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.