Government "Gazettes" for Northern Rhodesia

Government "Gazettes" for Northern RhodesiaAuthor(s): Andrew RobertsSource: History in Africa, Vol. 16 (1989), pp. 397-400Published by: African Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171796 .

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GOVERNMENT GAZETTES FOR NORTHERN RHODESIA*

Andrew Roberts SOAS University of London

Government Gazettes are a neglected source for the colonial history of Af- rica, and it may be worthwhile to draw attention to various types of information to be found in those for Northern Rhodesia, which have recently been made available on microfilm.

Up to 1911 the British South Africa Company administered two territories north of the Zambezi: North-Eastern Rhodesia and North-Western Rhodesia. For North-Eastern Rhodesia the Company published at Fort Jameson (now Chipata) a monthly Government Gazette from 1903 to 1911. There was no Ga- zette for North-Western Rhodesia; legislation for this territory was initially published in the Official Gazette of the High Commissioner for South Africa, though some relevant proclamations and government notices were reprinted in the North-Eastern Rhodesia Gazette. From 1911 the Company published a Government Gazette for the amalgamated territory of Northern Rhodesia; the frequency varied between twelve and twenty issues a year. In 1924 the Colonial Office took over responsibility for Northern Rhodesia. Thereafter the frequency of publication tended to increase, reflecting the growth of government, business, and white settlement. Before 1939 it ranged between 24 and 50 issues a year, and from 1939 to independence in 1964, between 50 and 80 a year.

The primary function of the Gazette was to publish legislation. At first, this appeared in the body of the Gazette, but from 1929 Ordinances and Gov- ernment Notices (regulations) were published in two separate series of Supple- ments; bills had appeared in separately numbered annual series since 1926. For studying the process of drafting, alteration in committee, amendment, and re- peal, all such material is of potential value, since collections of laws issued periodically record only those laws in force at a given date.

A good deal of statistical information was published in the Gazette. There were summaries of European crop production (annual, 1919-40), external trade (monthly, 1931-40; quarterly, 1946-53), mineral production (quarterly, 1927-29, monthly, 1929-40, 1945-64), and government finance (1922-23, 1926-57) and the Development Fund (monthly, 1950-56). The Gazette also published the annual accounts of various bodies, including the Rhodesian railway companies (1927-

History in Africa 16 (1989), 397-400



398 ANDREW ROBERTS

47, as supplements), the Post Office Savings Bank (1927-40, usually as supplements), the Maize Control Board (1938-51), the Cattle Marketing and Control Board (1941-59) and the municipalities of Livingstone and Ndola (irregular, 1928-42). A monthly cost-of-living index, based on European consumer habits in

eight towns, was published in 1941-43; an African Urban Consumer Index was

published in 1956-61; and maize prices in 1948-57. The Gazette throws some light on European settler politics. In 1918 an ad-

visory council of five elected Europeans was constituted: it held six meetings before Company rule came to an end and its proceedings were published as supplements to the Gazette. In 1924, after the Colonial Office had taken over, a

Legislative Council, with a minority of unofficial members, was set up. Its proceedings were from the first published separately, as a Hansard, but from 1924 to 1928 the Gazette published the Governor's speech at the opening of sessions. From 1925 to 1942 the Gazette annually published the register of voters quali- fied to vote in elections to the Legislative Council; this appeared as a supple- ment from 1933. Publication of the register was resumed in 1946 but it was no

longer part of the Gazette. From 1953 to 1959 the Gazette published the mem-

bership of the African Representative, Provincial, and Urban Advisory Coun- cils.

The Gazette provides varied detail on the operations of government at

many levels. It records the arrivals and departures, posting and transfers of

government personnel. It reveals that runners were still much used by the Post Office in 1930; it also enables the historian to chart the routine destruction of

legal records under the Disposal of Records Ordinance, 1938. The Gazette was sometimes used to publicize important documents issued by the Colonial Secre-

tary, such as his refusal in 1938 to challenge the mineral rights of the British South Africa Company,1 or his circular in 1941 on wartime economic policy.2 In the late 1950s, when the territory's constitutional future was being drastically reappraised, the Gazette published some of the correspondence on this subject between the Colonial Secretary and the Governor, along with related papers.3 As in other colonial territories, the Gazette was an important medium for

stressing the central imperial role of the British Crown4: several pages (and sometimes special issues) were devoted to royal messages, as in time of war, and to news of the illness or death both of kings and of governors (who were of course the monarch's representatives). However, the use of the Gazette to pro- mote imperial solidarity was taken to unusual lengths after Neville Chamber- lain had returned from Munich with a peace treaty which conceded Hitler's demands on Czechoslovakia. The Gazette for 4 October 1938 consisted simply of an announcement that a telegram expressing gratitude had been sent to the Colonial Secretary by the Governor, Sir John Maybin, who was "in no doubt that the whole community in this Territory would wish to communicate to the Prime Minister their feelings of obligation to him personally for his unremit-

ting efforts in the interests of Peace." For the social historian the Gazette has much of interest. In July 1903 the

Gazette for North-Eastern Rhodesia published the regulations for the man-



GOVERNMENT GAZETTES 399

agement of the Victoria Memorial Institute, Fort Jameson, which was "to be used exclusively as a Public Library and Museum, and for scientific, social and

literary purposes in connection therewith." The next issue reported an Indaba of Ngoni chiefs, one of whom claimed that the spirit of Zwangendaba, the leader of the great Ngoni migration, had appeared to him in a dream and com- manded him to assume his name. Between 1904 and 1908 this Gazette published several communications from the philologist A. C. Madan, who in 1906/ 07 carried out fieldwork on the Lala and Lamba languages.5 From 1928 to 1932 the Gazette published summaries of civil and criminal cases heard by the

High Court on circuit. The fortunes of settlers, European and Asian, may be traced, from the earliest issues, in notices of probate, deceased estates, and bankruptcies. Business history is documented by notices of liquidation, dissolu- tion, and deletion from the Companies register, and from 1951 the formation and breakup of cooperative societies is recorded.

The most substantial material in the Gazette for social history consists of prosopographical evidence: data concerning individuals recorded as members of various social categories. For the European population, the voters' register is of obvious importance; so too is the register of medical practitioners, dentists, and veterinary surgeons (1922-64) and the roll of Justices of the Peace (1929-64). Applications for certain types of license had to be published in the Gazette: by 1949 one-third of its space was taken up by applications for trading licenses. Several African applications for road service licenses appeared in 1954, but of wider importance were applications from Africans for exemption, under an ordinance of 1939, from the requirement to carry passes. The applications, which needed a district officer's approval, specified the applicant's tribe, home district, occupation, and address. They enable one to measure the growth of an elite of African clergymen, teachers, clerks, and artisans regarded as "respectable" by officials. In the early 1940s there were no more than twenty- odd exemptions each year, but by the later 1950s there were over a hundred, and when the African Exemption Ordinance was repealed in 1964 there were probably 600 or 700 holders of exemption certificates. Further insight into the changing composition and aspirations of Northern Rhodesian society may be obtained from the lists of societies either registered or exempted under the So- cieties Ordinance of 1957. In 1958 these included 240 branches of the African National Congress as well as 23 branches of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, to say nothing of the Nchanga Gaelic Football Club.6 In 1960 (when the full list occupied 24 pages), the Gazette recorded some 400 ANC branches, several branches of the newly-founded United National Independence Party, urban branches of the Lumpa Church, the Rhodesia Congo and Angola Chokwe Self Help Plan, and the Monte Carlo Crooners, Kitwe.7

NOTES

* These notes were originally written to accompany a series of microfilms of government publications relating to Northern Rhodesia. These have been published by



400 ANDREW ROBERTS

Microform Academic Publishers, East Ardsley, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF3 2JN, England, in conjunction with the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. I am grateful to Microform Academic Publishers for permission to reprint part of my in- troduction to the series.

1. Secretary of State to Governor of Northern Rhodesia, 31 December 1938, in Northern Rhodesia Government Gazette (NRGG), 10 March 1939.

2.Circular of 5 June 1941 in NRGG, 15 August 1941. 3.NRGG, 28 March 1958, 11 September 1958, 14 March 1959. 4.This subject has been explored by Terence Ranger, though he overlooks the role

of the Gazette as a "tribal noticeboard" of the colonial Establishment: see his "Making Northern Rhodesia Imperial: Variations on a Royal Theme, 1924-1938," African Affairs, 79 (1980), 349-73.

5.North-Eastern Rhodesia Government Gazette, 15 October 1904, 1 December 1906, 2 January 1908.

6. NRGG, 31 October 1958, 14 November 1958. 7. NRGG, 22 April 1960.



Documents

Government "Gazettes" for Northern Rhodesia