The Fault of Our European Fathers

Abstract

In 1947, the Northern Rhodesian government appointed a second committee to inquire into Coloureds’ status in the territory. In this chapter, I examine the Second Coloured Persons Committee. I begin by reconstructing Northern Rhodesia’s racial and social landscape in the 1940s and then, against this background, I explore the Second Coloured Persons Committee and the committee’s “interim” report submitted to the Northern Rhodesian government in 1948. I recreate Northern Rhodesian’s social and racial landscape through an analysis of three texts: a Northern Rhodesian Eurafrican man’s letter published in a Southern Rhodesian newspaper in 1947; a letter from a Belgian official in neighboring Congo asking the Northern Rhodesian government for clarification on half-castes’ status in Northern Rhodesia in 1941; and a chapter from the memoirs of a white settler woman who lived in Northern Rhodesia in the 1940s. Read together and in relation to one another, these texts provide us with a greater appreciation of Northern Rhodesian society in the 1940s, leading to increased understanding of Eurafricans’ unstable legal and social predicament in the British Empire.