Rhodesia at its height had about 270,000 white inhabitants and something over six million Africans. Almost everything written about it — then and since, by admirers and critics alike — is about the 270,000: their politics, their war, their tobacco, their grievance with Britain. This chapter is about the rest, because without it the events of the following chapters have no cause.
The structure was not improvised. It was built deliberately between the 1890s and the 1950s, by legislation, and it rested on three pillars: a racial division of the land, a labour system designed to make Africans work on European farms and mines at wages they would not otherwise have accepted, and a set of statutes excluding them from the institutions through which any of it might have been changed.
The land
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 is the single most consequential law in the country's history, and every subsequent quarrel — the war, Lancaster House, the seizures of 2000 — runs back to it.
It divided Southern Rhodesia by race. Roughly 49 million acres were designated European, about 28 million Native Reserve, some 7 million Native Purchase Area where a small class of African freeholders might buy, and the remainder unassigned or forest. On a population of about 50,000 whites and a million Africans, that gave each white settler, on paper, something in the order of a thousand acres and each African family a fraction of that.
Quality compounded quantity. European land was concentrated on the highveld along the railway line — the high-rainfall, fertile, accessible middle of the country. The reserves were disproportionately in the hot, dry, tsetse-prone lowveld, on poorer soils, further from markets and roads. Anyone who drives from Harare to Masvingo can still see the line: the change in vegetation and settlement density where one category ended and the other began is visible from the car.
The Act also made the towns European. Africans could not own land or, with narrow exceptions, live in urban areas except as employees housed by employers or in designated locations. A country was thereby created in which the majority had no legal right of permanent residence in any of its cities.
The Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951 made it worse in a way its authors did not expect. Intended to modernise reserve agriculture by allocating individual holdings and destocking overgrazed land, it was implemented with force, cut many families' cattle and land rights, and stripped urban migrants of their claim to a rural holding — removing at a stroke the security that had made low urban wages survivable. It was abandoned in 1961, having achieved little except to radicalise the countryside. Nationalist organisers of the late 1950s found their most receptive audiences among men who had just lost cattle to it.
The labour system
A settler economy needs cheap labour, and Southern Rhodesia's would not appear on its own: African families with land and cattle had no particular reason to work for wages on someone else's farm.
The state supplied the reason. A hut tax from 1894, later a poll tax, had to be paid in cash, which required someone in the household to earn. The reserves were made too small to support the families on them. Recruitment organisations brought migrant workers from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Mozambique, many of them walking hundreds of miles, which kept wages down by supplying labour that had no local alternative. By the 1940s perhaps half the African workforce on Southern Rhodesian farms and mines was foreign-born.
On the mines the system was chibaro — a word from forced labour — meaning compound housing, contracts enforced by criminal law, pass documents, and a mortality rate in the early decades that the industry's own records make uncomfortable reading. Charles van Onselen's study of it remains the standard account and has never been seriously challenged on the facts.
The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1934 completed the design by defining "employee" in a way that excluded African workers, so that recognised trade unions, collective bargaining and the industrial courts were all legally shut to them. Skilled trades were reserved by agreement and custom. An African could not be an apprentice electrician; he could carry the electrician's tools.
The colour bar
Rhodesia never enacted apartheid as a single codified system, and its defenders have made much of the distinction. What it had instead was a colour bar assembled piecemeal from statute, municipal by-law, employment practice and private covenant, which reached most of the same places by a less tidy route.
Residential segregation was statutory under Land Apportionment. Education was segregated and funded on a scale that is hard to state without sounding polemical: through the 1950s and 1960s per capita government spending on a white child's schooling ran at something in the order of ten times that on an African child's, and white education was free and compulsory while African education was neither. Most African schooling was provided by missions on government grants — which is why the nationalist leadership of the next chapter is so heavily populated by mission graduates, and why the missions occupy such an ambiguous place in the story.
Hospitals were separate and unequally provisioned. Hotels, cinemas, restaurants, swimming pools, public lavatories and bars were segregated by practice and, in many municipalities, by by-law. African urban residents carried passes — the situpa — and could be stopped and required to produce them.
Garfield Todd's government made a serious attempt at reform in the mid-1950s: expanded African education, some wage increases, a widened franchise. His own party removed him in 1958 for going too far. It is a useful episode to hold on to, because it establishes that the settler electorate had the option of a different course, was offered it, and voted it down — seven years before UDI and long before the guerrilla war that is usually offered as the explanation for white intransigence.
The townships
Because Africans were officially temporary in the cities, the cities built accommodation for temporary people: hostels for single men, minimal family housing, no freehold, and everything at a distance from the European suburbs.
Mbare in Salisbury, established in 1907, and Makokoba in Bulawayo, of similar vintage, are the oldest. By the 1950s they had become dense, permanent communities of people who were not going back to reserves that could no longer feed them, and the legal fiction of temporariness had become absurd — while continuing to determine the housing, the services and the political rights available.
These places were where an African urban culture formed: the beer halls, which the municipalities ran as a revenue source and which were consequently among the few permitted gathering places; the welfare and burial societies; the football clubs; the dance bands and the tsaba-tsaba halls; the small traders and the shebeen queens. They were also where a working class organised. The 1945 railway strike and the general strike of 1948, which stopped Salisbury and Bulawayo, were township events, and they produced the first generation of African leaders with a mass following rather than a petition.
The Salisbury bus boycott of 1956, against a fare increase, is the hinge. It was organised by the City Youth League, it worked, and it demonstrated to a generation of young men — among them the Youth League's organisers, one of whom was a young James Chikerema and another George Nyandoro — that ordinary people could be mobilised against the state and would turn out. Every nationalist party formed in the following decade drew on the networks built in that boycott.
What it produced
By the early 1960s the settler state had created, without intending to, precisely the conditions for the movement that would destroy it.
It had made a rural population with insufficient land and an acute, specific, documented grievance about how it had been taken. It had made an urban working class concentrated in townships, excluded from unions but not from organising, and denied any legal route to political power. It had educated, through the missions, a stratum of teachers, clerks and clergymen who could read the law that excluded them and argue with it in its own language. And it had removed, by constitutional design, every mechanism through which any of this could be addressed by voting.
The response of the 1961 constitution was to offer fifteen of sixty-five seats on a separate roll — an arrangement that no nationalist organisation could accept without conceding the principle, and which was rejected. After that the argument moved out of the constitutional arena, because there was no longer an arena.
What followed is the subject of the next two chapters: first the political movement that formed to change the system, and then, when it was banned and its leadership imprisoned, the war.
End of Chapter III