I was brought up on the wrong side of the railway line. It cut across Salisbury, capital of Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). To its north, beyond the spacious, sleepy city centre, stretched the lush white suburbs of Highlands, Borrowdale and Mount Pleasant. To its south lay poorer but still white suburbs, Braeside, Cranbourne and Hatfield, where my parents bought an old farmhouse near the airport in the early 1950s (many placenames were linked to the house of Cecil, whose chief, the third Marquess of Salisbury, was British prime minister when the colonisation of Zimbabwe began in 1890).
Here the houses were more closely packed together, the gardens small and scrubby because the soil was sandy, unlike the rich red earth that nurtured the luscious lawns of the northern suburbs. They were the homes of the white working class that Nicola Ginsburgh studies in this fascinating book – skilled men in the railways or the ‘industrial sites’ to the west of the city centre (not far from where the African townships of Harare and Highfield began), mainly female office workers, policemen, airport staff like the fathers of both my brother’s and my best friends.1
Although my parents had their money troubles, we didn’t quite fit – my brother and I went to Catholic private schools in Borrowdale and we were constantly visiting friends in the northern suburbs. The journey back and forth across the southern suburbs was a daily routine. Their white inhabitants enjoyed the privileges of the ruling race – citizenship, the vote, black servants – but everything was more cramped and up-close. I still have the mental snapshot of the little racial hell I once glimpsed while being driven through Braeside – I must have been in my early twenties, on a visit from university in Britain – of a white woman in curlers and nightie screaming in her back garden at an African man dressed in white uniform who was shouting back. She would have called him her houseboy.
Whiteness studies are now an important research area. But what makes Ginsburgh’s study so significant and distinctive is that she brings to her portrait of the white working class during the brief heyday of Rhodesian settler colonialism a sophisticated Marxist theoretical perspective. Her exploration of the construction of race is informed by an unusual focus on class and work:
Class was not displaced by race in British settler colonies. Instead, precisely because dominant racial ideologies demanded a set of unifying characteristics and visible signifiers of the ‘natural’ superiority of white settlers, class took on novel yet pressing dimensions. (2)
Settler colonialism in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere in Africa, took a specific form different from the North American and Australasian versions. Rather than simply dispossess, displace and, where the opportunity presented itself, exterminate the indigenous population, the colonists who established Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s sought both to seize African people’s land and to exploit their labour. Given the strong productive basis of the precolonial agrarian economy, this required the organisation of forced labour (the system known as chibaro) to supply the mines and the adoption of South African style segregationist measures to allow white landowners to develop and operate profitable farms on the best land. White workers – initially primarily skilled male manual labourers in industries such as mining, construction and railways, situated between white capital and black labour, found themselves in a position of ‘structural insecurity’, as Frederick Johnstone put it about their South African counterparts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Johnstone 1976). One of the principal strengths of Ginsburgh’s study is that she explores the different dimensions of this insecurity – economics and politics, but also identity, gender and sexuality.
This exploration takes inspiration from the concept of a ‘psychological wage’ introduced by W. E. B. du Bois in his masterpiece Black reconstruction in America (2007 [1935]) and further developed by David Roediger in various works (e.g. Roediger 2007 [1991]). Describing social conditions in the Southern United States after the final defeat of Reconstruction in 1877, Du Bois wrote:
the white group of labourers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. (Du Bois 2007 [1935], Kindle loc. 16462)
In a period marked by major strikes by white miners at the Wankie colliery in 1919 and by railworkers in 1919, 1920 and 1929, and by the Great Depression, when white unemployment prompted the settler government to establish work camps, the RLP and the unions used the language of class in expressing grievances and making demands. But always this was intended to protect the status of white workers as members of the ruling race. This involved demanding the wage levels needed to support a ‘European’ standard of living and maintaining the job colour bar reserving skilled jobs for whites. But it also required the constant effort to imagine white workers as quintessentially British, with all the virtues of the island breed, expressing the qualities of character and the skills that demanded both reward and respect:
Being white was defined as a set of characteristics rooted in working-class traditions and culture from Britain and South Africa; it was an attitude of defiance and bravery; it was the expression of solidarity and the fight for better working conditions. Intelligence, respectability, sobriety and productiveness were regarded as both reflecting and constituting racial identity. Central to white labour notions of respectability was the idea that work made a man and a family. (70)
Ginsburgh emphasises the white worker’s role as breadwinner and head of the family as central to this conception of whiteness. She also notes how, as women became a growing proportion of the white population, they were interpellated to ensure that their husbands and their homes maintain the ‘standards’ that made whites respectable and entitled them to rule. She makes superb use of the crude cartoons in the rail unions’ journals to illustrate the highly gendered conceptions of white identity at work here.
So the place of white workers was always shadowed by anxiety. And reasons to worry grew as the decades unfolded. The Second World War brought disruption in the shape of the rapid growth of secondary industry and an influx of the wrong kinds of whites – British Royal Air Force trainee pilots (among them a young Tony Benn), Polish refugees (like Mr Riegl, my best friend’s father, who had suffered at both German and Soviet hands), and Italian internees, none of whom could be relied on to know or respect the rules of the game. As in South Africa, wartime inflation and the growth of the urban African working class provoked a wave of black strikes – notably railworkers in 1945 and the general strike of 1948. Joshua Nkomo, a strike leader, became one of the first Zimbabwean voices announcing a new African nationalism that by the early 1960s had swept away the bulk of the European colonial empires.
Flanked by one of the exceptions, the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, and propped up by apartheid South Africa, the Rhodesian settlers hung on, illegally declaring independence from Britain (in the Unilateral Declaration of Independence [UDI]) in 1965. But the pressures grew – externally, as from the mid 1960s onwards, the armed wings of the African nationalist parties (Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union and what would become Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front) mounted guerrilla campaigns along Rhodesia’s borders, and internally, as the process of secondary industrialisation, accelerating during the 1950s boom years under the short-lived Central African Federation, and continuing into the early UDI period, simultaneously increased white prosperity and strengthened employers’ demands to ‘dilute’ and ‘fragment’ semi-skilled and skilled jobs, thereby opening them to cheaper Africans.
The white labour movement withered in this environment – the RLP peaked with a third of the white vote in 1939, and subsequently split and vanished. The Rhodesia Front (RF), the party of UDI under Ian Smith, came to power in 1962 promising to protect the privileges of white workers from the half-hearted multiracialism of the governing United Federal Party. But, in one of her most striking findings, Ginsburgh shows that the process of dilution and fragmentation continued under the RF, which gave priority to the appetite for an increasingly educated urban African workforce of both the transnational corporations dominating the Rhodesian economy and local white-controlled businesses. ‘Whereas the demarcating lines of “white work” had always been contested, many in the RF had begun to reject the very concept of a “white job”’ (234). Indeed, ‘[b]y the 1970s the language of “reverse racism” was common among white workers who repositioned themselves as victims’ (215). Nevertheless, as Smith gradually conceded to the demands of both Pretoria and the Western powers to dismantle the segregationist structures the RF had sought to perfect, he was able to brush off far-right electoral challenges seeking to preserve white privilege.
As the book moves through the RF period (1962–79), its focus shifts from the collective institutions of white labour to individual experiences. This has an objective basis in the decline of the white working class as a collective actor and in the post-war emergence of a white consumer society, in which, for example, following trends in the advanced economies, women increasingly became wage-earners as routine white-collar workers, nurses and teachers (though there too the pressure of African competition made itself felt). UDI and the escalating war (the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974 made possible a growing influx via Mozambique of the ‘boys’, or vakomana, directed by ZANU–PF) encouraged an increasingly frenzied assertion of white identity as maintaining an authentic Britishness lost in the corrupt metropolis. Ginsburgh doesn’t mention the improbable cult of the unprepossessing Smith, often portrayed in flying jacket to recall his record as a Spitfire pilot during WW2. As the real wage was squeezed, the psychological wage became more important.
But, as she shows in her brilliant concluding chapter, the fractures in white identity grew in Rhodesia’s final years. Class continued to shape destiny. The scarcity of white manpower did not simply help to drive the restructuring of work. It placed a growing burden on white men of military service to fend off the guerrillas. But this burden was differentially inflected through class. As Ginsburgh notes, ‘[a]ttending university offered a route for wealthier middle-class Rhodesians to evade military service’ (222). University overseas indeed gave my brother and me – and many of our contemporaries – our way out of Rhodesia (what came to be known as ‘taking the gap’): the school reunions we never attend are gatherings from across the postcolonial globe.
Ginsburgh also uses gender as a lens through which to explore the disintegration of white society. Once again she deftly selects images – for example, from the magazine Illustrated Life Rhodesia – to evoke the gendered representation of a (white) nation in arms. She probes how the war – through the repeated absences of men in the army and the economic cost that this often imposed – drove couples apart and encouraged some white women to assume more independent roles and try out different sexual partners. The crisis of white masculinity as settler power crumbled found expression in an obsession with the threat of castration by the advancing African hordes that white men imagined they faced.
Not surprisingly, then, the victory of Mugabe and ZANU–PF in the February 1980 elections held under the Lancaster House agreement provoked an exodus of tens of thousands of whites: ‘28,732 Europeans were counted in the 2012 Zimbabwean census – around a tenth of the population in the 1970s’ (248). But Ginsburgh rightly believes her study is of more than historical value (considerable though that is, it must be added). The discourse of white victimhood and ‘reverse racism’ that she reconstructs among white workers in colonial Rhodesia is today amplified in the metropolis – retweeted to tens of millions from the White House, its propagandists like Laurence Fox given prime-time spots. It matters that we understand this discourse as an inverted image of real relations of exploitation and oppression.