British South Africa Research Articles

‘Autonomy for Our Economy’: A Review of the Responsible Government Status and Economic Interest Groups in Southern Rhodesia, 1922 to the Second World War

ABSTRACT This article revisits the impact and legacy of the 1922 referendum and the subsequent granting of responsible government status to Southern Rhodesia in shaping the future economic trajectory of the self-governing colony. Governed through the chartered British South Africa Company (BSAC) from 1890, Southern Rhodesia developed as a typical colony dependent on the export of raw materials, the import of manufactured goods, external capital for economic development, and imperial control. The attainment of responsible government status three decades later gave Southern Rhodesia a unique opportunity to determine its economic affairs with minimum interference from the metropole. That autonomy was made possible by consolidated settler politics that manifested through organised civic organisations that coalesced around particular economic interests, leading to the emergence of interest groups of miners, farmers, commerce, and industrialists. These groups interacted, competed, and collaborated as they pursued their interests, and thus shaped the economic trajectory of Southern Rhodesia. This article demonstrates that unique self-governing colony status allowed Southern Rhodesia to flourish more than other colonies. It thus argues that the 1922 referendum that birthed responsible government laid the base for the diversification of the Rhodesian economy.

Flags, Stamps and Coats of Arms: Symbols and the Making of Identity in Southern Rhodesia

ABSTRACT The result of the 1922 referendum saw the white settlers in Southern Rhodesia vote for ‘responsible government’ rather than become the fifth province of the Union of South Africa. Prior to the granting of responsible government in September 1923, the territory had been governed by the British South Africa Company. It was the company’s arms and flag which were first used in the territory. These remained true to the prescripts of the company’s charter by reflecting its British origins and character. This nascent settler identity would evolve and consolidate around an essentially British character which highlighted allegiance to the Crown. This article shows how these, and the set of national symbols subsequently adopted by the colony, were a visible manifestation of the settlers’ ‘exceptional attachment’ to Britain and a reflection of their identity as being primarily British rather than Rhodesian.

Director and shareholder interactions at shareholder meetings: Compromising accountability in the service of colonialism

This research explores director and shareholder two-way face-to-face interactions at the shareholder meetings of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, as reflected in verbatim minutes of those meetings. Shareholder meetings are traditionally viewed as being for accountability. Alternatively, directors may engage in manipulative game-playing through skillful political maneuvering of shareholders, thereby compromising accountability. The research analyzes unique data, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim meeting minutes of 29 shareholder meetings over the period 1895–1925, using manual close-reading interpretive content analysis. Our unit of analysis is the interactions between directors and supportive/approving and dissenting shareholders. Our research question is how did the directors and shareholders interact at the shareholder meetings. We develop a typology of 16 types of interactions the directors and shareholders used in their exchanges. We complement our analysis with illustrations of types of interactions extracted from our verbatim minutes. We demonstrate how powerful directors mobilized supportive/approving shareholders to quash the dissenting shareholders’ voices. Our findings have implications for how modern-day shareholder meetings are conducted.

Nineteenth century audit reports: Evolution from free-form to standardised wording

The research comprises a case study focussed on the wording of 34 audit reports of the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which Cecil Rhodes established by Royal Charter to colonise Rhodesia from 1889 to 1924. The accounts were audited by Cooper Brothers & Co., now PricewaterhouseCoopers. The research analyses three audit-report characteristics that influenced audit-report wording. Of the 34 audit reports, eight contained qualified (i.e., unfavourable) audit opinions. Based on verbatim annual general meeting minutes and private correspondence, we provide evidence of the effect of the audit qualifications. The research further analyses the evolution of the audit-report wording over the period. Initially, the auditors customised the audit-report wording. Each year, they made micro changes to improve the precision of the wording. Then, in 1911, well in advance of any audit-report regulations, the wording became standardised and remained so until the end of the study period. The paper adds insights into why auditors standardised audit-report wording. We conjecture that years of struggling with customised wording prompted the auditors to adopt standardised wording. We do not know whether this decision applied just to the BSAC audit reports, or whether 1911 heralded standardised audit-report wording for all Cooper Brothers & Co. audit reports.

Regulatory capture in the British Empire: The British South Africa Company and the redefinition of property rights in Southern Africa

We study the redefinition of property rights under colonial rule with a focus on state and business relations. We study the case of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and how it was able to legitimise its claims to land and minerals in two non-settler colonies in Africa: Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The study shows that the BSAC was able to wield considerable influence over these political processes. The British government thereby came to favour the interests of the BSAC over those of other actors, including settlers and African subjects in the colonies, despite having the knowledge that many of the company’s claims had no legal basis. The findings show how the dynamic relationship between state and firms can evolve into one that sees the public interests subjugated.

Inter-Imperial Entanglement: The British Claim to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Over the nineteenth century, England and Portugal contested the possession of Delagoa Bay in south eastern Africa. Using documents from a British hydrographical survey mission of the east coast of Africa, and British Parliamentary Papers recording the dispute over possession of the bay in the 1870s, I demonstrate that bordermaking in the region was rooted in interimperial claims and disputes reaching back to the 1820s. The English claim to Delagoa Bay highlights how hydrography and cartography were used as tools of empire in the new imperial expansion and land appropriation of the nineteenth century. The production of the colonial border between Portuguese Mozambique and British South Africa interrupted and disconnected indigenous networks of relation, trade, and movement, while simultaneously entangling imperial projects of white worldmaking through racialized dispossession.

Lendy, Lobengula, and London: The 1893 Anglo-Ndebele War Revisited

In October and November 1893, Ndebele warriors of Lobengula Khumalo’s Matabeleland kingdom in the western third of what is now Zimbabwe were defeated by troopers of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Framed by the context of what Friedrich Engels understood to be the driving force behind colonization, ‘today this is purely a subsidiary of the stock exchange … Africa leased directly to companies … and Mashonaland … seized by Rhodes for the stock exchange’, but refracted through local, regional, and international issues, the first section covers the period 1888 to 1892. It focuses on the ownership of the concession extracted by Rhodes’s emissaries, the amalgamation in London of competing financial interests, and the local dynamics of the Ndebele state. The second part looks at the reasons why Rhodes was persuaded that war would solve the chartered company’s problems. The conclusion points to the global reach of late nineteenth-century financial capitalism.

Unfulfilled Promises and Desires: The British South Africa Company (BSAC), Settler Politics and the Development of Southern Rhodesia’s Fiscal System, 1890–1922

This paper examines how the British South Africa Company (BSAC; the Company), the founding administrator of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, navigated the creation of a fiscal system of the colony from 1890 to 1922 and how the fiscal system shaped political decisions regarding the colony’s administrative structure. It casts light on the early efforts of the colonial state-making process under the BSAC and how it established its administrative structure. Once occupation was completed, the Company’s ability to finance the cost of governance and administration was the most critical factor facing it. Whereas earlier scholarship has discussed various aspects of Southern Rhodesia’s early economic endeavors and political evolution, this paper demonstrates the significance of the fiscal system in shaping both the economic and political trajectories of the early administration. Through analyzing the Company’s revenue collection and expenditure patterns, the paper reconstructs the contours of shifting notions of what constituted the Company’s commercial and administrative revenue. It argues that the BSAC’s fiscal and budgetary administration approach was gradual, experimental, and sometimes ad hoc, resulting in continuous conflicts between the Company administration and the settlers. The paper relies on a wide range of sources that include the BSAC annual reports, historical manuscripts, Legislative Council debates, newspapers, and other political pamphlets to unpack the tensions between the Company government and white settlers over the fiscal and administrative evolution of the colony.

Northern Rhodesians (Zambians) in the Aftermath of the First World War

Abstract This paper investigates the demobilization of Northern Rhodesian (Zambian) servicemen after the First World War. Tied to this, is the compensation and commemoration of the askari (soldiers) and mtenga-tenga (porters) who died in the war. The compensation of ex-servicemen was a drawn-out process which took several years, eventually coming to a halt in 1928 with many Africans forfeiting their dues. The British South Africa Company (BSAC) and the British Colonial Government did not erect individual tombstones to commemorate ex-servicemen. The partiality exhibited in commemoration and compensation processes, based on racial lines, did not reflect the enormous contributions which these Africans made to the Allied war effort. The main sources for this article are official government records stored in the National Archives of Zambia, and records of the Catholic White Father missionaries.

Restraining Sub-imperialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1889–1898

This article examines the relations between the British government and the British South Africa Company through the 1890s. It aims to explore the ways in which the imperial government sought to restrain and control the BSAC as a sub-imperial actor with its own distinct agenda and interests. While sub-imperial actors were a useful way to claim colonial hinterlands before rival colonial powers, they could also land the government in difficult and unwanted situations. The 1895 Jameson raid scandal and the rebellions of the Ndebele and Shona in 1896–7 necessitated government intervention and limitation of company privileges. Yet, while such situations were on a whole unwanted by the government, they also proved vital pretexts to limit, control and convert sub-imperialism to the imperial and geopolitical interests of the government.

Shareholder sentiment at general meetings: speculating on colonialism

PurposeAnnual general meetings have been variously described as dull rituals for accountability versus entertaining theatre at the expense of accountability. The research analyses director and shareholder participation and dialogic interactions at annual and extraordinary general meetings of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC). The BSAC was incorporated under a royal charter in 1889 in return for power to exploit a huge territory, Rhodesia/now Zimbabwe. The BSAC's administration ceased in 1924/25. Thus, the BSAC had a dual mandate as a private for-profit listed company and to occupy and develop the territories on behalf of the British government.Design/methodology/approachThe article analyses 29 BSAC general meeting minutes, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim minutes between 1895 and 1925. The study adopts manual content analysis. First, the research adopts conversational analysis to analyse director and shareholder turn-taking and moves by approving and dissenting shareholders. Second, the study identifies and analyses incidents of shareholder sentiment from the shareholder turns/moves. Finally, the article assesses how shareholder sentiment changed throughout the period and whether the BSAC's share price reflected the shareholder sentiment.FindingsThe BSAC's general meetings were associated with the greater colonial project of building the British Empire. The authors find almost 1,500 incidents of shareholder sentiment. Directors and shareholders take roughly an equal number of turns (excluding shareholder sentiment). Ritual and ceremony dominate director and shareholder turns and moves, while accountability to shareholders was minimal. The BSAC share price spiked in the early years of the project, waning after that. Shareholder sentiment, both positive and negative, reflect the share price behaviour.Originality/valueA unique database of verbatim general meeting minutes records shareholders' reactions to what they heard in the form of sounding off through cheering, “hear, hears,” laughter and applause (i.e. shareholder sentiment).

COVID-19 endgame: From pandemic to endemic? Vaccination, reopening and evolution in low- and high-vaccinated populations

COVID-19 remains a major public health concern, with large resurgences even where there has been widespread uptake of vaccines. Waning immunity and the emergence of new variants will shape the long-term burden and dynamics of COVID-19. We explore the transition to the endemic state, and the endemic incidence in British Columbia (BC), Canada and South Africa (SA), to compare low and high vaccination coverage settings with differing public health policies, using a combination of modelling approaches. We compare reopening (relaxation of public health measures) gradually and rapidly as well as at different vaccination levels. We examine how the eventual endemic state depends on the duration of immunity, the rate of importations, the efficacy of vaccines and the transmissibility. These depend on the evolution of the virus, which continues to undergo selection. Slower reopening leads to a lower peak level of incidence and fewer overall infections in the wave following reopening: as much as a 60% lower peak and a 10% lower total in some illustrative simulations; under realistic parameters, reopening when 70% of the population is vaccinated leads to a large resurgence in cases. The long-term endemic behaviour may stabilize as late as January 2023, with further waves of high incidence occurring depending on the transmissibility of the prevalent variant, duration of immunity, and antigenic drift. We find that long term endemic levels are not necessarily lower than current pandemic levels: in a population of 100,000 with representative parameter settings (Reproduction number 5, 1-year duration of immunity, vaccine efficacy at 80% and importations at 3 cases per 100K per day) there are over 100 daily incident cases in the model. Predicted prevalence at endemicity has increased more than twofold after the emergence and spread of Omicron. The consequent burden on health care systems depends on the severity of infection in immunized or previously infected individuals.

The Spirit of Ulster in the Cape of Good Hope: The South African Anti-Irish Home Rule Movement, 1910–1914

ABSTRACT As the third Irish Home Rule crisis intensified, Ulster Unionists began searching for allies across the British Empire, including in South Africa. This article highlights the important role and influence of the South African anti-Home Rule movement from 1910 to 1914. It investigates a number of questions: Why did the Loyal Orange Institution publish sympathy resolutions? Who were the benefactors who donated funds to the Ulster Defence Fund or enlisted in a South African Ulster volunteer contingent? Most importantly, how widespread or organised were these Ulster sympathisers? This article uses extensive British, Irish, and South African newspaper archives, including the Belfast Weekly News that provides unique information on the Grand Orange Lodge of British South Africa and rare photography.

Cecil Rhodes: Racial Segregation in the Cape Colony and Violence in Zimbabwe

This article focuses on two key questions that have been central in debates following the Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Oxford in 2015–16: whether Rhodes supported and contributed to racial segregation in the Cape Colony, and how to characterise the violence in the conquest of Zimbabwe in the 1890s. With respect to the Cape, the evidence shows that Rhodes supported developments that intensified racial segregation in the late 19th century, including restrictions on the franchise, punitive racially based masters and servants legislation and a labour (poll) tax for African people only. He was involved as an employer in the beginning of coercive compounds for black workers and other racially restrictive practices. In respect of Zimbabwe, 1890–97, Rhodes and his British South Africa Company were responsible for extreme violence against African people. Unbridled use was made of the Maxim gun; cattle were looted by the Company and its agents on a large scale; grain stores and crops were appropriated or destroyed over a sustained period as a deliberate strategy; over a period of nine months in 1896–97, African men (including armed men), women and children sheltering in caves were blown up with dynamite. Rhodes was aware of these practices, at times participating or present while they were taking place and involved in strategic discussions. The article is based on published sources, and some of this is established in the historiography, but I do not know of an attempt to assess and quantify deaths in Zimbabwe. The material supports the argument that a celebratory statue of Rhodes at Oriel College is inappropriate and that it should be moved.

From Defensive to Transformative Business Diplomacy: The British South Africa Company and the End of Chartered Company Rule in Rhodesia, 1910–1925

Chartered companies were important tools of European colonialism, but also institutions with a political agenda of their own. In this study, we focus upon one key chartered company, the British South Africa Company, in particular the ending of its charter in 1923/24, in order to study the business diplomacy strategies employed by the company. We show how the company during the period under study moved from a reactive and defensive diplomacy strategy concerning its charter, to a proactive and transformative strategy. In this way, the company managed to renegotiate the terms under which it operated so that it eventually came to accept and even embrace the ending of chartered rule, rather than to oppose it.

‘Mandela’s out so apartheid has finished’: the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and South Africa’s transition to majority rule, 1990-1994

ABSTRACT Based on original archival research and oral history interviews, this article examines how the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) adapted to the evolving circumstances during South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy between 1990 and 1994. It argues that the successful framing and impact of the Free Nelson Mandela Campaign (FNMC) of the 1980s, inadvertently created a series of challenges for the AAM in the years after Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990, as many in Britain came to associate this moment with the end of apartheid. The pervasive sense that apartheid was over, coupled with the complexity, uncertainty and violence of South Africa’s political transition, created a difficult campaigning environment for the AAM, who found it hard to maintain the momentum generated through the FNMC. Despite encountering numerous (trans)national and local challenges which inhibited its impact after 1990, this article concludes that the AAM’s persistent campaigning presence allowed it to capitalise following renewed British interest in South Africa following the announcement in June 1993 of a date for the first non-racial democratic election. This enabled the AAM to make a tangible contribution, primarily through fundraising, to the African National Congress’ successful election victory in May 1994.

Hewing Fiction from History: The Writing of History, Conflict and Trauma in House of Stone

This article is based on a public lecture I gave at Oxford University in May 2019. It looks at my critically acclaimed novel House of Stone and the role of literature in shaping the complex human experience, particularly through conflict and trauma. House of Stone explores Zimbabwe’s history, from the fall of Rhodesia right through the early years of Zimbabwe, during Gukurahundi, to the contemporary moment in 2007, going back in time and memory to the arrival of Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company in the late 19th Century. In looking at literature and trauma, the article analyses the relationship between the particular and the universal and the importance of nuance when approaching complex lives written on the page. In considering nuance, I explore the fascinating process of hewing fiction from history, and how it is that fiction does something different from the narration of history as ‘real events’. In looking at the novel as historical fiction, importance is placed on the connections and continuities between various demarcated histories and relationships – such as what we think of as pre- and post-independence, colonialism and post-colonialism, and liberation war and post-independence genocide. Equally important is the challenge of how to present the violence inherent in this history. Zimbabwe has had a long, violent, bloody history, from the 1890 s right through the 1970s and the 1980s to the contemporary moment of the novel, the 2000s. How does one not wear down the reader with ‘violence fatigue’? Which violence should one portray and how? The article considers the various ways in which the novel portrays violence and the reasons for some of these strategies. At the heart of the question about violence and its portrayal in fiction is the question of how to give the novel a human, rather than inhuman, shape – the shape of humanity. It would be all too easy to fall into the trap of portraying a continuous violence that could quickly become gratuitous and pornographic, its own reason for being.

Accounting as a dehumanizing force in colonial rhetoric: Quantifying native peoples in annual reports

• The British Crown outsourced government to the British South Africa Company (BSAC). • To colonize Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). • The paper examines quantification of native peoples in BSAC annual reports. • Quantification dehumanized the native peoples, sanitizing their deaths. • The BSAC used annual reports to mask its exploitation of the native population. This paper examines quantification adopted by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) in its portrayal of native peoples in annual reports. In its colonization and administration of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), through a royal charter, the British Crown outsourced government to the BSAC, a private-sector, for-profit company. The royal charter imposed non-economic, public-benefit responsibilities on the company, including duties for advancing the native peoples’ interests. The research analyzes annual-report narratives referencing native peoples extracted from a continuous collection of the BSAC’s first 29 annual reports over a 35-year period, 1889–1924. The analysis focusses on the BSAC’s quantification of the natives, their deaths, their health and their livestock, supplemented by analyzing the BSAC’s use of rhetorical framing and the rhetoric of silence in its portrayal of native peoples. The BSAC mobilized quantification rhetoric to demonstrate delivery of its responsibilities/duties to advance the native peoples’ interests. Quantification dehumanized the native peoples, sanitizing their deaths in service of the company’s profitability, for the London audience for the BSAC’s annual reports. The BSAC silenced the supposed beneficiaries’ voices, the native peoples. The findings highlight how the BSAC used supposedly neutral annual reports as an instrument to mask its exploitation of the colony’s native population. The paper contributes to an understanding of how colonialists used accounting as an instrument to promulgate colonial propaganda and ambitions and to mask the means by which they achieved their objectives.

Corporate reporting to the crown: a longitudinal case from colonial Africa

PurposeA royal charter of incorporation imposing public benefit/social responsibilities established the privately owned British South Africa Company (BSAC), in return for power to exploit a huge territory using low-cost local labour. This study explores the dual principal–agent problem of how the BSAC used annual report narratives to report on its conflicting economic responsibilities to investors versus its public benefit charter responsibilities to the British Crown.Design/methodology/approachHaving digitised the dataset, the research analyses narratives from 29 BSAC annual reports spanning a continuous 35-year royal charter period, using computer-aided keyword content analysis to identify economic-orientated versus public benefit-orientated annual report narratives. The research analyses how the annual report narratives shifted according to four key contextual periods by reference to the changing influence of private investors versus the British Crown.FindingsThere are two key findings. First, economic primacy. At no point do public benefit disclosures outweigh economic disclosures. Second, the BSAC's meso-corporate context and macro-social/political context can explain patterns in public benefit disclosures. The motivation for producing public benefit information is not altruism. Rather, commercial interests motivate disclosure. The BSAC used its annual reports to sustain what proved ultimately unsustainable – royal charter-style colonialism.Originality/valueThis accounting history study contributes to an understanding of corporate narrative reporting using one of the earliest known cases of such analysis and shows how accounting plays a central role in facilitating a company in sustaining its interests. This 100-year lookback may be a portend of the future for modern-day annual report corporate social responsibility narratives in, say, mining and oil and gas company corporate reports, especially if these natural resources run out.

The Guinea Fowl Survived, but a European Died that Afternoon: Confronting Colonial Hunting Policy in Zimbabwe, 1965–1966

ABSTRACT At midnight on Tuesday, 11 May 1965, in Chipinge, Zimbabwe, Basil Johnson, a European farmer who occupied Petronella farm, telephoned the British South Africa Police (BSAP) and reported that his brother, David Patrick Johnson, had gone missing that afternoon. The next morning, the BSAP-led search team assembled at the Johnson homestead and mounted an eight-hour ‘sweep search’ for the whereabouts of David, whose body was later located on a bushy hill some seven miles from the Johnson homestead. This was followed by a seven-day search for the person who killed David, and, upon his arrest and charge of murder, a nine-months legal battle that would finally be settled by the highest court of the land, the Appellant Division of the High Court of Rhodesia. Taking a microhistory approach, this article traces the story of an African hunting excursion that turned fatal to analyse contradictory Western and African game ownership and hunting philosophies. Simultaneously, this story is also a lens to view other facets of colonial encounters: race, class, justice, the meaning of colonial borders, and African agency.