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Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellion by James Barber Review by: L. C. Green Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 228-231 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/484123 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 19:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Canadian Association of African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.212 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 19:43:06 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellionby James Barber

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Page 1: Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellionby James Barber

Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellion by James BarberReview by: L. C. GreenCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 2, No. 2(Autumn, 1968), pp. 228-231Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/484123 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 19:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Canadian Association of African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines.

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Page 2: Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellionby James Barber

THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES

perilous polarisation of the world is the result of an accumulation of men's actions over four centuries. As such, the present situation, complex and near boiling-point as it is, can be altered for the better, by better actions. The Race War is dedicated to this faith. There is no historical inevitability, no collective human urge to destruction, behind the world's troubles. There is no longer any refuge behind the myth of white supremacy, now exploded and exposed for what it is, a crude and obvious rationalisation of cruelty and greed. Similarly, it is clear why the poor of the world no longer look to Europe, the United States, or Russia, for help and advice, when all they have received is melliflous rhetoric and continued exploitation. One country, above all, has suffered, and jettisoned the degradation and despoliation of white dominance, and is now emerging from the eternal cycle of poverty and weakness by its own efforts-China. The Chinese promise, not monopoly trade or enclaves of foreign capital and influence, but "a coloured world rising in revolutionary alliance to establish the millenium of the poor". The rich countries, including the Soviet Union, have built their own wall around China and can only view her actions through cold war spectacles.

For readers in the rich part of the world, the struggle is immense-against tendentious historical writing, against obtuse reporting, against the conven- tional wisdom and accumulated prejudice of ages. But however immense, Segal declares, the battle must be joined, now. While the rich countries have for- feited their leadership of the caravan of human progress to quite another tradi- tion-inspired by China's example, lyricised by Franz Fanon, and adapted to local conditions-there is still the hope of averting the worst violence of the coming conflict by crash education, for the rich, in the realities of the world. Absorbing the lessons of The Race War is the first, eye-opening, and essen- tially hopeful, step.

Stephen Hughes, Addis Ababa

Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellion. By James Barber. London: Oxford Univer- sity Press, for the Institute of Race Relations. 1967. xii ? 338 pp. $6.35.

With the collapse of the talks on the Fearless, Rhodesian rejection of Britain's proposed safeguards for the African position, and the completion of the third year of successful rebellion, it is likely that we will soon be getting works describing the achievements of the Rhodesian Front, the statesmanship of Ian Smith-perhaps this is the point to remind ourselves that before U.D.I. "nego-

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Page 3: Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellionby James Barber

COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS

tiations were seen as a means of persuading the British Government to accept R.F. terms, not as a means of reconciling differences by compromise or new approaches", the outstanding vision of the proclamation of November 11, 1965, and the success of U.D.I.

In the meantime, and before we are overwhelmed by this new material, it is as well to recall what led to it all, and this task of description and analysis has been admirably fulfilled by James Barber in his recently published Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellion. From this it becomes clear that whatever may have been the beliefs or sincerity of individual Rhodesian statesmen like Whitehead or Tredgold, the basic attitude of the old displaced establish- ment and the new regime towards the majority population and its political and social rights has been the same. The old establishment may have been honest in its commitment to multiracial participation in government, but its attitude gave the impression that this would certainly not have been achieved until the Greek kalends, and that native improvement was only possible to the extent that it constituted no threat to the vested and entrenched interests of the white minority. As long ago as 1953, the town clerk of Bulawayo said of the Land Apportionment Act, 1930, that it "aims at residential segregation and ... obviously owes a lot to Union thought on the subject, but it was designed more as an interim measure to protect the natives from losing their land to shrewder members of other races. Whether the passage of time will have the same hardening effect as senility on the heart, it is too early to say". As a result of this act, a European population of 220,000 enjoys 49,060,000 acres, while 4,000,000 Africans are restricted to less than half of this area. It is perhaps worth mentioning at once, especially as there is a tendency to suggest that the Africans are really rural villagers and not town-dwellers interested in politics, that there are nearly twice as many Africans resident in Salisbury and Bula- wayo as there are Europeans in the whole territory.

It is not only in relation to landholding that disparity appears. In so far as annual income is concerned, between 1958 and 1964 the European level increased by about 25%, while that of the Africans was more than double this percentage. Perhaps this is not surprising, since the Europeans' annual income went from ?995 to ?1241 and the Africans' from ?80 to ?121. The same sort of improvement took place in the size of the electorate. Whereas, between 1928 and 1960, the European voters only increased by some 160%, from 26,629 to 72,000, the African electorate went up by 400%, from 62 to 3219. The educational contrast is even worse.

According to Mr. Barber, antagonism between Britain and the white settlers probably dates from British support for the Africans in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia in their attitude to federation, but if British principles meant anything it is difficult to see how there could ever have been agreement

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Page 4: Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellionby James Barber

LE JOURNAL CANADIEN DES ETUDES AFRICAINES

with groups with views like these from Southern Rhodesia's Hansard and other government sources, on communism and international finance-"Finally, we come to the greatest revolution of all, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This revolution was financed and supported by international financiers in New York . . . these revolutions which have always been organised and carried out by Communists always ended up with the international financiers in con- trol. Russia is the international financiers' paradise"-on international organiza- tions-"We have various institutions of the devil . . . weaving their way into our society. It will be a sorry day if we are ever directly implicated in financing them and I wonder if this increase in the grant to the University in any way helps these institutions, these offshoots of the greatest communistic and devil- ish institution in the world known as the United Nations"-and on the World Council of Churches-"an organization with a revolutionary political programme which it seeks to carry out in the name of Christianity" and which is under the control of "those with leftist, liberal and Communist connections". While Mr. Smith may be content to leave these wilder statements to his more ex- treme henchmen, his own comments show a similar lack of proportion and realism. In the independence broadcast, he explained that U.D.I. was "for the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity", and his warnings to the opposition indicate an inability or unwillingness to recognize the nature of democracy even within the narrow limits within which it applies in Rhodesia. Further, the application of the principles of apartheid leads one to sympathise with Mr. Barber's view that "the Europeans of Rhodesia enjoy no monopoly nor even a disproportionate share of Christian virtue or superior moral stand- ards".

It has often been said that if Ian Smith and his supporters had been coloured, British reaction would have been different. While it might have been possible to crush the rebellion speedily and with a minimum of force in November 1965, it is unlikely that this would be so today. But if an African leader had spoken as Smith did in 1960 or referred to the American Revolu- tion as he had done, his freedom of political action would have been somewhat shortlived; and if there had been under a black government the police blood- shed there was in 1960, the Colonial Office would almost certainly have re- sorted to direct rule.

In view of the attitude now being adopted by the British Conservative party, it is as well to recall the comment by Duncan Sandys to Winston Field in 1963: "The present difficulty arises from your desire to secure independence on the basis of a franchise which is incomparably more restricted than that of any other British territory to which independence has hitherto been granted." To this should be appended Mr. Barber's own view that "what is striking is how little the attitude of the two Governments changed, whether

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Page 5: Rhodesia: The Road to Rebellionby James Barber

COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS

the Southern Rhodesian Government was led by Field or Smith, and whether the Labour or the Conservative Party was in power in Britain. Neither Govern- ment was prepared to give way on some vital issues, and neither Government fully trusted the other." While it may well be that there is now more trust, or sympathy, between Smith and the Conservative leaders, there is still a wide gulf of distrust between Smith and Labour, which would probably shift towards the Conservatives if they formed a government in Britain. For Smith "is a dedicated man, sincere in his dedication, and simple in his beliefs and ideals. A strong sense of mission, a conviction that his course is the only right course for Rhodesia ... the chosen leader [who] always came down on the side of his more intransigent followers . .. [determined] to gain independence from Britain without making concessions." There is nothing to suggest, despite the withdrawal from the Rhodesian Front of the more right wing elements, that Smith is ideologically any more liberal than they, and that the cleavage is anything but an internal struggle for leadership. For an examination of these right wing views see chapter twelve.

But there is another basic problem. "The U.D.I. was in character with the pattern of politics which Southern Rhodesians, both African and European, had created for themselves in the nineteen sixties. It was part of the 'all or nothing at all' spirit, the politics of desperation. It stemmed from fear and mistrust and suspicion. In hard reality, neither race had been prepared to trust the other..." While we may agree with Mr. Wilson that "fear is a bad coun- sellor, when the primary need is for wise advice and cool and rational states- manlike judgment", is he not being somewhat too sanguine when he states that "the first freedom that Rhodesia needs to achieve, the foundation of all the others, is freedom from fear; and from that will develop the freedom that has flowered in the twentieth century, freedom from contempt based on the dignity of man"?-and perhaps Mr. Barber too is excessively sanguine in agree- ing with that statement in the closing sentence of his Rhodesia: The Road To Rebellion.

L.C. Green, University of Alberta.

Agriculture in the Congo Basin. Tradition and Change in African Rural Econ- ornies. By Marvin P. Miracle. Madison, Milwaukee and London: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1967, Pp. xv - 355, U.S. $8.50.

Since the author asserts that "we are only beginning to understand the nature of the tribal economies of tropical Africa", his objective is to characterize in

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