contribution to the settlement was
vital, it is hard to deny that, for the African majority in Zimbabwe, the road to heaven was
paved with the evil intentions of Apartheid. Fortunately, official computers, even those of
white South Africa, occasionally do right in doing wrong.
This brief account of incongruous British dealings with Rhodesia tells us little of the common
man and woman, or their heroic efforts at defending or liberating their land, but it does have
a moral. Though preaching black rights and white wrongs in American or European terms is good
for the conscience, what ought to be happening rarely corresponds with what is actually going
on in Africa. The British rhetoric of imperial trusteeship, native paramountcy, and eventual
majority rule though usually sincere, meant little until the Africans began fighting for
themselves. Even then, the African majority proved hard to find among the bitterly divided
factions disputing the succession; and when its rule was won, it proved far from democratic
and was economically dependent on South Africa. The ending of Apartheid in Zimbabwe suggests
that neither black nor white can afford to pursue their racial ethics to the point of wrecking
the South African economy, or there will be nothing but poverty and anarchy for anyone to
inherit.
Notes
1. Martin Meredith, The Past is Another
Country: Rhodesia: UDI to Zimbabwe (London, 1980). Back.
2. The author learned to fly in Rhodesia
under the Empire Air Training Scheme, 1941-1942; worked in the Colonial Office African
Division, 1947-1951; toured Kenya, Uganda, and Southern Rhodesia, 1954; taught Colonial Office
officials, 1951-present, University of Cambridge; chaired the Cambridge Development
Conferences for the British Overseas Development Agency, 1961-1970; lectured in the University
of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1964; and observed the Rhodesian election for the Foreign Office,
1980. He is Emeritus Beit Professor of British Empire and Commonwealth History in Oxford
University.
3. For the "official mind," see Ronald
Robinson, John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of
Imperialism, 2nd ed. (London, 1980), 18-22.
4. 0n Rhodes, see John E. Flint, Cecil
Rhodes. (Boston, 1974). On funding the Rhodes Scholarships see C.W. Newbury in Frederick
Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse, eds., Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth (London,
1982).
5. Robinson, Gallagher, and Denny,
Africa and the Victorians, chap. VII.
6. See T.0. Ranger's celebrated study,
Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance (Evanston, III.,
1967).
7. For the making of the Union, see Leonard
M. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa (Oxford, 1960); T.R.H. Davenport, South
Africa: A Modern History, 2nd ed. (London, 1978), chap. IX; on the development of
segregation and apartheid, chaps. X- XX.
8. Bonar Law, 5 July 1920, Hansard,,
H.C., 5th ser., CXXXI, col. 1019.
9. For a full account, see Ronald Robinson,
"The Moral Disarmament of African Empire," in N. Hillmer and P. Wigley, editors, The First
British Commonwealth (London, 1980), 89-92.
10. Ibid., 92.
11. P.P., H.C. Report, "Aborigines
(British Settlements), 1837," 79-80.
12. Sir J. Masterson-Smith, quoted in R.
G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire,
1890-1939 (Oxford, 1971), 239-240.
13. Reading to Montagu, 6 February 1922,
Churchill Papers, 17/22, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill 1874-1945, IV,
pt. 3, Documents (London, 1977), 1756.
14. Churchill to Montagu, 8 October 1921,
2 February 1922, ibid., 1644, 1749.
15. Cabinet Minutes, (Cabinet Papers
23/29), 13 Feb. 1922, ibid., 1771-1772; "Indians in Kenya," Memo by Secretary of State,
14 Feb. 1923, C.0. 25473/30/1, Public Record Office.
16. On the origins of native paramountcy,
see Ronald E. Robinson, "The Trust in British Central African Policy, 1889-l939" (Ph.D.
Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1951), 167 ff.
17. Indians in Kenya, Cmd. 1922,
(London, 1923), 9.
18. Cabinet Paper, "Future Policy in
Regard to Eaat Africa," 16 June 1927, C.P. 179/27, C.0. 17167/27/4, P.R.O.
19. Ormesby-Gore, Minute, 16 May 1927,
C.0. 17126/27, P.R.0.; Robinson, "The Trust in British Central African Policy, 1889-1939,"
178-192.
20. Passfie1d adopted the Hilton Young
Commission's chief recommendations (Cmd. 3234) in two policy statements, "Memorandum on Native
Policy in East Africa" (Cmd.3573), and "Conclusions of HMG as Regards Closer Union in East
Africa" (Cmd. 3574), both in June 1930.
21. Robinson, "The Trust in British
Central African Policy, 1889-1939," 206-210.
22. Cabinet Paper and Conclusions, 9
April 1930, C.0. 25437/30/a/4, P.R.0.
23. Robinson, "The Trust in British
Central African Policy, 1889-1939," 244-250, 284-292.
24. Sir Arthur Dawe, Memo, "A Federal
Solution for East Africa" (Secret), July 1942, C0 822/111/3/46709, P.R.0.
25. Cranborne to Attlee, 22 July 1943,
C.O. 847/23/47181, P.R.0.
26. Robinson, "The Trust in British
Central African Policy, 1889-1939," summarized in Ronald Robinson, "The Moral Disarmament of
African Empire," in Hillmer and Wigley, eds., The First British Commonwealth,,
86-1O4.
27. Dawe, Memo, "A Federal Solution for
East Africa," July 1942
28. 0n the "New Deal" for Africa, see
Ronald Robinson, "Andrew Cohen and the Transfer of Power in Tropical Africa," in W.H. Morris
Jones and Georges Fisher, eds., Decolonisation and After: The British and French
Experience (London, 1980), 50-72; and "Sir Andrew Cohen: Proconsul of African Nationalism
(1909-1968)," in L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan, eds., African Proconsuls: European Governors
in Africa (New York, 1978), 353-864; on the international aspect, see William R. Louis and
Ronald Robinson, "The United States and the End of the British Empire in Tropical Africa,
1941-51," in Prosser Gifford and William R. Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa:
Decolonisation 1940-60 (New Haven, Conn., 1982), 31-55.
29. Cohen to Baxter, 9 March 1950, Memo,
"Relations on the Two Rhodesias and Nyasaland," D.O. 25/3587/H 63011. On federation, see
J.R.T. Wood, The Welensky Papers (Durban, South Africa, 1983); R. Blake, A History
of Rhodesia (London, 1977).
30. Cabinet Paper, "Closer Association in
Central Africa," 9 Nov. 1951, C (51) 11, P.R.0. See Ronald Hyam, "The Geopolitical Origins of
the Central African Federation: Britain, Rhodesia and South Africa, 1948-1953," Historical
Journal, XXX (1987), 145-172.
31. Robert I. Rotberg, The Rise of
Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1965); D. Mulford, Zambia: The Politics of Independence, 1957-64, (London,
1967).
32. See R. Good, UDI: The
International Politics of the Rhodesian Rebellion (London, 1973).
33. 0n the Development of Apartheid, see
Davenport, South Africa, 2nd ed., chaps. XIV-XX.
34. Lord Carrington, Reflect on Things
Past: The Memoirs of Lord Camngton (London, 1988), 302.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 303.
37. For ZANU's doctrine, see Robert
Mugabe, Our War of Liberation: Speeches, Articles, Interviews 1976-79 (Mambo, 1983).
38. For Machel and Frelimo, See Barry
Munslow, Mozambique: The Revolution and Its Origins (London, 1983).
39. 0n Prime Minister Mugabe's departure
from ZANU's revolutionary program, see Alexander Callinicos, Southern Africa after
Zimbabwe (London, 1981), chap. III; for the economic dependence on and political pressures
from South Africa, see Martin J. Murry, South Africa, Time of Agony, Time of Destiny: The
Upsurge of Popular Protest (London, 1987), 26-27; and Colin Stoneman, ed., Zimbabwe's
Inheritance (London, 1981). For ZANLA's "Chimurenga" see T.0. Ranger, Peasant
Consciousness and the Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe (London, 1985).
First Published: 1988
First Online Edition: 1 July 1998
Last Revised: 3 June 2002
Carl Swanson, Brewster Scholar, 1987-1989
Kenneth Wilburn, Web Editor for the Brewster Lectures
Return to the Lawrence F. Brewster Lectures in History Series Home Page.