Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 25 Alois S
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Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 25 Alois S. Mlambo Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 430 Defining Racism ................................................................................. 430 Scientific Racism and the White Man’s Burden Idea .. ........................................ 431 Racism and the Black Peril Phenomenon ....................................................... 433 White Racism and the Alienation and Racialization of Land .................................. 436 A Racialized Labor Regime ..................................................................... 439 Some Are “More White” than Others (Mlambo 2000)......................................... 441 The Invisible Minorities ......................................................................... 442 Political Marginalization and Other Forms of Discrimination .. ............................... 443 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 444 References ....................................................................................... 444 Abstract Colonial Zimbabwe (known as Southern Rhodesia until 1965, and Rhodesia there- after until independence in 1980) was established in 1890 under the sponsorship of Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company (BSAC). Rhodes was a firm believer in the White-Man’s Burden idea of the duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to help “civilize” the “darker” corners of the world and regarded British imperialism as a positive force for this purpose. The settlers who occupied colonial Zimbabwe shared this view of the world and treated the indigenous African population as children who needed their guidance, protection, and civilization. The policies which the settler state adopted and implemented, therefore, whether in politics, constitution making and governance, education, economy, land and labor policies, social relations, or residential policy, were based on this sense of racial superiority and the determination to promote white interests at the expense of the nonwhite population. Racial segregation permeated the entire colonial project at every level, A. S. Mlambo (*) University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 429 S. Ratuva (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2898-5_28 430 A. S. Mlambo whether it was in sports, hotel facilities, or the use of public conveniences and amenities. White racism in colonial Zimbabwewasalsoinformedbyasenseof fear, given the fact that whites were grossly outnumbered in the country throughout the colonial period and were always afraid of being overwhelmed by the African majority. This contributed to their determination to control the Africans and keep them in their place. Attempts at promoting racial partnership in the 1950s achieved little. State sponsored white racism ended with Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Keywords Racism · Imperialism · Colonization · Black peril · Land · Education · Labor · Rhodes · Rhodesia · Settler Introduction Late nineteenth-century European imperialism and colonization in Africa were motivated by a range of factors, including a predominant European racist view of the world which regarded the Anglo-Saxon race as the most civilized of all the races and, therefore, duty-bound to spread the benefits of their civilization to the “lower” races of the world. Called the White Man’s Burden or “civilizing mission” and “mission civilisatrice” in the English and French world, respectively, this idea was celebrated by Rudyard Kipling in his 1902 poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden,” which was, partly, in celebration the United States victory over Spain in the Cuban-American- Spanish War and, mainly, an assertion of the Anglo-Saxon race’s right to rule other races. As will be shown, the founder of Rhodesia, Cecil John Rhodes, was a strong believer in the civilizing mission idea and had no doubt whatsoever that his race was the best in the world. He firmly believed that bringing the land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi under British rule was for the unquestionable benefit of the indigenous people of that territory. Rhodesian white settlers shared Rhodes’ world view. Not surprisingly, therefore, racism remained the foundation and the pervasive ethos of white colonial rule from the establishment of the British colony in 1890 until the collapse of white rule in 1979, mainly because of the African liberation movements’ determination to dismantle the racist colonial system by any means necessary, including taking up arms. Defining Racism For purposes of this study, racism means “any action or attitude, conscious or unconscious, that subordinates an individual or group based on skin colour or race ...[whether] enacted individually or institutionally.” Institutional racism manifests itself in discriminatory policies based on race in schools, businesses, employment, religion, and media, among others, which are designed to “perpetuate and maintain the power, influence and wellbeing of one group over another.” Such discriminatory 25 Racism in Colonial Zimbabwe 431 policies often manifest in the denial of benefits, facilities, services, and opportunities to a person or a group of people on the basis of their racial origins. In addition, racism also exists when “ideas and assumptions about racial categories are used to justify and reproduce a racial hierarchy and racially structured society that unjustly limits access to resources, rights and privileges on the basis of race” (Tatum 2003). Scientific Racism and the White Man’s Burden Idea While racism and racial prejudice have a long history, as evident in the racial justifications of the transatlantic slave trade as beneficial to the enslaved because it took them away from their savagery in Africa and exposed them to Western civilization and the dignity of manual labor, it is the specific manifestation of this phenomenon in late nineteenth century Western Europe which has a direct bearing on the partition of Africa in general and the colonization of Zimbabwe in particular. Based on the intellectual arguments advanced by American and European Social Darwinists, such as Spencer and Alfred Mahan, which regarded the Anglos-Saxon race and its civilization as the most evolved and best, this version of racism, particularly in Late Victorian Britain, postulated that it was the Anglo-Saxon race’s duty to spread Anglo-Saxon civilization to the “darker” corners of the world through colonial domination for the benefit of the colonized peoples (Hofstadter 1944; Rogers 1972). There was no doubt, for instance, in British arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes’ view that British imperial domination was the best thing that could happen to the world at large. He wrote: I contend that we [the English] are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. (Rhodes 1877) With respect to Africa, specifically, Rhodes stated: Africa is still lying ready for us. It is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses. (Rhodes 1877) The White settlers who entered the territory of what was to become Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1890 as part of an invading group of adventurers known as the Pioneer Column which Rhodes sponsored were imbued by this sense of mission and superiority which made them regard the indigenous African majority as a lesser breed to be controlled and guided toward Western civilization. Following their victory in the 1893 Anglo-Ndebele War and the subsequent successful suppression of the Chimurenga/Umvukela armed uprisings of 1896, colonial settlers not only claimed the right to rule by conquest, but also consolidated their white supremacist 432 A. S. Mlambo ideology and the conviction that the African majority was a subject race, not only in need of moral guidance and civilization, but also of strict and close control. The determination to control the majority of Africans as closely as possible stemmed from the fear of them inspired by the 1896 uprisings and the ever-present fear of the largely outnumbered white settler population of being swamped by the Africans. Not surprisingly, little effort was made to understand the Africans and their worldview, while a determined resolve prevailed to “civilize” the so-called natives. (This innocuous term normally used to denote indigenous peoples of original inhabitants of a place took on a rather derogatory meaning in colonial Zimbabwe where it increasingly implied inferiority and lack of civilisation. Hence, it will be used in this chapter only in quotation marks.) Thus, the gulf between the races was entrenched in Rhodesian society from the very onset of European colonialism. According to Anthony Chennells, the white Rhodesian self-image which devel- oped in the early years of colonialism “was based on the idea that they were civilisers of the wilderness, taming its violence.