Rhodesian Independence Research Articles

Fighting for Time: Rhodesia’s Military and Zimbabwe’s Independence by Charles D. Melson

<i>Fighting for Time: Rhodesia’s Military and Zimbabwe’s Independence</i> by Charles D. Melson

‘Australia in this Matter is under Some Scrutiny’: Early Australian Initiatives to the Rhodesian Problem, 1961–64

Australia’s attitude towards the problem of Rhodesian independence in the early 1960s has been largely ignored by the literature on the subject. Not unnaturally, the focus of recent research and scholarship has been Australia’s response to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in November 1965 and the absence of any appetite for sanctions against the white minority regime. This lack of enthusiasm is often interpreted as symptomatic of an abiding sympathy not only for ‘kith and kin’ but also for Rhodesia’s white supremacist policies, which are invariably conflated with Australia’s own racially discriminatory practices. While senior Australian policymakers were uncomfortable with the notion of alienating people with whom they shared traditional political, economic and sentimental ties, they showed no support for the perpetual domination of the African population by Europeans, and indeed, accepted both the desirability and inevitability of black majority government. With this in mind, they worked hard to contribute to a genuine solution to the Rhodesian problem in the early 1960s and were deeply critical of Britain for refusing to adopt positive action. Although Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies continued to struggle with these competing forces, he too recognised the irresistible nature of black rule and acted accordingly.

Double Standards: South Africa, British Rugby, and the Moscow Olympics

The year 1980 proved to be a time of diplomatic crisis for the British government and the Commonwealth due to the confluence of two events: a British Lions tour of South Africa and the Moscow Olympics. The Thatcher government debated its Commonwealth counterparts over the perceived hypocrisy of British policy towards South Africa and Moscow. While the British government campaigned internationally for a boycott of the Moscow Games, many African and Caribbean countries believed Britain was taking a harder line against Moscow than in enforcing the Gleneagles Agreement to end all sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. This inconsistency led to threats of retaliation from African countries and seriously affected the influence Britain had in Africa during the period of Rhodesian independence and the ongoing conflict in Namibia. Controversy erupted surrounding the plans for a British Lions tour, how the invasion of Afghanistan changed the target of the Moscow boycott, and about the discussions between Britain and other countries about sporting ‘double standards’.

Waging peace: militarising pacifism in Central Africa and the problem of geography, 1962

Despite the discipline having undergone a ‘peace turn’ in recent years, the history of the peace movement itself remains curiously under explored by geographers. This paper retraces the World Peace Brigade and its collaboration with the Northern Rhodesian independence movement in 1962. I argue that the Brigade offers geographers important insights into how ideas of peace have been circulated, adapted and even resisted. The paper suggests that geography poses a distinct conceptual problem for peace movements, which must simultaneously operate beyond conventional forms of territorial politics while remaining sufficiently flexible in the political arena for their strength and relevance. In Central Africa this meant the Brigade developed two, ultimately incompatible, conceptions of peace: an internationalist one that stressed world community, and a local one that adapted pacifism for nationalist movements. I suggest this case study has two implications for peace research in geography. First, it encourages us to remain attentive to the big stories of peace and, specifically, the way in which the peace movement has been a historically important conduit for a range of internationalist ideas. Second, the histories of waging peace (peace armies, civil disobedience, etc.) allow us to critically interrogate the co‐constitutive geographies of violence and nonviolence while retaining peace as a distinct category around which to promote political engagement.

“Men who smell of fear”: The Menzies Government and Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence

This article uses international archival sources to examine Australian policy on the problem of Rhodesian independence during the 1960s. It demonstrates that until November 1965 the Australian government led by Sir Robert Menzies followed a finely balanced policy that was broadly supportive of Britain but also sympathetic to the Rhodesian Front. However, the Australian response to Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) revealed increasing bureaucratic conflict in Australian policy‐making and exposed the limits of Australian support for Britain in dealing with the international consequences of the UDI. Analysis of Australia's decision to not attend the Lagos Conference in January 1966 demonstrates the Menzies government's anxiety about the implications of racial issues for Australian domestic and foreign policies. This suggests that historians should pay more attention to the significance of Africa in Australian foreign relations during the Menzies era.

Book Review: Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization

Book Review: Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization

The Citizens’ Council and Africa: White Supremacy in Global Perspective

When the Citizens' Council's chief administrator, William J. Simmons, returned to Mississippi after several weeks of traveling through southern Africa in 1966, he confidently reported that he had found evidence of racial tension, despite widespread reports of armed whites and unsettled conditions in the region. During his remarks on the Citizens' Council weekly program, Forum, he explained that whites in southern Africa struck him as very much like ... white people in the South ... prior to ... the civil rights revolution. The relationship between white and black was of acceptance, with no hint of theoretical preconceptions about how things ought to be or how some sociologist thinks they ought to be. In a word, they're just natural. (1) Simmons's nostalgia notwithstanding, his appearance in southern Africa in 1966 signified more than a wistful glance. The eleven Forum programs that the Citizens' Council recorded in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and South-West Africa (Namibia) were only one piece of a broad investment that the Council made in the post-civil rights movement years to preserve what was left of the system of segregation and state-sanctioned white supremacy recently lost in the American South. Close examination reveals that the decolonization process in Africa was a consistent concern for the Citizens' Council. That consistency and the partnerships between the organization and various benefactors suggest that scholars need to develop a deeper understanding of global networks of white supremacy and their reinvigoration in the midst of challenges and institutional defeats. Scholars of the civil rights movement have correctly situated the contours of the black freedom struggle in the United States within a global context of black liberation movements and decolonization abroad. In similar fashion, historians of American foreign policy have linked administrative priorities to both decolonization events and civil rights campaigns at home. (2) In each of these approaches, scholars have uncovered communities of activism and power, contextualizing local movements within broader and more complex environments of politics, economy, and national identity. This essay suggests a similar treatment of white supremacy within the segregationist movement. It does so through an examination of the Citizens' Council's engagement with decolonization processes in Africa. The Council's interest in Africa escalated dramatically after Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in November 1965, so much so that the Forum program organizers recorded interviews from various locations in southern Africa over the course of several weeks. A closer examination of the Citizens' Council's relationship to Africa from the organization's beginnings in 1954 to the Rhodesian independence crisis in 1965-1966 contextualizes American iterations of white resistance within a global ecosystem of white supremacy that sustained the Council after its campaign to preserve segregation in the United States failed. The relationship between the Citizens' Council and white minority regimes in southern Africa is not a new area of scholarly interest. The working framework among scholars who have written about these connections recognizes the Council's interest but lacks consensus about its motivation. Thomas Noer describes the Council's interest in global networks of white supremacy as mostly pragmatic, an investment that, he argues, increased after 1964 in an attempt to secure financial support from organizations with deeper pockets as support in Mississippi was disintegrating. (3) Zoe L. Hyman's work on the intersections of American segregationist ideology and movements to secure white power in South Africa challenges this perspective. Her research identifies a much earlier transatlantic exchange of literature, evidenced through the partnership of the Citizen, the monthly journal published by the Citizens' Council, and the South African Observer, a parallel publication from Cape Town committed to maintaining white supremacy in southern Africa. …

Unpopular sovereignty: Rhodesian independence and African decolonization

In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (known after 1980 as Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to the policies and practices of the end of empire. In Unpopular Sovereignty, Luise White shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa: indeed, this history of Rhodesian political practices reveals some of the commonalities of mid-twentieth-century thinking about place and race and how much government should link the two. White locates Rhodesia's independence in the era of decolonization in Africa, a time of great intellectual ferment in ideas about race, citizenship, and freedom. She shows that racists and reactionaries were just as concerned with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy as African nationalists were and took special care to design voter qualifications that could preserve their version of legal statecraft. Examining how the Rhodesian state managed its own governance and electoral politics, she casts an oblique and revealing light by which to rethink the narratives of decolonization.

The sports boycott against Rhodesia reconsidered

Lost amongst the contemporary debate over Zimbabwe's place in world sport (and especially international cricket) is an awareness that its predecessor state, Rhodesia, had itself been the target of an international sporting boycott during its period of Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain (1965–79). This paper reconsiders that campaign and analyses its broader significance. Two key elements of the campaign against Rhodesian sport are highlighted that are particularly worthy of wider attention. The first was the fundamental rationale behind the boycott movement. Unlike the initial campaign against apartheid sport in South Africa, the boycott against Rhodesia was always centred on the nature and legitimacy of Ian Smith's regime rather than on racial issues within Rhodesian sport itself. Sport became a tool of the wider campaign to deny the legitimacy of Rhodesian independence and nationhood. Secondly, the depth of involvement of the British Government in the boycott campaign is revealed. Indeed, it was the British Government that first instigated the sporting boycott of Rhodesia, and a significant feature of the overall campaign was that it was almost exclusively led by state actors rather than public protest movements. The paper thus examines the motivations and behaviour of successive British governments in using sport as a tool of their overall policy towards Rhodesia.

Post-colonial Nation-building and Southern African Liberation: Tanzania and the Break of Diplomatic Relations with the United Kingdom, 1965–1968

On 15 December 1965 Tanzania broke off diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom (UK) because of Harold Wilson's policy towards Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). Although Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere took this course of action to comply with a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Organisation of African Unity, he made the support for Rhodesian independence a central pillar of Tanzania's nation-building project. Since 1967 human dignity, African liberation and opposition to racialism and colonialism became central tenets of both Tanzania's foreign policy as well as the Ujamaa socialist policy implemented internally by its government. The loss of a British £ 7.5 million loan notwithstanding, Tanzania's unyielding criticism of British policy towards UDI strengthened Nyerere's national and international legitimacy and reinforced the Tanganyika African National Union's hegemony over the national political space. Relations between Tanzania and the UK were finally restored in July 1968, after the other African governments had re-established them. Nyerere felt sure that this policy reversal would not put at risk his government's political legitimacy.

Britain, the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964–65

This article uses new sources from the National Archives of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to examine the consultation and cooperation between Britain and the Old Commonwealth in dealing with the problem of Rhodesian independence. It demonstrates that Canada developed a proactive approach towards the Rhodesian problem but Britain, Australia and New Zealand gave only limited encouragement to Canadian initiatives to avert Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). This article also argues that problems in British policy formulation – especially the weakness of its attempts to deter Rhodesia from unilateral action and its hesitant contingency planning for a UDI – strained the relationship with its Old Commonwealth partners. This is significant because it belies the impression that the problem of Rhodesian independence divided the Commonwealth simply along racial lines.

Dilemmas of Intra-Commonwealth Representation during the Rhodesian Problem, 1964–65

By the mid-1960s the arrangements for intra-Commonwealth representation between its sovereign member states were well established. The racial tension engendered by the problem of Rhodesian independence threatened the continued existence of the Commonwealth, but the conventions of Commonwealth diplomatic representation made the problem more difficult to manage. This article examines how Rhodesian attitudes towards the Commonwealth and the exclusion of Rhodesia from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference ruled out the possibility of multilateral diplomatic engagement. Opportunities to influence the Rhodesian Government were therefore restricted to bilateral exchanges, but the mechanisms for such diplomatic representation, though technically correct in terms of Commonwealth relations, were limited and inadequate. This historical case study therefore confirms the necessity for sufficient representation between sovereign states and other international actors, but demonstrates that the parties to such a diplomatic relationship can conceive the functions of representation in different terms.

The United States, Britain, and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964-1965*

The United States, Britain, and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964-1965*

The United Nations, International Law, and the Rhodesian Independence Crisis. By Jerico C. Nkala, Lecturer in law, University of Zimbabwe. [Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1985. xii, 239 and (Documents, Bibliography and Index) 49 pp. Hardback £30·00 net.

The United Nations, International Law, and the Rhodesian Independence Crisis. By Jerico C. Nkala, Lecturer in law, University of Zimbabwe. [Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1985. xii, 239 and (Documents, Bibliography and Index) 49 pp. Hardback £30·00 net.] - Volume 46 Issue 2

The United Nations, International Law, and the Rhodesian Independence Crisis

The United Nations, International Law, and the Rhodesian Independence Crisis

The United Nations, international law, and the Rhodesian independence crisis

The United Nations, international law, and the Rhodesian independence crisis

Books reviewed

J. H. P. Serfontein, Brotherhood of Power: An Expose of the Secret Afrikaner Broederbond (London, Rex Collings, 1978) Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, The Super Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1978) Mozambique: Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1st and 2nd December, 1978 (Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1979. pp. 204.) 3.50 T. H. Henriksen, Mozambique: A History (Rex Collins (London) with David Philip (Cape Town), 1978, pp. 276) Price £7.50 Charles Harvey, Macroeconomics for Africa, Studies in the Economics of Africa, edited by I. Livingstone and H. W. Ord, (London: Heinemann, 1977) 240pp. Charles Simkins and Duncan Clarke, Structural Unemployment in Southern Africa. Development Studies Series: 1. Pietermaritzburg: (University of Natal Press, 1978. pp. ix + 82) R3.75 Elaine Windrich, Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence (London, Croom Helm, 1978, £10.95). Black Leaders in Southern African History. Edited by Christopher Saunders. (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979) Pp. 160. £5.50 Cased. £2.25 Paper.

Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence

Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence

Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence

Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence

Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence

Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence