Book Reviews / Social Sciences and Missions 25 (2012) 305–316 307
Book Reviews / Social Sciences and Missions 25 (2012) 305–316 307 Michael W. Casey, The Rhetoric of Sir Garfield Todd: Christian Imagination and the Dream of an African Democracy. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007, xiii + 389 pp., illus., hdbk. $54.95, ISBN 978-1932792867. Garfield Todd was born in 1911 in New Zealand and died in 2001 in Zimbabwe, where he had lived since 1934. His life is emblematic of the territory’s evolution, political as well as nomenclatorial, from Southern Rhodesia to Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Todd went to Southern Rhodesia as part of a contingent essential to the colonial project worldwide, and perhaps even more so in Africa: he was a missionary. By the time Todd arrived there, Southern Rhodesia was a confirmed white settler colony. Armed resistance to colonialism having long since been extinguished, the Africans seemingly were under proper subjection, their lives circumscribed by a raft of racist laws and a repressive apparatus every bit as brutal and effi- cient as neighboring South Africa’s. Fearing Afrikaner domination, the Rhodesian settlers, most of whom came from Britain, had previously voted against becoming a province of South Africa. Instead, white Rhodesia, to be redundant, opted for self-government within the British Empire, which meant concretely self-government for the settlers, complete with a colonial version of the British parliament, and a racist dictatorship for the colonized Africans, who were barred from the parliament, in fact if not in law. In immigrating to Southern Rhodesia, Garfield Todd ipso facto acquired membership in this settler-dominated society, with all the rights and privileges accorded white men qua white men.
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