Download FEATURE REVIEW The United States and the Final Years of White

thomas borstelmann
FEATURE REVIEW
The United States and the Final Years of
White Rule in Zimbabwe
Gerald Horne. From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe,
1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 389 pp. Notes,
index. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Andrew DeRoche. Black, White, and Chrome: The United States and Zimbabwe, 1953–1998.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001. vii + 378 pp. Notes, index. $29.95 (paper).
What’s in a name? In a small, landlocked nation in south-central Africa, the
answer was: a great deal. Five percent of the country’s residents had no doubt
that they lived in Rhodesia, a British colony since Cecil Rhodes and others had
invaded and settled the territory in the 1890s from neighboring South Africa.
These 250,000 whites enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world
by World War II, due to the country’s mineral wealth and fertile soil for tobacco
farming. The other 95 percent of the population, however, had no political
power, endured comprehensive segregation, and received just 5 percent of the
nation’s income. These four million Africans lived in Rhodesia, but they wanted
to live again in a place free from white-minority rule. They called that once and
future nation Zimbabwe, and they brought it into being in 1980 after fourteen
years of costly armed struggle.
The peculiar history of its place and time shaped the emergence of modern
Zimbabwe. Its place was southern Africa, the final redoubt of the pattern of
white rule over peoples of color that had marked almost the entire nonEuropean world, including the United States. The two decades following World
War II witnessed the liberation of most of Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean,
and Africa from colonial overlords in Europe as well as Japan and the United
States. In the same years, black activists and their white supporters forced the
downfall of legal segregation and discrimination in the United States. After
1965, only southern Africa remained bound by racial tyranny: powerful South
Africa, which had established apartheid in 1948; South African-ruled Namibia;
Angola and Mozambique, under dogged Portuguese colonial control; and, right
in the center of the region, Rhodesia.
Its time was the Cold War, when the competition between Soviet-led Communism and American-led capitalist democracy helped shape the contours of
Diplomatic History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 2003). © 2003 The Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
155
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political possibilities in every corner of what was then called the Third World.
The white authorities of southern Africa, with their close ties to Western
Europe, vigorously opposed Communism. This stance and the vast mineral
wealth they controlled won them a warm relationship with the U.S. government, at least for the first decade and a half after 1945.1 But the relationship
between anticommunism and racism turned out to be anything but straightforward. As the Third World gained independence and African Americans won
legal equality, overt racial discrimination lost its legitimacy in North American
and Western European public life. Indeed, competition with the Soviets and
the Chinese for influence in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa required the
United States to maintain a multiracial, nondiscriminatory alliance of the First
World and the Third World against the Second World. The legacy of slavery,
segregation, and colonialism hindered this American Cold War strategy,
however. Nowhere did these complications appear in starker relief than in the
white settler states of South Africa and Rhodesia, where Communists seemed
to support democracy—that is, the political inclusion of the nations’ black
majorities—and pro-Western capitalists fought to preserve minority rule and
racial oppression.2
White Rhodesians under the leadership of Ian Smith made a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) from Britain in November 1965. For them, this
decision had impeccable logic. They had watched the rest of Africa to the north
gain independence in the previous eight years, including neighboring Malawi
(formerly Nyasaland) and Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), which had,
after 1953, been joined with Rhodesia (formerly Southern Rhodesia) in the
short-lived Central African Federation. With South Africa a model of white
settler rule to the south, Smith and his followers were determined likewise to
preserve control of their country and their privileges from the dangers of majority rule. UDI was to be a peculiar form of decolonization that would leave the
structures of white rule entirely intact.
UDI provoked a hostile reaction from most quarters. Unlike South Africa,
which had gained its independence from Britain in 1910 when racial segregation and colonialism were still the norm in international life, Rhodesia never
received official recognition as a legitimate state. In precisely the same years
that legalized white supremacy was being swept out of the United States and
most of Africa, white Rhodesians tried to move in the opposite direction. The
British government, though unwilling to use force to subdue Rhodesia, refused
to acknowledge the Smith regime and placed sanctions on trade with the rebel1. Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa
in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993); William Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited: Western
Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (New York, 1986); Thomas J. Noer, Cold
War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (Columbia,
MO, 1985).
2. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the
Global Arena (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
The United States and the Final Years of White Rule in Zimbabwe : 157
lious colony. The U.S. government did the same. President Lyndon Johnson
vigorously promoted racial equality at home, but the newly escalated war in
Vietnam and signs of racial polarization in the United States convinced Washington officials that, in the words of Undersecretary of State George Ball, they
“should not get bogged down in the African swamp.”3 The United Nations, the
Communist bloc, and the Third World nations all condemned the white junta
in Salisbury. Africans found themselves in the unusual position of promoting
continued British colonial rule, and they denounced London’s decision not to
regain control of the territory by whatever means necessary (in contrast to
Britain’s ready use of force against nonwhite rebels in colonial Malaya and
Kenya). Even the South African government and the Portuguese rulers of
neighboring Angola and Mozambique, despite obvious sympathies for white
Rhodesians, did not recognize the new government.
Gerald Horne’s fascinating new book, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United
States and the War against Zimbabwe, makes clear, however, that many Americans took a much more positive view of an independent white-ruled Rhodesia.
Conservative anticommunists such as Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona considered the English-speaking, British-descended, Christian, pro-Western, white
farmers of Rhodesia in 1965 to be parallel to the American revolutionaries of
1776 and deserving of similar respect. The Salisbury regime represented to
them a strong friend and strategic ally in the Cold War, particularly in light of
Rhodesia’s vast reserves of chrome, a crucial mineral for modern weapons production. Elements of the U.S. government, especially in the Central Intelligence Agency, shared this view. Horne even uncovers a handful of African
Americans whose anticommunism and opportunism enabled them to swallow
their race consciousness and support the Smith regime. American businessmen
and investors found Rhodesia a profitable and friendly place to engage in
commerce, as did multinational oil companies. Horne concludes persuasively
that “the Smith regime would have fallen much earlier but for its continued
ability to import oil—the lifeblood of its economy—in the face of sanctions”
(p. 184).
From the Barrel of a Gun focuses on two sets of Americans whose enthusiasm
for the Rhodesian cause helped lengthen the struggle for Zimbabwe: white
Southerners and mercenary soldiers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 punctuated the end of centuries of formal racial hierarchy and privilege in the states of the former Confederacy, to the distress of
many white residents. Those Southerners saw in Rhodesia’s UDI “a latter-day
version of their own attempt to secure independence a century earlier” (p. 71)
with the firing on Fort Sumter that began the American Civil War. “It was just
like being back in Texas” (p. 74), one visitor to Rhodesia explained. They
worried about the loss of the “Southern way of life” and rising black militancy;
3. Transcript of telephone conversation, Walter Lippmann and George Ball, 25 August
1964, George Ball Papers, box 2, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
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Salisbury’s race relations, they noted in the wake of the 1965 Watts riot, were
calmer than those of Los Angeles. Some white Southerners moved to Rhodesia to preserve the privileges they feared losing at home; the American Women’s
Club of Salisbury flew the Confederate rather than the U.S. flag. And some
of them were powerful members of the U.S. Senate, such as Strom Thurmond
(R-SC), Jesse Helms (R-NC), and James Eastland (D-MS). In combination
with colleagues such as Robert Dole (R-KS), they provided moral support and
encouragement for Ian Smith, whom they considered a kindred spirit. In 1971
they also managed to blow a large hole in the sanctions against Rhodesia by
passing the Byrd Amendment, named for segregationist sponsor Harry Byrd
(D-VA), with the acquiescence of President Richard Nixon. The Byrd Amendment allowed the United States to buy chrome from Rhodesia, in part to avoid
having to procure it from the Soviet Union, the other leading source. For the
next five years, anticommunism continued to trump antiracism, putting the
United States in the distinctive camp of South Africa and Portugal as the only
nations openly breaking the UN sanctions against the illegal regime in
Salisbury.
The other set of Americans who most influenced the course of events in
Rhodesia between 1965 and 1980, the years of white independence, were soldiers of fortune. Timing again proved crucial. Just as UDI came right when
many white Southerners were mourning the loss of racial hierarchy at home,
white Rhodesia’s war against the Zimbabwean liberation forces intensified in
the early 1970s (due in part to Portugal’s 1974 revolution and subsequent withdrawal from neighboring Mozambique), just as hundreds of thousands of U.S.
veterans of the Vietnam War were returning home to an economy in recession.
They provided a large recruiting pool for soldiers willing to enlist in the Rhodesian armed forces for pay. Along with comrades from South Africa and elsewhere, these mercenaries fought for a combination of reasons, including money,
the thrill of combat, genuine anticommunism, and a belief in white superiority.
Horne makes clear that many of these “whores of war” teetered on the edge of
psychological instability or criminality, and their often-brutal behavior contributed to the high cost of the liberation struggle and the profound divisions
in Zimbabwean society after 1980.
Horne’s research endeavors are Herculean. He uses rich archival materials
from Zimbabwe, the United States, Britain, and South Africa, and he has
combed through a remarkably diverse array of document collections spread
across the United States, particularly those of Southern and mercenary supporters of Rhodesia. The footnotes alone will prove fascinating to any student
of U.S. relations with Africa. Horne’s prodigious groundwork and creative
analysis result in a work of unusual depth and often brilliant insight. He reveals
the personal ties linking the United States and Rhodesia, such as the marriage
of Chester Crocker, President Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for
Africa, to a Rhodesian. Horne examines in thoughtful ways how Rhodesians’
understanding of themselves as “whites” rather than “Europeans” evolved after
The United States and the Final Years of White Rule in Zimbabwe : 159
World War II, reflecting growing U.S. influence in the southern African region.
Americans, after all, were not European, as suggested by the oft-cited story of
American visitors to southern Africa in the era of strict segregation occasionally lining up behind the “non-European” signs for services. Horne also demonstrates how the Nixon administration pursued a “Southern Africa Strategy” of
cozying up to Salisbury and Pretoria as well as a “Southern Strategy” at home
of pursuing disenchanted white Democratic voters. Such sensitivity to the links
between race relations in the United States and race relations elsewhere is one
of the many achievements of this important book.
From the Barrel of a Gun does suffer from certain limitations. These are not
related to the author’s personal involvement in the struggle for Zimbabwe, mentioned at several points, which surely helped energize the extraordinary research
that illuminates his work. Rather, the problems stem from how the book
“focuses intently on those who supported Rhodesia, not on those—like myself—
who opposed this policy” (p. 12). This approach necessarily skews the story,
as the sometimes very different administrations of Lyndon Johnson, Richard
Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter all appear here as primarily similar in
their complicity, to varying degrees, in sustaining white rule in Salisbury. Horne
acknowledges that “throughout the course of the war in Rhodesia the U.S. government was torn by conflicting and contradictory pressures” (p. 138), but the
interpretation offered here too often downplays such complexities. Johnson is
dismissed as “having helped to pave the way” (p. 145) for Nixon, yet Johnson’s
imposition of sanctions after UDI reduced U.S. trade with Rhodesia from
U.S.$29 million in 1965 to $3.7 million in 1968—a genuine blow to the Rhodesian economy—in sharp contrast to Nixon’s signing of the Byrd Amendment.
Horne is similarly dismissive of the moderate black opposition in Zimbabwe,
led by Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa, which sought a compromise solution
with the Smith regime and was therefore hailed by Smith’s American supporters. Such an interpretation can indeed be persuasive, but only if readers are first
allowed to consider the perspective of Muzorewa and his supporters.
Horne at times appears not to understand Johnson and Carter well. He
claims that Johnson in 1964–1965 “apparently . . . did not fully recognize” that
appealing to black voters “would alienate many within the Democratic ranks,
particularly Euro-Americans” (p. 15). But on the very night he signed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, Johnson told an aide, “I think we just delivered the South
to the Republican party for a long time to come.”4 Horne seems to misunderstand Carter’s decision to sustain sanctions against Rhodesia after the limited
elections of June 1979 and amplifies the mistake with an unfortunate note of
disdain: “In retrospect it is difficult to say which was more astonishing: Carter
yielding to the international community [that continued to back sanctions]
rather than to Congress or Congress itself being so willing . . . to endorse white
4. Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York,
1998), 120.
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supremacy in the name of anticommunism” (p. 165). But Carter had a famously
prickly relationship with Congress (to which he rarely yielded) and a genuine
commitment to encouraging the demise of racial tyranny in southern Africa;
there is nothing astonishing here. At such points in the book, Horne seems less
than evenhanded. Determined to highlight the power of the white backlash in
American politics after 1965, From the Barrel of a Gun also fails to clarify the
significance of such major domestic reforms as the 1965 Immigration Act, which
eliminated the national-origins system (symbolically ending America’s tradition
of welcoming only whites as new citizens), and the Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving
v. Virginia decision, which overturned state laws banning interracial marriage.
Horne’s emphasis on American collusion with white power in Rhodesia would
be even more persuasive if it incorporated such complicating contexts.
Andrew DeRoche offers a more positive assessment of the Carter administration in Black, White and Chrome: The United States and Zimbabwe, 1953–1998.
Breaking down “the barrier between the U.S. government and African blacks,”
he contends, was “one of the most significant accomplishments of the Carter
Administration” and serves as “the focal point” of this book (p. 9). DeRoche
credits Carter, the first sitting U.S. president to visit sub-Saharan Africa, and
Andrew Young, his ambassador to the United Nations, for their efforts to build
trust with the leaders of the armed Zimbabwean liberation struggle, particularly Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. Carter’s appointment of Young as the
first African American to represent the United States to the world at the UN
symbolized the president’s determination to improve U.S. relations with the
Third World. Carter and Young both loathed white-minority rule in southern
Africa and, in their moderate, diplomatic fashion—they were no revolutionaries—worked to undermine it. DeRoche finds their diplomacy a crucial support
for the British government in bringing Rhodesians and Zimbabweans together
in London in 1979 for the Lancaster House agreements, which cleared the way
for Mugabe’s election the following year and the change in the country’s name.
Black, White and Chrome provides several insights into the character of U.S.
relations with Zimbabwe. It explains how little attention most of the American
public paid to Rhodesia, a point that clarifies why the pro-Rhodesian lobby on
which Horne focuses was able to be so influential on U.S. policy toward southern Africa. It suggests how lawful racial segregation and discrimination in the
United States in the 1950s and early 1960s allowed Rhodesian leaders like Roy
Welensky to dismiss modest early U.S. efforts to encourage racial reform in his
country. It illuminates U.S. policymakers’ concerns before 1965 that Southern
Rhodesia, as it was then known, not be driven into a tighter embrace of
apartheid South Africa. It makes clear the significance for the fledgling Zambian
economy of Johnson’s airlift of oil to Lusaka after Rhodesia responded to sanctions by halting oil shipments through its territory to its vulnerable northern
neighbor. And it occasionally offers eye-opening incidents, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s proclamation in support of Southern Rhodesia’s black
majority, in response to which the country’s “white minority burned bibles” (p.
The United States and the Final Years of White Rule in Zimbabwe : 161
111)—an intriguing retort by a people whose identity as Christians was hailed
by their American supporters as integral to their worthiness.
Black, White and Chrome operates as fairly traditional diplomatic history, told
from the perspective of American diplomats and policymakers. This approach
has the benefit of explaining the perspective of key figures such as Carter. But
it carries the hazard for the author of adopting that same perspective as his own.
The language sometimes suggests this. Mugabe is called an “extremist” (p. 72)
and his actions “rabble-rousing” (p. 206) despite little discussion of the internal politics of the liberation struggle; African leaders “shout” (p. 147) for armed
international action against the Smith regime; recruits for the guerilla war are
described as having “swarmed” (p. 206) into training camps in neighboring
Mozambique; and “widespread violence” (p. 67) is associated with guerillas
much more than with Rhodesian government forces. DeRoche offers little
analysis of Rhodesian society or politics, either white or black, or of British
policy toward Rhodesia, despite London’s leading role in dealing with its
rebellious colony. He tends not to make the kind of connections that Horne
suggests between U.S. foreign policy and American racial politics; Nixon’s
Southern strategy, for example, does not appear at all.5 The regional context of
Rhodesian developments deserves greater emphasis, as between 1960 and 1965
Africans north of the Zambezi River gained their freedom from white rule,
while those to its south were forced to take up arms to pursue theirs in Angola,
Mozambique, South Africa, and Rhodesia. Black, White and Chrome also suffers
from a very light editorial hand, with misspellings and errors of punctuation
littering its pages.
Two more different books on the same subject would be difficult to imagine.
DeRoche finds much to commend in U.S. policy toward Rhodesia, while Horne
finds little. DeRoche absorbs much of Washington’s perspective, while Horne
rejects it. Horne zeroes in on American supporters of Ian Smith, while DeRoche
considers them minor players. Horne reveals the troubling world of white mercenaries, while DeRoche makes no mention of their role in Zimbabwe. Horne
takes a thematic approach, while DeRoche uses a chronological narrative. The
common ground of these authors is the seriousness of their research and their
recognition of the abiding significance of how the United States, with its troubled racial history, responded to one of the final struggles to vanquish worldwide racial tyranny.
5. For detailed analysis of such connections, see Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color
Line, and Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton, NJ, 2000).