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Ian Macpherson
© University of the West of England Do not reproduce or redistribute in part or whole without seeking prior permission from the Rhodesian Forces oral history project coordinators at UWE Ian MacPherson Born in Calcutta in 1945. Went to school in the UK. His family left India for the UK in 1962. Ian trained in Bristol and hoped to go to South Africa but ended up travelling to Rhodesia in 1969. Volunteered for the Police Reserve in 1971/2. Left Rhodesia for the UK(?) in 1977. This is Dr Sue Onslow talking to Mr Ian MacPherson in Sunningdale on Friday 5th June 2009. Ian, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to talk to me about this Rhodesia project. I wonder if you could begin by saying, please, where were you born? I was born in Calcutta on 12 November 1945. And how did your parents come to be in India? My mother’s grandparents were in India in the 19th century and my father went out to India in 1932. They were married in ’45. When did they leave India? 1962 So they stayed there after Partition? Yes Your childhood and upbringing then were in India? A lot of it. I was educated over here but, like a lot of those kids in those days, I used to fly backwards and forwards for my holidays. When did you come back to England for your schooling? Well, I was actually at school in England. I started off at prep school when I was six up in Scotland. Boarding? Yes, and then I went out for my holidays or I stayed with my grandmother in Dundee or my Aunties down in Dunfermline. -
Shadow Cultures, Shadow Histories Foreign Military Personnel in Africa 1960–1980
Shadow Cultures, Shadow Histories Foreign Military Personnel in Africa 1960–1980 William Jeffrey Cairns Anderson A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand November 2011 Abstract From the 1960s to the 1980s mercenary soldiers in Africa captured the attention of journalists, authors and scholars. This thesis critically examines the shadows of mercenarism in sub-Saharan Africa during decolonisation – an intense period of political volatility, fragility and violence. The shadows of conflict are spaces fuelled by forces of power where defined boundaries of illegal/legal, illicit/licit and legitimate/illegitimate become obscured. Nordstrom (2000, 2001, 2004, 2007) invokes the shadows as a substantive ethnographic and analytical concept in anthropological research. This thesis considers how the shadows are culturally, socially and politically contingent spaces where concepts of mercenarism are contested. Specific attention is given to ‘shadow agents’ – former foreign military combatants, diplomats and politicians – whose lived experiences shed light on the power, ambiguities and uncertainties of the shadows. Arguing the importance of mixed method ethnography, this thesis incorporates three bodies of anthropological knowledge. Material from the official state archives of New Zealand and the United Kingdom (UK) where, amongst themselves, politicians and diplomats debated the ‘mercenary problem’, are used alongside oral testimonies from former foreign soldiers whose individual stories provide important narratives omitted from official records. This ethnography also draws on multi-sited fieldwork, including participant observation in Africa, the UK and New Zealand that engages with and captures the more intimate details of mercenary soldiering. As findings suggest, the worlds of diplomacy, politics and mercenarism are composed of shadow cultures where new perspectives and understandings emerge. -
Names, Currency, and Acronyms
PLACE- NAMES, CURRENCY, AND ACRONYMS The convention of historical writing of the country this book is about is to include a list of place- names in the front matter, with Rhodesian names on one side and the Zimbabwean names on the other. I will not do that here. The country I write about had four names between 1960 and 1980; what these were and how they changed are discussed at the start of the first chap- ter. I avoid such lists because of my concerns about a notion of before- and- after in history: a list of place-n ames and their changes suggests a too pat transformation from colony to nation, from bad to good, from minority to majority rule. Such a list also suggests that transitions are instantaneous, that a threshold has been crossed. For the reco rd, however, Rhodesia be- came Southern Rhodesia from mid- December 1979 to April 1980, when it became Zimbabwe. Salisbury, the capital, became Harare only in 1982. More common and never part of any list has been the tendency to use “Rhodesian” to mean white and “Zimbabwean” to mean African. I have tried to avoid this as often as I could throughout this book. With the breakup of the Central African Federation, Rhodesia named its currency the pound (£). Cast out of the sterling zone shortly a fter the Unilateral Declaration of In de pen dence (udi), Rhodesia valued its pound at US$2. In 1970, Rhodesia adopted the dollar as its currency. It was de- signed to be valued at half a British pound and between 1970 and 1980 hovered at about US$1.50. -
The Rhodesian Crisis in British and International Politics, 1964
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository THE RHODESIAN CRISIS IN BRITISH AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, 1964-1965 by CARL PETER WATTS A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Historical Studies The University of Birmingham April 2006 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis uses evidence from British and international archives to examine the events leading up to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965 from the perspectives of Britain, the Old Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and the United States. Two underlying themes run throughout the thesis. First, it argues that although the problem of Rhodesian independence was highly complex, a UDI was by no means inevitable. There were courses of action that were dismissed or remained under explored (especially in Britain, but also in the Old Commonwealth, and the United States), which could have been pursued further and may have prevented a UDI. -
The Rhodesiana Society C
The Past is Our Country: History and the Rhodesiana Society c. 1953-19701 David Kenrick, University of Oxford2 This paper uses the work of an amateur historical society - the Rhodesiana Society – as a lens to explore the racialised nature of attempts to define a white Rhodesian identity in the crucial post-war period of 1953-1970. It builds upon the existing corpus of work on history and national identity, moving beyond the more traditional sites in which historical discourse is produced – academia and the state – looking instead at how individuals in private organisations sought to use the past to shore up identities in the present. It does so using the particularly interesting example of a British settler colony in the late twentieth century, where minority rule was being upheld even as the rest of the continent entered the first stages of its post-colonial life. The paper focuses in particular on discourses of imperial legitimation which stemmed from the earliest history of white British/South African settlement in the colony. Historical work and narratives exploring early conflicts with Africans, specifically the 1896 Mashona and Matabele rebellions, served to legitimate the continued white presence by having shown that they had ‘won’ the country with their own blood. These histories also used techniques of historical silencing, culturally reinforcing the social, legal, and economic segregation which ascribed to Rhodesia’s Africans a state of permanent subservience and anonymity. The paper also suggests how these sanitised narratives of Victorian (white) heroism may have resonated with white Rhodesians in the 1960s, embroiled as they were in their own slowly escalating guerrilla war. -
Politics in Plural Societies : a Theory of Democratic Instability
POLITICS IN PLURAL SOCIETIES A Theory of Democratic Instability ALVIN RABUSHKA University of Rochester and KENNETH A. SHEPSLE Washington University, St. Louis Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company A Bell & Howell Company Columbus, Ohio CHAPTER 5 Majority Domination We turn in this chapter to an analysis of ethnic politics in dominant major- ity configurations. A major theme that emerges from this analysis is the denial by majorities of political freedoms to minorities as well as access to a proportional share of the public sector. First we explore ethnic politics in Ceylon to illustrate how a dominant Sinhalese majority deals with an important Tamil minority; second, we extend the empirical coverage with a comparative treatment of majority domination in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). Ceylon The most important source of division and disruption in Ceylonese politics and the greatest impediment to integrative trends has been the persistence of sentiments of identification and solidarity with broader primordial groups generally referred to as communities.1 The Sinhalese, constituting about seventy percent of the population, is the majority community in Ceylon. The remaining minorities consist of Ceylon Tamils who arrived from India between the fourth and twelfth centuries, eleven percent; Indian Tamils who arrived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to work on the tea estates, twelve percent; Moors 1. Robert N. Kearney, Communalism and Language in the Politics of Ceylon (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1967), p. 4. We rely heavily upon the evidence Kearney provides of Sinhalese politics. See also W. Howard Wriggins, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Calvin A. -
A Crucial Watershed in Southern Rhodesian Politics
A crucial watershed in Southern Rhodesian politics The 1961 Constitutional Process and the 1962 General Election E v e n t u e Högskolan på Gotlandll fi 2011 VTg ”Kandidatuppsats”u Författare: Jan Olssonr / Avdelningen för Historiab Handledare: Erik Tängerstadil d ( 1 F o r m a t Abstract The thesis examines the political development in Southern Rhodesia 1960-1962 when two processes, the 1961 Constitutional process and the 1962 General Election, had far- reaching consequences for the coming twenty years. It builds on a hypothesis that the Constitutional process led to a radicalisation of all groups, the white minority, the African majority and the colonial power. The main research question is why the ruling party, United Federal Party (UFP) after winning the referendum on a new Constitution with a wide margin could lose the ensuing election one year later to the party, Rhodesian Front (RF) opposing the constitution. The examination is based on material from debates in the Legal Assembly and House of Commons (UK), minutes of meetings, newspaper articles, election material etc. The hypothesis that the Constitutional process led to a radicalization of the main actors was partly confirmed. The process led to a focus on racial issues in the ensuing election. Among the white minority UFP attempted to develop a policy of continued white domination while making constitutional concessions to Africans in order to attract the African middle class. When UFP pressed on with multiracial structural reforms the electorate switched to the racist RF which was considered bearer of the dominant settler ideology. Among the African majority the well educated African middleclass who led the Nationalist movement, changed from multiracial reformists in late 1950‟s to majority rule advocates. -
June 2013 Rhodesian Services Association Incorporated
June 2013 A monthly publication for the Rhodesian Services Association Incorporated Registered under the 2005 Charities Act in New Zealand number CC25203 Registered as an Incorporated Society in New Zealand number 2055431 PO Box 13003, Tauranga 3141, New Zealand. Web: www.rhodesianservices.org Secretary’s e-mail [email protected] Editor’s e-mail [email protected] Phone +64 7 576 9500 Fax +64 7 576 9501 To view all previous publications go to our Archives Greetings, A big thanks to all of you who made donations and/or became financial members. Your support is heart-warming. I am pleased to tell you that our project to produce the definitive history of the Rhodesia Regiment, the project that has run my life since 2007, is close to completion. Publication will not mean the end of the work because then we have to sell the books, but I am relieved that all the material is in safe hands and is having the final polish done now…………..and I can stop being lured into last minute changes chasing scraps of information. When I consider the countless hours that have gone into this book; the 400 people who have made submissions and assisted with it; and given that this project was initiated in order to respect all those who wore the Maltese Cross of the Rhodesia Regiment over its eighty year history; I feel a huge responsibility to make as perfect a job as possible. Surely this has been the biggest Rhodesian project of its type ever? Other exciting news is that our Contact! Contact! team is to be joined by fifteen year old Cameron McNeil. -
55Th Birthday Celebrations
Curabitur Vulputate Viverra Pede 55th Anniversary Edition Rhodesian Light Infantry Regimental Association February 2016 ! " 55 1961 - 2016 55th Birthday Celebrations The Trooper South Africa Rededication The Ouens look back Skydde Rowe " FROM THE EDITOR Dear Members It was a very special & emotional evening for Time marches and not even RSM Reed can a unique band of brothers in arms. Many of bring it to a halt! Pace is 140 to the minute whom had not seen each other for decades. too -surely it cant be 5 years since those Ian - we salute and thank you. momentous & unforgettable 50th Anniversary celebrations in South Africa in February 2011 and in the UK in September of that year? The strength of the bond between all of us who served together in this ‘Incredible’ Battalion is quite extraordinary. You might Such great memories. Meeting only have shared experiences for a month comrades one hadn't seen for decades, the but that bond will last a lifetime. roller coaster of emotions– joy at the reunion, sadness remembering those no longer with us. We need to treasure these reunions as we head towards the zimmer frame and the ‘ou skate’ tag depicted on Vic Mackenzie’s For those who work so hard to get us brilliant evolutionary cartoon. together we owe them a huge thank you. The SA Branch and Committee who will, as I write this, be grafting away at the double to In light of the above, the Africa Branch is to put together a great event to mark the 55th be lauded for creating a ‘Legacy’ group Anniversary in Joburg over the weekend of where youngsters are being encouraged to the 5th, 6th & 7th of February. -
6. the Mobilisation of Indigeneity
6. The mobilisation of indigeneity Representations of the indigene and, more particularly, the process of indigenisation became prominent during Zimbabwe’s second decade of independence. According to Horowitz (1991:4), the introduction of new terms designating categories of people invariably reflects aspirations of an improved collective status or a different conflict alignment. Changes in language therefore indicate the setting or shifting of borders and reveal other, alternative configurations regarding who properly belongs within them and how these people are connected to the land. The ways in which the subject position of the indigene have been constructed, represented and mobilised (Brah 1996:191) and, at the same time, the question of white ethnicity brought into sharp relief, are discussed in this chapter. First, the Rhodesian narrative of the indigene and the lines along which Rhodesian, and later Zimbabwean, society was divided terminologically are addressed. This is followed by an account of various representations of the indigene that have appeared since 1990 and, in particular, how these have played out in the economic sphere. Towards the end of the chapter, the implications of the revised term for white autochthony—their right to be of the land—are examined. Representations of the indigene during the Rhodesian era The 1969 Rhodesian Constitution and Land Tenure Act for the first time explicitly divided the population into European and African, and provided definitions of both. A European was any person who is not an African, and an African, any member of the aboriginal tribes or races of Africa, and the islands adjacent thereto… and any person who has the blood of such tribes and races and who lives as a member of an aboriginal native community. -
Pioneers, Settlers, Aliens, Exiles: the Decolonisation of White Identity In
Pioneers, Settlers, Aliens, Exiles J. L. Fisher Pioneers, Settlers, Aliens, Exiles The decolonisation of white identity in Zimbabwe J. L. Fisher THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY E P R E S S E P R E S S Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/pioneers_citation.html National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Fisher, J. L. (Josephine Lucy) Title: Pioneers, settlers, aliens, exiles : the decolonisation of white identity in Zimbabwe / J. L. Fisher. ISBN: 9781921666148 (pbk.) 9781921666155 (pdf) Notes: Bibliography. Subjects: Decolonization--Zimbabwe. Whites--Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe--Politics and government--1980- Zimbabwe--Race relations. Dewey Number: 320.96891 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU E Press Printed by University Printing Services, ANU This edition © 2010 ANU E Press Contents Abbreviations. ix Preface . xi 1 ..Introduction. 1 2 ..Zimbabwe’s.discourse.of.national.reconciliation . 27 3 ..Re-inscribing.the.national.landscape. 55 4 ..Zimbabwe’s.narrative.of.national.rebirth. 79 5 ..Decolonising.settler.citizenship. 103 6 ..The.mobilisation.of.indigeneity. 131 7 ..The.loss.of.certainty. 173 8 ..Zimbabwe’s.governance.and.land.reform.crises—a.postscript.201 -
November 2012 Rhodesian Services Association Incorporated
November 2012 A monthly publication for the Rhodesian Services Association Incorporated Registered under the 2005 Charities Act in New Zealand number CC25203 Registered as an Incorporated Society in New Zealand number 2055431 PO Box 13003, Tauranga 3141, New Zealand. Web: www.rhodesianservices.org Secretary’s e-mail [email protected] Editor’s e-mail [email protected] Phone +64 7 576 9500 Fax +64 7 576 9501 To view all previous publications go to our Archives Greetings, The RV weekend is covered further on, but let me emphasise my grateful thanks to all who assisted in making the RV the popular event that it has become. I will not name names of those who assisted this year for fear of leaving someone out, so thanks to ALL OF YOU who stepped up and helped wherever you could, whenever you could. It is important that we share the load in order that those with the heavy loads are able to have time to enjoy themselves as well. This is the last issue of Contact! Contact! for 2012 as I am putting all the spare time that I have towards completion of History of the Rhodesia Regiment which has to be closed off and sent to the publishers by the end of the year. Publication is set for mid-2013. So on behalf of the team that compiles this publication, the Rhodesian Services Association, and my wife Diana and I; we wish you a peaceful and safe Christmas and health and good fortune in 2013. Rhodesian Services Association Purpose & Web Links The Rhodesian Services Association Incorporated is an Incorporated Society as well as a Registered Charity under the New Zealand Charities Act 2005.