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The Rise of an African Middle Class

Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898â"1965

Indiana University Press

Running against the Wind

African Social Mobility and Identity in a Settler Colonial Society

In 1915, a high police official in Bulawayo, responding to repeated entreaties by various African organizations, appealed to the top colonial administrator to establish a housing scheme "for the more respectable class of natives who form part of the labour supply of the town, and who shun the location [or African ghetto] as a dwelling place for their wives and families." Shortly thereafter the chief native commissioner, the head civil servant in charge of the colonized people, announced that the government had purchased land outside the city for such a scheme, asserting further that the move was aimed at accommodating the "wishes of the better class of natives ... who desire to remove their women and children from the contaminating influences inseparable from town native locations." Yet despite such statements by officials acknowledging the existence of a "more respectable" and "better" stratum among the colonized population, the preponderant tendency of government policy, and certainly the general tenor of Southern Rhodesian settler society, vitiated the process of African middle-class formation. In the case of the housing scheme, for instance, it took two decades for the colonial regime actually to fulfill its promise, and even then the project fell so short of minimal expectations that it was initially boycotted by elite Africans in Bulawayo, their abhorrence of ghetto living notwithstanding. In this, as in almost all respects, the rise of a black petty bourgeoisie in Southern Rhodesia was largely a tale of running against the wind.

Succinctly stated, the Rhodesian settlers and their political leaders opposed the rise of an African middle class because they believed such a social stratum posed a threat to white colonial domination. The colonialists were especially fearful that a politicized black elite, its aspirations frustrated by racial barriers, would seek to mobilize the African masses against settler rule. These concerns, previously expressed only inchoately, began to crystallize in the immediate post-World War I era, hard on the heels of a vast upsurge in African political consciousness, agitation, and organization.

THE NEGATION OF AFRICAN SOCIAL MOBILITY

The first target of the postwar attack on African middle-class formation was education, the principal avenue of social mobility in colonial Africa. Blaming their problems on the missionaries, who at that time provided practically all the formal schooling Africans received, colonial officials opened a major critique of African education, focusing on what they considered an overemphasis on literary development. The missionaries, these officials sneered, had sown a patch of book learning, leaving white society to reap the bitter fruit of deracinated and frustrated school-leavers who existed in a social netherworld: alienated from the African masses, these striving blacks were rebuffed by the ruling race as well. But mission natives, as Africans with formal schooling were derisively called, did not just threaten white domination. They also were seen as a menace to the colonially constructed conception of "tribal" society, an imagined community of pristine Africans whom the authorities jealously sought to protect from the baneful influences of "civilization," especially if those professing to be the bearers of civilization were black.

Missionary education, then, had produced the Dangerous Native, a figure portrayed — and caricatured — in settler lore as a miseducated, urbanized male agitator, his lips dripping with wild and imperfectly understood rhetoric about rights. Juxtaposed against the Dangerous Native was the Good Native. Equally idealized and masculinist as his sinister opposite number, the Good Native was "properly" trained and respectful of authority, deferring to white Native Affairs bureaucrats and their African underlings (chiefs) as he moved about the countryside, tools in hand, making himself useful to his neighbors. As the image suggests, the Good Native was, fundamentally, a product of industrial education.

Lauded as a social alchemy, an antidote to the Dangerous Native, industrial education occupied pride of place in the "retribalization" campaign launched by the colonial regime in the post-World War I era. Dubbed "native development" in official parlance, retribalization had as one of its main objectives a full-scale reorientation of African education, with academic pursuits, if they figured at all, occupying a decidedly inferior position to industrial training in the curriculum.

Retribalization also privileged chiefs and other so-called traditional authorities over the emerging African middle class, a sociopolitical assault much resented by elite blacks. The resentment was especially strong in the rural areas, where elite Africans were far less concentrated than in the urban centers and where, conversely, the traditional authorities and their Native Affairs Department patrons were strongest. T. Joseph Magore Chitenene, a teacher in Gutu, an area notorious (and celebrated) for its rebellious ways, vented the feelings of the rural, educated black elite: "There are two divisions of people to-day, the cultured division and the division of the illiterate. Cultured people are finding it hard to be ruled over by the illiterate, simply because the illiterate swallow things unchewed, that is they get anything from the authorities and they do not bother to ask why it is like this or who has made this thing. Cultured people like to do things when they understand why they should do them." Retribalization was directed against self-described cultured and civilized Africans like Chitenene. As envisaged by officials, the recipients of industrial training, a major plank in the retribalization project, would be rusticated. Thus discharged into the Reserves — the official name for the unproductive rural areas to which Africans were consigned under the system of racial segregation — educated Africans would develop "along their own lines," instead of being allowed to migrate to the white urban centers to compete directly with European settlers.

The leading strategist in the campaign to undermine the foundation of African middle-class formation was Herbert S. Keigwin, a roving British imperial bureaucrat. "The policy of raising the mass ever so little is infinitely preferred to any scheme for the advancement of the few," Keigwin announced in a landmark report submitted to the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Council in 1920. Such a high-profile rebuke of missionary education for its alleged elitism and bookish propensity — a gross exaggeration of the missionary enterprise as it actually operated, as we shall see — was not altogether unprecedented. A decade earlier the colony's first general commission on native policy, using similar language, had "greatly deprecate[d] any scheme of education that aims at the development of the exceptional, while advocating with all their power the steady enlightenment and upliftment of the mass." Now, with the full and enthusiastic backing of officials at the highest level, and under the guise of "raising the mass," Keigwin offered a comprehensive plan to retard the development of a cadre of modern-educated Africans.

The notion of raising the mass was an integral part of the project to checkmate the Dangerous Native. In his report to the Legislative Council, Keigwin outlined the goal of the policy of native development and its linchpin, industrial training. He conceded that "talented men will from time to time emerge" among the Africans, individuals whose desire for "advanced education" could not easily be frustrated. Instead, the regime should seek to "minimise the dangers arising from over-education," that is, literary training, by reducing "the gap between these [educated men] and the mass" through what amounted to universal industrial education. If the "general standard of intelligence will be raised," Keigwin reasoned, more Africans would "become capable of a correct appreciation of values, political and economical. The educated agitator will not have the same ignorant populace to work upon, and his inflammatory doctrines will have less chance of success."

Keigwin's plan both expressed and reinforced widespread settler fear and loathing of Africans with any kind of book learning. It had long been considered axiomatic by officials and ordinary whites alike that missionary education virtually rendered Africans useless. Indeed, the colonialists were never more rhapsodic than when holding forth on the virtues of "raw natives" as compared with educated "boys" (educated "girls" were much more rare). In evidence presented to the South African Native Affairs Commission of 19031905, which included Southern Rhodesia, one native commissioner exclaimed: "The majority of educated Natives I have met usually turned out to be idle and in a great measure dishonest. ... I don't think the State should support Native education beyond what is required to make him a good workman; he should not be educated until he fancies himself a fine gentleman too good to undertake ordinary work." Literate Africans, another official informed the commission, faced open discrimination in employment: "Many employers of labour will not engage a boy who is a 'Mission boy.'"

The vilification, effectively a disinformation campaign against the aspiring African elite, became more intense and widespread over time. Appearing before another commission in 1925, this one investigating the concerns about black education so prominently publicized by Keigwin, a "kind and justly employer" with more than two thousand Africans in his service declared: "if you want to spoil a good nigger send him to a mission. He is casual and approaches you as an equal." Nor was the animus gender-specific. The 1925 education commission also heard testimony that white women shared the views of their husbands: "A clear majority of Rhodesian women, a large number of whom are fair and indulgent mistresses, have the opinion that mission-trained Natives are self-assertive and impudent. It is also said that mission Natives are not as honest as 'raw' Natives."

The Rhodesian settlers were in no doubt as to why the colony had been established, and they generally regarded pursuit of their individual and group interests as mutually exclusive of whatever aspirations toward mobility the colonized majority might hold. "The white people came here primarily not to uplift the native," Godfrey Huggins, then leader of the opposition, announced bluntly in the Legislative Assembly in 1931. "They came here for commercial reasons." Little wonder, then, that the negation of African aspirations reached its high point under Huggins, who became prime minister in 1933, a position he retained for two decades before moving up to head the government of the newly created Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a union of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi). Huggins, his sympathetic biographers affirm, "dreaded the idea of producing [African] babus who could not find jobs but would read or write revolutionary pamphlets instead."

Huggins's eventual political ascendancy reaffirmed the preeminence of settler over African interests in Southern Rhodesia, both in substance and symbol. Yet the prime minister's policy of segregation, called parallel development — a formulation inspired by the American doctrine of separate but equal — involved no radical disjunction; it was more a refinement of, rather than a sharp departure from, past segregationist practices. The major pillars of Rhodesian segregation — territorial, juridical, educational, and occupational — had been established under the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which governed the colony from its inception in 1890 until 1923. In 1923, when company rule gave way to self-government, chosen by the almost exclusively white electorate in preference to incorporation into the Union of South Africa, the system of segregation underwent additional fine-tuning.

Self-government, a British imperial arrangement stopping just short of independence, greatly enhanced the political power of the settlers. The new dispensation spawned increasingly shrill demands to "make Rhodesia white," that is, to enshrine settler privileges by closing all major avenues of social mobility to Africans and, concomitantly, guarding against Indian (South Asian) "penetration." Especially eager for protection against black advancement, present and future, were the national bourgeoisie (that is, settler businessmen who had chafed under the BSAC, which they considered an agent of international capital) and organized white labor, composed mainly of artisans and other skilled workers.

The Rhodesia Party — which ruled the colony for a decade, from the advent of self-government in 1923 to Huggins's assumption of power in 1933 — did not betray the confidence of the settler electorate; indeed, it strengthened the barriers against African aspirations in two crucial areas — land and education. In the history of colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, no issue was more vexatious than land, and the crowning achievement of the Rhodesia Party government was codification of territorial segregation. The racial division of the land, legally and formally, commenced with the appointment of a blue-ribbon commission, in good British imperial fashion. The commission's report, presented in 1925, culminated five years later in the Land Apportionment Act. Hailed as a settlers' Magna Carta, this legislation designated the colony's best farm land, as well as its mines and urban centers, as exclusive white preserves — areas from which Africans were barred, except as temporary sojourners in the employment of Europeans. The Land Apportionment Act thus forbade Africans from owning real property in the urban centers, dashing the dreams of aspiring black homeowners as well as crippling the accumulation prospects of black would-be entrepreneurs.

In yet another blow to black social mobility, the Rhodesia Party government sought to further limit the aspirations of the colonized people by expanding the BSAC policy of undermining African education. Toward this end, a commission on African education was appointed, with the commission presenting its report in 1925, the same year — and not coincidentally — that the land commission tabled its findings. The report of the education commission repeated the stereotypes of educated Africans and came out in favor of industrial training over academic learning. Extolling the virtues of raising the mass instead of advancing the few, it advocated a broad approach to native development and industrial training. In line with the commission's recommendations, the government eventually established a new agency, the Department of Native Development, ostensibly to promote social and economic progress in the Reserves. The department's name, however, belied its mission: it promoted underdevelopment rather than development. Using its admittedly limited funds, and more importantly the coercive capacity of the state to bend the missionaries to its will, the Department of Native Development and allied agencies funneled scarce resources into the cul-de-sac of industrial training, which they regarded as the counteragent of African middle-class formation.

The efforts of the Rhodesia Party government to consolidate white supremacy did not, however, impress Godfrey Huggins and his Reform Party. As leader of the opposition in the Legislative Assembly, Huggins — the most prominent to date in a long line of alpha-champions of white Rhodesia — attacked the government's initiatives as insufficient, sounding a note of settler populism as he thundered against the economic threat allegedly posed by Africans. The Rhodesia Party, reputedly beholden to the settler national bourgeoisie, had not done enough to protect white labor and small settler shopkeepers, Huggins objected. He thought it "absolutely wrong from the white man's point of view if you are going to allow and to place these educated natives, preachers, parsons and skilled people of every description, to throw them back on the white civilisation," that is, to allow them to take up residence in the urban areas where they would compete with the settlers. To guard fully against the economic black peril, Huggins advocated influx control, a rigorous screening of Africans in the urban centers to weed out those considered undesirable, coupled with greater control over the ones allowed to remain.

On coming to power, Huggins was forced to swallow much of his fire-eating rhetoric: the indispensable role of African labor in the colonial economy — agrarian, mining, and urban — ruled out the more drastic measures he had advocated while in the opposition. But although unable to expel Africans en mass from the cities, Huggins's government maintained and intensified the regime of segregation it inherited from the BSAC and the Rhodesia Party, including in the crucial areas of land and education. Further, Huggins's unremitting hostility to African entrepreneurship in the urban business districts, his even deeper aversion to anything remotely smacking of social equality between the races, and his repeated attempts to disfranchise the small number of African voters — all measurably solidified the edifice against African social mobility.

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Excerpted from The Rise of an African Middle Class by Michael O. West. Copyright © 2002 Michael O. West. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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