Abstract
In 1947, the Northern Rhodesian government appointed a second committee to inquire into Coloureds’ status in the territory. In this chapter, I examine the Second Coloured Persons Committee. I begin by reconstructing Northern Rhodesia’s racial and social landscape in the 1940s and then, against this background, I explore the Second Coloured Persons Committee and the committee’s “interim” report submitted to the Northern Rhodesian government in 1948. I recreate Northern Rhodesian’s social and racial landscape through an analysis of three texts: a Northern Rhodesian Eurafrican man’s letter published in a Southern Rhodesian newspaper in 1947; a letter from a Belgian official in neighboring Congo asking the Northern Rhodesian government for clarification on half-castes’ status in Northern Rhodesia in 1941; and a chapter from the memoirs of a white settler woman who lived in Northern Rhodesia in the 1940s. Read together and in relation to one another, these texts provide us with a greater appreciation of Northern Rhodesian society in the 1940s, leading to increased understanding of Eurafricans’ unstable legal and social predicament in the British Empire.
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Notes
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Barbara Carr, Not for Me the Wilds (London: Bailey Bros. & Swinfen, 1963).
S. S. Broomfield, Kachalola or the Mighty Hunter (New York: William Morrow, 1931), 82, 83.
Carr, Not for Me the Wilds, Gertrude Page, The Silent Rancher (13th ed.) (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1909).
ASC Afrika 301.185.12–054.9/689.4, Northern Rhodesia, Report of the Committee to Inquire into the Status and Welfare of Coloured Persons in Northern Rhodesia (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1950), 5.
Julius Lewin, The Colour Bar in the Copper Belt (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1941), Preface.
CO1015/728, “Racial Discrimination in Public Buildings in Northern Rhodesia”; see also Richard Hall, Zambia 1890–1964: The Colonial Period (New York: Longman, 1976), 115;
and Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia Shall Be Free: An Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1962), 32–36.
Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Shelf Mark 756.12 1/1956 (2), Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Extent to Which Racial Discrimination is Practised in Shops and Other Similar Business Premises (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1956), 6.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 167, 168;
see also Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 85.
ASC Afrika, Annual Report on Northern Rhodesia for the Year 1947 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1948), 6.
Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1997), 14.
Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), 133;
Henry Reynolds, Nowhere People (Camberwell: Viking, 2005); McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 18.
Anne Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 52.
On race science in the South African context, and the discussion of mental testing and intellectual capacity of Africans and Europeans in South Africa, see Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 197–245.
For the impacts of the Great Depression on Coloureds in the Zimbabwean context, see James Muzondidya, Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 45–53.
For a brief discussion of the Depression and its effects on the Zambian community, see Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 335–339.
Lane-Poole, cited in Ibbo Mandaza, Race, Colour and Class in Southern Africa: A Study of the Coloured Question in the Context of an Analysis of the Colonial and White Racial Ideology, and African Nationalism in Twentieth Century Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi (Harare: Sapes Books, 1997), 199, 200.
For an African person’s perspective on the humiliation experienced because of being forced to carry a pass, see K. Makasa, Bwana District Commission: White Colonial Master (Lusaka: Multimedia Publications, 1989). For a former Northern Rhodesian white settler in Northern Rhodesia’s perspective and support of the “pass laws” in Northern Rhodesia and wider British imperial Africa,
see Gerald Webb Bloomfield, Color Conflict (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1944), 43–52.
In their representations to the Northern Rhodesian government, Eurafricans utilized “autoethnography” in the way that Mary Louise Pratt applies the term “rather autoethnography involves the partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror”; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.
Edwin Smith and Andrew Murray Dale, The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia Volume 1 (London: Macmillan, 1920);
Edwin Smith and Andrew Murray Dale, The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia Volume 2 (London: Macmillan, 1920).
NAZ SEC1/584, “Status of Coloureds’ Committee to Inquire into the Position of Coloured Persons, Note for Executive Council dated 27th October 1948,” 4; ASC Afrika 301.185.12–054.9/689.4, Northern Rhodesia, Report of the Committee to Inquire into the Status and Welfare of Coloured Persons in Northern Rhodesia (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1950), 4.
Hugh Macmillan and Frank Shapiro, Zion in Africa: The Jews in Zambia (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 1, 234, 247; Mandaza, Race, Colour and Class, 814.
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© 2012 Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton
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Milner-Thornton, J.B. (2012). The Fault of Our European Fathers. In: The Long Shadow of the British Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013088_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013088_8
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