The geopolitics of dependent development in Central Africa: race, class and the reciprocal blockade

Abstract

This paper explores dependent development, industrialisation and transitions to the semiperiphery, examining tensions between geopolitics, racial and class conflict that evolved into a ‘reciprocal blockade’ in the Central African Federation (CAF), comprising Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi). The 1923 transfer of power from the chartered British South Africa Company to a semi-autonomous, settler-dominated government in Southern Rhodesia provided the foundations upon which an asymmetrical relationship between capital, white settlers, Africans and other groups was built. Incipient African nationalism arose in the 1950s in the shadow of an introverted apartheid South Africa and British decolonisation. Industry, commerce and the professions embraced the idea of a multiracial CAF, but recent white immigrants believed their privileged positions to be threatened, setting the stage for the 1962 election of the white supremacist Rhodesian Front and its unlawful 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the UK, despite profound misgivings in the security forces. An examination of the geopolitical, economic, ideological and institutional dynamics and ultimate failure of Rhodesian state-building from 1923 to 1963 places the reciprocal blockade in context.