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Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe
Alois S. Mlambo
Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................... 2
Defining Racism................... ................................................... ............ 2
Scientific Racism and the White Man’s Burden Idea . . .......................................... 3
Racism and the Black Peril Phenomenon . . ...................................................... 5
White Racism and the Alienation and Racialization of Land ................................... 8
A Racialized Labor Regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . . . .. . .. . .. . 11
Some Are “More White”than Others (Mlambo 2000) .......................................... 13
The Invisible Minorities . . . . . . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. . .. . . . .. . .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . 14
Political Marginalization and Other Forms of Discrimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Conclusion . . . . . ................................................................................... 16
References . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Abstract
Colonial Zimbabwe (known as Southern Rhodesia until 1965, and Rhodesia there-
after until independence in 1980) was established in 1890 under the sponsorship of
Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company (BSAC). Rhodes was a
firm believer in the White-Man’s Burden idea of the duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to
help “civilize”the “darker”corners of the world and regarded British imperialism as
a positive force for this purpose. The settlers who occupied colonial Zimbabwe
shared this view of the world and treated the indigenous African population as
children who needed their guidance, protection, and civilization. The policies
which the settler state adopted and implemented, therefore, whether in politics,
constitution making and governance, education, economy, land and labor policies,
social relations, or residential policy, were based on this sense of racial superiority
and the determination to promote white interests at the expense of the nonwhite
population. Racial segregation permeated the entire colonial project at every level,
A. S. Mlambo (*)
University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
e-mail: alois.mlambo@up.ac.za
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
S. Ratuva (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0242-8_28-1
1
whether it was in sports, hotel facilities, or the use of public conveniences and
amenities. White racism in colonial Zimbabwewasalsoinformedbyasenseof
fear, given the fact that whites were grossly outnumbered in the country throughout
the colonial period and were always afraid of being overwhelmed by the African
majority. This contributed to their determination to control the Africans and keep
them in their place. Attempts at promoting racial partnership in the 1950s achieved
little. State sponsored white racism ended with Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.
Keywords
Racism · Imperialism · Colonization · Black peril · Land · Education · Labor ·
Rhodes · Rhodesia · Settler
Introduction
Late nineteenth-century European imperialism and colonization in Africa were
motivated by a range of factors, including a predominant European racist view of
the world which regarded the Anglo-Saxon race as the most civilized of all the races
and, therefore, duty-bound to spread the benefits of their civilization to the “lower”
races of the world. Called the White Man’s Burden or “civilizing mission”and
“mission civilisatrice”in the English and French world, respectively, this idea was
celebrated by Rudyard Kipling in his 1902 poem entitled “The White Man’s
Burden,”which was, partly, in celebration the United States victory over Spain in
the Cuban-American- Spanish War and, mainly, an assertion of the Anglo-Saxon
race’s right to rule other races. As will be shown, the founder of Rhodesia, Cecil John
Rhodes, was a strong believer in the civilizing mission idea and had no doubt
whatsoever that his race was the best in the world. He firmly believed that bringing
the land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi under British rule was for the
unquestionable benefit of the indigenous people of that territory. Rhodesian white
settlers shared Rhodes’world view. Not surprisingly, therefore, racism remained the
foundation and the pervasive ethos of white colonial rule from the establishment of
the British colony in 1890 until the collapse of white rule in 1979, mainly because of
the African liberation movements’determination to dismantle the racist colonial
system by any means necessary, including taking up arms.
Defining Racism
For purposes of this study, racism means “any action or attitude, conscious or
unconscious, that subordinates an individual or group based on skin colour or race
... [whether] enacted individually or institutionally.”Institutional racism manifests
itself in discriminatory policies based on race in schools, businesses, employment,
religion, and media, among others, which are designed to “perpetuate and maintain
the power, influence and wellbeing of one group over another.”Such discriminatory
2 A. S. Mlambo
policies often manifest in the denial of benefits, facilities, services, and opportunities
to a person or a group of people on the basis of their racial origins. In addition,
racism also exists when “ideas and assumptions about racial categories are used to
justify and reproduce a racial hierarchy and racially structured society that unjustly
limits access to resources, rights and privileges on the basis of race”(Tatum 2003).
Scientific Racism and the White Man’s Burden Idea
While racism and racial prejudice have a long history, as evident in the racial
justifications of the transatlantic slave trade as beneficial to the enslaved because it
took them away from their savagery in Africa and exposed them to Western
civilization and the dignity of manual labor, it is the specific manifestation of this
phenomenon in late nineteenth century Western Europe which has a direct bearing
on the partition of Africa in general and the colonization of Zimbabwe in particular.
Based on the intellectual arguments advanced by American and European Social
Darwinists, such as Spencer and Alfred Mahan, which regarded the Anglos-Saxon
race and its civilization as the most evolved and best, this version of racism,
particularly in Late Victorian Britain, postulated that it was the Anglo-Saxon
race’s duty to spread Anglo-Saxon civilization to the “darker”corners of the world
through colonial domination for the benefit of the colonized peoples (Hofstadter
1944; Rogers 1972). There was no doubt, for instance, in British arch-imperialist
Cecil John Rhodes’view that British imperial domination was the best thing that
could happen to the world at large. He wrote:
I contend that we [the English] are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world
we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present
inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would
be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a
new country added to our dominions gives. (Rhodes 1877)
With respect to Africa, specifically, Rhodes stated:
Africa is still lying ready for us. It is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every
opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our
eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the
most human, most honourable race the world possesses. (Rhodes 1877)
The White settlers who entered the territory of what was to become Southern
Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1890 as part of an invading group of adventurers known as
the Pioneer Column which Rhodes sponsored were imbued by this sense of mission
and superiority which made them regard the indigenous African majority as a lesser
breed to be controlled and guided toward Western civilization. Following their
victory in the 1893 Anglo-Ndebele War and the subsequent successful suppression
of the Chimurenga/Umvukela armed uprisings of 1896, colonial settlers not only
claimed the right to rule by conquest, but also consolidated their white supremacist
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 3
ideology and the conviction that the African majority was a subject race, not only in
need of moral guidance and civilization, but also of strict and close control. The
determination to control the majority of Africans as closely as possible stemmed
from the fear of them inspired by the 1896 uprisings and the ever-present fear of the
largely outnumbered white settler population of being swamped by the Africans. Not
surprisingly, little effort was made to understand the Africans and their worldview,
while a determined resolve prevailed to “civilize”the so-called natives. (This
innocuous term normally used to denote indigenous peoples of original inhabitants
of a place took on a rather derogatory meaning in colonial Zimbabwe where it
increasingly implied inferiority and lack of civilisation. Hence, it will be used in this
chapter only in quotation marks.) Thus, the gulf between the races was entrenched in
Rhodesian society from the very onset of European colonialism.
According to Anthony Chennells, the white Rhodesian self-image which devel-
oped in the early years of colonialism “was based on the idea that they were civilisers
of the wilderness, taming its violence. They saw themselves as peace-bringers and
profoundly moral beings, in contrast to the less-than-human blacks that embodied
brute nature”(Sicilia 1999). Not surprisingly, therefore, whites generally regarded
Africans as perpetual children to be firmly and strictly controlled by the civilized
settlers. Africans were, thus, perpetually infantilized and were routinely referred to
as “boys”or “girls”regardless of their age, as in the then common references to
“houseboys”and “house girls”for grown-up African men and women.
Increasingly, therefore, whiteness became a mark of superiority and civilization
and, therefore, power and privilege to be promoted guarded and defended at all
times, and remained so throughout Zimbabwe’s colonial history. This was very
evident in the way the successive generations of white political leaders asserted
this superiority and white entitlement and repeatedly affirmed the white people’s
civilizing mission in the colony. For instance, Godfrey Huggins, Rhodesian Prime
Minister from the 1930s onwards, declared that “the greatest civilising influence in
Southern Rhodesia is the White settler, as long as he is really white inside”, while
dismissing Africans as incompetent and incapable of holding political or adminis-
trative office. When discussions were under way to set up the Federation of Rhodesia
and Nyasaland or the Central African Federation, Huggins was adamant that Afri-
cans should not be given any administrative positions in its governance structures.
He made it abundantly clear that his vision of the proposed Central African Feder-
ation had no place for blacks at all in its structures because, “they are quite incapable
of playing a full part ... They may have a university degree, but their background is
all wrong.”In response to a seeming insistence by politicians in the United Kingdom
to make the Federation more inclusive, Huggins asserted: “It is time for the people in
England to realise that the white man in Africa is not prepared and never will be
prepared to accept the African as an equal, either socially or politically”because
there was “something in their [Africans] chromosomes which makes them more
backward and different from peoples living in the East and West”(Turnbull 1962:
90). Given this racist attitude toward the Africans, it came as no surprise that
Huggins spearheaded the policy of separate development which he labelled the
two-pyramid system when he became the colony’s Prime Minister in the mid-
4 A. S. Mlambo
1930s. As the name suggests, the policy had much in common with the later policy
of separate or parallel racial development which was the foundation of the South
African apartheid system when the Nationalists came to power in that country in
1948.
Similarly, Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, in the Unilateral Declara-
tion of Independence (UDI) government from 1965 to 1979 justified UDI by saying
that by preventing black majority rule in the country, they had “struck a blow for the
preservation of justice, civilisation and Christianity.”
Racism and the Black Peril Phenomenon
A clear manifestation of pervasive White settler racism and the fear of the African
majority which accompanied and underpinned it was the black peril phenomenon of
the early twentieth century which saw White settler society experiencing collective
hysteria over the alleged sexual threat of African males to white womanhood. The
fear, it seems, stemmed from the 1896 uprisings which had resulted in the killings of
almost 10% of the total white population and the resulting and ever-present specter
of racial swamping, especially given the ratio of Africans to whites of 45:1 in 1901
and 22:1 in 1931 (Mhike 2016). Constantly aware that Africans resented their
domination, White settlers were apprehensive about their future in the country and
of the likelihood of Africans seeking revenge at some point, including through
possible sexual abuse of white women by the, generally, depraved black males
driven by irresistible primitive animal sexual instincts. Commenting on this perva-
sive and ever-present fear of the Africans stemming from the 1896 uprisings,
Katherine Gombay stated:
The ‘Rebellion’confirmed the settlers’preconceptions about the brutishness of the Africans,
while also awakening in them a sense of their own vulnerability which diminished little over
the next two or three decades. It was this legacy of fear and hate which found expression in
phenomena such as the black peril. (Gombay 1991)
Imagining Africans as less than human and naturally depraved and brutish was
not difficult for the settlers, given that they regarded Africans as little more than
children who were ruled by emotions and, therefore, capable of the most violent
outbursts of anger and dark acts of sexual passion. Such attitudes were fed by the
“scholarship”of the day which was steeped in the racist principles of Social
Darwinism, which “formed such a crucial ideological underpinning to colonial
conquest”(Pape 1990) and claimed that Africans were subhuman. An example
was Professor Henry Drummond’s book entitled Tropical Africa, published in
1890, in which he characterized Africans as “tribes with no name, speaking tongues
which no man can interpret”and who were “half animal half children, wholly savage
and wholly heathen”(Drummond 1890). According to such “scholarship,”Africans
were still at a lower level of evolution and were not yet capable of controlling their
sexual urges. This is what was reflected in the statement by one member of the
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 5
Legislative Assembly in 1916 that “the male native more or less has a tendency to
commit rape”(Rhodesia Herald 14 July 1916). Similarly, describing African girls,
N. H. Wilson stressed that African morality was low and that African girls passions
“are stronger, they have much more of the animal in them in sex matters and they
have not the restraint and control that white women have”(Mushonga 2013). This
toxic combination of fear and racial hatred of the Africans inevitably led to the
determination to impose strict legal controls on Africans in order to monitor and
govern their every activity.
Because Africans were believed to be little more than infants, it was presumed
that they could not handle European liquor, hence the passage of the 1898 Sale of
Liquor to Natives and Indians Regulations. Also, to keep Africans out of white
residential areas, the government passed the Native Locations Ordinance in the same
year. In 1901 came the Master and Servants Ordinance designed to enforce African
workers’obedience and subservience to their white employers, as well as to limit
their work and economic options. Most significantly, in order to address the settler
community’s fear of the abuse of white womanhood by African males, colonial
authorities passed the Immorality Suppression Ordinance of 1903, followed by the
Immorality and Indecency (Suppression) Ordinance of 1916. Thus African actions
and behaviors were systematically criminalized.
The 1903 Ordinance, specifically, outlawed sexual relations between white
women and black men and made such transgressions punishable by a maximum
sentence of 2 years in prison for white women and 5 years for black men. In addition,
black men could be condemned to death for any act legally defined as “attempted
rape.”Significantly, there was no law preventing white men from having sexual
relations with black women or pronouncing on attempted rape of black women by
white men. Indeed, the growing number of children of mixed race, known in
Southern Rhodesia as Coloureds, is testimony to the prevalence of white male and
black female sexual relations over time. Indeed, while white males who married or
cohabited with black women were ostracized or criticized by fellow whites, evidence
abounds that such sexual arrangements were quite common in the early decades of
the twentieth century (Mushonga 2013; Schmidt 1992). Attempts to pass laws
criminalizing white men’s sexual interaction with black women were continually
unsuccessful until the 1950s.
Indeed, as Pape pointed out, while the black peril legislation was the result of
white male anxiety and sense of insecurity arising out of the fear of the African
majority, it may also have been a diversionary tactic designed to divert attention from
their sexual shenanigans with black women. Thus,
By encouraging white rage against black sexual offenders, settler men were able to hide their
own far more widespread and often violent sexual relations with black women. This was the
real sexual ‘peril’in colonial society, but it can only be discovered by reading between the
lines of the tirades against [Africans accused of such crimes]. (Pape 1990)
Moreover, white settler society seems to have downplayed the role that some
white women may have played in encouraging or initiating sexual relations with
6 A. S. Mlambo
their black servants for purposes of self-gratification or out of curiosity. Mushonga
reports that there were 46 cases of white women who used their authority as
employers of black men to “persuade”them to have sexual relations with them
between 1899 and 1914 (Mushonga 2013). Vambe argued that consensual sexual
relations between white women and black men were not that uncommon and that it
was only when a white woman involved with a black man was exposed that she
would cry rape. Power relations were such, he argues, that even if the black man was
reluctant to have sexual relations with a white woman, if the white woman ordered
the servant to sleep with her, he had little choice, lest he be falsely reported as having
attempted to rape the mistress (Vambe 1976).
According to McCulloch, as a result of the immorality and indecency in legisla-
tion, no less than 20 African men were “charged and executed for sexual assault of
white women”, while, approximately, “two hundred others were either imprisoned or
flogged between 1902 and 1935”(West 2003). The sentences meted out to alleged
offenders by white-only male kangaroo-type courts, which were “quick to convict
African men for any behaviour which could be construed or misconstrued as being
threatening to white women”(Vambe 1976), were, most likely, unfair and unjustified
and spoke more to the ingrained racial prejudices of white settler males and the
hysterical public rhetoric of the threat to white womanhood at the time than to
evidence of actual sexual assaults. West observes that:
The brief kangaroo proceedings that passed for trials went hand in hand with the public
expression of white outrage, as exemplified in rallies, fulminations in the press, and demands
for still tougher action by the colonial legislature and the administration. (West 2003)
The settlers’hostility to interracial sexual relations persisted for most of the
colonial period, as evidenced by the fact that when an African, John Matimba,
who had married Adriana von Hoom, a white woman of Dutch descent while
studying in England, returned to the country in the mid-1950s, he and his wife
found it impossible to settle in the country because of the hostility of the local white
society. Not only could they not find anywhere to stay because of the 1930 Land
Apportionment Act (LAA) which divided the country into white and black areas and
did not provide for mixed marriage accommodation, but they also came under
hostile attack in the press, while their marriage was the subject of such acrimonious
public debates that they decided to go into exile in 1959 (Mushonga 2008).
Meanwhile, as late as the 1950s, new white female immigrants into the then
Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland were still warned “never to allow their female
children to exhibit any degree of nakedness and for themselves to make their own
beds, wash their own underwear and avoid appearing in a state of casual undress ...
[as this would put them] at risk at the hands of male servants”(Mlambo 2014).
Doris Lessing’sThe Grass is Singing captures the persistent white fear of the back
peril and disapproval of interracial sexual relations between white women and black
males very well in her portrayal of the murder of Mary Turner, the main white female
character, by her African male servant under circumstances which smacked of an
intimate relation gone wrong. Lessing’s representation of the settler community’s
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 7
reaction to this tragic event suggests that, for many, this merely confirmed what was
expected of such an unnatural and undesirable interracial liaison. Pointedly, the
novel’s opening words are:
Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front of
their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to
the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables. The
newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph
with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost
satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could
only have been expected. (Lessing 1950)
As shown, racism, which was informed by Social Darwinism at the turn of the
twentieth century, underpinned the European colonization project in Africa and gave
the incoming settlers a sense of superiority which translated into negative attitudes
toward the African majority and discriminatory policies against them.
Indeed, as time went on, the settlers’sense of Africans as infantile and in need of
“civilization”deepened, with adult men continuing to be referred to as “boys”who
were expected to behave respectfully toward their elders (whites of whatever age)
and whose “insolent”behavior, which might include speaking in a loud voice,
appearing angry toward any authority figure, and “laughing outright and grinning
when being interrogated by the police,”was prosecutable behavior (Shutt 2007). In
tandem also developed white ideas of “native stupidity”and “inferiority,”particu-
larly among the semiskilled whites.
White Racism and the Alienation and Racialization of Land
White racism in colonial Zimbabwe was most pronounced in the manner in which
the incoming white settlers arrogated themselves the right to land without any
consultation with the local inhabitants whom they found already in the country
and then proceeded to decide what parts of the country Africans could legally
occupy based on their race. The expropriation of land by the whites commenced
with the arrival of the Pioneer Column in 1890. Through his British South Africa
Company (BSAC), Rhodes funded a group of adventurers called the Pioneer Col-
umn to occupy the land north of the Limpopo River and promised them 3000 acres
of land claims each for participating in the occupation. No negotiations with local
African authorities had been conducted prior to this decision being taken and then
implemented; the assumption being that, either the land belonged to no one or the
incoming whites had the right to allocate the land as they wished. This right, it was
assumed, was bestowed on the settlers by the Royal Charter given to the BSAC by
the British Government, authorizing it to govern the territory it was, yet, to establish.
It was assumed, therefore, that the company could dispose of the colony’s land on
behalf of the British Crown.
It can be argued that the settlers’decision to arbitrarily expropriate and allocate
land was, initially, based on a misconception that any uninhabited land at the time of
8 A. S. Mlambo
occupation belonged to no one and was, therefore, available for the taking, whereas,
the situation was very different. In African society, land did not belong to either
individuals or chiefs and kings, but to the community as a whole, together with the
yet to be born and those who had passed on. Individuals only had usufruct rights on
the land which was allocated to them and which was administered by the traditional
leaders. The fact that there were stretches of land which were not occupied at the
time of the British occupation did not necessarily mean that the land belonged to
nobody, as local populations and their rulers knew exactly which group owned
which stretch of land, without boundary pegs or picket fence demarcations.
In the early years of occupation, Whites used very little of the land allocated to
them as they concentrated mainly on prospecting for gold. After all, most early
settlers had entered the colony in the hope that they would make their fortunes from
the fabled gold deposits that, reportedly, were as rich as those at the Rand in South
Africa. With time, however, disappointed at not finding the reported rich gold
deposits, many of the pioneers either abandoned their land and drifted back to
South Africa or sold the land to a number of speculative land companies that were
emerging in the colony. Some settlers turned to agriculture, but for a long time, this
was little more than subsistence farming. Meanwhile, the small, but growing white
settler population depended on the agricultural produce of the African peasant
farmers who had responded favorably to the market opportunities offered by this
incoming population and increased their output for sale in the mines and other
emerging white settlements. Eventually, more Whites took up farming for a living
and sought government support for their industry. In the process of developing white
agriculture, the colonial government, under pressure to promote and defend the
white agricultural sector, proceeded to destroy African agriculture and to promote
white agriculture, instead.
The destruction of African agriculture was effected, mainly, through land alien-
ation and confining Africans to designated areas of the country known as African
reserves. The first three African reserves, namely Gwaai, Tsholotsho, and Nkai, were
established in 1893 in Matebeleland, following the recommendations of the Com-
mission of Enquiry on future land policy set up by the Company Government in that
year. What all three areas had in common were poor soils and little rainfall. They
were also far away from the emerging urban centers which provided viable markets
for agricultural produce. This pattern was to characterize most of the African
reserves established by successive governments throughout the colonial period. By
1905, 60 reserves had already been established. More reserves were established
following the recommendations of the 1913 Reserves Commission, most of them
also located in areas “with little rainfall and far away from major transportation lines
and market towns”in order to eliminate competition from African farmers in the
agricultural market (Mlambo 2014; Phimister 1988). By 1914, Whites, whose
population amounted to only 28,000 people or 3% of the total population, controlled
75% of the land, while Africans, numbering 836, 000 people and accounting for 97%
of the population, were confined to only 23% of the land in the agriculturally
marginal areas of the country (Mushunje 2005).
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 9
The most defining law of Southern Rhodesian’s racially based land segregation
was Land Apportionment Act (LAA) of 1930 which became the pillar and key
symbol of racial segregation in colonial Zimbabwe. Dividing the colony’s land
surface into white, African, and crown lands, the Act decreed where the two racial
groups could legally own land or reside, with a minority population of whites
amounting to 50,000 people receiving 52% of the land, while the 1 million African
majority were allocated a mere 29.8%, designated as Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs). In
order to create a buffer class between whites and Africans, the Act also provided for
the so-called Native Purchase Areas (NPAs), where Africans could purchase land.
The Crown lands were owned by the state in reserve for future allocation, as well as
for public parks and state forests. The 1930 LAA was a close copy of the South
African 1913 Native Land Act, which also sought to cripple African agricultural
self-sufficiency in order to generate cheap African labor, among other objectives.
When, as expected, the growing African population began to exert pressure on the
allocated land resources through soil erosion and other forms of environmental
degradation, the colonial governments placed the blame on poor African agricultural
practices and imposed cattle destocking measures as well as a number of very
unpopular soil conservation policies which alienated a growing number of Africans.
These measures were accompanied by the 1951 by the Native Land Husbandry Act
(LHA), Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA), which was designed to reform the
African land tenure system from communal to individual ownership, ostensibly, in
order to improve efficiency in African agriculture. A not-so-obviously stated objec-
tive was to promote stable labor in the emerging industries in the colony’s emerging
towns and cities by creating a class of Africans permanently divorced from the land
and, therefore, obliged to provide labor in the emerging industries. The last major
piece of land legislation during the colonial period was the Land Tenure Act of 1969
passed by the Rhodesian Front government of the day, which replaced the LAA and
still unfairly allocated an equal amount of land to Africans and whites, even though
whites comprised only 5% of the colony’s population. Thus, approximately 5 million
Africans were to share 44.9 million acres at the ratio of 67.9 persons per square mile,
while less than a quarter of a million whites shared 44.95 million acres at 3.2 persons
per acre (Austin 1975). As was presaged by the first three African reserves created in
1893, most of the land allocated to the Africans in subsequent legislation was in dry
areas with marginal and unproductive soils, thus contributing greatly to the eco-
nomic marginalization and underdevelopment of the African majority. In the words
of Reg. Austin,
Apart from tenure and scale, Africans suffer other disadvantages: The main roads and
railway lines were planned only in relation to white areas. Urban centres and, hence, industry
and associated activities are concentrated in white areas. In relation to soil fertility and
rainfall, the better agricultural land is predominantly in white areas. By and large, whites
have almost as much ‘good’land as ‘bad’land, while the African land is three-quarters ‘bad’
and only a quarter ‘good’. (Austin 1975)
10 A. S. Mlambo
A Racialized Labor Regime
A dilemma facing early white settlers was how to maintain spatial racial segregation
while ensuring the constant supply of cheap African labor. The solution was found in
the creation of African reserves where Africans could permanently reside but be
allowed to provide labor in the white areas as transient laborers. For this reason, there
was great resistance to the provision of urban housing and social amenities to
Africans, especially since there was also a widely held belief that Africans were
“unhygienic”and most likely to engender disease outbreaks which would impact
negatively on the white population. According to Ginsburg,
Under the policy of segregation, Africans were categorised as temporary lodgers in white
cities to fulfil the most menial of tasks. It was believed that physical proximity meant more
chance of social mixing, miscegenation and the spread of disease ... Africans were seen to
carry infectious diseases over to the white population and this provided a powerful justifi-
cation and motivation for urban segregation. (Ginsburg 2017)
Consequently, the state passed the Native Urban Locations Ordinance (1906) and
the Private Locations Ordinance (1908) restricting Africans to designated native
areas or native locations which were very basic, since they were regarded as only
temporary homes for the transient laborers who had their permanent homes in the
Reserves.
In order to control African labor, the state passed the 1901 Masters and Servants
Ordinance and the 1902 Natives Pass Ordinance, both designed to enforce labor
contracts and to regulate African labor mobility. The first regulated relations between
white masters and African servants in ways which gave the former unchallenged
control over the latter, while the second was meant to control the movement of male
laborers in the colonial economy and to reduce desertions, among other goals.
Indeed, the lives of African males above the age of 14 years became closely
governed by a variety of passes, namely registration certificates, work-seeking
passes, visiting passes, contract service passes upon gaining employment, and passes
to get out of the employers’premises at night. Meanwhile, mine owners adopted the
compound system which housed laborers, mostly migrant workers from the sur-
rounding countries of Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Mozambique, in prison-
like institutions where they were closely monitored and could be easily disciplined.
To get the labor out, the state introduced a range of taxes, including the Native tax,
dog tax, dip tax, and a tax for every second and subsequent wives; all payable in
money and, therefore, necessitating Africans to seek for employment in the white
economic sector in order to raise the required amounts.
Meanwhile, white workers, like white farmers, remained strongly hostile to
African competition, as evidenced in the open hostility by white artisans to the
training of African artisans at Missions in the early 1920s, resulting in the commit-
ment by the country’s Chamber of Mines under pressure from the white trade unions
that “coloured employees should not be employed on certain skilled work”(Steele
1972). Opposition to possible African competition in the work place was pushed
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 11
vigorously by the Rhodesian Labor Party in the 1920s, which, reminiscent of white
workers on the Rand in South Africa at the time, insisted on guaranteeing the white
workers’future through an industrial color bar that would ensure that African
artisans would be permitted to work only in their own areas. It maintained that
Africans should be employed in white areas only as unskilled workers. Significantly
also at its foundation in 1929, the White Rhodesia Association, whose first chairman
was the future Prime Minister, Godfrey Huggins, proposed to stem African compe-
tition in the labor market through increased white immigration which would result in
the country having more whites than Africans and, thus make African labor redun-
dant. It was partly under this pressure that Prime Minister Huggins promulgated his
two-pyramid policy in which whites and Africans were to develop separately from
each other.
This was followed by the state passing the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1934,
which was enacted partly “in response to a strike by European workers within the
building industry who felt threatened by being replaced by African workers”(Gins-
burg 2017). The Act effectively introduced a labor color bar by providing for the
establishment of trade unions and industrial councils for employers as part of an
industrial conciliation system, but pointedly excluding Africans from the definition
of employees and, thus, making it unlawful for them to be part of trade unions.
Meanwhile, apprenticeships were restricted to whites under the Act. This was in
addition to the fact that the Public Services Act of 1921 had already excluded
Africans from employment in the civil services, meaning that Africans could not
work as “foremen, telegraphists, postal sorter, salesmen, typists, printers, dispensers,
or even mechanics employed by Government or industry.”Despite such restrictions,
an African middle class developed, nevertheless, over time, much to the consterna-
tion of some white workers (Ginsburg 2017).
Justifying his policies, Huggins stated:
The Europeans in this country can be likened to an island of white in a sea of black, with the
artisan and tradesmen forming the shores and professional classes the highlands in the
centre. Is the native to be allowed to erode away the shores and gradually attack the
highland? To permit this would mean that the leaven of civilisation would be removed
from the country, and the black man would inevitably revert to a barbarian worse than
before. (Bulawayo Chronicle, 31 March, 1938)
Under the Huggins administration, African workers faced other restrictive dis-
criminatory legislation, including the 1936 Native Registration Act, which regulated
the movement of African males into the urban centers by requiring that, in addition
to the registration certificate introduced earlier in the century, one had to have either a
“pass authorising him to seek work in town, a certificate to prove that he was
employed in the town, a certificate signed by a native commissioner”testifying
that he was “earning a living in the town by lawful means”or a visiting pass from his
employer if employed outside town (Phimister 1988). With time, however, Huggins
realized that separate development was not practical in the Rhodesian context and
moved more toward a discriminatory but more integrated development model.
12 A. S. Mlambo
Discrimination between white and black workers persisted into the Unilateral
Declaration of Independence (UDI) years from 1965 until the country’s indepen-
dence in 1980, during which period many white workers supported the Rhodesian
Front Party’s policies to maintain “segregation, land apportionment, the colour bar”
and “to protect the white settler state”and its claims to fighting to maintain
“standards”and against communism. While the official rhetoric was that of
defending Christian civilization, white workers, in fact, sought to maintain so-called
standards, “through upholding racist labour practices”and “conflated their own fate
with the idea of ‘white civilisation’” (Ginsburg 2017).
Some Are “More White”than Others (Mlambo 2000)
Racism in Southern Rhodesia manifested itself, not only along the white and black
racial divide, but also among whites themselves, with settlers of English stock
regarding themselves as superior to whites from other countries or regions of the
world. While Cecil John Rhodes had dreamt of developing Southern Rhodesia as a
white man’s country, this was not to be because Rhodesian governments were very
particular about who they let into “their”country, preferring to accept only the “right
type”of immigrant, by which they meant British immigrants. In fact, despite the
semblance of unity, the white Rhodesian community was deeply divided by, among
other factors, racism and racial chauvinism which emanated, largely, from settlers of
British stock and which evoked equally strong animosities from other white groups,
particularly the Afrikaners. By the 1920s, Afrikaners were generally regarded as
illiterate, indigent, and undesirable and a group which was once described as
“neither black not white but really worse than animals; and ... mentally deficient”
(Townsend 1964). British settlers also dismissed Afrikaners as people with “no code
of honour such as is understood by the Britishers”,“low class,”and “persons of a
poor and shiftless type, physical degenerates, sick and diseased”as well as people
who were “low in mentality and mode of existence ... little removed from the
native”(Mlambo 2003). Also looked down upon were Poles, Greeks, Italian,
Spaniards, and people of the Jewish religion (Mlambo 2003).
Writing in the 1920s, E. Tawse Jollie, the only female member of the Southern
Rhodesian Legislative Council, noted that the “average-born Rhodesian feels that
this is essentially a British country, pioneered, bought and developed by British
people, and he wants to keep it so”(Jollie 1921). Similarly, in 1939, C. Harding of
the Department of Internal Affairs gave the official Southern Rhodesian government
position on immigrations as follows:
The policy of the government in regard to immigrants is to maintain a preponderance of
British subjects in about the same proportions as last year when the total number of
immigrants was 3 500 of whom 3 000 were British subjects and 500 aliens i.e. 6 to 1.
(Mlambo 2003)
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 13
Ginsburg reported that the 1933 Immigration Bill listed “Levantines, Europeans
from Eastern Europe, Europeans from South Eastern Europe, Low class Greeks, low
class Italians, ‘Jews of low type and mixed origin and other persons of mixed origin
and continental birth’” as undesirable immigrants (Ginsburg 2017).
As Gann and Gelfand correctly observed, in the post-Second World War years as
well as in earlier years, “After dinner speakers would extol ‘white Rhodesia’but
agreed that white aliens should not be allowed to overrun the country but must only
be assimilated in penny packets”(Gann and Gelfand 1964).
The Invisible Minorities
In addition to the racial categories of European and “native,”there was also another
category, that of Asians and Coloureds, who Muzondidya calls the “invisible subject
minorities ... who held an intermediate status in the Rhodesian racial hierarchy,
distinct from the white and African populations.”(The category of “natives”com-
prised two distinct groups, namely the so-called colonial natives, who included all
the Africans in the country and who originated from outside the country, and
indigenous natives, i.e., those descending from tribes indigenous to Rhodesia.)
Included in this category were local and foreign descendants of mixed race, includ-
ing “Griquas, Malays and Cape Coloureds from South Africa”and Indian immi-
grants (Muzondidya 2007). The settler state strongly discouraged Indian
immigration into the country, resulting in the Indian population in the country
remaining small for much of the colonial period. The immigration of Indians into
Rhodesia was regarded with both fear and hostility. The fear was of economic
competition as Indians were accused of undercutting European merchants which
threatened the very existence of whites in the country (Douglas n.d.). In 1908, the
state passed the Asiatic Immigration Ordinance of 1908 designed to discourage
Indian immigration except at the discretion of the Company Administrator. The
ordinance was rescinded following protests from the British India Association and
the Indian Government (Mlambo 2003).
Despite being regarded as inferior to whites, the invisible minorities were con-
sidered superior to the “natives”and were, accordingly, granted some privileges
which were denied the indigenous population. For instance, they did not have to
carry passes and had easier access to the urban areas. They also were free to live in
the urban areas and were not confided to the Locations, until the passage of the 1930
LAA after which they were required to reside in segregated areas. Asians and
Coloureds also had access to white hospitals, schools, and other social amenities
and had some voting powers, at least until the Rhodesian Front removed this right in
its 1969 Constitution. These privileges notwithstanding, the subject races were still
discriminated against in the types of employment they could take up and “remained
on the margins of colonial society where they faced exploitation, discrimination and
denial of full citizenship because of their race and origin”(Muzondidya 2007).
14 A. S. Mlambo
Political Marginalization and Other Forms of Discrimination
Throughout the colonial period, Africans remained politically marginalized even
though, technically, the vote was open to everyone who met the various stipulated
qualifications. The main problem was that these qualifications were set so high that
very few Africans could meet them, so the majority of the African population could
not vote. A good example is the 1923 Constitution which granted the vote to all men
(White women had been allowed to vote in 1919) who were British subjects over
21 years of age and literate enough to fill the particulars of the application form but
set the conditions that to be eligible, applicants for enrolment must have an income
of £100 per annum, occupy buildings worth £150, or own a mining claim. Given the
fact that the average wage of an African was £3 a month, only whites were eligible to
vote under this constitution (Mutiti 1974). Subsequent constitutions raised the
property qualification bar to levels that excluded the African majority as well as
demanding specified educational levels that were unattainable to most Africans in an
educational system which favored white children over blacks in several ways.
The state discriminated against African children in education by showing no
interest in African education and leaving it in the hands of the missionaries until well
into the 1940s and encouraging mostly industrial education in those schools through
a grant system which it provided the mission schools with (Dierdorp 2015). The state
had no interest in providing a well-rounded education for African children, for as one
member of the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Assembly emphasized in 1927:
We do not intend to hand over this country to the native population or to admit them to the
same society or political position as we occupy ourselves ...We should make no pretence of
educating them in exactly the same way as we do the Europeans.
Following that logic, African education was consistently underfunded throughout
the colonial period. In addition, while education was made compulsory for all white
children from 1930, over 50% of African children were not attending school as late
as 1979, while the government established the first secondary school in the country
only in 1946 (Mlambo 2014). It is no wonder most Africans could not meet the
educational requirements for voting.
Apart from the political marginalization, as in South Africa, Africans in Rhodesia
were also governed by petty discrimination legislation barring them from using
Whites-only toilets, park benches, and other public facilities, and, until the late
1920s, from walking on the pavements in the towns. Until the 1960s, the major
hotels in Salisbury, the Miekles and the Ambassador, enforced a color bar and did
not serve Africans in their bars and restaurants. The third, the Jameson, was
multiracial but deliberately exclusive of the African majority by insisting on certain
standards of “culture,”“civilization,”and dress code. Lastly, until 1959, “it was
illegal to accommodate Africans in hotels that were located in European areas (and
vice versa)”without special permission from the Secretary of Native Affairs (Craggs
2012).
Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 15
There was also rampant discrimination in sports (Novak 2012, Dierdorp) and in
other social spaces. Such discrimination belied the official policy as a member of the
Central African Federation (1953–1963) which was, officially, one of promoting
partnership between the races, although it later turned out that the partnership which
was envisaged was that between a rider and a horse, rather than one based on
genuine equality. White liberal organizations, such as the Interracial Association
(IRA) and the Capricorn Africa Society (CAS), mushroomed in this period and
maintained the fiction of racial partnership, succeeding in attracting the attention of a
few African nationalists for a while until the Africans realized that partnership was a
sham (Mlambo 2014; Townsend 1964; Craggs 2012). It was the cumulative result of
the many years of political, economic, social, educational, and other types of
marginalization on the basis of race which eventually led to the rise and intensifica-
tion of African nationalism which culminated in the armed struggle as African
nationalists fought to end white settler colonialism in the country.
Conclusion
Colonial Zimbabwe was born out of a racist ethos espoused by its patron, Cecil
Rhodes, and rooted in the late nineteenth century scientific racism, social Darwin-
ism, and the white-man’s-burden philosophy which extolled the virtues of whiteness
and Western civilization and denigrated everything African. Not surprisingly, the
African population was treated as second-class citizens and marginalized in every
walk of life throughout the colonial period, resulting in African nationalists taking up
arms in a bitter struggle to overthrow the racist colonial dispensation. The result was
Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.
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