Indian Migrants and the Politics of Exclusion in Early Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890 to 1923

African and Asian Studies 16 (2017) 312-335 AFRICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES brill.com/aas Contested Foreignness: Indian Migrants and the Politics of Exclusion in Early Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890 to 1923 Francis Musoni Assistant Professor, History Department, University of Kentucky, KY, 40506, USA African Center for Migration and Society, Room 5, South West Engineering Building, East Campus, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa [email protected] Abstract The British South Africa Company’s conquest of Zimbabwe in the 1890s opened the country to settlement by immigrants from Europe, South Africa, India and other re- gions. Using their position as benefactors of the emerging colony, the British-born settlers deployed various notions of foreignness to marginalize the indigenous populations and other groups. Focusing on thirty-three years of company rule in Zimbabwe, this article examines how Indian immigrants contested the British attempts to foreignize them in the emerging colony. Rather than presenting Indian migrants as passive victims of discrimination and marginalization, the study emphasizes their creativity and deter- mination to establish their own destiny, against all odds. It also shows that foreignness in colonial Zimbabwe was a key factor in the politics of power, identity formation and nation-state building. In that respect, the article explores the constructed-ness as well as the malleability of foreignness in processes of nation-state formation in Africa. Keywords British settlers – Indian immigrants – foreignness – colonial Zimbabwe Introduction On 12 September 1890, a group of about 700 white settlers, sponsored by Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC) hoisted the British flag at © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/�569��08-��Downloaded34�378 from Brill.com10/01/2021 01:50:36PM via free access contested foreignness 313 a place they subsequently named Fort Salisbury (now Harare) in present-day Zimbabwe. This development, which officially marked the beginning of European colonization of the plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo riv- ers, opened what later became Southern Rhodesia to occupation by immigrants from different areas of the world. In addition to the British-born migrants and Afrikaners who came from present-day South Africa, Southern Rhodesia attracted white settlers from all over Europe and North America. By 1891, the number of white people in the BSAC administered colony had grown to around 1,500. This figure increased to 12,596 in 1904, before leaping to almost 36,000 by 1923.1 Along with white settlers, the early years of colonial rule in Zimbabwe witnessed the settlement of migrants from the Asian continent – mostly Indians. Despite being foreigners, like other immigrant groups, the British-born colonists imposed themselves (by virtue of conquest) as rightful owners and rulers of the colony and went ahead to deploy various strategies to marginalize the indigenous populations, the Indians as well as the non-British white settlers in the colony. As was the case in other settler colonies such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and what later became the United States of America, the BSAC colony witnessed intense conflicts and out-right fighting between and among different groups. While several scholars have examined the indigenous Africans’ efforts to re- sist colonial invasion and exploitation by the British settlers,2 very little has been done to understand other groups’ struggles against marginalization in early colonial Zimbabwe. In fact, Zimbabwean historiography, and indeed African studies scholarship in general, treats the early colonial period (some- times referred to as the contact zone) predominantly as an era of the encounter between the indigenous Africans and their European colonizers. In that respect, scholars often present the early colonial encounter in Zimbabwe as if it was simply a black-versus-white affair. This approach, no doubt, helps to understand the colonial roots of poverty and underdevelopment among the indigenous population in the country, along with the racial tension that engulfed the land reform and other economic and political projects that the Zimbabwean 1 Alois S. Mlambo, “ ‘Building a White Man’s Country’: Aspects of White Immigration to Rhodesia, Upto World War II,” Zambezia, 25, 2 (1998): 123-146. See also National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) files: L2/2/95/9-10, L2/2/95/15-17 and L2/2/95/46-48. 2 For the most recent examples of this approach, see, Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, eds., Becoming Zimbabwe: A History From the Pre-colonial Period to 2008 (Harare: Weaver Press, 2009); Alois S. Mlambo, A History of Zimbabwe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). african and asian studies 16 (2017) 312-335 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 01:50:36PM via free access 314 musoni state launched in the post-colonial period.3 However, such an approach encourages and promotes a narrow view of the country’s colonial history. In an effort to broaden our knowledge of the colonial state-building process in Zimbabwe, this article examines the Indian migrants’ struggles with racial discrimination and economic marginalization during the thirty-three years of BSAC rule, from 1890 to 1923. In so doing, the study builds on a handful of other works that have examined the experiences of the Asian diaspora community in Zimbabwe. Among the earliest scholarly publications on this topic is Floyd Dotson and Lillian Dotson’s 1968 book, which provides a general overview of Indian migrants’ experiences of marginalization in the former Central African Federation made up of present-day Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.4 In a simi- lar fashion to the Dotson’s who deployed a comparative approach to Indian experiences in the three countries, Hasu Patel conducted a study, which looks at the marginalization of Indian migrants in Uganda and Zimbabwe.5 In addition to these two books, there are a few journal articles that have dealt with the same topic. For example, Pip Stigger’s 1970 article compares the Indian diaspora’s participation in African nationalist activities in Kenya and Zimbabwe,6 while Barry Kosmin analyzed the business practices and challenges that Indian traders faced in Southern Rhodesia,7 as well as the participation of Indians and other non-British settler groups in Southern Rhodesia’s electoral politics.8 More recently, Busani Mpofu examined the Indian migrants’ struggles with residential segregation in Southern Rhodesia’s second largest city of Bulawayo from the 1930s to the 1970s.9 Put together, these works provide an insightful ac- count of the emergence, growth and resilience of the Indian diaspora community in Zimbabwe. However, they tell us very little about the construction of 3 For more details on this, see Ian Scoones et al., Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities (Oxford: James Currey, 2010). 4 Floyd Dotson and Lillian O. Dotson, The Indian Minority of Zambia, Rhodesia and Malawi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 5 Hasu H. Patel, Indians in Uganda and Rhodesia: Some Comparative Perspectives on a Minority in Africa (Denver: Center on International Race Relations, 1973). 6 Pip Stigger, “Asians in Rhodesia and Kenya: A Comparative Political History,” Rhodesian History, 1 (1970): 1-8. 7 Barry A. Kosmin, “Freedom, Justice and Commerce’: Some factors affecting Asian Trading patterns in Southern Rhodesia, 1897-1942,” Rhodesian History, 6 (1975): 15-32. 8 Barry A. Kosmin, “Ethnic Groups and the qualified Franchise in Southern Rhodesia, 1898- 1922,” Rhodesian History, 8 (1977): 35-70. 9 Busani Mpofu, “ ‘Undesirable Indians,’ Residential Segregation and the Ill-fated Rise of the White ‘Housing Covenanters’ in Bulawayo, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1930-1973,” South African Historical Journal, 63, 4 (2011): 553-580. african and asianDownloaded studies from 16 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2017) 312-335 01:50:36PM via free access contested foreignness 315 Indian migrants as foreigners and how that related to the broader socio- political contestations that shaped inter-group relations at the formative stag- es of the colonial state in Zimbabwe. As such, rather than simply adding onto the crucial observations of these scholars, this article seeks to advance Zimbabwean historiography by provid- ing an alternative intellectual position that might re-order the way we think about the history (and politics) of identity and nation-state building in the country. Relying on materials from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, espe- cially early colonial Newspapers and documents relating to the administration of the BSAC colony, as well as other historical materials produced by the Indian community in Zimbabwe, the article questions the mainstream approaches to Zimbabwean history. It interrogates the role that competing conceptions of, and contestations over foreignness played in the making of Southern Rhodesia. In doing so, the article begins with a brief discussion of the socio-economic and political context in which the Indian migration into Southern Rhodesia occurred, and then moves on to examining how the British-dominated white settler community deployed racially charged notions of foreignness in dealing with Indians in this period of tenuous stability. In the third section, the article explores the grounds upon which, and the strategies that Indian migrants deployed to counter the white settlers’ efforts to picture and treat them as foreigners. In so doing, the study also illustrates how, in contesting foreignness, the

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