he Evolution of Auto/biography

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CHAPTER 3: RHODESIA- THE SELF AND NATION

Introduction

The previous chapter reviewed relevant literature that defined concepts of self identity and nation. Both concepts were historicized as a way of putting into context how they can manifest in Zimbabwean political auto/biography. This current chapter focuses on how white Rhodesian settler life narratives conceived of and constructed Rhodesia as a nation, and Rhodesian-ness as a distinct quality of belonging to that particular racial group. The chapter is confined to an analysis of Ian Douglass Smith’s Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath (2001) and Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa-A White Boy in Africa (1996). The two life narratives have been chosen as representative of the general patterns understanding contradictory settler identities in Zimbabwean political autobiography. The chapter argues that perceptions of settler identities in Rhodesia are not a homogenous entity. There were always diverse voices from within the British and Afrikaner components of this community. The chapter will thus explore how the concepts of Rhodesia and Rhodesian-ness are mapped out against their perceived others such as Britain, the imperial progenitor, the Cape colony which sponsored the initial project and even the other imperial projects in its neighbourhood such as Portuguese Mozambique, as well as the Afrikaners and Africans on the contested geography of Zimbabwe. Further to this, constructions of the self and its complex manifestations and interactions with the conflicting ‘collective’ identities embedded in the idea of self, community and nation are explored within the specific conditions that obtained in colonial Rhodesia and independent Zimbabwe.

Ian Smith – Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath
Clearing Spaces: Entrenching White Settlerism in Rhodesia in Ian Smith’s Bitter Harvest:

The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath

Ideological spaces are bitterly contested in any given context as these entitle one to claims of not only belonging, but also of defining one’s identity. Space in this sense must be conceived of as more than just “an objective physical surface with fixed characteristics upon which social categories are mapped out but both as social product and a shaping force” (Primorac, 2006:59). The import of this is that spaces are in the first instance created by society, both physically and discursively, so as to house specific cultural and social perceptions of self and group identity. In the second instance space influences the way those who inhabit it view their world. In the context of Rhodesia, both self and national identities are imagined within a physically and discursively determined space which also begins to propagate certain and desired world views and identity amongst those who occupy it, all to the exclusion of those who are deemed not to belong. Self and national identity are therefore rooted in, and defined within the parameters of a specific space that can be appropriated as one’s own. The act of appropriation involves discrediting, or even eliminating, other narratives that vie for the same space.
Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath, (hereafter to be referred to as Bitter Harvest) is an auto/biographical narrative that attempts to construct the life of Ian Douglas Smith from the time of his birth, through his childhood days in the small mining community of Selukwe (now Shurugwi) and his formative years at university in South Africa. The narrative also paces through the subject narrator’s participation in the First World War and the years of radical political formation in the 1950s when he began to grapple with ideas of what it meant to be Rhodesian as well as an individual in this colony that was culturally bound to England. This phase is the most critical in Smith’s life, and the narrative constructs an individual who begins to position himself as predestined for the great challenges that link him inextricably with the nation of Rhodesia. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 is plotted as the defining moment for both the Rhodesian nation and Smith, and themes of betrayal are built around activities and notions that are divergent to this defining moment. UDI is forced on Rhodesians partly against the counsel of the mother country, Britain, and at a time when African nationalism was already beginning to organize into articulate forms of resistance to colonial occupation. Thus Smith’s auto/biography resorts to constructing identities that are informed by race as well as ideological differences, and in the ultimate striving for an unassailable, unitary identity of the subject narrator. It leaves no alternative ways of conceiving the nation outside his construction of Rhodesia, and no alternative ways for conceiving individual identity outside the epistemologies of racist Europe. Africa and the Africans are constructed as the others who must be subordinated to Europe and the Europeans, and post-independence Africa is described in terms of regression to primordial forms of existence. The most significant act that the auto/biography attempts to do in the first place is to entrench white settlerism in the land that now bore the name Rhodesia, and to dispel contesting narratives that viewed his white community as colonial usurpers.
The entrenchment of Rhodesian settlerism in the land bounded to the south by the Limpopo and to the north by the Zambezi was a result of efforts to clear the space, both physically and discursively, of any other contestants. Primorac (2006:64) observes that imperial conquest and expansion always “involved new concepts of space-time being violently imposed on societies which had developed significantly different forms of manufacturing the experience of the “real”. In Smith’s Bitter Harvest, (2001) the ultimate objective of raising the “flag for Queen and country” (p.1), alludes to a collusion between metropole and colony in a relationship that sought the establishment of an empire. Empire refers to the authority assumed by a state over another territory. The auto/biography thus from the beginning operates within the framework of imperial discourse. Its thrust leads to what Boehmer (2005:3) would situate within the ambit of what can be called “colonialist literature.” By definition this is a literature that is informed “by theories concerning the superiority of European culture and the rightness of empire.” Alternatively, Primorac’s categorization of the Rhodesian chronotope to refer to Zimbabwean fiction works that are “instrumental in essentializing colonial identities by infusing spaces with fixed, polarized meanings, and tying them into social identities”(p.72) would very much accommodate white auto/biographies.
In this categorization binaries of black/white spaces, inside/outside Rhodesia are predominant. Though the imagination of the empire has much been associated with the novel of the empire (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Kipling’s poetry (1922), the white auto/biographical genre in this case proves to be a very useful source of insight into the identity tropes of the empire. Such identities are constructed on the values of empire and entrenched in opposition to everything that deviated from those values. Up to the point of disengagement from the British Empire, Smith’s contention is that his Rhodesian people were the only genuine remnant of the imperial spirit that the British people had betrayed. The establishment of empire is both a cartographical and discursive exercise that aims at effective physical occupation of the Rhodesian space as well as rationalizing the process. Thus Smith’s auto/biography straddles both the physical and discursive tasks of empire building. The geographical space that the Pioneer Column occupied is discursively populated to enable the settlers to appropriate it as their own by virtue of them projecting a perception that amounts to suggesting that there were no deep rooted claims of nativity by any of the indigenous African groups.
Smith’s first contestation in his auto/biography is that the west of the country that became known as Rhodesia was occupied by Matebeles, “a tribe of the Zulus in Natal” (p.1) who had recently arrived and settled “in this new country” (ibid). It is further contested that the Matebeles had moved into a land which was “uninhabited apart from wandering Bushmen” (ibid). The net effect of these statements is that the Matebeles were new comers with no deep historical links with the land they occupied. As such, they cannot claim to belong to this new country as their origins and nativity is traced to Zululand in Natal. Not only are the Matebeles’ claim to nativity challenged, but the narrative also does not allow any other group to lay claim to the space. The presence of the local people is acknowledged grudgingly as they are dismissed as “wandering Bushmen” (ibid). The qualifying adjective “wandering” here serves to deny these people any serious cultural and spiritual attachment to the land they occupy, their presence is temporary, even transient. The same effect is achieved by the usage of the denigrative term “Bushmen” which relegates them to the margins of the human family where they are not allowed any fixed claim to any specific geographical space. In essence then, as a group they are effectively obliterated and denied any claims of belonging to the space they occupy.
The eastern parts of the country, which also became the subject of settler occupation, also had to be ‘unpeopled’ if white settlerism was to take root effectively. These parts are said to have been settled by ‘a number of different tribes, nomadic people who migrated from the north and east, constantly moving to and fro in order to accommodate their needs and wants” (ibid). The suggested motley nature of these “tribes” is meant to hint at the fact that there was no social or cultural cohesion amongst these groups. This also suggests a dearth of political organisation that could account for any definitive claim to the space. Effectively de-rooting these groups is the assertion that they were not sedentary and that they moved from the north and east, therefore not identified with any specific place. Even the south of the country only consisted of “scattered settlements of Shangaans from Mozambique and Northern Transvaal” (ibid). To this extent, the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo was not occupied by any group and was open space for contestation by who so ever willed and had the means. What is achieved through this narrative is a statement that this was “no man’s land” (ibid) and the white man moved in to settle with “a clear conscience” (ibid) as there was never an invasion to facilitate the birth of the Rhodesian nation.
The auto/biographical narrative in this case performs the role of discursively clearing the ground for the white Rhodesian nation to take root. It performs what can aptly be referred to as displacement by discourse, a process through which all other claims of presence and belonging are destabilized and undermined so as to open up the space for fresh contestation. Smith’s narrative of Rhodesian nation effectively denies any claims of indigeniety by any of the African groups in the land, and critically ruffles notions of who is indigenous and who is not. It also opens up critical interrogations that threaten to go beyond ascriptions of belonging that tend to assign and associate certain races with certain continents or regions. The obvious implication of this narrative is that if what became known as Rhodesia was no man’s land, all the groups who came to ‘people’ it at relatively the same time can claim to be indigenous to it, and this includes the Whites. Definitions of nativity assume a complex nature that not only defy commonsensical interpretations, but opens up fierce contestations of who is native to the land and who is not. The narrative provokes new ways of defining concepts of settlerism and colonialism as after their discursive displacement the African groups are defined as potential colonists. The liberation movement is denied the legitimacy of presenting itself as representing the owners of the land who are fighting the invaders. The reference to the “New Zanu PF colonialists” (p. x) raises the possibility that the ruling party had an agenda of its own that it wanted to impose on the people. Moore (2008) supports Smith’s thesis when Moore refers to elements of “Bonapartism” (p.31), a concept implying ZANU PF’s leading the new black government gravitated towards domination rather than hegemony as its operational strategy to consolidate its hold on the people over which it ruled. By branding the ruling party the new colonists Smith’s intention is to invoke ideological nuances of the meaning of colonialism, where, beyond denying the nationalist movement’s claims to having brought political independence, entrenches settler claims to nativity, because the new black government led by ZANU PF is depicted as imposing a foreign ideology on the land and its black and white people. This foreign ideology is deemed as running counter to constructions of a Rhodesian society that is modelled around Western civilisation.
The appropriation of a native identity is crucial for the Rhodesian whites as this will enable them to contest for both cultural and political dominancy from a vantage point. Auto/biography in the first instance operates as the first line of defence and in Smith’s narrative that defence comes in the form of an assertive positioning of the Whites as indigenous Africans. Having just arrived in the land, just like any other African group, the Pioneer Column is just another African tribe, albeit a White one. By rebranding the White settlers as a tribe the narrative is conveniently situating them within those identity conceptions, albeit constructed in Western thought, that are normally reserved for black African groups. The objective is to establish parity which would then deflect their being designated as aliens in Africa. The assertion that “there is only one white tribe, the Rhodesians, who are indigenous to this country” (p.327) is an aggressive declaration of belonging to a space which otherwise would have been understood to belong to the black groups. The White tribe, – the Rhodesians-, are entrenched into the space alongside the “many tribes in our country- the Matebele in the West, the Karanga in the Midlands, the Zezuru and Manyika in the east, the Venda and the Shangaan in the south and the Makorekore and Tonga in the north” (ibid). The quest for legitimation in this space assumes even more subtle nuances where the White Rhodesians in the various regions of the country can also adopt the identities of the Black tribes occupying the area.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1 Introduction
1.0 Background to the Study
1.1 Statement of the Problem
1.2 Key Questions Upon which Study is Based
1.3 Research Objectives
1.4 Understanding Auto/biography
1.5 Defining ‘Political’ Auto/biography
1.6 The Self in Auto/biography
1.7 Justification of the Study
1.8 Theoretical Framework upon which Research is Based
1.9 Research Methods and Methodologies
1.10 Chapter Delineation
1.11 Conclusion
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The Evolution of Auto/biography
2.3 Theoretical Issues in Auto/biography
2.4 Auto/biography and Self Identity in Western Scholarship
2.5 African Conception of Auto/biography
2.6 Critical Scholarship on Zimbabwean Auto/biography
2.7 Conceptions of Nation
2.8 Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE: RHODESIA- THE SELF AND NATION
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Ian Douglas Smith-Bitter Harvest-The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath
3.4 Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: ZIMBABWE- THE SELF AND NATION IN BLACK AUTHORED AUTO/BIOGRAPHIES
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Maurice Nyagumbo- With the People
4.3 Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa- Rise Up and Walk
4.4 Joshua Nkomo- The Story of my Life
4.5 Edgar Tekere- A Lifetime of Struggle
4.6 Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE: CONTRADICTIONS IN WHITE RHODESIAN/ZIMBABWEAN
AUTO/BIOGRAPHERS
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Doris Lessing- Under my Skin
5.3 Fay Chung- Re-Living the Second Chimurenga and Postcolonial Zimbabwe
5.5 Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX: DISEASED IDENTITIES: BLACK ZIMBABWEAN WOMEN AND THE AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL
HIV/AIDS NARRATIVE
6.1 Transcending Generic Ambivalences and Definitional Ambiguities
6.2 Global Perceptions of Africa, Women and HIV/AIDS
6.3 Tendayi Westerhof- Unlucky in Love
6.4 Lutanga Shaba- Secrets of a Woman’s Soul
6.5 Conclusion
CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: ZIMBABWE AND THE PARADOXICAL MODES OF SELF WRITING 
Bibliography
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CONTESTING NARRATIVES: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE SELF AND THE NATION IN ZIMBABWEAN POLITICAL AUTO/BIOGRAPHY