2.2. WHITENESS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT
2.4.2. Whiteness in Southern Rhodesia/Rhodesia
2.4.2.2. Whiteness: The geographical space
bourgeois Rhodesians of a more liberal persuasion, opposed the move on the grounds that they believed it would take Rhodesia closer to the racial politics of South Africa (Todd, 1982).
As the Rhodesians under Ian Smith moved to defend their political actions and strengthen their power they went out of their way to unite whites behind a white Rhodesian nationalism (Smith, 1997; St. John, 2007). As they did so they drew heavily on a pioneering mythology, which if it did not exist, they created (Godwin & Hancock, 1993; Liebenberg, 2008; St. John, 2007). They constructed themselves as an energetic, motivated people who built Rhodesia out of virgin bush (Godwin, 1996). They were totally convinced of the rightness of their actions, even “…the need to protect our munts from themselves” (Fuller, 2004, p. 37). They were the bearers of civilisation and Christianity.
It can be concluded from the above that white Rhodesians used their political power, derived initially from their attachment and loyalty to the British Empire and later sourced in their rebellion against the same, to protect their privileged economic standing along with what they perceived to be their racial and cultural superiority. Since they viewed themselves as being racially superior their political ascendency was logical to them and was necessary in order to maintain their position of power and privilege.
government buildings and schools as well as postage stamps and coins. In support of such a declaration of loyalty all formal occasions, even cinema shows, were introduced by the playing of the British national anthem (Smith, 1997). Rhodesians were also proud of the Federation with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland since they regarded it as a spatial extension of the empire in their particular part of Africa (Welensky, 1964). At the same time however, they were always mindful of the distance between themselves and London and claimed a superior knowledge of Africa and its peoples, because of their direct and close involvement (Griffiths, 1995).
From the earliest days of their settlement white Southern Rhodesians, like their Northern Rhodesian counterparts, set themselves the task of creating a home away from home by building ‘little Englands’ in Africa. These are described by Kay (1967, p.
29) as “…secure islands of civilisation within a primitive and undeveloped country”.
Within these segregated spatial enclaves whites lived what they came to regard as their unique ‘Rhodesian way of life’ (L'Ange, 2005; Weinrich, 1979), a way of life which conferred on white Rhodesians a standard of living much higher than they would have enjoyed elsewhere (Godwin & Hancock, 1993; L'Ange, 2005; St. John, 2007; Weinrich, 1979). L’Ange (2005, p. 280) describes this “Rhodesian way of life” as “…a rare and satisfying existence made possible by an equable climate, largely beautiful scenery, good farming country, relatively rich mineral resources, plenty of cheap labour, and superb recreational amenities”. Some Rhodesians lived this way of life on their farms.
Most lived in towns and most of these, in turn, lived in either Salisbury or Bulawayo (Fig.
1) (Kay, 1967).
When the British began the process of granting independence to their colonies and the geographical space harbouring the ‘Rhodesian way of life’ became threatened, Ian Smith declared UDI and promised that the way of life in question would last a thousand years. The incorporation of a powerful sense of geographical space and the need to protect it at all costs, not least from guerrilla incursions from bases in Zambia and Mozambique, was a noteworthy feature of the nation building project which followed the declaration of independence (Smith, 1997). A sense of the white Rhodesian nationalism that was encapsulated by this is captured by St. John (2007, pp. 191-192):
All my life I’d been taught to value and hold sacred the name of Rhodesia and the history and blood-ties that bound me to it. I’d been raised on the belief that ours was the very best country on earth, with
the best climate under God’s sun, and that everything about it was special: our landscape, our wildlife, our green and white flag, the living flame that was our national flower, the flame lily, our national anthem, set to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. And that because these things were so special, they were worth fighting for and worth dying for. Even our war was better than anyone else’s war, because we had the best songs and the most cheerful ‘troopie canteens’ and the bravest, most dedicated soldiers. And because we were told these things so often and saw all of this beauty and courage and magnificence with our own eyes, our land became our life; our nationality, our identity.
St. John (2007) focuses on the romantic and emotional call of Rhodesia’s landscapes in the building of Rhodesian whiteness. Frequent other references in the biographical literature bear testimony to the same (Baker, 2000; Godwin, 1996; Liebenberg, 2008;
Megahey, 2005; Taylor, 2000). I return to this in Chapter 6.
The contention of Hughes (2010) is that white settlement depended not only on seizing power, wealth and territory from Africans but on finding some way of including whites.
Whites had to establish a geographical form of ownership and they achieved this by narrating the land. An ability to control territory was integral to this and as the Rhodesians marked out their territory they were able to engender a patriotism which harked back to the time when the conquering pioneers made the land their ‘own’ for the first time (Godwin & Hancock, 1993; Liebenberg, 2008). The position of Pilosoff (2012) on this is that Rhodesians used the landscape as a means of engaging with Rhodesia without having to engage with the African people. Many have continued with the same in present day Zimbabwe.
As a mark of taming and controlling their landscapes Rhodesians established distinctive farmsteads and colourful gardens on their farms. The signs could be traced by “…the bright scarlets, mauves and pinks of the bougainvillaea…the corrugated tin roofs of their homesteads peeping through thickets of mimosa trees” (Godwin, 1996, p. 63). The houses themselves were typically “…without architecture or design…long and sprawling, with random additions” (St. John, 2007, p. 104). As they marked out their geographical presence in this way Rhodesians formed deep attachments to the environments they built. St. John (2007, p. 119) describes her deep attachment to her family farm, Rainbow’s End, which she refers to as her “…Enid Blyton idyll of niceness”.
Fuller (2002) tells of her deep attachment to her parents’ farm on the Mozambique
border, an attachment which became all the more absorbing by its situatedness at the epicentre of the liberation war which she witnessed as a child and in which her father fought. Rhodesians also established distinctive towns to which they became equally attached. St John (2007, p. 26), for example, is impacted by the “…low colonial-style buildings in washed-out colours, like some sun-faded postcard from the fifties”, which she finds in her home town, the quintessentially Rhodesian country town of Hartley (now called Chegutu). Taylor (2000, p. 213) identifies with the “…rough, open feel of the frontier”, which he finds in Bulawayo, the country’s second city. In a similar vein, Godwin (1996) feels intimately connected to what he calls his spiritual home, the village of Chimanimani, set in its mystical mountain setting in the Eastern Highlands of the country (Fig. 1).
‘Localism’ was a much stronger phenomenon among Southern Rhodesians/Rhodesians than it ever was among Northern Rhodesian whites. It found expression in the pride Rhodesians had in their white towns and cities, their ‘little Englands’, as has been noted above, and in the spaces occupied by such public places as schools. Such local places were typically beautifully landscaped and evoked much pride among those white Rhodesians who were associated with them (Lamb, 2006). Localism also found expression in clubs and societies and was strongly manifested in sporting affiliations at town, district and provincial levels.
In reality, whether Rhodesians lived on farms or in towns and cities, they lived in scattered, racially exclusive spatial enclaves. The much flouted ‘Rhodesian way of life’, as has been noted, meant a lifestyle of exclusiveness and privilege. It was lived within these enclaves where, if they were allowed entry at all, Africans were not even permitted to shop in the same shops as whites (Todd, 1982). They were artificial worlds, completely disconnected from African realities (Caute, 1983). Furthermore, the nationalist project with which Rhodesians became preoccupied was built on insecure, tenuous foundations since not only were their white numbers minimal, but only about 40% of them were actually born in Rhodesia (Caute, 1983). There was also a high turn- over of population as people came and left the country in not insignificant numbers (Godwin & Hancock, 1993). As a result, “…when they spoke of ‘everything we built up here’, that first person plural depended on a self-serving osmosis” (Caute, 1983, p. 88).
From the above it is apparent that geographical spaces were not neutral abstractions for white Rhodesians who formed emotional attachments to their spaces and drew them into their conceptualisations of who they were. The control of space was tied to the exercising of political control and was also a means of asserting white control and occupation without whites having to engage the majority African people in any capacity other than as a labouring class.
2.4.2.3. Whiteness: The educational space
Integral to the creation and maintenance of white Rhodesian nationalism was an education system which catered separately for whites and Africans. This in itself set white children apart and prepared them for separate, privileged lives as adults (Caute, 1983). Whites regarded themselves as being superior and they believed that they needed an education system which could safeguard the moral stamina of their children as they negotiated their way through a sea of degenerative African influences (Atkinson, 1982). It was also necessary for Africans to be educated to believe that whites were superior.
Most white children attended state schools at no cost to their parents and attendance was compulsory for children between the ages of 7 and 15 years (Megahey, 2005).
Most state schools were bilateral in nature, offering both ‘academic’ and ‘practical’
streams (Winch, 1982). Some however, focused purely on academics. Such schools went out of their way to set themselves up along the same lines as British grammar schools and portrayed themselves as bastions of privilege and custodians of British bourgeois heritage (Caute, 1983).
Umtali (Mutare) Boys’ High School was one such school and I describe it here so as to provide an insight to what was involved. Although it was a state school there were distinct similarities with St Stephen’s College, the private school I attended in Rhodesia.
It sought to fashion itself along British grammar school lines, although a distinct public school ‘feel’ could also be detected. It provided a fine example of what many white Rhodesians regarded as their ideal in respect of state education. Caute (1983, p. 403) demonstrates the point by citing an advertisement for the school to show how the school marketed itself and its mission and the educational experience it offered. The school’s many achievements are highlighted and it is described as “…a paradise of games fields, tennis courts, and squash courts set down in 120 landscaped acres”, a
setting becoming of a school which produced gentlemen. The advertisement was published in August 1980 just as the new state of Zimbabwe was being born. It was now for the first time that Africans were allowed to attend the school and the headmaster was concerned about a ‘sudden influx’. He was interviewed by Caute (1983, pp. 402- 403) and his responses to questions are particularly telling. He refers to a brochure which declares that pupils will be accepted to his school as long as they “…accept and fit in with the traditions, way of life, discipline and type of curriculum as have hitherto prevailed at the school”. Insisting on the fairness of this, the headmaster said it was “…a question of preserving your westernised, Christian concept of education”. He hastened to add that “…we might be forced to play soccer here instead of rugby…if we suffered an influx”, soccer being regarded as a working class and African sport.
The extract below, in which Judith Todd (1982, pp. 91-92), the daughter of Southern Rhodesia’s liberal prime-minister, Mr Garfield Todd, of the early 1950s, describes race relations in the 1960s, goes some way in helping to contextualise such racialised thinking about white schooling:
When children go to school they go to white schools and the only Africans they will see are those who sweep the grounds, tidy the classrooms and empty the wastepaper baskets. All around them, right through their society, Africans are employed in a subservient position. If by any chance they should meet an African doctor, or lawyer, or teacher, the fact that this man has a black skin is more telling than any letters he might have after his name. Because he is black he is a servant. Because he is black he has no right to be anything but a servant. ‘You can go in there to sweep the floor’, a legendary policeman stationed outside a white church is said to have told an African, ‘but God help you if I catch you praying!’
The state schooling system was designed to be supportive of the elite model of bourgeois whiteness. Pupils were treated as if they were all in this fold and while the majority were not, there was a sense in which they, or at least their parents, could imagine that they were and there was an element of control in this. Many of the schools in fact did no more than “…fit the average boy and girl for citizenship” (Winch, 1982, p.
76). Children finished school by writing the examinations of British Examination Boards and as such, they were taught curriculum content of a decidedly British, bourgeois character (Atkinson, 1982; St. John, 2007). They learnt little about Africa and Africans unless it was according to European constructions of the same. There was hardly any
teaching of African languages at schools (Godwin & Hancock, 1993). White Rhodesians knew Africans only as a servant-class. If African children did attend school, they did so in African residential areas (known as townships or compounds) which were situated away from white areas, out of sight and out of mind (Caute, 1983; Godwin & Hancock, 1993; St. John, 2007).
White Rhodesians learnt about themselves as a homogenous, brave, pioneering people and frequent reference was made in their lessons to the brave pioneers who had gone before. They had tamed a wilderness, calmed backward tribes and created a country out of nothing. Based on this, white Rhodesians believed that they had every right to secure what they believed was rightfully theirs’ (Godwin & Hancock, 1993; Liebenberg, 2008; St. John, 2007). The notion of children being taught an inverted epistemology (Steyn, 2012), which was explained earlier, has relevance here.
Both state and private white Rhodesian schools prided themselves in being strong sporting institutions and sport featured prominently in the school day (Lamb, 2006). It was always important to play a fair game and to never let the side down since this would help to teach children how they should one day regard their country (Smith, 1997). School traditions, discipline and conformity were highly prized and schools were inevitably authoritarian institutions where children, especially boys, were subjected to the kind of discipline that would stand them in good stead for the leadership roles they would be expected to play as adults (Caute, 1983). It was also the case that individualism was stressed in that pupils were taught that the progress they made within the structures into which they had been socialised depended on their own effort and choices (Atkinson, 1982).
The patriarchal nature of white Rhodesian society has been referred to in the afore- going sub-section and official attitudes towards sexuality have also been mentioned.
Supportive moral codes were readily taught as norms in white Rhodesian schools in respect of both curriculum content and organisational structure (Caute, 1983; Todd, 1982). Behaviour which departed from established sexuality norms was considered deviant and was supported by powerful codes of silence on the part of those who were not heterosexual (Caute, 1983).
While educational standards in the country’s white government schools were comparable to those in many parts of the western world, not least to those in Britain
itself, there nevertheless emerged a growing demand for private schools. Megahey (2005) identifies a number of factors as being responsible for this. Some parents wanted their children to be educated according to a specifically Christian ethos, whilst others desired the status they believed a private school education would confer. An outward sign of the desired status was how people spoke and many parents believed that a private school education would teach their children to speak without the unattractive Rhodesian accent which showed such “…a lack of cultural training”
(Megahey, 2005, p. 7), and a distinct absence of a particular form of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 1988). The coming to power of the Afrikaner dominated National Party in South Africa in 1948 was another factor. A number of Rhodesian parents had availed themselves of the opportunities presented by private schools in South Africa but after the National Party came to power the highly racialised atmosphere in the country became far less appealing to white Rhodesians in “…their most British of colonies”
(Megahey, 2005, p. 9). Increased immigration, especially from Britain after the Second World War, and the prospect of the coming into being of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, were further factors favouring the establishment of a strong private school sector in Rhodesia (Megahey, 2005).
Randall (1982) identifies a typical British ‘colonial mentality’ as implying devotion to the British crown and to an empire that would last forever. Elitist private schools were strongly supportive of such a mentality and those in Rhodesia were no exception. The country’s elite private schools were clones of British public schools. Their sole purpose was to turn out refined white individuals of Christian character, individuals who were loyal and patriotic and dedicated to the maintenance of civilised Christian standards and values in Rhodesia and beyond (Megahey, 2005). In pursuit of this, academically inclined Eurocentric curricula were followed and examinations were set by British examining authorities (Megahey, 2005).
Traditionally, British public schools, upon which Rhodesian private schools were so closely modelled, were single-sex schools. This was necessary so that boys and girls could be prepared for their different roles in life, boys needing to be gentlemen and empire builders, and girls needing to be prepared to play the supportive roles of
‘gentlewomen’ whose thoughts were not supposed to extend much beyond the social graces and the well-being of their menfolk. Given the patriarchal nature of Victorian and
colonial societies there was always a strong emphasis on boys’ public school education, in particular (Randall, 1982).
Like British public schools and their colonial clones, Rhodesian private schools were typically boarding-schools (Megahey, 2005). Such schools were thought to be able to exert a stronger hold over pupils who could more readily become part of a ‘total institution’ (Randall, 1982). In some ways sending a child to boarding school amounted to extrusion from the nuclear family. Randall (1982, p. 41) argues that the effect was
“…to realign dependency and loyalty from the immediate nuclear family to a wider grouping”. When there were accompanying initiation ceremonies, which were reminiscent of rites of passage, the realignment to school and eventually to country was even stronger (Randall, 1982).
Typically it was the case that British public boarding-schools were set on their own in the country, often on vast country estates (Randall, 1982) and the same applied to Rhodesian private boarding-schools. Being set apart spatially they were away from the distractions of life and would thus be better able to do their work of preparing young men and women for their future roles in life. Being set on country estates was furthermore reminiscent of the large country estates from which the children of the aristocracy came. This was attractive to those aspiring to aristocratic standards (Randal, 1982).
Strong ‘house systems’ existed within Rhodesian boarding-schools. Within the houses, strong ‘boy government’ was heavily relied upon in assisting masters to enforce the required standards of discipline, respect for rules and rituals, and the inculcation of conformity to the requirements of the school. The moulding of character was the primary goal. In the case of boys, good character was measured by their attitudes, accents and manners and their loyalty to both their school and their country (Randall, 1982). A strong individualism was a further defining feature of a boy’s character despite the requirement of conforming to what the school expected (Megahey, 2005).
Sport was highly prized in British public schools (Randall, 1982) and perhaps even more so in the private boarding schools of Rhodesia (Megahey, 2005). Cricket and rugby were the key sports and were thought to be important games in the teaching of physical courage, mental discipline and team spirit. The notion of ‘playing the game’ and ‘having