The African immigrant factor in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1930 : the origin and influence of external elements in a colonial setting

• Main Author: Makambe, Elioth Petros
• Published: University of York 1979
• Subjects: 968.91
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.464710

The founding of the colony of Southern Rhodesia created a plural society quite in keeping with the Furnivall model and very much characterized by dissensus, conflict and coercion as features of general interaction between the dominant and the subordinate strata of this newly founded society. In reality, a three-tier social segmental system evolved in the new society, with the foreign African elements representing an interpolating median between the dominant white settler classes and the subject African indigenous societies. Introduced, at first, as simple menials, military auxiliaries and necessary adjuncts to missionary enterprise, the foreign Africans, then largely from South Africa, were gradually reinforced in their numbers by numerous other immigrant groups brought into the country later, at various stages, as labourers, but with various degrees of success. The Abyssinians, Somalis and Arabs from North East Africa and Aden, for example, failed to provide Southern Rhodesia with a perennial external source of labour supply either because these recruits would not accept employment under the chattel labour conditions prescribed by Southern Rhodesia's repressive colonial setting or because of the reluctance of the territory's colonist employers to reform these conditions in question. Indian labour supply would not materialise because the plan obviously ran counter to the relatively liberal political philosophy of the colonial government of India at Simla; a philosophy that was expected to take into consideration issues of relevance to universal British imperial citizenship and trusteeship. Chinese labour supply raised so much controversy and fragmented the white colonial front in Southern Rhodesia so seriously that it had to be abandoned. The Mfengu settlement scheme was only a temporary success, as far as its labour value was concerned.