Rhodesia's System of Law and Order
Like that of Northern Ireland, the core of the Rhodesian state was essentially immune from oversight by the judiciary, legislature, and other agencies; the state displayed little concern for the consent or the human rights of its subordinate population and organized law and order around the narrow interests of the settler minority. A resourceful and intransigent settler bloc created an apparatus of control that was considerably more elaborate than in conventional colonies as well as some settler societies such as Northern Ireland and Liberia.
During most of Rhodesian history, the leading internal security institutions were the national police force and the Native Affairs Department. Until the late 1960s, the country maintained only a rudimentary territorial army. The proportion of public revenue earmarked for defense was small, and the army played a small role in domestic order and external defense until the outbreak of guerrilla war in the 1970s. Rhodesia's British South African Police (BSAP) was the de facto defense force. Formed in 1896, it performed both conventional policing and paramilitary tasks. The Ministry of Justice had (until 1962) responsibility for policing, as well as prosecution, the courts, and law-and-order policy.
The largest and most powerful branch of the state was the Native Affairs Department (NAD), which operated with considerable resources and autonomy and had broad geographical and functional jurisdiction. As a state within a state, the department successfully resisted interference from other agencies well into the 1970s. NAD officers in the countryside were the principal agents of social control and intelligence, largely free from interference by other state sectors. They governed rural blacks with a mixture of paternalism and coercion—formally embracing
the doctrine of Africans' gradual "advancement" in their "separate areas,' but skeptical that Africans could ever proceed very far.
The legal and institutional changes introduced in Rhodesia during the watershed years of 1959 through 1962 provided the cornerstone upon which the internal security enterprise would be further refined over the next twenty-five years. (As Chapter 6 shows, the essence of this system survives in independent Zimbabwe.) The post-1959 period analyzed here is not one of unmediated African resistance as portrayed in much of the literature on Rhodesia, in which African opposition appears to be the sole cause of repressive state responses and systemic innovations. Our analysis presents a more balanced, multicausal account by linking pressures from the African community to intra-white politics and the distinctive interests of the settler regime.
The 1959 State of Emergency
In a dawn swoop on 26 February 1959, the Rhodesian Government staged a surprise arrest of five hundred members of the African National Congress (ANC) and proclaimed a state of emergency. It labeled those arrested "agitators," "fanatics," and "extremists" bent on defying authority and causing pandemonium in the country. The official justification for the state of emergency was contained in a pamphlet written by the Chief Native Commissioner and Secretary of Native Affairs, Stanley Morris, and distributed to Africans and the press:
It is clear that these self-appointed leaders of Congresses in Southern Rhodesia, who come from the towns, are working to get rid of the tribal authorities, so that they can take control and force everyone to accept their power. These rabble-rousers ... could not even manage a business ... yet they seek to govern the people and recklessly disregard the harm they would bring to everyone in the country.... Abuse, threats and intimidation have crept into their words. Defiance and insolence have become their claim to leadership.... The people of certain districts have been called to meetings by these Congress leaders and exhorted to break the laws of the country and to ignore their Native Commissioners and Chiefs.... Government has decided to remove these agitators and trouble-makers—to remove from them the power to play with hot words, to make it impossible for them to collect more money from you, and if necessary to keep them in a place of detention until they mend their thoughts.... Now you can continue your peaceful lives in the Reserves and your work in the towns and on farms and on mines, secure in the knowledge that Government intends to preserve law and order, and to support the Chiefs in their status and their authority.... Settle down conscientiously to your work, you have nothing to fear. Use the proper channels for
addressing any grievances or requests that you may have to Government ... and not to a group of noisy boys who are not out to help you really, but are looking only to their personal aggrandizement and power at your expense.[68]
The pamphlet suggested that the African detainees were guilty not of violent conduct or specific criminal acts but rather of "hot words," intimidation, and defiance and disobedience—driven by a lust for "aggrandizement and power." In classic fashion, the regime branded political opposition subversive.[69]
Visible public support for African nationalist organizations challenged the regime's definition of the situation. Urban rallies were beginning to draw unprecedented crowds: five thousand at an ANC rally in December 1958, three thousand in January 1959.[70] While privately alarmed at the size of these meetings, the Rhodesian authorities (like the Pretoria regime today) publicly dismissed them as the result of "intimidation" by the few on the lunatic fringe. To have done otherwise would have been to accept that the ANC was generating broad support. The preamble to the 1959 Unlawful Organizations Act reflected the official construction of African nationalists' actions:
[they have] assembled meetings or gatherings of ignorant and unwary persons, whereat in violent and threatening language, the speakers have wilfully misrepresented facts, sown seeds of discord and racial hostility, excited disaffection towards established authority, urged civil disobedience and passive resistance to the law.
A former senior official in the Native Affairs Department reflected that blacks "were happy and content, otherwise they would have risen up long before they did. They were roused by agitators who told them the story that the whites had taken the best land."[71] But many were far from "content";[72] one official commission concluded that the government had
[68] Reprinted in African Daily News (Salisbury), 26 February 1959.
[69] See Eshmael Mlambo, Rhodesia: The Struggle for a Birthright (London: Hurst, 1972), p. 128; Dissent (Salisbury), 26 March 1959. Before the Mau Mau disturbances in Kenya, rural administrators similarly equated opposition with subversion (see Bruce Berman, "Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence: Colonial Administration and the Origins of the 'Mau Mau' Emergency in Kenya," British Journal of Political Science 6 [April 1976]: 166).
[70] Mlambo, Rhodesia, p. 127.
[71] Interview with author, 8 June 1983. A survey in 1965 found that whites believed the nationalists lacked widespread support (Stephen Hintz, "The Political Transformation of Rhodesia, 1958–1965," African Studies Review 15 (1972): 182).
[72] J. Van Velsen, "Trends in African Nationalism in Southern Rhodesia," Kroniek van Afrika 4 (June 1964): 149.
"generally underestimated" African "political consciousness and awareness of human rights."[73]
If in 1959 the prevailing tendency within the executive was to deny the existence of black discontent, a minority reformist faction held opposing views, which gradually won support in Cabinet (including that of the prime minister, Sir Edgar Whitehead). Moderates included the Minister of Labour, who reflected on his position:
In agreeing to the principle of the declaration of emergency and security legislation I made it very clear that my belief was that this could not provide a solution for the real grievances and disabilities of Africans. It could never substitute for or avoid necessary reforms. There were real grievances which had to be remedied in the quickest possible time.[74]
After 1959 the Government of the United Federal party (UFP) embraced the idea of granting minor concessions to moderate Africans—removing the so-called pinpricks of petty discrimination.[75]
The African National Congress sought more substantial changes, but less sweeping than the Government believed. Its platform advocated racial cooperation, the right of all to "permanent citizenship" in the country, and "equality of opportunity in every sphere," but it stopped far short of demanding land redistribution, majority rule, or independence from Britain.
Black discontent had been growing in the rural areas largely because of the disruptive impact of the 1951 Land Husbandry Act. It was designed to improve the rural economy in the African reserves, which experienced the pressure of a growing population within fixed areas, but its provisions violated traditional practices.[76] Rather than expand the size of the reserves, the act limited cattle grazing in specified areas and provided for the de-stocking of African herds; it allowed officials to dictate patterns of cultivation and crop growing and to fix dwelling sites on
[73] [Robinson Commission] Government of Southern Rhodesia, Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report on Administrative and Judicial Functions in the Native Affairs and District Courts Departments, C.S.R. 22-1961, Salisbury, 20 May 1961, V. L. Robinson, Chair, p. 30.
[74] Correspondence with author, 30 January 1984.
[75] To channel African opinion, NAD pamphlets labeled extremists as "liable to drag people down, to bring trouble to them, even death or injury," but moderates were calm, constructive, and able to "reason things out intelligently, within the framework of constitutional law and regulations." Rhodesia was "full of moderates" who had achieved progress, honor, and respect (NADFORM Broadsheet no. 4, Native Affairs Department, February 1959).
[76] William Barber, "The Political Economy of Central Africa's Experiment with Inter-Racial Partnership," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 25, no. 3 (August 1959): 324–35.
farm land; it prohibited cultivating or grazing without a permit and imposed compulsory labor on unemployed rural Africans. Implementation of the act meant the depletion of highly valued herds, reduction of the land under cultivation, and the forced uprooting of families and entire villages.
George Nyandoro of the ANC called the act "the best recruiter Congress ever had,"[77] and the ANC capitalized on peasants' grievances over the measure. Tasked with implementing the act, the Native Affairs Department was acutely aware of blacks' resentment and the erosion of its authority, which two 1961 commissions of inquiry documented.[78] The prime minister understood the seriousness of the problem and feared "the development of the Land Husbandry Act and indeed the whole administration of the native areas would break down."[79]
Discontent with socioeconomic conditions was growing among urban Africans as well. A recession in 1957–1958 hit blacks hard; rising unemployment and inadequate township housing contributed to their sense of deprivation and provided ready-made issues for ANC organizers.
The existence of African grievances and nascent politicization in the late 1950s—however unnerving to the authorities—posed no serious threat to public order or national security. Even the Director of African Administration for Bulawayo, E. H. Ashton, challenged the Government's line, "The Bulawayo detainees were generally responsible people, who did not fall into the category of 'rabble rousers' described by the Secretary for Native Affairs."[80] Another authority remarked, "What has happened is simply that African nationalism has become a lot more noisy ... but it is still not backed by anything more substantial than po-
[77] Quoted in Patrick O'Meara, Rhodesia: Racial Conflict or Coexistence? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 100.
[78] The Robinson Commission underscored the "extreme opposition and bitter resentment centred on the Native Department, which has come to be regarded as the author of, and instrument for, all oppressive legislation" (p. 30). The Brown Commission (also of 1961) found that the Native Commissioner "tends to become regarded as the local symbol of a restrictive if not 'oppressive' White Government, and therefore unavoidably the target of mounting resentment" ([Brown Commission] Government of Southern Rhodesia, Report of the Mangwende Reserve Commission of Inquiry, 1961, James S. Brown, Chairman, para. 107). A 1968 survey found that most Africans obeyed district commissioners only "reluctantly" and out of "fear" (A. K. H. Weinrich, Black and White Elites in Rural Rhodesia [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973], pp. 54, 58).
[79] Southern Rhodesia, Assembly Debates, vol. 42, 26 February 1959, col. 2018 (hereafter, Assembly Debates ).
[80] City of Bulawayo, Report of the Director of African Administration for 1958–1959 (Bulawayo: Rhodesian Printers, 1959), p. 72.
litical aspirations alone.... Why let it frighten us?"[81] Organized political violence was not imminent, and most ANC members were hardly subversives.[82] The ANC had rather modest goals, few resources, and a rudimentary organization. Although black grievances were intensifying during this period, official controls prevented the movement from developing into a force to be reckoned with. Thus, as predicted by the resource mobilization school of social movements, African resistance remained a fledgling movement.[83]
The security panic of 1959—the official overreaction to perceived threats—is best explained within a framework that centers on the overriding concerns and interests of the ruling United Federal party. It was under pressure from several sectors of white society, including its own MPs and party loyalists, a press that had been clamoring for months for harsh action against "subversives," and the politically important white farming community.
Most disturbing to the UFP Government was the possible loss of support among a white electorate fairly evenly split in its support for the ruling party and the opposition Dominion party (DP). The white supremacist DP had been attacking the Government for nine months before the crackdown.[84] While supporting the emergency, the DP faulted the Government for not acting sooner or going further to quash African nationalism, and for having created the problem in the first place through appeasement of Africans. To DP supporters, like their counterparts in contemporary South Africa, reforms that might result in even limited African advancement were anathema. The opposition's clamor for an iron fist policy helped convince the regime to declare the emergency; as the general election of 1962 neared, this pressure became increasingly salient.
The concerns of the white electorate were abundantly expressed in local newspaper reports and letters to the editor from 1958 to 1960 that I examined. Their views were also reflected in a 1958 survey of five hundred whites that documented their mistrust of African nationalism, be-
[81] Sir Roy Welensky, prime minister of the Central African Federation (of which Rhodesia was a member), Rhodesia Herald, 27 January 1959.
[82] Clyde Sanger, Central African Emergency (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 256; Philip Mason, Year of Decision: Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 218; Guy Clutton-Brock, "The 1959 'Emergency' in Southern Rhodesia," in New Deal, ed. Leys and Pratt, p. 161.
[83] John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements," American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (May 1977): 1212–41; Tilly, Mobilization .
[84] Assembly Debates, vol. 43, 14 August 1959, col. 1559.
lief that African political mobilization was inspired by outside agitators rather than a natural outgrowth of internal conditions, view of the ANC as a real security threat, concern that whites should have firearms, and support for tight police surveillance over African meetings.[85]
One pivotal constituency was that of white farmers. Terrified that they might lose their land, commercial farmers criticized the regime's "reluctance" to take firm action against unruly blacks who were "troubling" African farm workers. Drawing lessons from Kenya's Mau Mau disorders, they warned that "it is the farming and whole rural community which always has in Africa received the first shock of violence."[86]
Continental events provided a backdrop for the stirrings of Rhodesian blacks. In the late 1950s, nationalist movements were sweeping through other African colonies; in many, independence seemed imminent. Lurid press coverage of outbreaks of black violence elsewhere in Africa superimposed external developments on the Rhodesian situation.[87] Grisly descriptions of events contributed to fears in white circles that Rhodesian blacks would be encouraged to rebel. Such a demonstration effect was anticipated during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and signs of that country's impending independence, the civil war in Algeria, and the violence against whites in the Belgian Congo and French Congo in early 1959.[88] The effect of sensationalized reports of these events was to deepen white Rhodesians' fears of murder, rape, and expulsion in the event of a black revolt or the transfer of power to the black majority.[89] In this larger context, the future of white supremacy in Rhodesia seemed to depend on the imposition of much tighter controls on the black population.
Closer to home, violence had broken out in Nyasaland, and tensions were rising in Northern Rhodesia as blacks demanded independence. (Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and Southern Rhodesia had formed
[85] Rogers and Frantz, Racial Themes, pp. 259–63.
[86] Editorial, Rhodesian Farmer, 6 December 1957; ibid., 13 December 1957.
[87] Similar panic stories in the South African press are examined in Pierre Hugo, "Towards Darkness and Death: Racial Demonology in South Africa," Journal of Modern African Studies 26, no. 4 (December 1988).
[88] In 1960, one indignant opposition MP painted all Africans with the same brush: "The African ... is interested in exterminating the European and it is no good anybody getting up and saying that the Southern Rhodesian native is different.... The Southern Rhodesian native, the Congo native, the Mau Mau terrorists of Kenya, the massacre plot African of Nyasaland, the petrol burning types of Northern Rhodesia and the ritual murderers of Basutoland, they are all the same" (Wynn Starling, Assembly Debates, vol. 45, 19 July 1960, col. 359).
[89] The Rhodesian prime minister stated, "We had the moral of the Mau Mau trouble very much in mind" (Sunday Mail (Salisbury), 22 March 1959).
the Central African Federation in 1953.) Southern Rhodesian security forces had been sent into Nyasaland in February to help quell disturbances. In the regime's view, this external operation required the tightening of screws at home. Lord Malvern (former prime minister of Rhodesia and the federation) stated, "It was decided that the Southern Rhodesian African Congress must be put behind wire so that they could not create a diversion and prevent the sending of necessary police to Nyasaland."[90]
Disturbances within the federation thus precipitated the introduction of emergency rule in Rhodesia. The prime minister admitted that "there is a real emergency not in Southern Rhodesia at the moment, but in the Federation."[91] The security crackdown in Rhodesia was largely a preemptive strike against further nationalist organizing of blacks and against potential African unrest.[92] Disorder seemed likely because of the sinister construction authorities placed on both continental pressures and domestic black politics. Such linkage of external and internal threats is common in deeply divided societies.[93]
The embryonic challenge from Rhodesian blacks was only one factor contributing to the declaration of the state of emergency. The Whitehead regime's political interests also played a role: it attempted to gain political capital among the white electorate, steal the thunder of the opposition party, and thus secure its incumbency. The Government sought in one stroke to undermine the ANC to the left, curry favor with DP loyalists to the right, and retain the support of its own constituents in the middle. Already evident in 1959, these interests grew increasingly salient as the 1962 election approached.
Normalizing Emergency Rule
The emergency episode proved counterproductive in several respects. It ruined the prospects for genuine racial partnership, made heroes out of the detainees, and alienated moderate Africans from the Government.[94] To deflate the crisis atmosphere of the state of emergency and yet pre-
[90] Great Britain, House of Lords, Debates, 24 March 1959, col. 258.
[91] Assembly Debates, vol. 42, 26 February 1959, col. 2049; emphasis added.
[92] Berman's state-centered analysis of the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya similarly notes, "The Emergency, in reality, was a pre-emptive attack carried out by the incumbent colonial authorities against a significant segment of the African political leadership of Kenya and its supporters" ("Bureaucracy," p. 170).
[93] David Brown, "Crisis and Ethnicity: Legitimacy in Plural Societies," Third World Quarterly 7, no. 4 (October 1985): 989.
[94] Mlambo, Rhodesia, p. 133; Ranger, Crisis, p. 34.
serve its sweeping powers as insurance against the future, the regime sought to normalize the exceptional measures by incorporating them in statute law.[95] Thus institutionalized, the official emergency came to an end.
The 1959 Unlawful Organizations Act (UOA) was novel in that it outlawed certain organizations. The act proscribed the African National Congress and provided for the banning of additional organizations if their activities were deemed "likely" to disturb public order, "prejudice" the tranquility of the nation, endanger "constitutional government," or "promote feelings of ill will or hostility" between the races. Furthermore, the UOA outlawed any organization that was "controlled by or affiliated to or participates in the activities or promotes the objects or propagates the opinions of any organization outside the colony" (emphasis added). The executive's banning of an organization was "not open to question in any court of law," and the burden of proving that one was not a member of a banned organization fell on the accused. Attendance at a meeting or possession of books, writings, accounts, documents, banners, or insignia "relating to an unlawful organization" were prima facie evidence of membership "until the contrary is proved." Prosecution of such offenses could be held in camera. Finally, the act provided for the complete indemnification of police and civil servants for actions connected with enforcing the measure. Between 1960 and 1965, 1,610 Africans were prosecuted and 1,002 convicted under this law.[96]
The Preventive Detention Act (PDA) was introduced to continue the detention of ANC members who had been arrested and held without charge during the state of emergency.[97] During parliamentary debate on the bill, the prime minister argued that the nationalist detainees had made a "mockery" of the law, had stirred up rural discontent, and had established connections with those outside the country who were intent on "bringing about a complete change" in Africa. He admitted that these activities were not "in any way contrary to the old laws" unless violence could be proved—hence the need for the PDA.[98]
The act authorized the detention of persons "concerned," "associated," or "supporting" "any of the activities of any organization which
[95] Codification of emergency powers after a crisis is fairly common among authoritarian regimes (see Anthony Mathews and R. C. Albino, "The Permanence of the Temporary," South African Law Journal 83 [1966]: 16–43).
[96] Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia, p. 60.
[97] Minister of Justice and Internal Affairs, Assembly Debates, vol. 42, 20 March 1959, col. 2687.
[98] Assembly Debates, vol. 42, 20 March 1959, cols. 2738–44.
led to the present state of emergency" and persons considered "potentially dangerous to public safety or public order." The decision as to whether individuals were "potentially dangerous" was left to the governor, which in practice meant the Minister of Justice and Internal Affairs.
Lest the act give the appearance of completely unchecked executive power, it established a Review Tribunal—composed of a judge, a magistrate, and a Native Commissioner—to review annually the case of each detainee and recommend release or continued detention. Tribunal proceedings were held in camera; deliberations depended heavily on the evidence of the police Special Branch; and the minister was not obliged to follow the tribunal's recommendations. The tribunal rarely advised the release of detainees, and its lack of objectivity was reflected in its general report on the emergency and detention exercise of 1959, which completely whitewashed the regime's actions.[99]
A third measure, the Native Affairs Amendment Act, was introduced in 1959 to prohibit any "native" from making statements or acting in a way "likely to undermine the authority" of, or bring into "disrepute," governmental officials, chiefs, or headmen. The act abolished meetings of twelve or more "natives" without the permission of the Native Commissioner. Hence, the rural areas became much less accessible to black nationalist organizers.
In January 1960 the National Democratic party (NDP) emerged out of the ruins of the ANC. Its goals included universal adult suffrage, higher wages, improvements in African housing and education, and abolition of the Land Apportionment Act and the Land Husbandry Act. Like the ANC, the NDP had a rudimentary organization, limited resources, and no access to the press; many of its would-be leaders remained behind bars. Given the far-reaching security restrictions passed in 1959, the party's activities were bound within tight parameters. Organizing in rural areas was virtually impossible. In urban areas, however, it was attracting up to ten thousand people to its rallies, and by mid-1961 it had over two hundred fifty thousand dues-paying members.[100]
Intended to paralyze black opposition and prevent political violence, the state of emergency proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. State repression deepened black alienation from the regime and suggested to some that
[99] Review Tribunal, Preventive Detention (Temporary Provisions) Act 1959, General Report, Presented to the Legislative Assembly, C.S.R. 27 (Salisbury, Rhodesia, 1959), T. Beadle, President.
[100] Mlambo, Rhodesia, p. 140; Davis M'Gabe, "Rhodesia's African Majority," African Report (February 1967): 19.
peaceful political organizing was a dead end. With the black leadership in detention, the political vacuum was filled by the more militantly inclined. As in Kenya during Mau Mau, violence in Rhodesia "derived from the conditions of the Emergency itself."[101] In July and October 1960 large-scale demonstrations and rioting broke out in black townships. During one riot, the police killed eleven Africans. The rioters were selective: they "destroyed everything that had anything to do with the central or local government."[102]
In reaction to the disorders and to the outcry of a shocked settler community, the Government introduced more comprehensive legislation: the 1960 Law and Order (Maintenance) Act (LOMA) and the Emergency Powers Act (EPA). LOMA banned publications; criminalized "subversive statements" and "intimidation," which it defined broadly; restricted persons without trial to designated areas; empowered police to search and arrest without a warrant; and summarily prohibited meetings. It outlawed the publishing of "false news," boycotting, creating "disaffection" in the police force, and using or encouraging violence, sabotage, and terrorism.
The Emergency Powers Act enabled the Minister of Justice to make "necessary or expedient" regulations for public order, safety, peace, and the maintenance of any "essential service." It provided regulations for summary arrest, detention, and restriction. It also gave the executive power to suspend or modify "any law" to make way for emergency regulations.
Although couched in race-neutral language, LOMA and EPA were applied almost entirely to Africans. Very few whites were sympathetic to the nationalist cause, and the rights and liberties of the white population were largely unaffected. Blacks were arrested, detained, or restricted; political meetings on Sundays and holidays were proscribed (in 1961, 1,028 Africans were arrested for violations of LOMA, and 1,084 in 1962).[103] The NDP was banned in December 1961 and its successor, the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), was outlawed in September 1962. By these actions the regime hoped to curry favor among the white electorate as a national election approached.[104]
[101] Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 277.
[102] Francis Nehwati, "The Social and Communal Background to 'Zhii': The African Riots in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia in 1960," African Affairs 69 (July 1970): 252.
[103] Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia, p. 60.
[104] Chengetai Zvobgo, "Southern Rhodesia under Edgar Whitehead: 1958–1962," Journal of Southern African Affairs 2, no. 4 (October 1977): 489.
The events of 1959 through 1962 helped to fortify the institutional power of Rhodesia's internal security agencies. The new security legislation greatly expanded the arbitrary powers of officials in the Native Affairs Department, the Ministry of Justice and Internal Affairs, and the police force; just as their manpower and financial resources were substantially enhanced.[105] New police stations were erected in black townships; the Special Branch of the police was established in December 1960 to provide intelligence on nationalists at home and on "sinister" forces elsewhere in Africa.[106] In late 1962, a powerful Ministry of Law and Order was created, with responsibility for the police. This new department specifically concerned with law and order was designed both to expand control over blacks and, once again, to give an alarmed white electorate a sense that the Government was being firm.[107]
As in contemporary South Africa, officials described repressive measures in Rhodesia as necessary to establish a bedrock of stability upon which a superstructure of reform could be built. The UFP regime gradually came to the view that it ought to balance repression with a package of concessions to Africans—a shock-absorber effect. It aimed concessions mainly at the moderate African "majority" and repression at the extremist "fringe," in order to drive a wedge between the two groups and weaken their potential for broad based political resistance. Improvements took place in African education, wages, and amenities; plans were made to dispense with some "petty apartheid" regulations the regime considered superfluous to maintaining white supremacy. The repeal of certain kinds of racial discrimination stopped far short of forced integration, as Whitehead made clear in 1959: "We will not legislate to force people to integrate who do not want to and we will not force people to meet socially if they do not want to."[108]
The use of both the carrot and stick reflected growing disagreement at the commanding heights of the security sector, some of whose elites called almost exclusively for reforms, some for undiluted repression, and others for a mixture of the two. Police chiefs and the Secretary of Native Affairs pushed strongly within Cabinet for repressive solutions, while others like the Ministers of Justice and Labour took a more "en-
[105] Government of Southern Rhodesia, Estimates of Expenditure (Salisbury: Government Printer, 1959–1962).
[106] "The Special Branch," Fighting Forces of Rhodesia, no. 2 (August 1975): 13.
[107] Author's interview with former minister, 26 May 1983; correspondence between former Minister of Labour and the author, 30 January 1984.
[108] Assembly Debates, 2 October 1959, col. 1457.
lightened" view.[109] As one minister in the Whitehead Cabinet later confided, conflict within the Cabinet and the ruling party over the balance between reform and repression "was a split which became deeper as the years went by. The greater the attempt to reform, the greater the reaction."[110] Despite the increased legal powers given to the police, Justice, and Native Affairs, hard-line factions within these agencies remained frustrated by the Cabinet's apparent weakness in curbing unrest. A significant number of state personnel were covert supporters of the Dominion party and its hard-line program. The 1959–1962 period was significant, therefore, not only for the growing black unrest but also for the unprecedented discord within the state over both security policy and reform of the racial order.
Breakdown and Restoration of Settler Cohesion
The increasing strain within the state over specific forms of repression and reform and over the proper mixture of the two coincided with a backlash within the dominant caste and heightened protest among the black majority. Reforms fueled white anxiety and opposition; repression further alienated African opinion. Of most consequence for the future of the Whitehead regime was its diminishing credibility within a settler population that had never given its leaders a mandate to open, even slightly, the window of social and political opportunity to Africans.
Serious electoral competition among settler parties was rare in Rhodesia. The only period in Rhodesian history when a white opposition party had any appreciable impact on security legislation was that of 1958 through 1962. During those years the United Federal party held a slim majority in Parliament and precarious support among the electorate. Unlike contests both earlier and later, the struggles over security policy from 1958 through 1962 were significant precisely because the Dominion party presented a serious challenge to the UFP's incumbency. The DP, not the African nationalists, had the capacity to bring the ruling party down. Champion of undiluted white domination and the fierce repression of African opposition, the DP sought to make political capital out of the UFP's "weakness" by stirring the pot of white fears. According to a minister in the Whitehead Cabinet, in the field of law and order, the Dominion party "influenced the UFP quite a bit."[111]
[109] Former Minister of Labour, correspondence with author, 30 January 1984.
[110] Correspondence with author, 28 May 1984.
[111] Interview, 26 May 1983.
In 1959 Prime Minister Whitehead boasted that 99 percent of the whites and 85 percent of the blacks supported his administration[112] —a gross exaggeration at the time, and the UFP's legitimacy in both quarters had all but collapsed by 1962.
The Government's new security measures did not assuage the white electorate, disturbed both by the regime's inadequate use of the iron fist and its experiment with conciliation and gradual African advancement. Staunch advocates of settler supremacy considered Whitehead's reforms treasonous: for example, plans to extend the franchise, appoint African Cabinet ministers and increase the number of African MPs, remove petty apartheid restrictions, and repeal the cornerstone Land Apportionment Act.[113] In October 1962 the prime minister made the mistake of telling the United Nations' Trusteeship Committee that Africans "will have a majority [in Parliament] within fifteen years." Although the premier did not mean majority rule, his prediction was too much for the settler community to bear.[114] A 1958 survey revealed that whites believed the franchise was already too generous toward Africans, and 86.5 percent opposed repeal of the Land Apportionment Act.[115]
One barometer of white morale, migration rates, registered the falling confidence in the Government: in 1956 the country had eleven thousand immigrants; in 1961, it had two thousand emigrants. But the extent of white concern was most clearly evidenced in the December 1962 election when the DP's heir, the white supremacist Rhodesian Front (RF), won a surprise victory over the UFP.
The 1962 election was the first in which a white ruling party sought to broaden its base by enlisting African support. It failed. Of the 10,632 registered African voters (a fraction of voting-age blacks), only 2,577 voted.[116] In a context of increasing racial polarization, Africans withheld support from a Government that had arrested their leaders, banned three of their political parties, and attempted to break their spirits. The use of the stick had canceled out the desired effect of the carrot. Similarly, the white electorate was not prepared to endorse a Government
[112] Assembly Debates, vol. 42, 24 March 1959, col. 3167.
[113] See "Southern Rhodesia Polarized: Fall of the United Federal Party," Round Table 53, no. 210 (March 1963): 137–66; and Samuel Speck, "The Gap Widens in Southern Rhodesia," Africa Report 8, no. 1 (January 1963): 10–13.
[114] Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia, p. 35.
[115] Rogers and Frantz, Racial Themes .
[116] In elections from 1962 to 1977, less than 0.3 percent of Africans of voting age were able to vote because of qualifications on property, income, and education (Anthony Lemon, "Electoral Machinery and Voting Patterns in Rhodesia, 1962–1977," African Affairs 77 [October 1978]: 511–30).
that seemed ready to capitulate to black pressures. In the election, the African boycott combined with a shift of white voters to the RF to defeat the UFP. The Rhodesian Front won 56.5 percent of the total vote and 35 seats; the United Federal party received 26.
Whitehead's predecessor, Garfield Todd, was removed in a Cabinet revolt in 1958 for his own slightly reformist gestures, which his colleagues considered altogether premature. But Whitehead's Cabinet could not bring itself to do its own housecleaning when he embarked on a more serious reform program than anything Todd had contemplated. It was thus left to the settler electorate to purge this deviating regime. The result of the 1962 election was convincing proof that a ruling party could attempt to reform this settler state only at its peril. A majority of white Rhodesians was simply not prepared to allow political leaders to modernize state institutions and promote serious racial conciliation. The year 1962 can thus be regarded as a "point of no return" in Rhodesia, one that soundly rejected an accommodationist solution and sharpened racial polarization.[117] The RF victory signaled a dramatic return to the traditional Rhodesian pattern, in which "power tends to gravitate towards those who are least ready for change."[118]
The coming to power of the Rhodesian Front under Premier Winston Field had a salutary effect on settler unity and state cohesion, which had so troubled the Whitehead Government. In Rhodesia, the transfer of power to an ultrarightist settler Government helped to ease strains within the state well into the 1970s. (It did not have this effect in Northern Ireland, discussed in Chapter 5.) Reunified, the Rhodesian state was better able to defend the cause of settler domination, which increased the whites' confidence in the country. The balance of power within the state shifted in favor of the hawks; moderate elites from the old regime were purged, converted, or ignored—much as occurred in South Africa after the National party's victory over the United party in 1948. In both cases the former ruling party lost all influence on security policy, ceased to offer a viable political alternative, and gradually faded from the scene.
It took time for the new regime to subdue African unrest. In August 1963 several leading nationalists broke with the banned ZAPU to form a new organization, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Between August 1963 and August 1964, widespread violence between
[117] Kuper, The Pity .
[118] Leys, European Politics, p. 36.
ZAPU and ZANU supporters occurred in African townships. By 1965 this internecine rivalry had abated within the country (but continued between the exiled wings of each party), and domestic political violence had declined.
In line with the new regime's break with multiracialism, it made little attempt to cushion repression through reforms. The Government made full use of the inherited repressive machinery and introduced amendments to make the legislation even more severe; it also created an important new security agency in 1963, the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO). CIO became responsible for gathering external intelligence (and the police Special Branch then focused on domestic matters). The need for a special intelligence agency was growing with the possibility that the regime might soon unilaterally declare independence from Britain, and the international fallout that this might create.[119]
Unilateral Independence
The Central African Federation came to an end in 1963, after a decade of life. The federation had been an attempt to shield Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland from British interference by incorporating them under Southern Rhodesia's protective umbrella, but it left open the possibility that London would unilaterally grant independence to the black majority in all three territories. The end of the federation meant that Rhodesia had successfully shed one more layer of London's formal authority over the colony. Regarding Britain with suspicion after its "sell-out" of Kenya's settlers, Rhodesia's whites realized that without full independence from the home country they would have no guarantee against a similar fate. Although British officials had seemed rather indifferent to the cycle of unrest and repression in Rhodesia after 1959, the lingering possibility that the metropole might intervene against the interests of the settlers caused tremendous anxiety within the white community. Consider this candid communiqué from Prime Minister Field to a British Secretary of State:
so long as the last remaining links remain and the impression persists that the United Kingdom has the right to interfere in our internal affairs there is the danger of a series of serious incidents of disorder [among blacks] being en-
[119] Author's interview with former CIO official, 30 May 1983; the Federal Intelligence Security Bureau operated in the Central African Federation, under British auspices.
couraged from outside in order to compel such intervention by the British Government.[120]
Field's Cabinet colleagues, however, judged him too weak to give Britain an ultimatum on independence. He resigned in April 1964 and was succeeded by Ian Smith, an ardent advocate of unconditional independence. In the 1965 election, Smith received his mandate to pursue independence vigorously and if necessary illegally and unilaterally. The Rhodesian Front swept 79.3 percent of the vote (up from 56.5 percent in 1962), and its victory confirmed that the old UFP—now the Rhodesia party—was a spent force.
Refusing to grant Rhodesia unconditional independence, the British Government stipulated six preconditions: (1) unimpeded progress toward majority rule; (2) guarantees against retrogressive amendment of the 1961 constitution; (3) immediate improvement in Africans' political status; (4) progress toward ending racial discrimination; (5) evidence that independence was acceptable to the entire Rhodesian population; and (6) formal prohibitions against racial oppression either by the minority or the majority. The settlers responded to these conditions with a litany of noes. They were most prepared to resist the first principle: majority rule was to them a euphemism for a "racialist black dictatorship," which would be suicidal for white power and prosperity and would erode "civilized standards" in the country.
The impasse between the two governments had lasted more than a year when Smith announced his country's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in November 1965. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson immediately denounced UDI as an "act of rebellion against the Crown" and predicted that the illegal action would be short-lived. British officials took quite some time to realize that Rhodesia was no longer within their sphere of influence and that the Crown's authority over Rhodesia was, in large measure, a constitutional fiction. The home country had no military or civil service personnel in the country, only an impotent governor; it was in no position to intervene with force.[121] Whitehall eventually convinced the international community to apply economic sanc-
[120] Winston Field, letter to R. A. Butler, British Secretary of State, 29 March 1963, reprinted in Central African Office, Correspondence Between Her Majesty's Government and the Government of Southern Rhodesia, Cmnd. 2000 (London: HMSO, April 1963).
[121] The use of force against Rhodesia was unpopular at home (where the Labour Government had a bare majority of one in the Commons); it went against the policy of "consensual decolonization," presented logistical difficulties, was opposed by Britain's military chiefs, and would have violated the "kith and kin" ties between the two countries (see Robert C. Good's excellent discussion, U.D.I.: The International Politics of the Rhodesian Rebellion [London: Faber and Faber, 1973], pp. 55–64).
tions and diplomatic isolation to bring Rhodesia to its senses. When this failed, Britain made several attempts at a negotiated solution. Yet, as neither party would compromise on basic principles, the discussions came to naught. It became increasingly clear that the Rhodesian settler state was immune to metropolitan leverage.
One week prior to UDI, the Rhodesian Front regime declared a state of emergency: it has been in effect ever since. The timing of the declaration clearly anticipated the constitutional crisis between Britain and Rhodesia and the possibility that blacks might launch an insurrection against the regime. They did not, but already in 1964 ZANU and ZAPU resolved to pursue an armed struggle against the regime from exile in Zambia. Rhodesia's security forces swiftly crushed their first attempts at guerrilla infiltration in 1966, and the campaign remained ineffective until 1972.
Although the country was peaceful in the later 1960s, Rhodesia retained the state of emergency and used the security arsenal to harass and subdue black political opponents, not simply those few involved in crime and violence. Almost all the principal nationalist leaders of the early 1960s languished in detention, restriction, or exile for several years.[122] The lack of leaders, organization, and resources to challenge the regime made this a time of disarray and frustration in the nationalist movement.
The settlers were in a different mood altogether. The rebellion against Britain and resultant international isolation cemented the settlers' political and ideological unity. The whites stood solidly behind the Government and its commitment to resist social and political change. In the general elections of 1970 and 1977, the Rhodesian Front won 77.8 percent and 86.4 percent of the vote. Settlers also broadly accepted the need for severe security powers. In one small 1971 survey, 88 percent of the whites questioned approved of the regime's handling of security; only 3 percent disapproved.[123]
Conclusion
The pillars of settler rule had weathered several storms. Britain and the international community had failed to affect the Rhodesian situation;
[122] The new orders for detention and restriction declined steadily—from 650 and 1,670 respectively in 1964 to 0 and 14 by November 1969.
[123] Morris Hirsch, A Decade of Crisis: Ten Years of Rhodesian Front Rule (Salisbury: Peter Dearlove, 1973), p. 151.
settler solidarity had been restored; peaceful black opposition had been quieted and armed struggle seemed futile.
When a maverick regime tampered with absolutist settler rule, it succumbed to a backlash consistent with the prediction that state power would "gravitate towards those who [were] least ready for change."[124] Hard-line settlers saw the most modest concessions to the natives as threatening the sacred pillars of settler rule.
Not all settler castes have displayed the political intransigence of the Rhodesians. The Arab elite in Zanzibar tried another strategy in the 1950s:
to preserve its position by gaining the acceptance and political support of the African majority. This method was fundamentally different from the usual technique of dominant racial minorities which have attempted to retain power by coercive means elsewhere in Africa.... The Arab oligarchy of Zanzibar actively sought to bring about the introduction of a representative parliamentary system based on universal suffrage, and tied its political future to the idea of gaining sufficient [African] electoral support to win a majority of constituencies.[125]
But Zanzibar's experiment with gradual native incorporation was motivated by the same underlying concern as Rhodesia's UDI: to preempt a British move to grant independence to the black majority.
When Clapham wrote that "Liberia is not a sort of black Rhodesia," he had in mind the Liberian regime's efforts during the final decades of settler rule to win the compliance of the indigenous African population through partial social assimilation and political incorporation.[126] In the late 1960s and 1970s Liberia extended the franchise to Africans, relaxed coercive sanctions, and set in motion a "Unification Policy."[127] These genuine efforts at accommodation went further than anything Rhodesia contemplated, but they were nevertheless designed to streamline, not dissolve, settler rule. Liebenow notes that "the more the central bastions of settler privilege were threatened, the tighter the restrictions imposed upon significant entry of tribal persons into the upper echelons" of the
[124] Leys, European Politics, p. 36.
[125] Michael Lofchie, "The Plural Society of Zanzibar," in Pluralism in Africa, ed. L. Kuper and M. Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 309 and Michael Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
[126] Christopher Clapham, "Liberia," in West African States, ed. J. Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 122.
[127] J. Gus Liebenow, Liberia: The Evolution of Privilege (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).
state and economic order.[128] At the time of the coup d'état in 1980, settlers still dominated the Cabinet; the True Whig party, under tight settler control, had held power for a full century; and the native majority still had little influence on state policy.
That settler rule came to an abrupt and violent end in Zanzibar in 1964 and Liberia in 1980 illustrates the difficulties inherent in a reformist solution to settler domination. Contemporary Taiwan may prove that incremental democratization and liberalization is indeed an alternative to protracted settler rule. But most settler populations will not endorse the kinds of changes that would satisfy native interests, just as natives are normally unwilling to rest content with the modest concessions offered. Unwilling to reform themselves out of power, enlightened modernizing regimes often walk a tightrope between irreconcilable settler and native demands. This delicate balancing act is currently occupying South Africa.
Northern Ireland and Rhodesian settlers held steadfast to their power and privilege as communal divisions deepened and instability grew in the 1960s and 1970s. In those decades, they mobilized the full force of their respective security systems to defend settler supremacy. Ultimately, the repressive apparatus proved unequal to the task, as the next two chapters show.
[128] J. Gus Liebenow, Liberia: The Quest for Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 6.