There were fears that White wealth, power and prejudice would be lost.The coming of independence signaled new imaginations of nationhood.
Rhodesians Never Die: Dis-covering the indignity of the hierarchies of coloniality
THIS week’s rendition is absent of my usual philosophical articulation meander which largely gives shape to the discursive carving of this weekly literature review.
The idea is to win more readers for this column this week. The objective is to keep the flames of this decolonial Sunday gospel reaching out to many. It can’t always be about scholars and deep interference with egos of coloniality. Most early enthusiasts of this column have grown weary of confronting strenuous theoretical frameworks and weighty classroom discourses in the newspaper.
So this week it’s about simple engagement, I won’t be about the weekly routine of unpacking issues from a decolonial-panAfrican perspective. Nonetheless, this does not mean that colonial rhetoric and myths will be spared the usual whip of correction. Of course I will try by all means to make this submission have less conceptual issues to generally engage the reader’s attention to appreciate to Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock’s publication, Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c.1970-1980.
The preceding two articles of this series fairly captured the ideological bedrock of this text’s authorship.
The book in concern clearly revives the memory of a long gone Rhodesian legacy. In a way, the book attempts to challenge the existing abundant body of nationalist literature which has presented the grotesque image of the Rhodesian regime. This position is cemented by a comrade’s comment on last week’s article; the comrade argued that Godwin and Hancock’s book challenges “official patriotic history”.
Patriotic history refers to Terence Ranger’s problematic mild attribute of nationalist legacies revived during and after the land reform as Zanu-PF propaganda used to consolidate electoral popularity. However, Godwin and Hancock fall short of eliminating the established realities of Rhodesia being more than a state, but an ideological symbol of tyranny, African cultural erosion and exclusionism based on a self-arrogated superiority of whiteness.
Where Godwin and Hancock miss it The book is a preservation of an exclusively imagined white reality/experience of colonial national belonging. A form of belonging which did not recognise other representatives of the human race (including the Black majority) in the then Rhodesia. Godwin and Hancock conform to the given normalcy of Africans as subjects of the Whites. The explicit contextual limitation Rhodesia and Rhodesians to Whites/Europeans is a reproduction of the myth of Africans as less human than their white counterparts.
This position indicates that the writers of the book under review consciously or unconsciously maintain the colonial tradition of not considering Africans as humans. As a result, their book makes it clear that the African is not worth acknowledging in the memory of the undying nationalism of Rhodesia which constitutes the broader subject matter of the book.
Godwin and Hancock can be justified because Africans in Rhodesia represented an anti-establishment force to the existing system thereof. Africans were a sovereignty liability to the life of Rhodesia. The struggle for freedom from colonial bondage challenged the superficial imagination of a Rhodesia which would never die.
This false imagination of Rhodesia’s political fortitude was founded on a national consciousness which was built on White supremacy. In last week’s article I revisited some of the pertinent traditions and rituals used by Rhodesians to instill a positive time in its history, Britain assumed direct control of the colony’s government. The sovereignty of Rhodesia was Britain’s and only Britain could hand over power to the nationalists.
UDI was an affront against history and was the direct cause of the death of perhaps 50 000 people. And yet Smith recalled that awful time between 1965 and Zimbabwe’s independence as “fourteen great years” which he had conferred Rhodesians. It is this mindset that one encounters when they interact with several White writings.
This body of literature popularises the myth of an all-perfect governance under Smith. Such literature has also been used to explain how the Rhodesian were the best drivers of an agricultural economy.
Likewise, this exaggeration has been equally exploited to present Rhodesia as the most advanced colony which built sound development opportunities for its colonial subjects.
The lie that Rhodesia never died This body of literature has been misread by sympathisers of “Whiteness”. The key characteristic of this kind of writing largely emphasises how Rhodesians were not peculiarly evil, but were conforming to set hierarchies of colonialism characterised by the slave-master relationship.
There is a usual predisposition that the success of Rhodesia was a result of imported capital and Black labour, as a result the Rhodesians created a relatively developed economy. However, this position is challenged by the reasons of the armed struggle against Smith’s regime.
The causes of the liberation struggle which gave birth to Zimbabwe in 1980 were not significantly detached from the reasons of the first Chimurenga of 1896-97. Africans were unified by the oppression they faced, yet the Rhodesians were united by the privilege which colonialism offered them.
Like any privileged group, they wanted to retain their position and from the earliest settler elections they voted for whoever seemed able to guarantee it.
They were even willing to fight although as the book shows, as soon as the call-ups interrupted the easy flow of settler life, people started drifting away. When it was obvious that their privileges would be lost, the majority of Whites simply fled the country.
It is also valid that most of these Whites fled because they could not confront the reality of a united effort of Africans dismantling colonialism. This is why even after the death of Rhodesia Godwin and Hancock write, “Rhodesians Never Die”.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network (LAN). Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on rasmkhonto@gmail.com