- The vicious conflict (1964-79) that brought Robert Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe - Expert coverage of the war, its historical context, and its aftermath - Descriptions of guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency operations, and actions by units like Grey's Scouts Amid the colonial upheaval of the 1960s, Britain urged its colony in Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) to grant its black residents a greater role in governing the territory. The white-minority government refused and soon declared its independence, a move bitterly opposed by the black majority. The result was the Rhodesian Bush War, which pitted the government against black nationalist groups, one of which was led by Robert Mugabe. Marked by unspeakable atrocities, the war ended in favor of the nationalists.
A truly satisfactory history of Rhodesia, one that takes into account both the African history and that of the whites, has never been written. That is, until now. In this book Luise White highlights the crucial tension between Rhodesia as it imagined itself and Rhodesia as it was imagined outside the country. Using official documents, novels, memoirs, and conversations with participants in the events taking place between 1965, when Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain, and 1980 when indigenous African rule was established through the creation of the state of Zimbabwe, White reveals that Rhodesians represented their state as a kind of utopian place where white people dared to stand up for themselves and did what needed to be done. It was imagined to be a place vastly better than the decolonized dystopias to its north. In all these representations, race trumped all else including any notion of nation. Outside Rhodesia, on the other hand, it was considered a white supremacist utopia, a country that had taken its own independence rather than let white people live under black rule. Even as Rhodesia edged toward majority rule to end international sanctions and a protracted guerilla war, racialized notions of citizenship persisted. One man, one vote, became the natural logic of decolonization of this illegally independent minority-ruled renegade state. Voter qualification with its minutia of which income was equivalent to how many years of schooling, and how African incomes or years of schooling could be rendered equivalent to whites, illustrated the core of ideas about, and experiences of, racial domination. White s account of the politics of decolonization in this unprecedented historical situation reveals much about the general processes occurring elsewhere on the African continent."
In Fighting and Writing Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, White finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods. In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.
Mukiwa opens with Peter Godwin, six years old, describing the murder of his neighbor by African guerillas, in 1964, pre-war Rhodesia. Godwin's parents are liberal whites, his mother a governement-employed doctor, his father an engineer. Through his innocent, young eyes, the story of the beginning of the end of white rule in Africa unfolds. The memoir follows Godwin's personal journey from the eve of war in Rhodesia to his experience fighting in the civil war that he detests to his adventures as a journalist in the new state of Zimbabwe, covering the bloody return to Black rule. With each transition Godwin's voice develops, from that of a boy to a young man to an adult returning to his homeland. This tale of the savage struggle between blacks and whites as the British Colonial period comes to an end is set against the vividly painted background of the myserious world of South Africa.
This is the story of military aviation in Rhodesia from the romantic days of 'bush' flying in the 1920s and '30s-when aircraft were refueled from jerrycans and landing grounds were often the local golf course-to the disbandment of the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF) on Zimbabwean independence in 1980. In 1939 the tiny Royal Rhodesian Air Force (RRAF) became the first to take up battle stations even before the outbreak of the Second World War. The three Rhodesian squadrons served with distinction in East Africa, the Western Desert, Italy and Western Europe. At home Rhodesia became a vast training ground for airmen from across the Empire-from Britain, the Commonwealth and even Greece. After the war, Rhodesia, on a negligible budget, rebuilt its air force, equipping it with Ansons, Spitfires, Vampires, Canberras, Hunters and Alouettes. Following UDI, the unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965, international sanctions were imposed, resulting in many remarkable and groundbreaking innovations, particularly in the way of ordnance. The bitter 'bush war' followed in the late 1960s and '70s, with the RhAF in the vanguard of local counterinsurgency operations and audacious preemptive strikes against vast guerrilla bases in neighboring Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana and as far afield as Angola and Tanzania. With its aging fleet, including C-47 'Dakotas' that had been at Arnhem, the RhAF was able to wreak untold havoc on the enemy, Mugabe's ZANLA and Nkomo's ZIPRA. The late author took over 30 years in writing this book; the result is a comprehensive record that reflects the pride, professionalism and dedication of what were some of the world's finest airmen of their time. The late Beryl Salt was born in London in 1931. She emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1952 to get married in Salisbury, where her two sons were born. In 1953 she joined the Southern Rhodesian Broadcasting Services (later the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation, the RBC). With a love of history she wanted to find out as much as she could about her new country. This interest led to radio dramas and feature programmes, followed by several books: School History Text Book, The Encyclopaedia of Rhodesia and The Valiant Years, a history of the country as seen through the newspapers. She also produced a dramatized radio series about the Rhodesian Air Force. In 1965 she left the RBC and spent three years with the Ministry of Information, following which she was a freelance writer/broadcaster involved in a wide variety of projects until 1980 when she moved to Cape Town. She died in England in November 2001.
On November 11, 1965 the colony of Southern Rhodesia unilaterally and illegally declared itself independent from Britain, the first and only time that this had happened since the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. After fifteen years of international ostracism, economic sanctions, and civil war Rhodesia finally walked the path to legal independence as the state of Zimbabwe in 1980. Interdisciplinary in its scope and international in its coverage, this book analyzes the weaknesses in Britain's Rhodesian policy in the 1960s and the strains that Rhodesia's UDI imposed on Britain's relations with the Commonwealth, the United States and the United Nations.
A Brutal State of Affairs analyses the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and challenges Rhodesian mythology. The story of the BSAP, where white and black officers were forced into a situation not of their own making, is critically examined. The liberation war in Rhodesia might never have happened but for the ascendency of the Rhodesian Front, prevailing racist attitudes, and the rise of white nationalists who thought their cause just. Blinded by nationalist fervour and the reassuring words of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and army commanders, the Smith government disregarded the advice of its intelligence services to reach a settlement before it was too late. By 1979, the Rhodesians were staring into the abyss, and the war was drawing to a close. Salisbury was virtually encircled, and guerrilla numbers continued to grow. A Brutal State of Affairs examines the Rhodesian legacy, the remarkable parallels of history, and suggests that Smiths Rhodesian template for rule has, in many instances, been assiduously applied by Mugabe and his successors.
Before there was Zimbabwe, there was Rhodesia, a British colony founded by the great capital imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, and administered by the British South Africa Company. Rhodesia was the last British territory in Africa, and the most difficult to divest. This is the story of a gifted land, bitterly contested as the final imperial chapter in Africa. Through war and peace, following the careers of some of the great African leaders of the modern age, this was the last, painful transition from colonial to liberated Africa.A story intricately told and meticulously researched. For all enthusiasts of African and British Imperial history, this book is a must read!
Within Africa and around the world, the Ridgeback has proven its versatility, devotion and intelligence. This text examines the breed's unique appearance and its ability to hunt, as well as its adaptability as a family companion.
In January 1896, the author's second cousin (thrice removed) embarrassed the British government when as a Boer Commandant he thwarted the attempted overthrow of the Transvaal Republic by a column raised in Cecil Rhodes' company-run colony of Rhodesia. The resulting scandal forced Rhodes to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.Four years later, in February 1900, a Boer army led by the same cousin (now a general) held off an onslaught by overwhelming British, Canadian and Australian forces for eight days before surrendering in a capitulation which proved to be the turning point of the war, and which still rankles in the hearts of Afrikaners.This memoir chronicles the ebbs and flows in the fortunes of the author's Huguenot and English forebears during their migration northward from the Cape of Good Hope into the African hinterland, and goes on to tell the story of his own Rhodesian childhood. In the early 1960s, the country was enjoying the fruits of a two-decade economic boom; the future looked bright, and the early stirrings of African nationalism were not to be taken seriously.
