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The Problem of Todd and the Limits of Liberalism

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The Problem of Todd and the Limits of Liberalism Journal of Southern African Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20 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. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data 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 Zimbabwe: John White, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Reginald Garfield Todd, Jean Grace Todd (Harare, Mutapa Publishing House, 2017). Susan Woodhouse, Garfield Todd: The End of the Liberal Dream in Rhodesia (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 Rhodesian Front. The questions remain: could the government of Sir Garfield Todd (1953–58), an unlikely ex-missionary New Zealander, really have found a pathway for Southern Rhodesia 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 Ian Smith, 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 Abel Muzorewa’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 Joshua Nkomo).4 Muzorewa captured international attention only fleetingly, but discussing the real and imagined flaws of his successor, Robert Mugabe, 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.
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