The Semantics of Settler Colonialism

David Kenrick

On 11 November 1965, the Southern African colony of Southern Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain.[1] Incensed by the ‘winds of change’ blowing through the continent, the white settler state broke off negotiations with Harold Wilson’s Labour government, and decided to go it alone. Britain, having handed political autonomy to the Rhodesian government (along with control of one of Africa’s most technologically-advanced militaries), was powerless to resist this act of treason, which was somewhat ironically taken in Queen Elizabeth II’s name.

This declaration of independence (UDI), a ‘loyal’ act of treason, was a paradox typical of Rhodesia: a place typified by the tensions between a quintessentially colonial British society, and its vision for itself as a viable, post-colonial national community. The rebellion persisted until April 1980, when Britain’s last African colony gained its independence as Zimbabwe, over two decades after Britain’s colonial withdrawal from Africa had begun with the independence of the Gold Coast colony (as Ghana) in 1957.[2]

Viewed alone, the UDI rebellion is a bizarre and anomalous late-colonial episode, but it was profoundly connected to broader trends taking place around the world: the decolonisation of Africa and Asia and the advent of ‘majority-rule’ administrations and states; the re-negotiation of national identities taking place in settler colonial societies in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand; and the evolving and deeply intertwined discourses of Cold War and decolonisation. It also has ramifications for the way we understand contemporary identity politics in what Lorenzo Veracini has called ‘the settler colonial present’.[3] In particular, Rhodesia continues to inspire discourses of racially-defined national identities and ‘whiteness’ in these settler societies, as well as in Britain and other parts of the ‘Western world’.

The period in which Rhodesia rebelled against Britain and the concept of ‘majority-rule’, or the right of black Africans to rule themselves, was one of flux, transition, and contestation as different groups fought for the right to define their nations. The languages of unilateralism, sovereignty, and independence used by the Rhodesians thus belied the fact that their nation relied upon, and was embedded within, a series of transnational networks that worked both for and against the rebel state.

One such network was the so-called ‘white bloc’ which surrounded Rhodesia upon UDI. This bloc, consisting of South Africa and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, almost surrounded Rhodesia, and went a long way towards mitigating the international economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations in 1965. Thanks to trading links through South African ports and the Mozambican port of Beira, Rhodesia continued to receive vital supplies, such as oil, to keep its rebellion going.

The Southern African white bloc also shared intelligence, and military personnel and hardware, mirroring the transnational struggles waged by the major Zimbabwean liberation armies, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and the Zimbabwean People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA). These armies were based outside of Rhodesia, in Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

In this sense the war being fought for the Rhodesian and Zimbabwean nations was markedly transnational. While it claimed to stand alone, the support of Portugal and South Africa meant that Rhodesia did not fight alone, and by the end of the liberation war South Africa was bankrolling the defence of the white state.

Figure 1- Rhodesia in 1965, surrounded on 3 sides by colonies or friendly states (purple) and states which actively supported the Zimbabwean liberation movements (orange) – Image: Cliftonian, Wikipedia

Rhodesia was also part of wider settler colonial networks which, along with the former imperial mother country of Britain, were forced to interrogate their identities in the face of imperial retreat. Though nationalist histories told stories of colonies flourishing as nations, often in the wake of bloody sacrifices such as the First World War battle of Gallipoli, these tales were simplistic and self-serving.

These settler-colonial fictions served to obscure the continuing domination of indigenous populations by indigenising the settler presence, recasting settlers (who were, by definition, outsiders) as ‘natural’ citizens. These languages of belonging masked continued social, political, and economic inequalities. In this sense Rhodesia was one among many; far from being an exceptional basket-case state, it engaged in wider global reassessments of white identity which saw a raft of new national symbols such as anthems and flags emerge to signify sovereignty.

The Rhodesian rebellion also drew upon and engaged with debates in Britain about what Britishness meant, leading  postcolonial scholars like Bill Schwarz to see in the Rhodesian crisis the evolution of long-gestating notions of racial whiteness and their associations with Britishness.[4] As Britain became more multicultural after the Second World War, white Britons began to invert discourses of colonisation, claiming that the ‘mother country’ was being ‘colonised’ by Caribbean and South Asian migrants.

This logic was, and continues to be, perverse. Yet it had a considerable emotive hold. What Rhodesia offered to discontented Britons, feeling adrift and emasculated in a post-imperial world, was a haven of Britishness, a vision of a past – better Britain – where imperialist notions of gender, race, and decorum were preserved.

Such notions were fuelled by a sense of shared history and culture. When proud Rhodesians spoke of their plucky little country defying global economic sanctions, they used the idioms of the Second World War. Rhodesia had inherited the ‘blitz spirit’ and the ghost of Winston Churchill was often evoked by the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, who went so far as to say that if Churchill were still alive (he conveniently died in 1965, shortly before UDI) he would choose to live in Rhodesia.[5]

In Rhodesia, whites were a race set against time, defying decolonisation to preserve what they considered to be the ‘best of British’. Their failure was due to the collapse of white society domestically, the ratcheting up of pressure by an increasingly effective liberation movement, and the erosion of the white Southern Bloc. Mozambican independence in 1975 saw the opening of a new 3,000-mile frontier for the already-overstretched Rhodesians to police, and whenever South Africa sought to bring the intransigent Rhodesians to the negotiating table, it simply turned off the economic and military taps sustaining the rebel state’s resistance.[6]

Figure 2- Rhodesia in 1975, after the fall of Portuguese Colonialism and Botswanan Independence, relied solely upon South Africa (purple) and was now surrounded by hostile states (orange). Image: Cliftonian Wikipedia

In 1977, two years before Rhodesia collapsed, British pop-punk band The Jam sang of ‘War in Rhodesia, Far Away, A Distant Land’.[7] But thanks to the international networks of which Rhodesia was a part, Rhodesia was closer to home than the lyrics suggested. The Rhodesian rebellion came at a time of increasing racial anxieties in 1960s and 1970s Britain. In the twilight of Britain’s empire, white nationalist fervour was stoked by opportunistic politicians such as Enoch Powell. Powell often held up the Rhodesian crisis as yet another example of Britain’s post-imperial emasculation and humiliation.[8]

Though Powell’s conception of Britain was more complicated than it has often been portrayed, a white backlash in support of Rhodesia’s rebellion helped to fuel a broader narrative that continues to haunt contemporary British politics: the idea that Britain, once so great, could be great again. This, like white Rhodesia’s narrative of sovereign independence, was based upon misplaced assumptions about the strength of the nation, and its failure to reassess its place in the world after the empire.

Today, as white nationalism around the globe has become resurgent, the symbols of the Rhodesian state have re-emerged. Dylann Roof, who massacred 9 black churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015, was famously pictured wearing a jacket with the apartheid South African and Rhodesian flags. For such white nationalists, the story of Robert Mugabe’s

Figure 3- Dylann Roof wearing a jacket with the apartheid South African (top) and Rhodesian (bottom) flags (Facebook)

misrule of Zimbabwe (and the failings of the post-apartheid South African state) have been read as proof that white people are inherently more capable than black people. Similarly, older online communities of ‘Rhodies’, now dispersed around the world, whose colonial nostalgia has been joined and in some senses usurped by today’s growing online community of white supremacists, with no direct connection to the former colony, who venerate Rhodesia as part of their broader racist discourse.[9]

Now, as then, this obscure historical episode in Southern Central Africa was never just about a single country. It had implications which reverberated through space and time to inform debates about British and settler identity and belonging; the meaning of decolonisation and sovereignty; and the racialised nature of national identities. Though Rhodesians spoke of ‘going it alone’, their rebellion would have lacked both materiel and meaning without these broader international contexts.

David Kenrick is an independent researcher. He received his BA and MA from the University of Liverpool and his D.Phil. from St John’s College, University of Oxford. His first book, “Decolonisation, Identity and Nation in Rhodesia, 1964-1979” will be published by Palgrave as part of the Britain and the World Series on 12 December 2019. He has published work in the Journal for Southern African Studies (JSAS) regularly reviews books on imperial history, decolonisation, and settler colonialism for the JSAS, Itinerario, and other journals. He tweets at @dwkenrick

References

[1] BBC, On This Day, 11 November ‘Rhodesia breaks from UK’; AP Archive, ‘Rhodesia Proclaims Independence – 1965, Today in History, 11 Nov 16’, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6fof-8r0kM

[2] Wikipedia, ‘Decolonisation of Africa’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonisation_of_Africa

[3] L. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present(Basingstoke, 2015).

[4] See B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World(Oxford, 2012), esp. chapters 5 and 6.

[5] David Blair, ‘Ian Smith: The Man Whose Folly Unleashed Mugabe’, Daily Telegraph, 20 November 2007: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1569980/Ian-Smith-Man-whose-folly-unleashed-Mugabe.html

[6] AP Archive, ‘RR7545A Rhodesia: Ten Years After U.D.I.’, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVl8hsj7wIE

[7] https://genius.com/The-jam-the-combine-lyrics

[8] For a nuanced exploration of Powell and his politics see Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain(Cambridge, 2015).

[9] John Ismay, ‘Rhodesia’s Dead: But White Supremacists Have Given It a New Life’, New York Times Magazine, 18 April 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/magazine/rhodesia-zimbabwe-white-supremacists.html, Zack Beauchamp, ‘The racist flags of Dylann Roof’s jacket, explained’, Vox, June 18 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/6/18/8806633/charleston-shooter-flags-dylann-roof

Featured Image: © Alexander Mitrofanov / Shutterstock.com

World Revolution / Postcolonial Paradise: Utopian Visions of the “Soviet East” in the 1920-30s

Mollie Arbuthnot

Modernist re-imaginings of space and society were everywhere in the 1920s. Avant garde artists were captivated by the ideas of progress, utopia, and, especially in the Soviet Union, by revolution. Film, photography, and architecture all embraced the possibility of creating new worlds: politically, socially, and aesthetically. Soviet propaganda posters denounced the old and celebrated the radiant future awaiting the workers and peasants under socialism.

These visions of the new world were remarkably varied. This was really a period when competing visions of modernity emerged in many different places, from Paris to Moscow to Istanbul to Samarqand. Even within the scope of Soviet propaganda posters – which we might expect to represent the single, official voice of the state – there was a wide range of images and ideas, with influences from religious imagery, abstract art, and commercial advertising.

It’s hardly surprising, then, to find that there were almost as many visions of the utopian future as there were artists to depict it. Some focussed on the image of the “Soviet East.” They depicted the Bolshevik revolution as an anti-imperial uprising, and the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union as postcolonial space.

Fig.1. TheLife of Peoples of the Soviet and Capitalist East. Signed “RiaM,” Samarqand, 1927. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019,  http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/9936

One such poster [Fig.1] directly contrasts life for “peoples of the East” [sharq xalqlari (Uzbek), narody vostoka (Russian)] under Soviet and colonial rule. A bold geometric diagonal divides the composition between the Soviet and the colonised East in such a way as to make the Soviet East seem bright and open, in contrast to the crowded and oppressive capitalist world, which was populated by caricatures of grotesque and bloodthirsty colonialists and downtrodden peoples suffering under the colonial yoke.

The light of modernity shines upon the Soviet East, whose people are both much bigger in scale and fewer in number, giving them a sense of monumentality and implicit grandeur. This exaggerated scaleis echoed in the architecture; besides fruitful fields and urban landscapes, the Soviet side also features a huge fantasy structure. Its foundation is a red five-pointed star, and rises up in geometric tiers, like flattened scaffolding, to hold a giant hammer and sickle and the letters USSR (in both Cyrillic and Arabic scripts) in silhouette against the rising sun.

The message is clear: the Soviet East, having thrown off imperial rule, is free and fruitful, and serves as an exemplar to be emulated by other colonised peoples. It visualises, therefore, the Soviet government’s policy to exploit cross-border ties in the hope that if they overtly and ostentatiously promoted the interests of minority groups, it would attract the support of other “oppressed nations” abroad, and further the cause of world revolution.[1] The poster even depicts a small group of figures on the colonial side who look and gesture upwards at their Soviet counterparts as if in supplication.

Fig.2. Long Live Proletarian Revolution All Over the World!!! Vladimir Kaidalov, Tashkent, 1933. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019,  http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/10015

Other images, too, stress the solidarity between the Soviet East and the colonised abroad. А1933 poster by Vladimir Kaidalov contrasts, in bold black and red, peaceful celebrations of the 15^thanniversary of the 1917 revolution with violence and starvation in the colonies [Fig.2], while another symbolically represents the Uzbek SSR as “the brightest lighthouse on the edge of the colonial east.” [Fig.3]. The metaphor of light – signified here by the lighthouse, but in other images by the sun, lightening, electricity or abstract rays of light – was extremely common, and not just limited to Eurocentric imagery. The rising sun in particular was used by Uzbek reformist Muslim intellectuals known as the Jadids as a symbol of their own brand of modernity and enlightenment.

Fig.3. The UzSSR is the Brightest Lighthouse on the Edge of the Colonial East. Semion Mal’t, Tashkent, 1934.

However, despite some shared aims with local reformists, Soviet developmentalism was underpinned by a fundamentally Eurocentric, teleological view of progress. The very concept of the “Soviet East” is based in Orientalist assumption: the idea of an intrinsic Eastern-ness uniting the Soviet East with the colonial subjects of European empires, irrespective of specific differences in culture or geography. It is also rooted in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of teleological progress, according to which societies are at different stages of economic development, and some are therefore more “advanced” or more “backward” than others. The “backward” nationalities, according to Soviet definition, were those who had been oppressed by Russian imperialism and lagged behind on the path of progress.

Soviet policy, therefore, despite its anti-imperialist bite, also revived and rationalised particularly crude categories of East (backward) and West (advanced) to justify its civilising mission.[2] To belong to the peoples of the Soviet East was to have a shared history of colonial oppression, to have been liberated by the October revolution, and now to be in the process of catching up. Or, to use the Soviet term of the time, to be “formerly-oppressed.”

In several ways, therefore, depictions of the “Soviet East” actually reveal the profoundly Eurocentric perspectives underlying Soviet cultural policy and propaganda. As the 1920s went on, temporary compromises made between the Soviet state and local elites began to wear thin: national cultures were to be celebrated only so long as they conformed to the party line on progress (without leaning towards “bourgeois nationalism” or “local chauvinism”), and liberation meant not just rejecting imperial power but also overthrowing traditions and social norms seen as backward. Soviet “postcolonialism” therefore operated within rigid boundaries.

This didn’t stop artists from representing the “Soviet East” as a paragon of liberty.

Fig.4. For the Soviet East!Vladimir Rozhdestvenskii, Tashkent, 1928. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019, http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/10008

This poster [Fig.4], produced for the 10-year anniversary of the Red Army, does just that. It depicts a cavalryman riding a red horse directly out of the frame of the poster, towards the viewer, his gaze uplifted and his posture composed: he is literally the flag-bearer of Soviet order. He is also a romanticised figure, the mountain horseman depicted in monumental scale and vivid colour against a stylised landscape. The poster frames the Soviet East as ordered, militarised, mapped space, but emphasises too its agency and dynamism.

Others emphasised the brotherly harmony between the formerly-oppressed nationalities and the Russian proletariat, striding Together, As Friends, to Elections, to Work, and to the Soviets! [Fig.5]. Predictably, this image of a peaceful utopia glosses over real resentments and conflicts between workers of different nationalities. In Central Asia, conditions for local workers were often worse than for Russians, who nonetheless often expressed resentment at the preferential treatment afforded non-Europeans under the state’s affirmative action policies [korenizatsiia]. They expressed their mutual hostility in direct fashion on the shop floor: ‘in one Tashkent factory, European workers taunted Uzbeks by calling them women’s names, and Uzbeks dropped crowbars and bolts on Europeans as a “joke”.’[3] (It is interesting to note that, unusually, this poster is captioned only in Russian, perhaps indicating an intended audience among the predominantly-Russian industrial workers, and perhaps suggesting that the Russian workforce was thought to be the main cause of interethnic conflict).

Fig.5. Together, As Friends, to Elections, to Work, and to the Soviets!Unknown artist, 1920s. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019, http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/10111

Images of the “Soviet East,” as created in posters of the 1920s and early 30s, were therefore utopian in more ways than one. The Soviet East was depicted as a beacon, a sunbeam, a ray of light; a model of postcolonial transformation, industrialisation, and interethnic friendship; and a paragon of freedom in vivid colour. Propaganda images hinted at some of the problems faced by Soviet nationalities policy in practice, such as in the reference to interethnic conflict, but largely present images of a postcolonial paradise. These posters show the diversity of Soviet propaganda images in the 1920s, before the ‘friendship of the peoples,’ an array of nationalities gathered around Stalin, became the defining metaphor of the Soviet body politic.

Mollie Arbuthnot is a PhD candidate in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester. Her dissertation focuses on propaganda posters in Soviet Uzbekistan, c.1920-1936, and examines propaganda images in the context of Soviet nationalities policy and contemporaneous theories about national identity, artistic heritage, and visual propaganda. Previously, she studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Cambridge.

 

References

[1] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001),9.

[2] Michael Kemper, ‘Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia’ in Die Welt des Islams, vol.50 no.3/4, A Muslim Interwar Soviet Union(2010), 435-476 (476).

[3] Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941(Westport CA and London: Praeger, 2001), 213-214.

Blog Round Up!: March-April 2019

Tom Shillam

Round Up March/April 2019

Britain, Protest, Colonialism

As the beleaguered British government lurches from one constitutional fracas to another, it seems apt again to begin with Brexit. Despite the appearance of torment – in a recurring theme for this month’s round up – the political actors involved are perhaps behaving more rationally, for better or worse, than imagined. Aaron Ackerley notes the disturbing proximity of leading ‘Brexiteers’ to ostensibly independent think tanks and brings to light a deeper history of hapless British politicians forming influential pressure groups behind the scenes.

The British government has overlooked a recent petition to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU, which garnered over 6 million votes. But are petitions as contemporary and ineffective as we might think? As the 200^th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre approaches, Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller contend that petitioning acts ‘as a tool for building a broader campaign and an enduring instrument for popular politics beyond and outside elections’. Ruth Mather explores the contributions of female reformers to early 19^th-century protest, emphasising their ingenuity in negotiating with a ‘tyrannical government’ which was claiming to ‘offer paternal protection to its citizens’ while actually behaving violently towards them.

Shirin Hirsch sets this violence within a broader imperial context, reminding us of how black revolutionary Robert Wedderburn drew comparisons between atrocities abroad and the oppression of the working class at home. Similarly, on the anniversary of another colonial atrocity – the Amritsar Massacre of 13 April 1919 – Oliver Godsmark remarks on how political actors today continue to treat such violence as an aberration rather than a means through which to initiate difficult conversations about Britain’s past.

Anti-Colonialism, Decolonisation, Memory

A number of writers have considered how scholars of different backgrounds and disciplines can help begin these conversations. Eva Schalbroeck – perhaps offering a model for historians of other regions – explores how students of Belgium and the Congo can write revisionist and challenging histories which help establish ‘more culturally diverse post-colonial relationships’. Meg Foster highlighted the problems that can result from the uncritical portrayal of the histories of indigenous societies. In her review of an exhibition of Oceanic art held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year, Foster argues that such exhibitions often index indigenous artworks as objects of intrigue, distracting us from reckoning with their continued affective importance for the producers.

Speaking of the imperial mind and its affinity for ‘exotic objects’, Tom Harper of the University of Surrey studies how China has been variously depicted in the Western world as ‘a uniform mass with little or no individuality and prone to extreme cruelty’ and more recently as a neo-colonial power comparable to ‘the Great Powers of the Past’. Today, China is using its growing geopolitical clout to try and reshape these depictions.

Mark Fathi Massoud and Hussein Omar both offer hope in the face of authoritarian retrenchment. Omar shows how uprisings which occurred across North Africa and the Middle East 100 years ago comprised not isolated protests but an early ‘Arab Spring’ in which local actors exchanged ‘slogans, ideas, ideals and personnel’ in resisting European imperial intrigue. His emphasis on how history might have turned out differently had alternative ideas entered the ascendancy is replicated by Massoud, who demonstrates that a democratic conception of Sharia – which comprises ‘a broad set of values and ethical principles’ rather than the rigid code of law implied by Islamophobes – predominated among many politicians and intellectuals in early postcolonial Sudan.

Reason and Resistance

For those more interested in modes of political control in authoritarian states, in December Elena Goukassian penned a fascinating piece in Lapham’s Quarterly about the associations between time and power. She argues that the standardisation of time zones from the mid-19^th century onwards has provided a means for authoritarians across the world to assert control over populations and manoeuvre towards important geopolitical allies.

As she suggests, as political power consolidated within the state, actors on the periphery resisted. Quan Nguyen offers some context for the recent attacks of prominent politicians on schoolchildren protesting about climate change, reminding us that the ‘understanding that emotions must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse…stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy’. Victoria Brooks goes into much greater detail about this Cartesian tradition, emphasising its gendered character, and calling for new philosophies which do not ‘value ideas over bodily sensations’.

Of course, developing new philosophies of life in an increasingly authoritarian and xenophobic global political climate demands intercontinental networking. On this note, it is worth rounding off this blog with the movements and arguments of two very different but equally determined internationalist activists in the mid-20^th century. Samuel Zipp argues that Wendell Willkie – a little known Republican nominee for President in 1940 who later travelled across Africa and the Middle East observing the spread of nationalist movements – engineered an egalitarian and anti-imperialist vision of international order which is worth re-examining today. Carolien Stolte looks into an anti-imperialist actor with greater affective and symbolic reach among decolonising African and Asian peoples – African-American singer and activist Paul Robeson. Despite the US State Department preventing him travelling over a period of 8 years through the 1950s, by 1958 Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was calling for ‘a widespread celebration or Robeson’s sixtieth birthday’. This was thanks to the ingenuity of countless Global South activists and internationalists many of whom were inspired by Robeson’s music. Their refusal to be bowed by censorious states and a global atmosphere of growing political cynicism perhaps offers hope today.

Tom Shillam is PhD student at the University of York who holds a Departmental Scholarship from the Department of History. His research considers how mid-20^th century South Asian intellectuals synthesised anti-authoritarian ideas of their own with those of writers elsewhere to propose a different decolonising politics to the dominant developmentalist dogmas of the time. Catch him on Twitter @tomshillam.