Duncan Bowie on a colonial critique
A Critical History of Southern Rhodesia by Gardner Thompson published by Lynne Reinner
There are surprisingly few books on Southern Rhodesia before UDI. The standard history is by the semi-official Conservative Party historian, Lord Robert Blake and was published in 1978. There are of course lots of books on Cecil Rhodes and the early settlers, but little written on the period since 1923, when the settlers were granted a form of self- government under a prime minister. There are biographies, fairly laudatory on the successive prime ministers, Sir Charles Coghlan, Godfrey Huggins and Sir Roy Welensky, and a more modern biography of the liberal prime minister, Garfield Todd, who battled first with Ian Smith’s Republican Front who promoted the unilateral declaration of independence, and then suffered under the Mugabe regime. There is also a somewhat dry academic study of settler politics by Colin Leys published in 1959. There are a number of memoirs of the nationalist struggle, for example the memoirs of Joshua Nkomo and Masipula Sithole’s study of the conflicts within the nationalist movement and Laurence Vambe’s history from a native Zimbabwean perspective.
However, Thompson’s book is welcome as a more critical and neutral study. Thompson is a retired history teacher who has written books on East Africa and most recently on the British government’s role in the establishment of a Zionist state in Israel (reviewed in Chartist), but not previously on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. His sympathies, so far as they are possible to derive from this balanced study, are with the moderate nationalists such as Joshua Nkomo and the more liberal settlers such as Garfield Todd.
Thompson’s narrative covers the whole period of Rhodesian history up to UDI in 1965. It is interesting in demonstrating the extent to which the wider settler government was able to rule a country and to introduce forms of segregation and domination over the much larger indigenous population that paralleled and to some extent preceded the establishment of an apartheid regime in neighbouring South Africa. The Rhodesian government in the postwar period managed to resist the “winds of change” and the moves to decolonisation by successive postwar British governments, with these governments reluctant to intervene, even post UDI, for fear of upsetting South Africa, who was seen as a critical ally in the Cold War.
With limited support for the White liberalisers such as Garfield Todd, both within and beyond Rhodesia, the move of the Rhodesian Front to the explicitly racist politics of Ian Smith and his fellow settler ministers, with the unwillingness to compromise with Harold Wilson’s attempts to arbitrate, led to a vicious civil war with nationalist groups, which inevitably led to the fall of Smith and the settler government.
Thompson’s book does not cover the aftermath of coming to power of a nationalist government under Robert Mugabe, the development of a one-party state and the violent suppression of nationalist groups led by Nkomo and Sithole, but the violence and economic collapse of the post-independence years is at least partly explained by the complete failure of previous settler governments to share both land and economic and political power with the indigenous population. Those who denied any democracy during the period of the settler regime are not in the strongest position to criticise Mugabe and his successor, Emmerson Mnangabwa for their wish to cling on to power at all costs.
Thompson is conscious of the challenges to a British historian of writing colonial history in the context of campaigns such as “Black Lives Matter” and “Rhodes Must Go”. In a concluding chapter entitled “Judging Empire” he seeks to relate the historical narrative and analysis to current debates. He refers to Zimbabwean historians who recognise the positive as well as the incontestable negative impacts of colonialism, as far as Rhodesia was concerned, noting that in 2020 the city council of Bulawayo, Rhodesia’s second city, as well as naming roads after pre-colonial Ndbele kings such as Mzilkazi Lobengula, also named roads after the first settler Minister Patrick Coghlan, Rhodes colleague, Star Jameson of the famous Jameson Raid into the Transvaal, and Rhodes himself. Thompson points out that this is perhaps a challenge to the West’s more sweeping critics of colonial rule.