Disturbing the People’s Peace: Patriotism and “Respectable” Racism in British Responses to Rhodesian Independence

Abstract

On the morning of November 11, 1965, the Rhodesian Broadcasting Company enjoined listeners to stand by for a radio address from Ian Smith, head of the Rhodesian Front Party and Prime Minister of the self-governing British colony that would become Zimbabwe in 1979. That afternoon, at 1:15, Smith went on the air and announced that his cabinet had just issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain. Citing a “paralyzing state of uncertainty” created by nationalist agitation and communist insurgencies throughout Africa, Smith declared that there could be “no future” for Rhodesia while it drifted in “constitutional twilight”.¹ Unlike Britain’s Labour government, committed in Smith’s view to the steady transfer of power to Soviet-backed African nationalists throughout the continent, the Rhodesian Front (RF) “rejected the doctrinaire philosophy of appeasement and surrender”.² Rhodesians, he asserted, would stand in defence of European civilization, democracy and free enterprise (these often conflated in Smith’s UDI address and other RF pronouncements), “fortified by the same strength and courage” that had distinguished Rhodesia’s founding pioneers.³