Journal of Southern African Studies

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Reappraising the 1950s in Zimbabwean History: The Problem of Todd and the Limits of Liberalism

K.B. Wilson

To cite this article: K.B. Wilson (2021) Reappraising the 1950s in Zimbabwean History: The Problem of Todd and the Limits of Liberalism, Journal of Southern African Studies, 47:3, 489-504, DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2021.1932092 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2021.1932092

Published online: 25 Jun 2021.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjss20 Journal of Southern African Studies, 2021 Vol. 47, No. 3, 489–504, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2021.1932092 Review Article Reappraising the 1950s in Zimbabwean History: The Problem of Todd and the Limits of Liberalism

Aeneas S. Chigwedere, The White Heroes of : John White, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Reginald , Jean Grace Todd (Harare, Mutapa Publishing House, 2017).

Susan Woodhouse, Garfield Todd: The End of the Liberal Dream in (Harare, Weaver Press, 2018).

Introduction

With independence euphoria long gone, a sense of entrapment in Zimbabwe’s politics dating back to the early 1960s has stimulated unexpectedly persistent interest in white liberal politics prior to the rise of the . The questions remain: could the government of Sir Garfield Todd (1953–58), an unlikely ex-missionary New Zealander, really have found a pathway for to decolonise itself through transition to multiracial democracy? Was the only legacy of Todd’s bruising downfall in 1958 the stimulus to radical populism, and was this failure down to his domineering style or the deadening inevitability of settler racism? Todd has attracted numerous biographers and many political historians; he emerges as being as rhetorically gifted as he was politically ineffective, as genuine as he was hated, as being more Christian than liberal, and as a radical paternalist who became a prime minister by accident and then a prophet by vocation. The two new biographies reviewed here, deeply informed but unconnected to all this scholarship, will change those views. Providing unparalleled new source material, Susan Woodhouse reveals Todd as an economic liberal who was surprisingly effective at finding and articulating plausible technocratic solutions to politically impossible issues while rapidly growing and reorganising a diversifying economy in the complex environment of the Central African Federation.1 Aeneas Chigwedere, on the other hand, demonstrates the scale of the impact of Todd’s educational, health, urbanisation and other policies on the capacity of Africans to take on the settler state for themselves a generation later. Todd stands tall in these biographies which gently but resolutely reveal the poverty of scholarly understanding of societal change in the 1950s and the almost complete elision of other possible pathways to independence in nationalist histories. These observations highlight the need to reopen the question of how vague multiracial liberalism was replaced by a passionate racially defined populism in the 1957–1962 period. To this end, this review begins with exploring existing insight and lacunae of the life and times of Todd as prelude to introducing the two books under review.

1 The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–63) was an effort by the British government, mainstream white politicians and significant business interests to use economic integration to grow a liberal alternative to then conflicting alternatives of apartheid and African independency to the south and north of British Central Africa; its complex consequences and its destruction by African nationalism north of the Zambezi will be touched on in due course. 490 K.B. Wilson

Of Todd and the Struggle: The Scholarship and the Questions

A series of larger-than-life, supposedly omnipotent, prime ministers have dramatically failed to realise their utopian/dystopian visions for what they saw as the yearning space of Rhodesia, their magnetism as leaders reflecting just how much their people longed to be in a country on a different trajectory. The political buoyancy of , who led ‘a suburb masquerading as a nation’ to confound, for a time, such prevailing ‘winds of change’, and with such hope and hype,2 seems still inadequately digested by scholars, even as the internal dynamics of Rhodesia’s 1965 unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) have become ever more fully documented through thorough work on his papers.3 Meanwhile, the non-viability of Bishop ’s bid for power (1978 –79) in a random but highly managed black–white partnership is now better revealed through the work of Luise White, but not why Muzorewa and so many others ever imagined it could have succeeded (perhaps they only thought they needed to outmanoeuvre the larger-looming ).4 Muzorewa captured international attention only fleetingly, but discussing the real and imagined flaws of his successor, , has become a veritable global industry, with a torrent of books to match, most focused on the man rather than the society that created and embraced him for so long, and few with much distance. However, historians must ask whether Rhodesia really had to face the radicalised and arguably unwinnable racial ‘endgame’ symbolised by these prime ministers. If these hard men were all too rigidly certain and skilfully populist to achieve their goals, could an equally larger-than-life, utopian and omnipotent prime minister, namely the unlikely Garfield Todd, really have found a path to multiracial democracy in the 1950s? Todd was a man just as convinced of his righteousness as any of the above, and certainly a less experienced politician. An intemperate liberal, a conciliator who alienated, and a rhetorician who was supremely goal oriented, might he really have been supple enough to separate the Titanic and iceberg? Such a notion now seems as ungrounded as Smith’s ‘One Thousand Years’ and Mugabe’s ‘Reconciliation’;5 but did timing mean that Todd’s premiership (1953–58) might perhaps have found a viable route for Rhodesia to ‘decolonise itself’ through ‘partnership’ with the ‘African middle classes’, as Tony King framed the

2 This vibrant and condescending pre-social media meme, ‘a suburb masquerading as a nation’, is attributed variously to David Astor of the Observer and Alan Coren of Punch; White, Unpopular Sovereignty, p. 29, n. 69. It was intended to propose in one swoop the ‘smallness’ and ‘mediocrity’ of Rhodesia’s whites, to lampoon their claims of doing something glorious for the Great British empire, and point up the gap between their bush frontier rhetoric and the fact that by the 1960s they almost entirely lived in manicured small towns in rows of bungalows, each with a dedicated braai area. 3 J.R.T. Wood, So Far and No Further! Rhodesia’s Bid for Independence during the Retreat from Empire 1959–1965 (Victoria, Trafford Publishing, 2005). 4 L. White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015). 5 These references are to their two most famous and oft-referenced speeches, each of which presaged the opposite intent. Smith on 20 March 1976 stated: ‘I don’t believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia – not in a thousand years. I repeat that I believe in blacks and whites working together. If one day it is white and the next day it is black, I believe we have failed and it will be a disaster for Rhodesia’ (Wikiquote, ‘Ian Smith’, available at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ian_Smith, retrieved 11 May 2021). This was a skilful double-think speech actually designed to let Rhodesia’s whites understand that he was preparing to enter into a power-sharing deal with African politicians whom he thought he could control, even though he wished he did not have to (see P. Godwin, ‘If Only Ian Smith Had Shown Some Imagination, Then More of His People Might Live at Peace’, The Guardian, London, 25 November 2007). Meanwhile, Mugabe, on announcement of his victory in the independence elections, declared on 4 March 1980 – whatever were his actual intentions – that: ‘I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new pledge to forget our grim past, forgive others and forget. Join hands in a new amity and together as Zimbabweans trample upon racialism, tribalism and regionalism, and work hard to reconstruct and rehabilitate our society as we reinvigorate our economic machinery’ (R. Mugabe, ‘Mugabe on Reconciliation’, Politicsweb website, 13 March 2008, available at https://www.politicsweb.co.za/documents/mugabe-on-reconciliation, retrieved 11 May 2021). Review Article 491 wider white political zeitgeist of 1945–62.6 If so, does understanding the events of Zimbabwe’s recent decades actually require fewer books about Mugabe and more (or new) studies of the 1950s? Or is it merely that the ‘subsequent troubled history of independent Zimbabwe encourages some to look back wistfully at the reformist governments of 1957–62’.7 Todd himself struggled with those questions for the rest of his life. In 1985 he reaffirmed the existence of a window for change in his foreword for the book by fellow journeyer Hardwicke Holderness:

1953–58 was a period of hope for those whites who recognized that, in the long term, safety and progress for all depended upon a sharing of political power – theirs for the time being – with an ever- increasing number of blacks … five critical years at the close of which the opportunity to continue on the road to peaceful political evolution was supplanted by the growing danger of civil war.8 But then, on the passing in 1995 of his erstwhile sparring partner, radical Christian and nationalist ally Guy Clutton-Brock, Todd mused that while:

Guy and I were working for the same end … I was on the side of legality and working from the existing structures to a new order. Guy saw that that was a hopeless endeavour and worked entirely with the people … a position which eventually and in desperation I had to accept for myself. (Woodhouse, p. 213) So much for ‘windows’ and ‘musings’. Most scholars have instead argued for a continuity of white supremacism in Rhodesian politics, with there being little need to attend to the diversity and internal dynamics of white society prior to UDI.9 Todd may have been occasionally acknowledged for his personal integrity and non-racialism, but the political historians have seen potential in neither his struggles nor his moment in history. Indeed, little has changed in the scholarship around Todd’s downfall over the years since the first accounting, back in 1959, by Colin Leys, who referenced Todd’s ‘undeserved reputation among some sections of the electorate an “ultra-liberal”’ which was ‘due as much to the tone of his speeches as to the record of his administration’: a tone, indeed, that was ‘symptomatic of a tactlessness and self-righteousness, which it was alleged, characterised his conduct as Prime Minister and party leader generally’.10 For most analysts, Todd was merely a more congenial paternalist who was in more trouble for ‘what he said about Africans than what he actually did to enhance African interests’,11 who showed his true colours in the breaking of the 1954 coal lashers’ strike at Wankie,12 and who, having never really pressed an agenda beyond gradualism, was more to blame than anyone else for the

6 A. King, Identity and Decolonisation: The Policy of Partnership in Southern Rhodesia 1945–62 (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2001), p. 12. 7 J. Fraenkel, ‘“Equality of Rights for Every Civilized Man South of the Zambezi”: Electoral Engineering in Southern Rhodesia, 1957–65’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 6 (2015), p. 1180; he must actually mean 1953–62. 8 G. Todd, ‘Foreword’, in H. Holderness, Lost Chance: Southern Rhodesia 1945–58 (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1985), p. 2. 9 Even the major treatments of the diversity of white opinion leave the impression of little consequence in realpolitik, either through lack of groundedness in all their technical complexity (King, Identity and Decolonisation) or in their marginalisation from real power: I. Hancock, White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia 1953–1980 (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1984). 10 C. Leys, European Politics in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 142. 11 L. Kapungu, Rhodesia: The Struggle for Freedom (New York, Orbis Books, 1974), p. 31. 12 I. Phimister, ‘Lashers and Leviathan: The 1954 Coalminers’ Strike in Colonial Zimbabwe’, International Review of Social History, 39, 2 (1994), pp. 165–96. Woodhouse (pp. 109–13) provides the defence of his actions that Todd vigorously expressed throughout his life, especially that the army was brought in to keep the peace and not break the strike, and that he used the strike to press for African labour representation. 492 K.B. Wilson personality conflicts with white political colleagues while clumsily interfering with the Immorality Act in an era when racism became the driving force in electoral politics.13 Todd’s passionately sympathetic biographers, on the other hand, have described his political struggle – circumscribed as it was by the limitations of his electorate – in values- rich detail, and as the actions of a thoughtful, if accidental, prophet divorced from (rather than representative of) white society, morally victorious but doomed to failure, and then radicalised as an unfailing thorn in the side of Ian Smith and ultimately Robert Mugabe.14 And yet, even if these biographers are right, just what would be of interest in his story to scholars or to Zimbabweans trying to get their society working again? Indeed, as Terence Ranger advanced in a review of Michael Casey’s study of Todd’s rhetoric in this very journal:

The story of Sir Garfield Todd has proved very hard to tell. He was undeniably a great man – but never had the chance to do anything great. His political career was a failure and any account of it is inevitably about the many disconcerting concessions he made, in vain, to Rhodesian opinion. His moral career was ultimately a great success, during the long period when he did not need to make such concessions. But historians are unconvincing about and unhappy with virtue.15

13 Some of these include: L.W. Bowman, Politics in Rhodesia: White Power in an African State (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1973); D. Chanaiwa, ‘The Premiership of Garfield Todd in Rhodesia: Racial Partnership versus Colonial Interests’, Journal of Southern African Affairs, 1, 1 (1976), pp. 83–94; P. Keatley, The Politics of Partnership: The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963); P. Mason, Year of Decision: Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1960 (London, Oxford University Press, 1960); J. Olsson, ‘A Crucial Watershed in Southern Rhodesian Politics’ (Master’s thesis, University of Gotland, 2011), p. 17; M.O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002). Only one scholar, the Conservative British peer Robert Blake, has taken an overtly sympathetic line to the seriousness of Todd’s bid for change: R. Blake, A History of Rhodesia (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). Meanwhile, Eshmael Mlambo provides much the most nuanced and contextualised critique: E. Mlambo, Rhodesia: The Struggle for a Birthright (London, C. Hurst, 1972). 14 Including the two under review, there are five book-length biographies. The other three are R. Weiss with J. Parpart, Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe (London, British Academic Press, 1999); D.A. Mungazi, The Last British Liberals in Africa: Michael Blundell and Garfield Todd (Westport, Praeger, 1999); and M.W. Casey The Rhetoric of Sir Garfield Todd: Christian Imagination and the Dream of an African Democracy (Waco, Baylor University Press, 2007). There is also a film: R. Driver (dir.), Hokonui Todd, (Linehurst Films, 1990), produced by A. Landan and R. Driver, 47 minutes; and a recent play by S. Makuwe, Black Lover (unpublished, but performed in Auckland, , in 2020). There are also numerous shorter biographical efforts including the masterful summary by D. Lowry, ‘Todd, Sir (Reginald Stephen) Garfield (1908–2002)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online, Oxford University Press, n.d.; available to subscribers at https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/77353, retrieved 13 May 2021); M.W. Casey, ‘Todd, Sir Garfield (1908–2002) and Lady Grace (1911–2000)’, in D.A. Foster, P. Blowers, A.L. Dunnavant and D. Newell Williams (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement: Christian Churches, Churches of Christ and the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 743–4; B. Sell, ‘Garfield Todd: Leader with a Conscience’,inKiwi Heroes: 50 Courageous New Zealanders (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2010), pp. 268–73; M.O. West, ‘Ndabaningi Sithole, Garfield Todd and the Dadaya School Strike of 1947’, Journal of Southern African Studies 18, 2 (1992), pp. 297–316; G.S. Mount, ‘Todd, Reginald Stephen Garfield’,inHistorical Dictionary of the British Empire, Volume 2 (Westport Press, 1966), pp. 1099–1101; and S. Paul and T. Grundy, ‘The Dadaya Years: The Challenge of Understanding Garfield Todd’, The Round Table (The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs) 100, 417 (2011), pp. 629–38. In addition, Todd appears in almost every biography in the Zimbabwean 20th- century political archive, whether written by Africans or Europeans, from Michael Auret to Lawrence Vambe, nearly always as a sacrifice to white intransigence and/or a steadfast beacon of hope. Most recently, the late the leading Midlands politician, who had known him closely since the 1940s, described Todd as ‘colour-blind’ and said that Todd’s vehement opposition to racism at Dadaya School had been what ultimately propelled him, i.e. Msipa himself, into politics: C.G. Msipa, In Pursuit of Freedom and Justice: A Memoir (Harare, Weaver Press, 2015), p.19. 15 T.O. Ranger, ‘A Todd Succession? A Political Family and Modern Zimbabwe’ (review of Casey, The Rhetoric, and J.G. Todd, Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe), Journal of Southern African Studies, 34, 1 (2008), pp. 225–7. Review Article 493

In this, Ranger was only expanding on the theme he began with his review of ’s earlier biography where he wrote that Todd:

is worth writing about because he is admirable – yet a biographer cannot afford to be merely admiring. Ruth Weiss resolves the dilemma by being critical of Todd in power and admiring him in the long years after his overthrow. Even this is difficult. She is not sure whether to be critical of him because as Prime Minister he was too gradualist and paternalist or because he moved too fast to hold on to white political support. That was indeed Todd’s dilemma – he could not do what it was necessary to do.16 But what if the analysis of Todd in politics explored his contributions to the structural economic changes in 1950s Rhodesia beyond those directly relating to whether he managed to get Africans the vote; changes that Chigwedere shows, in the salient contribution of his 2017 biography, contributed greatly to the success of nationalism in subsequent decades? More specifically, what was Todd’s role in presiding over a rapid modernisation of African life – rural and urban – and in accelerating the growth and diversification of the national economy as the country transformed after WWII? Was it indeed the economy built under Todd (taking advantage of the Central African Federation, and including the Kariba Dam and hydroelectric power station) that served as the enabling foundation for all that end-of-empire immigration and political assertion under Smith; and was not Todd’s acceleration of African education and other advances a crucial platform for African political ambitions? And what if the manner in which Todd was ousted actually acted to shape, and not just to reflect, the confrontational and populist trajectories for Smith and Mugabe?17 Thus, John David Leaver provocatively asserts: ‘Todd actually did as much to polarize racial feeling as his government had done to liberalize society’;18 and, as observed by Tinashe Nyamunda, all this ‘created important political legacies that continue to influence politics in Zimbabwe decades after its attainment of majority rule’.19 Todd was ousted as prime minister in a bizarre cabinet coup in February 1958 which those who removed him claimed was motivated by reasons that they could not disclose that were not about policy or attitudes to race. Innuendo, denial and outrage gripped the country, generating a political watershed between white liberals and white conservatives, as well as between whites and Africans, that quickly became seen as preordained, unavoidable and proof of the necessity and virtue of violent authoritarianism for both white and black. As Alois Mlambo put it in his contemporary historical synthesis:

The African elite were becoming disillusioned with partnership and multiracial tea parties which were not leading to racial equality and better respect for African human rights. A major shock came when the leading white liberal who the Africans regarded as a champion of their interests, Garfield Todd, fell from power in 1958 following a Cabinet revolt against his ‘pro-African’ policies.20 It was then that they turned their backs on white liberals and joined hands with the masses that they had spurned in the past to build a militant African nationalist movement that was now demanding ‘one man, one vote’.21

16 T.O. Ranger, ‘Review’ of Ruth Weiss with Jane Parpart, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 63, 1 (2000), p. 155. 17 The position of Mungazi, The Last British Liberals, p. 130; this view is also recently posited in J. Pritchard, ‘Race, Identity, and Belonging in Early Zimbabwean Nationalism(s), 1957–1965’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018), p. 95. 18 J.D. Leaver, ‘Multiracialism and Nationalisms: A Political Retrospective on 1950s Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe)’, Journal of Third World Studies, 23, 2 (2006), p. 175. 19 T. Nyamunda, ‘“More a Cause than a Country”: Historiography, UDI and the Crisis of Decolonisation in Rhodesia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42, 5 (2016), p. 1005. 20 A.S. Mlambo, ‘From the Second World War to UDI, 1940–1965’, in Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo (eds), Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 (Harare, Weaver Press, 2009), p. 106. 21 Mlambo, ‘From the Second World War to UDI’, p. 95. 494 K.B. Wilson

To this point, Garfield succinctly references Ndabaningi Sithole’s reflections in the oral archive, drawn upon by Woodhouse, as saying: ‘[t]he noise of my falling, as I was thrown out, awakened the nationalist cause’ (Woodhouse, p. 257).22 The New Biographies

As is clear, therefore, these new biographies land in an already crowded space of earnest writing full of gaps about the Todds and the period. Their authors are octogenarians, but they bring something new. They are also the first accounts of his life that will be widely accessible to Zimbabweans, both because they are published locally (Woodhouse by the country’s indomitable Weaver Press, and Chigwedere by his family firm), and because they lack academic pretensions and have been crafted with Zimbabwean publics in mind. Indeed, no less a person than the late Lawrence Vambe closes his foreword to Woodhouse by writing: ‘I urge young Zimbabweans to read this book’.23 Chigwedere’s 2017 volume was actually written nearly 20 years ago, and the original manuscript presented to the Todds in April 2001. In his eulogy at Grace Todd’s funeral, Chigwedere anticipated publication by March 2002 (Chigwedere, p. 229).24 But those were racially eventful years in Zimbabwe. Chigwedere is a prominent Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) leader and a prolific writer on diverse themes of history, society and morality; he is a former Minister of Education (2001–09) and provincial governor (2008–13). recalls joking with Chigwedere at the time of its publication that it is fortunate that Mugabe had appointed him the Chair of the Censorship Board, ‘otherwise the existence of his book [White Heroes] might have been endangered by its very title’.25 As the first African History honours student at the University College of Rhodesia & Nyasaland, and member of a prominent chiefly household in Hwedza, currently serving as Headman Svosve Mubayiwa, Chigwedere has championed an approach to Zimbabwean history rooted in African culture, indeed cultural nationalism.26 The fact that the book White Heroes is now published in Zimbabwe signals his decision to break with Africanist discourse, though this work also shows how ‘nationalist history’ can comfortably embrace the notion of a ‘few good whites’. He explains in the book that he came to appreciate the Todds in 1997 when he was researching the expansion of African education from 1954, only to discover, he says, that what Garfield promoted as prime minister was what Grace had developed as the ‘Dadaya Schemes’–the curricular materials she formulated shortly after her arrival in 1934 to enable under-resourced African teachers in mission schools to deliver high-quality classes (Chigwedere, p. 227). Chigwedere takes an opposite tack to Ranger’s laments over the cynicism of historians and Todd’slackof success. Instead, he positively swoons over the Todds’ concrete accomplishments, introducing Garfield as follows:

I described John White as a cyclone that defended African interests and African rights. I described Arthur Shearly Cripps as a hurricane that, in addition to ‘scientifically’ defending African interests and rights, also hurled fish onto the African mainland for African consumption. Garfield Todd was neither a cyclone nor a hurricane. He was simply the white African MOSES who delivered the black Zimbabweans out of bondage … . Above all he

22 Almost every prominent African leader remarked similarly on Todd’s fall at the time or in their subsequent political memoirs: both Woodhouse and Chigwedere provide a rich selection and others are quoted across these biographies and studies. 23 L. Vambe, ‘Foreword’ in Woodhouse (p. xx). 24 Chigwedere’s powerful address at that funeral in January 2002 is printed in both the books under review. 25 E-mail communication from Judith Todd to author, 28 October 2019. 26 Tragically, Aeneas Chigwedere passed away from Covid-19 on 22 January 2021, during the period this article was being copy-edited. Review Article 495

gave the Black Zimbabweans not only the tools with which to improve their lives but also the weapons and ammunition with which to fight for their interests and rights including the recovery of their political sovereignty … . The Africans you see in Zimbabwe between 1955 and 1980 were the products of Todd’s ‘factory’. It is even difficult to imagine how the Liberation War could have been possible at the time it took place, without Todd. (Chigwedere, pp. 231–2) Chigwedere’s hyperbole notwithstanding, for changes were afoot across the whole of Africa in 1950s, whatever the bent of late colonial governments or of sundry Great Men, he certainly makes a convincing case, in a series of chapters, sparsely sourced but broadly informed, that Todd’s reforms advanced structural changes in the achievement and aspirations of Africans. Chigwedere starts with the urban home ownership schemes that chipped away at the infamous Land Apportionment Act by connecting with a new African elite’s ability to pay for a foothold outside of the Native Reserves, where Africans held communal residential rights.27 Chigwedere then turns to African health services, ostensibly a responsibility of the Federation government, showing that Todd drove investment in urban hospitals and rural district clinics, encouraged missions to expand health services with subsidies, and, crucially, from 1958, launched the training of African State Registered Nurses at the Harare and Mpilo hospitals. Chigwedere presents this as a response to changing African demands for western medicine, and argues that its consequence was the fourfold growth in the African population that occurred between 1950 and 1980: ‘a demographic revolution with an equal political revolution in its train’, because weight of numbers became crucial to overwhelming white Rhodesia in the 1970s (Chigwedere, p. 247). There is indeed evidence that African infant and child mortality dropped significantly from the 1950s, that this was associated with access to health care and maternal education, and, in the absence of fertility decline, that this did in fact drive extraordinary population growth, and, furthermore, that Rhodesian Front rule (1962–80),28 slowed but could not reverse this demographic revolution.29 As shown by Josiah Brownell, population management had long been politicised in Rhodesia and the issue was particularly hot in the 1970s as it became clear that whites were losing the demographic war; Brownell quotes, among others, an Ernest Mpofu writing to the Rhodesia Herald in 1971: ‘we the silent majority are not happily silent … while the government is busy screaming for more and more immigrants, we are busy sending our pregnant women to the nearest clinic to give birth to future voices’.30 Chigwedere next addresses education, where Todd had wrested African education out of the Native Affairs department to run it directly himself, and again promoted revolutionary changes across the board, not just in rural areas, but in towns, mining compounds, and even on white farms. African educational enrolment, already rising rapidly under his predecessor Godfrey

27 P. Bond, Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment (Africa World Press 1998), pp. 101–2, critiques the African capacity to pay for such housing, while connecting this with the general property slump of the early 1960s. 28 The rapidly cobbled-together Rhodesian Front emerged victorious as an anti-liberal white alliance at a critical political juncture in 1962 following the passing by referendum of the liberal-backed 1961 Constitution that offered gradual expansion of the electoral roll towards majority rule. The RF, under Ian Smith from 1964, somehow combined internal chaos, determined opposition to political change through wildly changing strategies, and unwavering electoral loyalty. Even after it failed to prevent black majority rule and independence in 1980, while evolving into the Republican Front, and later the Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe, it continued to dominate white political representation through the 1980s. 29 K.B. Wilson, ‘Ecological Dynamics and Human Welfare: A Case Study of Population, Health and Nutrition in Southern Zimbabwe’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1990). 30 J. Brownell, The Collapse of Rhodesia: Population Demographics and the Politics of Race (New York, Taurus Books, 2011), pp. 135–6. 496 K.B. Wilson

Huggins (Lord Malvern) since WWII,31 doubled during the five years Todd was in office, while quickly extending beyond rudimentary literacy and numeracy to new secondary education for Africans beyond the recently established Goromonzi, St Augustine’s, Dadaya, Kutama, Gokomere and other pioneer mission schools.32 To the chagrin of his conservative opposition, the goals of Todd’s 1956 five-year plan were achieved some three years early, despite his having been ousted, so strong was African demand and so judicious was Todd’s sourcing and application of funding. Chigwedere claims that over 80 per cent of the secondary schools ever established for Africans in colonial Rhodesia were part of that same Todd plan, and that training and salaries for African teachers were utterly transformed creating the stable professional class that formed, one could add, the rural intelligentsia so crucial in destroying the political settlement proposals evaluated by the Pearce Commission in 1972 and for providing political framing and logistical support during the Chimurenga war in the late 1970s. Todd also saw to the launching of technical training for Africans as part of his drive to provide skilled labour for industrialisation. This formation of a new generation was what Chigwedere calls the ‘Todd Factory’. Chigwedere’s work has most in common with the late Dickson Mungazi’s The Last British Liberals in Africa, an uneven book not least because of its premise: Garfield only went to Britain once he was prime minister, never really connected with the country, considered his distant heritage Scottish, not British, and only appealed as an outsider to the UK for constitutional intervention after 1960.33 Todd was much more at home with the aspirations of North America and the Dominions than with little England.34 But Mungazi’s biography is at its strongest when he writes about the evolution of the African experience of being colonised, and about how Todd understood the ‘psychology’ of post-WWII African aspirations and ‘placed educational development for Africans at the top of his national agenda’. Mungazi, like other biographers, recognised that this awareness was very much informed and shaped by Todd’s experience as a missionary, and his love for Grace the teacher. As early as 1943, writes Woodhouse, Todd had written to the Mission’s mother church congregations in New Zealand:

Africans are beginning to see visions and dream dreams and at Dadaya we have some who may become leaders of their people. Their life will not be easy for their people are in the chains of ignorance and heathendom and as ignorance passes they find themselves in a world where so much is against them because they are black. The colour-bar is the curse of Africa and one of our sacred duties is to endeavour to instil into the hearts of our people a greater and wider love than is shown them. If that cannot be done then Africa might become an even darker continent … . Education will bring power but that might result in tragedy and so in mission work we strive to show the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom … mighty forces are stirring in this continent … Dadaya may have a very small part to play but it is nevertheless an important part and that it may do it properly depends upon you and us. (Woodhouse, p. 59) Mungazi details the complexity of these African aspirations and responses during Todd’s premiership in ways that significantly relocate the agency to African educational activists,

31 Mlambo, Struggle for a Birthright, pp. 85–7. 32 See also Mason, Year of Decision, p. 187. 33 Mungazi’s argument appears to be premised on the mistaken view that Todd’s liberalism was that of Lloyd George. 34 At the close of WWII, Woodhouse revealingly quotes Garfield as writing: ‘Africa is just as great a question mark as ever, though, and I do not think we will extricate ourselves from the tragedy of the colour-bar unless America and the Dominions take an interest in us and lend us their strength’ (Woodhouse, p. 62). Meanwhile, Todd’s crucial March 1962 speech to the Committee of Seventeen at the United Nations opened by saying: ‘Frankly I am using New York as a back-door to London; I am here to endeavour to prod Great Britain … into accepting responsibilities which the representative of the United States says are acknowledged to be its responsibilities’ (Woodhouse, p. 330). Review Article 497 indirectly countering the view that Todd only knew how to be paternalistic.35 Like Chigwedere, Mungazi also points to the long-term consequences of Todd’s liberal policies for Africans, his white biographers typically moving on once they have shown that Todd had tried to ‘do the right thing’. Todd’s educational programme achieved enduring impact, despite his brief period in power, because he institutionalised reforms beyond prime ministerial patronage by encouraging partnerships for running schools and securing diverse routes for financial sustainability. He initially dedicated, for example, increased African taxation to African education, and then required and enabled Africans to pay supplementary fees under the 1959 African Education Act (shepherded through by his successor);36 even as education for whites was heavily subsidised, this enabled Africans to self-finance their progress irrespective of the attitudes of white voters and taxpayers. Chigwedere is little concerned with the fact that the nationalists opposed the legislation at the time,37 and the details of how Todd ‘The Breeze’ somehow managed to get these policy changes through, except that by quoting extensively from the parliamentary record he shows how Todd argued that educating Africans was essential for the growth of the economy, and that Europeans would thus gain rather than lose from such African advancement. For example, Todd told the house in 1957:

Today it is probable that for every ten factory workers, semi-skilled and unskilled Africans, a job is created for a highly skilled technician, at least an overseer, all of whom at the present time are Europeans, and there is no doubt, of course, that the sale and distribution of products of these factories, in its turn, makes opportunity for more employment … .We must get away on the one hand from the feeling that if the African advances and becomes educated, the European is going to suffer, and on the other hand, we must come to a fuller realization that unless we are able to provide the type of African labour industry wants, industry is not going to be set up here extensively as we would like to see. (Chigwedere, pp. 278–9) All this reveals Todd’s faith in classic economic liberalism: the marginalised are given the freedom to participate in a modernising system (though often having to finance access themselves), without the state having to engage in deeper structural reforms to redress historic injustice. The challenges and contradictions of this thinking require separate analysis, as does the play between African agency and Great Man largesse, but it is striking that Todd’s system of enabling Africans to co-finance their education withstood nearly two decades of Rhodesian Front power – the Front often mobilising the local electorate around curtailing African academic educational opportunity – while trumpeting to the world the Toddian achievements in African education as if they were their own.38 As Chigwedere asserts, the consequence was a growing phalanx of Africans battling through formal education and demanding a radical place in the country and world. Chigwedere, therefore, takes a different tack to Michael West, who viewed Todd as an ‘unalloyed paternalist’ who was ‘liberal in the use of the stick’, while also seeing ‘a need for

35 Mungazi, The Last British Liberals, p. 127. 36 K. Richards and E. Govere, ‘Educational Legislation in Colonial Zimbabwe (1899–1979), Journal of Educational Administration and History, 35, 2 (2003), pp. 137–51. 37 Mungazi, The Last British Liberals, p. 163. 38 Ironically, it was a book by a leading Rhodesian Front politician that provides the most detailed and enthusiastic (if sideways) account of how Todd’s financial and structural reforms enabled the momentum towards universal primary schooling and foundation for secondary school expansion: D. Lardner-Burke, Rhodesia: The Story of the Crisis (London, Oldbourne Book Co., 1966), pp. 87–95. There was a further irony here: Lardner-Burke, as Minister of Law and Order, had imposed (without charge) house arrest (restriction) upon Garfield Todd in 1965, while serving as Todd’s personal lawyer (Casey, The Rhetoric, p. 109). 498 K.B. Wilson the carrot’ to ‘turn the black petty bourgeoisie into political stakeholders, potential bulwarks of the status quo’.39 West had folded this analysis into a scathing account of Todd’s response to insubordination in the Dadaya Mission compound a decade earlier,40 in a story without reference to local sources that would have illuminated more subtle issues at play.41 Chigwedere, of course, knew the Todds, and just how little they even connected with a Rhodesian status quo; and, unsurprisingly, if perhaps unwisely, Chigwedere (unlike West) does not view the rise of African elites as disabling of wider or deeper social transformation. Neither of these two recent biographies, nor other work so far on Todd, adequately explains why Todd’s attention to reforming the Land Apportionment Act (1930) was so focused on urban issues, nor why he so readily, if awkwardly, presided over implementation of the Native Land Husbandry Act (1951) (hereafter NLHA), where Todd’s background of missionary service in the Runde Reserve and his critiques of the NLHA as a backbencher meant that he should have known better.42 However, it was this same enthusiasm for modernisation and ‘emergent’ Africa which made Todd choose to believe – consonant with many elite Africans at the time – that the new generation would leave their reactionary chiefs, their peasant drudgery and their incapacitating communal values and become instead equal and educated citizens of a modern state and diversified economy; only at the end of the 1950s did a broad swathe of nationalist politicians switch their discourse from expanding urban opportunity towards a focus on articulating peasant opposition to the NLHA,43 and only in 1960 did they start to wear animal-skin hats and talk with passion about the soil.44 While Todd was in power, the Africans he knew wanted more rights to purchase and live on land of their own (urban as well as rural), rather than the return of ancestral land on a collective basis under conditions where they would still be subject to state paternalism. In a similar respect, Eshmael Mlambo points up another area of enduring Todd reform: the African Councils Act (1957) through which Todd intended to bring about a reduction in the ‘concentration of responsibility in the hands of the Native Commissioners and the chiefs. Todd knew that these two groups were often reactionary, and unpopular with the educated Africans’.45 Little could it have been predicted that a few years later the nationalists would attack the councils, and the Rhodesian Front would back the chiefs, but Todd’s council approach, with all its ambiguities, would survive through independence and weather politics that backed councils over chiefs, district administrators over councils, chiefs over

39 West, The Rise of an African Middle Class, pp. 212–13; this is the thrust also of Chanaiwa’s ‘The Premiership of Garfield Todd’. 40 West, ‘Ndabaningi Sithole’, pp. 297–316. 41 Woodhouse’s account of the strike is most valuable in explaining why Todd’s actions were supported by Africans in the community (and in the courts), and for exploring Todd’s reconciliations with the protagonists (Woodhouse, pp. 73–7). Msipa, who was at Dadaya at the time, points to another dimension through his anti-Sithole Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) party lens, namely Sithole’s ambition ‘to become a leader of anything, anyhow’: Msipa, In Pursuit, p. 34. But there is still more story to tell. 42 When the bill was first presented to parliament in April 1951, Todd had warned that ‘the native people are frightened by this Bill and I believe they have good reasons for their fear’, stressing Africans’ need for ‘security of tenure’ and arguing that ‘we do not want native peasants’ and that effort was instead needed to enable Africans to get off the land and into the formal economy before reorganisation of the Reserves could be undertaken: see Woodhouse, p. 86. 43 The focus of political assault on the NLHA was actually on mandatory soil conservation work and cattle de- stocking, long-standing ‘conservation’ policies tacked into the NLHA as a component of its technocratic approach to making the overcrowded Reserves more sustainable; to this day the NLHA is poorly understood by the public, many conflating it with the Land Apportionment Act (1930), and few understanding its far- reaching but flawed modernist and demographic goals including ending rural–urban circular labour migration. 44 West, The Rise of an African Middle Class, p. 219. 45 Mlambo, Struggle for a Birthright, p. 53. Review Article 499 councils and then councils over district administrators (all notwithstanding councils’ lack of real funding). If Chigwedere is strong on long-term outcomes, this is where Susan Woodhouse is weakest, but her book is deep into how things were made to actually happen. This reveals many surprises, notably that Todd pressed his agenda by building technical consensus within the establishment through engaging them in systematic study of the actual problems.46 Todd’s marvellous rhetoric was merely the packaging: he actually gave minute and quiet attention to the complex content of achievable change, and his political stands were neither reckless leap nor vainglorious treachery. And Woodhouse’s is certainly the most significant insider effort since Holderness’s beguiling Lost Chance to inform the question of whether the politics of the 1950s could have gone differently.47 The greatest overlap between Woodhouse’s and other biographies is with that of Weiss: both seek to provide a comprehensive picture integrating Todd’s missionary trajectory and his political engagement, and they share underlying values. Weiss’s book includes important interviews by Jane Parpart with other players from the period, advances more interpretation, and consciously seeks critical distance. In many ways the Weiss–Parpart book was an excellent treatment, but its uneven tone straddles scholarly, journalistic and moralistic styles and its ambiguity about its subject – reflecting in part its two authors, one of whom stepped away – seems to have alienated some of its readership.48 Woodhouse embraces the reality of being neither an historically trained analyst, nor the possessor of ‘Rangerian’ or ‘Toddian’ rhetoric, and she avoids explicit questions and definitive answers. Instead, she leads from her huge strength: unparalleled material and unparalleled knowledge of the man. As the only authorised biographer, she had access to Todd’s 1970s draft autobiography as well as to copious papers; she made ten research trips to Zimbabwe; Todd himself read and commented interestingly on draft chapters; and she drew effectively on many interviews with the great and the good, and on frequent correspondence with the Todd family. More than that, Woodhouse worked for Todd in his critical years of political leadership in the 1950s, and subsequently on Grace and Garfield’s beloved ranch of Hokonui near Shabani. And, above all, often isolated (but with the encouragement and assistance of Trevor Grundy),49 and, having gathered such a monumental amount of material, she braved some mighty indigestion in making it a major purpose of her Edinburgh life for over 25 years,50 while resisting the urge to lionise him. The result is over 500 pages of closely organised, carefully sourced, sparkling material, most of which was not previously available. Scholars of southern Africa will find more than they expect of value in her book, and future generations will be ever grateful for the impending deposit of her papers at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Understanding Todd’s Values

The first assessments of Todd are readily critiqued for an all-too-easy deployment of the label ‘liberal’, which in southern Africa too often refers only and vaguely to attitudes about

46 See also R. Southall, ‘If Only: Missed Opportunity or Inevitable Fate in Rhodesia?’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 53, 2 (2019); pp. 367–79. 47 Holderness, Lost Chance. 48 J.D. Leaver, ‘Biography without Context [Review of] Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe,byR. Weiss, with J.L. Parpart’, Journal of African History, 41 3 (2000), pp. 487–526. 49 Grundy, a prominent journalist in the region between 1966 and 1996, worked full time on Woodhouse’s project between 2006 and 2009 (Grundy, personal communication, 30 June 2020). 50 In the interim between working for Todd and writing his biography, in 1969 Woodhouse married Archdeacon John Paul of Messumba Mission in Mozambique, the author of the important Mozambique: Memoirs of a Revolution (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975), African Library series no. AP46, honeymooning at Hokonui before going to live in Scotland. 500 K.B. Wilson race. Casey first raised the bar by arguing that Todd’s ‘rhetoric demonstrates that his politics flow directly from his religious heritage – and not from political liberalism’,51 and Casey is particularly revealing about the specifics of the theological developments in the New Zealand Church of Christ, and about the methods of A.L. Haddon and his new Glen Leith Bible School where Todd had trained.52 Todd indeed espoused (and basically lived) the robust ecumenical and restorationist values that Casey references, which have also been explored in other studies of the frontier Christianity of the broader Stone-Campbell movement, with its Protestant Free-Church non-hierarchical traditions; furthermore, these are now being explored in the historical experience of other branches of the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe.53 However, Casey’s command of the theological issues in play is not complemented by any empirical exploration of the actual Dadaya Mission experience, where the Todds had to struggle to keep the New Zealand mother church on board with a focus on African advancement rather than simply conversion.54 But Casey also points out that Garfield had actually long toyed with religiously grounded political ambition, having been named after the assassinated US president James Garfield, who shared his Campbellian religious heritage. Indeed, Garfield had won a prize in primary school for an essay on James Garfield’s life, and, for a while, aspired to be an American president, until he realised one had to be an American citizen.55 Woodhouse, in contrast, takes the family back to poor but yearning Scottish migrants on New Zealand’s South Island, acutely aware of inequality and justice, ambitious in their desire to serve, desirous for self-improvement, but ambivalent about privilege. Weiss had earlier conveyed well the family’s pursuit of advancement through education, noting that all 31 of Garfield’s cousins, born into manual trades, ultimately entered a profession.56 But Woodhouse takes us deeper, back as far as Scotland (whose internal dynamics are essential to understanding the human textures of so much anglophone imperialism). However, the greatest gift of Woodhouse’s opening chapters is to reveal Garfield the Pugnacious. The youth expelled from Bible School for punching his first girlfriend’s obnoxious father; the fellow selected by a divided church council to go to Rhodesia, in large part because he would be able to physically oust the recalcitrant existing missionary whom the home church had lost control over. The brickmaker who knew that he knew what was right; the tireless, eloquent steam-engine who married a well-trained teacher with an innate elegance and practical wisdom. The man who adopted his wife’s cousin’s baby to save her embarrassment, and in consequence accepted the gossip that he was the father, just as he would in the case of the ‘Coloured’ children adopted by the Mission who had been fathered

51 Casey, The Rhetoric, inside front cover of book. 52 Casey, The Rhetoric, pp. 25–30. See also M.J. Savage, Haddon of Glen Leith: An Ecumenical Pilgrimage (Dunedin, Associated Churches of Christ in New Zealand, 1970). 53 D. Newell Williams, D.A. Foster and P.M. Blowers (eds), The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History (Des Peres, Chalice Press, 2013); P. Chimhungwe, ‘The Indigene’s Undocumented Contribution to the Growth of the Two Branches of the Stone-Campbell Movement in Southern Rhodesia 1897–1949: A Historical Analysis’ (PhD thesis, McMaster Divinity College, Ontario, 2016); and G. Masengwe, ‘The Church of Christ in Zimbabwe: Identity- and Mission-Continuity (in Diversity)’ (PhD thesis, University of South Africa, 2019). 54 These issues are surprisingly well addressed in the Church’s own mission histories: M.J. Savage, Achievement: 50 Years of Missionary Witness in Southern Rhodesia (Wellington, A.H. and A.W Reed, 1949); and Forward into Freedom: Associated Churches of Christ in New Zealand Missionary Outreach, 1949–79 (Nelson, Associated Churches of Christ in New Zealand Publications, 1980). They are also raised in the other biographies. Future studies of the emergence of the African Church at Dadaya will seek to achieve greater balance between missionary and African perspectives on what Christianity was about for these communities. See also the vivid account of early 1950s life at Dadaya by C.M. ‘Queenie’ Ladbrook, Tools in the Hands of God (Glen Iris, Vital Publications, 1983). 55 Casey, The Rhetoric, p. 15. 56 Weiss with Parpart, Sir Garfield Todd,p.5. Review Article 501 out of wedlock by Belingwe’s white miners and farmers. The man who always produced some money out of nowhere when he needed it to keep the Mission going or to acquire and run his ranch, and who discovered he could make good things happen out of almost any impossible mess.57 Until Rhodesian whites showed that he couldn’t. He couldn’teven change the capital to .58 An Economic Liberal as Prime Minister

So dominant is the issue of race in thinking about Todd (and Rhodesian history) that it has taken someone like Woodhouse to lay out what Todd was actually pursuing in broad policy terms for Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s. More typically, his journey has been assumed a reactive walking of the political tightrope of racial politics while being governed by naïve moral instincts. While Casey suggests that Todd’s initial entry into politics in 1946 was in part driven by the desire to have the government learn more about how to provide for ‘African advancement’,59 and that as a backbencher this is largely what he did, Woodhouse shows that Todd as prime minister actually focused on massive, systemic and technocratically driven economic growth, leveraging European enterprise, a modernisation that he saw as good in itself as well as an essential tool for the opening of economic and then political space for Africans. Todd had lived through the miseries of the 1930s Great Depression and felt the leap to wealth for all was necessary and possible in the post-WWII economic boom. In 1957, the ‘renowned phrase-maker’ described it to his white parliament in these terms, saying that: ‘to take a whole population of hundreds of thousands from a rural peasant existence, and bring them into a developing, industrial economy is a very big undertaking’, but that ‘the change in the country from 1946 to 1956’ was ‘as great as that between white and black’.60 What he meant by this was that whites did not have to give up long-standing privilege to allow African advancement; that the wealth whites were experiencing was anyway mostly new, as it could be for Africans, and that abundant inclusive growth was self-evidently already happening. The post-war economy had grown at ten per cent a year from 1946 to 1953, and then eight per cent a year on average up to 1957, on the basis of the Federation and Todd’s leadership; this was not just growth (nearly tripling the size of the economy over 12 years) but transformation: wages grew across the board, and manufacturing and services expanded exponentially, as did urban centres, especially Salisbury.61 After Todd’s fall, it was a decade before annual growth again rose higher than three per cent.62 In this economic sense, then, Todd was more of a ‘liberal’ than he is often credited with, and more able to deploy teams of skilled planners, economists and engineers than has been acknowledged in the projections by scholars of Todd as an authoritarian individualist, overly shaped by being the lone white man in authority on an isolated African mission. Woodhouse, like Casey, demonstrates that Todd used rhetoric to create imaginative space

57 The major lacunae in these and other biographies of Todd is his complex financial life, including acquisition of the large ranch, the removal of its African occupants, and the building of an integrated store and butchery business. How this enabled his political and philanthropic resilience and affected local history and land struggles will be the subject of other publications. 58 This was the one occasion when the technical group he convened failed to come back with the recommendation he believed to be right (Woodhouse, p. 124). Todd chose to let it go. If he had pushed through the relocation of the capital it would have vastly affected the subsequent political life of Zimbabwe. 59 Casey, The Rhetoric, pp. 41–2. 60 Casey, The Rhetoric, p. 61. 61 A.M. Hawkins, ‘The Economy: 1924–74’, in G.M.E. Leistner (ed.) Rhodesia: Economic Structure and Change (Pretoria, Africa Institute of South Africa, 1976); and Mlambo, ‘From the Second World War to UDI’. 62 Hawkins, ‘The Economy’, pp. 19–20. 502 K.B. Wilson for growth and change, but it is she alone who shows how effectively he used parliamentary committees, commissions of enquiry and technocratic planning to bring people along and make good decisions. This was connected to his strategy on race:

I could have appointed a Cabinet who were sympathetic with my ideas on ‘Native Affairs’– men like Alan Lloyd, Ralph Palmer, Ben Baron – but I believed that such a group would not last a year in the tough racial climate of Southern Rhodesia. I considered that our only hope of introducing necessary but unpopular change was to make an outstanding success of the economy. The two best financial men were Geoff Ellman-Brown and Cyril Hatty. I decided to give Cyril Hatty the Treasury and to put Ellman-Brown in charge of the spending departments.63

As such, Todd was not an ideologue, but a pragmatist who transformed the road network, established public–private partnerships in areas like steel production (with the Rhodesian Iron and Steel Company), expanded the electrical grid, and generally advanced the conditions and confidence that generated booms in the real estate, mining and early secondary industries. The birthing of the Central African Federation both eased and complicated things for Todd in ways inadequately attended to by scholars, for whom the phenomenal growth of Rhodesia’s economy in the mid 1950s was a natural consequence of underlying federal and racial inequalities.64 In fact, federation created a tight corner for Todd and the Southern Rhodesian legislature, with the cream of the ruling (most of whom dated from the pre-war domestic Rhodesian scene) now in the federal parliament and claiming to be doing the thinking and controlling the money; yet Todd the Pugnacious was capable of direct confrontation with Huggins, including denouncing federal impediments to mobilising capital (Woodhouse, pp. 120–5). Indeed, Woodhouse shows how Todd, Hatty and Ellman-Brown often got their way through a combination of technical mastery, creativity and tenaciousness; this included defeating the federal leadership around long-forgotten issues of major consequence for UDI in 1965, and the progress of the war in the 1970s, such as locating the Kariba hydroelectric dam on the Zambezi rather than the intended site on the Kafue river in what became Zambia (Woodhouse, pp. 126–30).

Conclusions

If everything was going so well, why did Todd so suddenly fall in 1958? And if Todd’s demise was the end for liberalism in Rhodesia, why was it that another liberal, Sir , replaced him and held on until 1962 while achieving some surprising legislative success? Furthermore, why was it that these ‘liberal’ governments passed nearly all the restrictive legislation used by Smith and then Mugabe, and why and how did African nationalists choose that apparently hopeful moment, when a white government finally disgorged a ‘roadmap’ to African majority rule, to choose to disengage from internal political reform? Was there something particular about Todd’s falling that created conditions for the gathering of discontent under the Rhodesian Front? To answer all these questions requires a broader analysis of how the multiracial liberalism that Todd championed was

63 Todd, ‘Foreword’ in Holderness, Lost Chance, p. 3. 64 In the classical accounts, and the political critiques of the time, federation enabled Southern Rhodesian whites to benefit from Nyasaland labour and Zambian copper; A.S. Mlambo, A History of Zimbabwe (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 124–5; and A.J. Wills, An Introduction to the History of Central Africa: Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe (Oxford University Press, 4th edition, 1985), p. 327. Review Article 503 replaced by racially defined populism, among both whites and Africans, over the 1957–1962 period.65 Brooks Marmon, in a lively recent thesis, posits that this polarising realignment in internal Rhodesian politics reflected impacts of wider African decolonisation, when ‘Gold Coast fever’, the chaos of Katanga, and the prospect of Pan-Africanist sponsorship for radical nationalism overwhelmed domestic political trajectories and drove an ‘entangling and inflaming [of] political competition’ between whites and Africans, ironically dividing nationalists internally while uniting the white right; adding that the rise of Dr Hastings Banda and the Malawi Congress Party ‘electrified Rhodesian society, emboldening blacks and fuelling white anxieties’, eliminating any remaining grounds for partnership.66 However, additional insights around the triumph of populism can also come from analysing the limits of liberalism, because it turns out that the broader consequence of experiencing unprecedented economic growth was not the growth of white political generosity as Todd had assumed, but instead the rapid entrenchment of white entitlement. As Leaver put it, the problem was that while ‘liberals [drew] hope’ from this prosperity, reactionary whites instead ‘drew strength’, and, rather than creating space for professional Africans, economic growth pulled in immigrants who adopted conservative Rhodesian racial attitudes ‘within five years’.67 Meanwhile it was the ritualised excoriation of those liberal values and a determined distancing from that ‘perfidious Albion’68 that generated the energy that fired UDI and drove resolute military resistance to majority rule among a diverse, transient and historically divided white community. What manifested in Rhodesia in the early 1960s was the forging of a radical new identity and a magnetic sense of significance for ordinary white Rhodesians; a unification so skilfully catalysed by populist politicians that these whites still celebrate their participation in Rhodesia’s struggle today. All this was only starting to happen by 1958, when Todd was removed by that squirmingly collegial and carefully liberal coup, but his dance with white aspirations had always been deeply awkward. The sudden bitterness with which he was jettisoned by the Rhodesian public, a rejection his conspirators could doubtless smell coming, otherwise appears simply bizarre against the wall of detail provided by Woodhouse regarding all he was achieving, how he was being lauded by the white establishment and even much of the Rhodesian press; to say nothing of the smallness of the agendas of his various internal enemies. This bitterness, however, was enduringly that of an electorate betrayed, indeed manipulated, by their handsome, erstwhile champion, who was discovered to care more about African advancement than their own, and, worse still, who then shone a persistent cruel and moralising light on their desire to hold privilege and power in perpetuity. There is a laziness about how racism gets deployed to ‘explain’ anything to do with white Rhodesia. From this time, white Rhodesians’ repugnance for Todd was more

65 The specifics and human drama of Todd’s fall are central to that political story, and will be told elsewhere, but it can be noted here that Woodhouse is the most complete source yet on how he was ousted, Blake’s History of Rhodesia (pp. 296–318) having already drawn significantly on Todd’s version (including his problems with reforming the electoral roll and the legislation on inter-racial sex that were such lightning rods for the white electorate). 66 E. Brooks Marmon, ‘Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonisation in Southern Rhodesian Politics, ca.1950–1963’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2020); the quoted phrases are from pp. 267 and 254; and E. B. Marmon ‘From Dreams of Dominion to Aspirations for a New Africa: Ahrn Palley’s Political Re-invention in Southern Rhodesia, 1959–1961’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 45, 3 (2019), pp. 485–501. 67 Leaver, ‘Multiracialism and Nationalisms’, p. 173. 68 The term perfidious Albion had a long history in Europe to protest against and lampoon British diplomatic duplicity, and entered the Rhodesian lexicon in connection with Britain’s non-fulfilment of alleged promises of independence under the 1961 constitution (that is, prior to majority rule). The refrain well captures the longing and disappointment felt by Rhodesian whites around their abandonment as random colonial flotsam, as well as the energising disdain in which they held post-imperial Britain. 504 K.B. Wilson than reaction to his multiracialism; the way he had exposed them made it visceral, made it personal, and made it last.

Acknowledgements

Valuable comments on drafts have been received from Peter Fry, Trevor Grundy, Gerald Mazarire, John Mukokwayarira, Judith Todd, Susan Woodhouse, Robert Zeinstra, JSAS reviewers, and the JSAS copy-editor Clare Smedley. Robert Zeinstra assisted with access to key texts, and Judith Todd and Emmanuel Hove accessed the Chigwedere volume under difficult circumstances. Mattia Fumanti has been notably supportive as JSAS’s book reviews editor.

K.B. WILSON Independent Scholar [email protected]