Introduction

Kenrick, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32698-2_1

David Kenrick⁵

Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

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Abstract

Kenrick sets out the key arguments of the manuscript, starting with a history of white settlement in Rhodesia, exploring major themes in the history of imperialism, settler colonialism and nationalism. Kenrick skilfully illustrates how these different literatures overlap in the case study of white settler society in Rhodesia in the period of 1964–1979, and what this example can tell us more broadly about concepts of identity, decolonisation and nation in the febrile environment of late twentieth-century decolonisation. Kenrick also explores the implications of decolonisation in settler societies upon Britain and the resonances that these historical events have in the present day.

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Notes

1.
See R. Renwick, Unconventional Diplomacy in Southern Africa (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997) for a British insider’s perspective of these negotiations.
2.
‘Soames Ends UDI Today’, The Herald, 12 December 1979, p. 1.
3.
‘British Rule in Rhodesia’, The Herald, 13 December 1979, p. 1.
4.
Ibid.
5.
P. Godwin & I. Hancock, Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia ca.1970–1980 (Northlands, SA, Pan Macmillan South Africa, 2007).
6.
C. Mears, Goodbye Rhodesia (Sussex, Antony Rowe Publishing Services, 2005), p. 222.
7.
For more information on PVs, see J.K. Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia (London, Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 79–103; A.K.H. Weinrich, ‘Strategic Resettlement in Rhodesia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 3, 2 (1977), pp. 207–229. For the atrocities, see J. Frederikse, None but Ourselves: Masses Versus the Media in the Making of Zimbabwe (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1982). Other studies of the war include N. Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992); T. Ranger & N. Bhebhe (eds.), Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (Oxford, Currey, 1996); D. Lan, Guns & Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (London, Currey, 1985).
8.
M. Tendi, ‘Soldiers Contra Diplomats: Britain’s Role in the Zimbabwe/Rhodesia Ceasefire (1979–1980) Reconsidered’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 26, 6 (2015), pp. 937–956; J. Mackinlay, ‘The Commonwealth Monitoring Force in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia 1979–80’, in T.G. Weiss (ed.), Humanitarian Emergences and Military Help in Africa (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990), pp. 38–60. The Commonwealth Monitoring Force included contingents from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Kenya, Australia and Fiji.
9.
The phrase is taken from Harry Garner, ‘Back Under the Jack’, The Herald, 12 December 1979, p. 10.
10.
A. Mitchell, ‘Why the Jubilation?’ The Herald, 13 December 1979, p. 18.
11.
P.M. Taylor, ‘Cut Out the Pomp’, The Herald, 13 December 1979, p. 8.
12.
‘God Save the Queen—And an old Union Jack’, The Herald, 13 December 1979, p. 19; V.H. Van Cleef, ‘Singing Was Nauseating’, The Herald, 25 December 1979, p. 8.
13.
Wondering, ‘British Benefits, Please’, The Herald, 25 December 1979, p. 8.
14.
J. Pohl, The Herald, ‘Invaded—This City I Used to Love’, 25 December 1979, p. 8.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Ibid.
17.
L. Pritchard, ‘Remember Kenya’, The Herald, 28 December 1979, p. 4.
18.
D. Dur, ‘Rhodesia Is a Colony’, The Herald, 25 December 1979, p. 8.
19.
E. Kennes & M. Larmer, The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa: Fighting Their Way Home (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 11.
20.
A.R. King, ‘Identity and Decolonisation: The Policy of Partnership in Southern Rhodesia 1945–62’ (University of Oxford, DPhil Thesis, 2001); A. Cohen, The Politics and Economics of Decolonization: The Failed Experiment of the Central African Federation (London, I.B. Tauris, 2017).
21.
S. Ward, ‘The “New Nationalism” in Australia, Canada and New Zealand: Civic Culture in the Wake of the British World’, in K. Darian-Smith, P. Grimshaw & S. Macintyre, (eds.), Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2007), pp. 231–263.
22.
The author thanks Josiah Brownell for this reflection.
23.
See the #RhodesMustFall blog accessed on 2 February 2019 at https://rmfoxford.wordpress.com/; D. Lowry, ‘The “Rhodes Must Fall” Campaign: Where Would the Destruction End?’ The Round Table, 105, 3 (2016), pp. 329–331.
24.
Rhodes was not part of this column, however, and would not visit the colony until the following year, in late 1891. Robert Rotberg, Rhodes’ biographer, notes that Rhodes, despite his duties as Prime Minister of Cape Colony, saw the colony’s fortunes as inextricably linked to his own.
25.
R. Rotberg, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 299.
26.
Ibid., p. 299.
27.
Ibid., p. 442.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid., p. 555.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Rotberg, The Founder, pp. 574–575.
32.
The full epitaph, called ‘The Burial’, can be viewed at ‘Poetry Lovers Page’ accessed on 2 February 2019 at https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/burial.html.
33.
R. Charumbira, Imagining the Nation: History and Memory in the Making of Zimbabwe (Charlottesville & London, University of Virginia Press, 2015).
34.
T. Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle Over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30, 2 (2004), pp. 215–234; M. Tendi, Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2010).
35.
Godwin & Hancock, Rhodesians Never Die. Polemical histories of Rhodesia include the pro-settler P. Berlyn, Rhodesia: Beleaguered Country (London, The Mitre Press, 1967) and the pro-nationalist T. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford, Heinemann, 1964). Just a small selection the more scholarly work produced during or before UDI includes: R. Blake, A History of Rhodesia (London, Methuen, 1977); D. Murray, The Governmental System in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970); C. Leys European Politics in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959).
36.
T. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia: 1896–7: A Study in African Resistance (London, Heinemann, 1967). For Ranger’s account of his time in Rhodesia see, T. Ranger, Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957–67 (Oxford, James Currey, 2013).
37.
G. Arrighi, The Political Economy of Rhodesia (The Hague, Mouton, 1967); P. Moorcraft & P. McLaughlin, The Rhodesian War: Fifty Years On (Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2015), p. 31.
38.
For just a small sample of these, see: A. Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (London, Picador, 2002); P. Godwin, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (London, Picador, 1996); C. Cocks, Fireforce: One Man’s War in the Rhodesian Light Infantry (Alberton, SA, Galago, 1988); D. Lemon, Never Quite a Soldier: A Policeman’s War 1971–1983 (Stroud, Albida Books, 2000).
39.
J. Smith, ‘“I Still Don’t Have a Country”: The Southern African Settler Diaspora After Decolonisation’, in R. Craggs & C. Wintle (eds.), Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–70, p. 158
40.
R. Pilossof, The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from Zimbabwe (Harare, Weaver Press, 2012); D. McDermott Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); K. Law, Gendering the Settler State: White Women, Race, Liberalism and Empire in Rhodesia, 1950–1980 (Abingdon, Routledge, 2016), quote p. 152.
41.
Quoted in Robert Salisbury, ‘How to Ruin a Country’, The Spectator, 11 December 2007, accessed at https://www.spectator.co.uk/2007/12/how-to-ruin-a-country/ on 10 January 2019. Though often invoked by those critical of Mugabe’s rule, the story is so resonant it has also been quoted by the state-owned newspaper The Herald. See Gidi Ngwindingwinidi, ‘Tanzania: A Friend of the Struggle’, 4 October 2013, accessed at https://www.herald.co.zw/tanzania-a-friend-of-the-struggle/ on 10 January 2019. Here Nyerere is quoted as saying ‘You have inherited a jewel in Africa, don’t tarnish it.’ The two versions of the quote appear frequently in other media.
42.
L. White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Cape Town, 2003); in this work, White offers an extended deconstruction of the memoirs of Ken Flower, the head of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organisation who briefly worked for Robert Mugabe after independence: K. Flower, Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record: Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964 to 1981 (London, John Murray, 1987).
43.
E. Windrich, The Mass Media in the Struggle for Zimbabwe (Gwelo, Mambo Press, 1981), p. 79.
44.
For ‘nationalist’ accounts, see D. Martin & P. Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1981); N. Kriger, Peasant Consciousness. A growing body of work on white Rhodesians includes Godwin & Hancock, Rhodesians Never Die; the work of Donal Lowry including D. Lowry, ‘Rhodesia 1890–1980, “The Lost Dominion”, in R. Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 112–149 and the writings of Luise White, most recently, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesia and African Decolonization (Chicago, 2015). See also J. Brownell, The Collapse of Rhodesia: Population Demographics and the Politics of Race (London, I.B. Tauris, 2011); J. Francis, ‘The Formation and Nature of Identity in Rhodesian Settler Society from Colonisation to UDI’ (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, DPhil Thesis, 2012); C. Watts, Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence: An International History (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2012); Law, Gendering the Settler State.
45.
C. Seecharan, ‘Whose Freedom at Midnight? Machinations Towards Guyana’s Independence, May 1966,’; T. Barringer, R. Holland & S. Williams (eds.), The Iconography of Independence: ‘Freedoms at Midnight’ (London & New York, Routledge, 2010), pp. 71–88.
46.
J. Ismay, ‘Rhodesia’s Dead—But White Supremacists Have Given It a New Life Online’, The New York Times Magazine, 10 April 2018, accessed on 3 March 2019 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/magazine/rhodesia-zimbabwe-white-supremacists.html.
47.
B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 21. See also C. Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015).
48.
S. Hall, Familiar Strangers: A Life Between Two Islands (London, 2017).
49.
C. Schofield, D. Geary, & J. Sutton, The Global History of White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Donald Trump (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020).
50.
Schwarz, The White Man’s World; C. Knowles, ‘The Landscape of Post-imperial Whiteness in Rural Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31, 1 (2008), pp. 167–184.
51.
N. Shute, In the Wet (London, Heinemann, 1953).
52.
P. Buckner, ‘Reinventing the British World’, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 92, 368 (2003), p. 79.
53.
C. Bridge & K. Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 13, 2 (2003), p. 1; C. Bridge & K. Fedorowich (eds.), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, Frank Cass, 2003); J. Gallagher & R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, 6, 1 (1953), pp. 1–15 remains the ‘classic’ study of informal empire.
54.
S. Howe, ‘British Worlds, Settler Worlds, World Systems and Killing Fields’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40, 4 (2012), p. 693.
55.
Ibid., p. 693.
56.
A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London & New York, Routledge, 2001).
57.
J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
58.
J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: Settlers and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).
59.
P. Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010); P. Buckner & R.D. Francis (eds.), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, Calgary University Press, 2005); S. Dubow, ‘Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of South Africanism, 1902–10’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 53–85; J. Lambert, ‘An Unknown People: Reconstructing British South African Identity’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37, 4 (2009), pp. 599–617; N. Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, 31, 116 (2001), pp. 76–90; T. Brabazon, Tracking the Jack: A Retracing of the Antipodes (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2000).
60.
R. Bickers, ‘Introduction: Britains and Britons Over the Seas’, in R. Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1–17.
61.
W. Jackson, Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya’s White Insane (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013); D. Money, ‘No Matter How Much or How Little They’ve Got, They Can’t Settle Down: A Social History of Europeans on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–1974’ (University of Oxford, DPhil Thesis, 2016).
62.
Lowry, ‘The Lost Dominion’, pp. 112–149.
63.
J. Francis, ‘The Formation and Nature of Identity in Rhodesian Settler Society from Colonisation to UDI’ (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, DPhil Thesis, 2012).
64.
See J. Belich, J. Darwin, M. Frenz, & C. Wickham, The Prospect of Global History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016).
65.
R.K. Bright & A.R. Dilley, ‘Historiographical Review: After the British World’, The Historical Journal, 60, 2 (2017), p. 561. For a useful brief overview of settler colonial studies, see L. Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism: Career of a Concept’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41, 2 (2013), pp. 313–333.
66.
L. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke, Routledge, 2015).
67.
D. Bell & S. Vucetic, ‘Brexit, CANZUK, and the Legacy of Empire’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, accessed on 3 March 2019 at https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1369148118819070.
68.
See Schofield, Enoch Powell for a comparative example of how the right in Britain used memories of the Second World War in post-war politics.
69.
P. Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Kenrick, D. (2019). Introduction. In: Decolonisation, Identity and Nation in Rhodesia, 1964-1979. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32698-2_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32698-2_1
Published: 03 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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