Gardner Thompson. A Critical History of Southern Rhodesia. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2024. vii + 245 pp. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781685859886.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: The irony of A Critical History of Southern Rhodesia by Gardner Thompson is that it begins by interrogating itself: "Why a New History of Southern Rhodesia?"At stake in exploring this seemingly redundant question is that it helps reevaluate not only Zimbabwe's past, but also her current moment.Put differently, how do we make sense of the current crisis in Zimbabwe out of its troubled past?To address this, the book revolves around three issues urgently at stake: "First, an understanding of the former colony's history-especially the final two decades of reactionary White supremacist rule-throws light on the plight of the twentyfirst century Zimbabwe: its spectacular descent "from breadbasket to basketcase," personality rule (up to 2017) of Robert Mugabe to the current President Emmerson Mnangagwa.Second, Thompson engages "renewed discussions of empire from both sides of the Atlantic" (3).Third, he proposes a framework for making "fair judgments" about the past and historical figures (4).Following a chronological turn of events, the book begins with Cecil John Rhodes, who, with financial resources from the British South Africa Company and political ties to the Boers and Afrikaners, sought to subjugate Africa.His deceptive Rudd Concession initiated the colonization of the major African indigenous groups, Ndebele and Shona, leading to the country being named Rhodesia after him around the 1890s.On October 1, 1923, the country was fully annexed by Britain, governed by a white minority until their Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 under Prime Minister Ian Smith.At that time, 65,000 whites dominated the lives of 1,390,000 Africans.Later, African anti-colonial leaders including Ndabaningi Sithole and Joshua Nkomo emerged, alarming White supremacists (48).To curb this, White politicians instituted segregation measures, created a two-tier electoral system in 1958 to bar Black majority rule because qualifications skewed in favor of Whites.On the global scene, Thompson asserts that World War II made it increasingly difficult to justify colonialism morally, especially with the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which deliberately excluded peoples in Europe's African colonies from its provisions of human rights, setting the stage for "embryonic militancy among the educated African elite" such as Thompson Samkange, who led rural and urban African open protests (55).A Critical History of Southern Rhodesia is crucially instructive as it describes two categories of White people to challenge the frequent oversimplification in previous studies about how Whites perceived their coexistence and future with Africans (61).Thompson's reference to the award-winning literary writer Doris Lessing's return
Source: African Studies Review
Author: Lawrence Chamunorwa
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4413380431