Book Reviews / Social Sciences and Missions 25 (2012) 305–316 307

Michael W. Casey, The Rhetoric of Sir : 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 and died in 2001 in , where he had lived since 1934. His life is emblematic of the territory’s evolution, political as well as nomenclatorial, from Southern to Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Todd went to 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 ’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 , 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. Todd’s life in his adopted homeland is the subject of Michael W. Casey’s study. The Rhetoric of Sir Garfield Todd is not a conventional book: it is part biography, which accounts for roughly a third of the text, with the remainder consisting of Todd’s sermons and speeches. Casey has written a highly laudatory account of Todd’s life, amounting to hagiography. Casey’s chief focus, both in the biographical section and in the selection of the primary documents, is Todd’s political life. It is an appropriate choice, since Todd’s historical impor- tance lies precisely in his political engagement, first as a champion of white Rhodesia and ultimately as a supporter of its antipode, African nationalism. Before he became a politician, however, Todd was a missionary. Indeed, he used his mis- sionary career as a launching pad into politics. Garfield Todd was named after the assassi- nated US president, James Garfield, who, like Todd’s parents, belonged to the Disciples of Christ Church, sharing a tradition with the Churches of Christ. On arrival in Southern Rhodesia, Todd assumed control of the colony’s New Zealand Church of Christ’s principal mission station, which, like many such institutions, was church, school, farm, and clinic rolled into one. At Dadaya, as his mission station was called, Todd built on the foundations he inherited, fashioning a school that acquired a sterling reputation colony-wide, all the while gaining commensurate prominence for himself. Among a notoriously racist white populace, Todd was among the few “friends of the natives.” Against the grain of the domi- nant settler opinion, which held that the colonized people were only suited to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, Todd was among a small band of whites who argued that Africans, potentially, could be “civilized” and elevated to European cultural standards. It is a measure of the Rhodesian mentality that as late as 1947, in the wake of the racist horrors of World War II, Todd was still addressing white audiences on the subject of “The Native as Human Being.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18748945-02503007

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In such circumstances, Casey may be forgiven for calling Todd “a paternalistic but demo- cratic missionary” (p. 11). In fact, though, there was nothing democratic about Rhodesian paternalism, Todd’s included. It was Todd the paternalist, indeed Todd the dictator of Dadaya, who emerged during a famous crisis at the school in 1947. He infamously crushed a strike by female students protesting use of the whip, that ever-present and fearsome instru- ment of what some called colonial slavery, a term that encapsulated the connection between Atlantic slavery and African colonialism. Having suppressed the Dadaya strike, Todd then fired the individual he accused of instigating it: Ndabaningi Sithole, a former Dadaya stu- dent who had been hired to teach at his alma mater and a future African nationalist theoretician. In 1946, the year before the Dadaya strike, Todd had been elected to parliament on the ticket of the United Party led by , the arch-segregationist prime minister. The missionary had morphed into the politician, but without surrendering control of Dadaya. Politically, Todd’s major moment came in 1953, with the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and , better known as the Central African Federation. The federation consisted of the three British territories in southern-central Africa, namely the two and Nyasaland (Malawi). It was a naked power grab by the Southern Rhodesian settlers, who sought to control the copper mines of (Zambia) and the labor of Nyasaland. Naturally, Africans in all three territories bitterly opposed the federation, a fight they lost. Huggins, the federation’s chief architect, left his job as prime minister of Southern Rhodesia to become prime minister of the federation. With Huggins’ blessing, Todd then became prime minister of Southern Rhodesia. Casey notes that, as a member of parliament, Todd was “an advocate of modest improve- ments for black Africans in education, jobs, and voting rights” (p. 4). As prime minister, Todd continued in that role. But he was also tough on the Africans, crushing strikes by work- ers just as vigorously as he had crushed the student mutiny at Dadaya. Todd was tougher still on African nationalism, which, as a cold warrior, he twinned with communism. The struggle against the ideologies of the Blacks and the Reds became a major theme of his premiership. Southern Rhodesia and the federation as a whole, he declared typically, was “overwhelmed by a tide of black nationalism and world Communism” (p. 226). In time, Todd himself would be overwhelmed by a tide, nay a flood, of Rhodesian ultra-racism. The source of the problem was the prime minister’s attempt to erect a levee between African nationalism on the one hand and the small but politically and socially important African middle class on the other hand. To that end, Todd proposed to add a few thousand more middle-class Africans to the voters’ roll. This proposal, if enacted, would have had little or no impact on white political domination, although it may well have succeeded in its aim of draining African middle class support away from African nationalism, if only for a while. Anyhow, Todd’s planned sociopo- litical attack on African nationalism would not be launched. The proposal was too much for the prime minister’s cabinet and parliamentary colleagues, many of whom had long dis- trusted him for being overly friendly to the natives. Todd, in office for five years, was promptly removed, his career in white Rhodesian politics ended. The way was now clear for the paternalist to evolve into the prophet, to use Casey’s inflated formulation. In the years after Todd’s ouster, Southern Rhodesia increasingly drifted toward -style fascism in all but name, culminating in the 1965 Unilateral

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Declaration of Independence under , the last and most determined of a long line of champions of an ever whiter Rhodesia. At this point, Todd took leave of his fellow settlers and turned to the only force capable of creditably resisting white Rhodesia. He turned to African nationalism. Invoking the biblical exodus, Casey explains Todd’s evolution thusly: “The images of Moses leading the Africans and being a prophet ahead of his time stuck and Todd lived up to those images” (p. 69). This is pure fiction. Todd was never a political leader of any stature after his premiership ended, least of all leader of the African struggle. Actually, the former prime minister was reduced to the function of spokesman for one faction of Zimbabwean African nationalism, the one led by . It was in this capacity that Todd made what Casey describes as his most important political speech ever, before a com- mittee of the United Nations. Todd’s appearance at the UN was a veritable Damascus Road performance. As prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, Todd had painted African national- ism as a dark force, figuratively and literally, allied with communism and hostile to Christianity. As a spokesman for African nationalism, Todd took every word back, and then defended armed struggle against white Rhodesia. “Almost every African is a nationalist,” Todd assured his UN audience, “but the [Rhodesian] government actively propagates the fallacy that the mass of blacks are intimidated by a few men who are Marxists and that the people wish to be protected from them by the security forces. The guerillas are in fact the cutting edge of the nationalist movement; the guerillas and the people are one” (p. 295). When Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, thanks largely to the guerillas aided by the people, even if that aid was sometimes less than voluntary, Todd participated in the victory lap. He was appointed a member of the Senate, the largely toothless upper house of parliament. Eventually, he resigned his post as Senator and began a new phase of his prophetic ministry, as Casey would have it. Garfield Todd, booster and then bane of white Rhodesia; Garfield Todd, adversary turned advocate of African nationalism, became a critic of the government of . Todd turned on Mugabe not because Mugabe had bested Joshua Nkomo, Todd’s African nationalist sponsor, in the struggle for leadership of Zimbabwe, but because Mugabe was becoming increasingly authoritarian. In line with the subtitle of his book, Casey credits Todd with arriving in Southern Rhodesia with “a democratic sensibility that was transformed from paternalism to a pro- phetic stance” (1). Like much else he has written in this book, whose consistent virtue is indeed its presentation of Todd’s rhetoric, Casey is wide of the mark on this point. Whatever democratic sensibility Todd may have left New Zealand with, he lost it on the way to Southern Rhodesia, or shortly after arriving there. The parliament to which Todd was elected, and the government he headed, were anything but democratic. White Rhodesia, in fact, was the very antithesis of democracy. It was only as an African nationalist that Todd came to an appreciation of democracy. But it was all contingent. African nationalism, as Mugabe and others have so amply demonstrated, is no more inherently democratic than the Rhodesian parliament in which Todd served. If Mugabe has been a poor student of democ- racy, his performance fairly reflects the lessons he learned in the school that was white Rhodesian politics. In Zimbabwe, as everywhere else, the struggle for democracy is waged daily, and it is eternal. Todd eventually came to this realization. Speaking at a birthday party for Joshua Nkomo in 1989, four years after resigning his post as Senator, Todd counted “myself fortunate to have

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:46:34AM via free access 310 Book Reviews / Social Sciences and Missions 25 (2012) 305–316 lived to see the miracles that have happened in Zimbabwe” (p. 337). He credited Nkomo for having “had a greater influence on my life in Zimbabwe than any other man” (p. 337). “The years of my glory as Prime Minister stretched from 1953 to 1958,” Todd went on, “and Dr. Nkomo was not impressed with my performance” (p. 338). As well he wasn’t. Nor appar- ently was Todd himself, in the last analysis. Addressing a Christian audience the year before the Nkomo birthday bash, Todd made an important confession, which, as a Christian, of course was good for his soul. Representing himself and his wife, Grace Todd, he remarked that “in the first half of our service in Africa we didn’t question the validity of the life we lived, but in the second half we were racked with doubt” (p. 346). They were racked with doubt. Faith, facilitated by white intransigence and African nationalism, led Garfield Todd to doubt, and doubt led to grace, not to be confused with his wife. Happily, both Grace and grace remained with Todd till the end. What a life for this transplanted New Zealander in Zimbabwe, in Africa. Michael Casey’s hybrid of a book, for its errors of interpretation, is a fascinating journey into the life and times of Garfield Todd.

Michael O. West Binghamton University, USA

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