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Report of the Aluka Zimbabwe Committee on Possible Sources of Documentation for the Aluka Intellectual Architecture

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Report of the Aluka Zimbabwe Committee on Possible Sources of Documentation for the Aluka Intellectual Architecture Report of the Aluka Zimbabwe Committee on Possible Sources of Documentation for the Aluka Intellectual Architecture Gerald Mazarire, Alois Mlambo, Terence Ranger December 2005 Editor's note: The Aluka Zimbabwe Advisory Committee was organized in 2005 to advise Aluka on selecting relevant content about Zimbabwe for Aluka's Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa digital library project. This edited report was the outcome of a meeting of several members of the Committee held on November 26-27, 2005 in Pretoria, South Africa. It is structured around the seven main categories of a cross-regional intellectual architecture developed by Aluka's advisors as a framework for selecting content across the region (the seven categories were subsequently consolidated to five categories). An article published in Africa Today (Volume 52, Number 2, Winter 2005), "Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project," by Allen lsaacman, Premesh Lalu, and Thomas Nygren, provides a general description of the intellectual architecture and the Aluka project. It is also available on the Aluka website at http://www.aluka.org/page/content/struggles/AfricaTodayArticle . The body of this report is organized around the seven parts of Aluka's provisional intellectual architecture, which are: (i) State repression, reactions and adaptations; (ii) Conflict and resistance in civil society; (iii) Internal and contested histories within and between liberation movements; (iv) Regional and international perspectives; (v) Southern Africa's thirty-year war; (vi) Producing knowledge/contested accounts; (vii) Politics of identity. In addition to these seven major categories, is one called 'life histories.' The Committee does not wish to recommend this be kept as a distinct section but would rather have biographies and personal reminiscences scattered throughout the other parts. To that end, the appendix to this report contains a list of biographies, designed to include political, trade union, religious, cultural and military leaders, and to give representation to women and to both reactionary and radical whites. The appendix also lists a number of important sources of oral testimonies. The report focuses in most detail on Parts One through Three. Parts Four through Seven are discussed in more general terms and are intended as a provisional starting point for further comment. The Committee also recommends that a more comprehensive introduction be written for each part of the architecture. Part One: State Repression, Reactions And Adaptations The original draft of Aluka's intellectual architecture (from May 2004) was written with South Africa in mind. Hence in this section the major thrust was to explore the apartheid regime as ideology and practice. A very great deal has been written about this. By contrast relatively little has been written about the ideology of the Rhodesian regimes. Over the period covered by the Aluka project one political party ruled South Africa in the name of a single ideology. Over the same period in Zimbabwe the country was until 1963 part of a Federation and its government subscribed to the ideology of 'partnership'; thereafter it was controlled by the Rhodesia Front under an ideology which combined 'community development', renewed segregation and neo-traditionalism. In the last part of the period there was recourse to martial law. Throughout the period there were influx controls in the urban areas and successive schemes of re-organisation in the rural areas. This part therefore has to combine an examination of changing ideologies and practices with a study of underlying and continuous structures. Rhodesia was often contrasted with South Africa, not least by the South African government itself, for lacking any worked-out and consistent ideology. Nevertheless we think it important to set out the ideas behind white minority rule and also to explore the changing means by which the Rhodesian state sought to achieve African assent. Up to 1963 these took the form of modern versions of the old imperial ideology of 'equal rights for all civilised men' and the ambiguous doctrine of 'partnership'. In this period the state sought to achieve the assent of African elites through provision of more and higher education for Africans, development of lease-hold and eventually free-hold schemes in the cities, and the creation by means of the Land Husbandry Act of a 'prosperous peasantry'. In this period chiefs were of little importance. There was a symbolic change from the Department of Native Affairs to the Department of Internal Affairs. The crucial allies were seen as the African urban and rural middle classes at whom 'Build A Nation' campaigns were aimed, who were offered the vote in heavily qualified franchises, who were promised a very slow dismantling of urban segregation and eventually were even to be offered the chance to acquire land in the areas hitherto reserved for Europeans by the repeal of the Land Apportionment Act. This 'liberalism' was accompanied by authoritarian control of the majority of Africans in town and countryside and by repression of those who advocated the alternative ideals of a mass franchise and African majority rule. Sir Edgar Whitehead's 'liberalism' was accompanied by the Emergency of 1959, by show trials, by detention and restriction and by the passage of coercive legislation like the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act. By 1961 it had become clear that the 'liberal' paradigm had failed. Federation was breaking up. The most highly educated Africans had joined and were leading the nationalist parties. Authoritarian and interventionist attempts to implement Land Husbandry and bring about a rural tenurial revolution were frustrated by widespread resistance. In the towns Africans with the most secure tenure were demanding the Municipal vote and the right to control Councils. The Rhodesia Front government elected in 1963 aimed at different African allies. Its ideology was 'community development' through which African 'traditional' communities in the rural areas and township communities around the cities could achieve a degree of self-government. This was an ideology which went with the revival of social and occupational segregation; a new legislative division of the land into white and black areas; a neo-traditional emphasis upon 'authentic' chiefs and African religious leaders; development of an inferior education 'appropriate' to Africans, etc. This cluster of ideas constituted 'the Rhodesian Way', which the declaration of UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) in 1965 was supposed to defend. Each ideology gained some African supporters and the Rhodesian government throughout employed many policemen, soldiers, clerks, teachers etc. Africans in town and countryside adapted on a day to day basis to the pressures on influx control and rural social engineering and to the realities of racial discrimination. An obvious way to illustrate some of this is by use of the papers of successive Federal and Southern Rhodesian Prime Ministers. The papers of Sir Godfrey Huggins, Lord Malvern, are in the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ). There is a biography by L.H. Gann and M. Gelfand, Huggins of Rhodesia: The Man and His Country (Allen and Unwin, 1964). The papers of Sir Roy Welensky are in Rhodes House, Oxford. There is a two volume catalogue, and there is a biography by J.R.T. Wood, The Welensky Papers: A History of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Graham, Durban, 1983). The papers of Sir Garfield Todd are in NAZ. There is a biography by Ruth Weiss and Jane Parpart, Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe (British Academic Press, 1999). Todd's ex-secretary, Susan Paul, is working on a large biography and has written several hundred pages of text, including many verbatim citations from letters and diaries. Michael Casey is working on a collection of Todd's speeches to illustrate an essay on oratory. The papers of Sir Edgar Whitehead and of Winston Field are in Rhodes House, Oxford. Also now available are Ian Smith's papers which have been donated to Rhodes University. No Aluka researcher has yet worked through them. Meanwhile much material from the Smith archive is available in J.R.T. Wood, So Far and No Further: Rhodesia's Bid for Independence during the Retreat from Empire, 1959-1965 (Trafford Publishing, 2005). A second volume, A Matter of Weeks Rather than Months: Sanctions and Aborted Settlements, 1965-1970, is to be published next year. Wood's blurb claims that he 'secured the crucial support and interest of the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, I.D. Smith, and access to his private papers.' In addition to material from prime ministerial papers the theory and practice of Rhodesian government needs to be illustrated from administrative papers. Native Department and Internal Affairs Department files are in NAZ, as are Federal and territorial intelligence reports and police files. Particularly interesting for changing policies in the countryside are the Land Husbandry files. There is a statement of government hopes for Land Husbandry Act, What the Native Land Husbandry Act Means to the Rural African and Southern Rhodesia (Salisbury, 1955) which should be digitised. For Community development the Community Delineation reports, NAZ S.2929 are critical. Particularly revealing of neo- traditionalism is the Spirit Index for every medium, priest, holy place and independent church leader, NAZ S.2376. For the urban areas state files can be supplemented by Municipal records and reports. The annual reports of the Directors of Native Affairs for Salisbury and Bulawayo are available in NAZ. There are a series of official and unofficial reports on the situation in the cities, all earlier than the starting date of the Aluka project but retaining their relevance: o J.P. McNamee, Report on Native Urban Administration in Bulawayo (Bulawayo, 1948); o Roger Howman, Report of the Committee to Investigate Urban Conditions in Southern Rhodesia (1943); o B.W. Gussman, African Life in an Urban Area (Bulawayo, 1952-53); o Percy Ibbotson, Report of a Survey of Urban African conditions in Southern Rhodesia (Bulawayo 1943).
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