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 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

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.

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.

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

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).