Africa, united

Are Southern African leaders ready to be more ambitious?

In the spring of 1922, Jan Smuts found himself at a banquet table in Bulawayo, surrounded by the city’s worthies. He rose, glass in hand, and declared, ‘I need scarcely remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not a political tour at all, that this tour has nothing to do with politics’.¹ One imagines the smirks and the knowing glances exchanged around the room. The Prime Minister of South Africa, traversing the scrublands and railways of Southern Rhodesia, could hardly have been there for the scenery.

Within weeks, the true nature of Smuts’s mission would become clear. In a referendum, white settlers voted in favour of responsible government and the end of the British South Africa Company’s long rule, but, more pointedly, they rejected union with South Africa. Smuts’s dream of extending the Union northwards was, for now, dashed.

This was not a minor matter. Southern Rhodesia, since its founding in 1889 under Rhodes’s charter, had always formed part of an imperial blueprint for a unified British South Africa: a Cape-to-Cairo federation. Clause 150 of the South Africa Act kept the door open for Rhodesia’s eventual absorption as a province. But by 1922, that door was closing. Britain saw strategic advantage in tying Rhodesia’s British settler population to South Africa’s fate. The Unionist Association in Rhodesia, backed by mining magnates and tobacco barons, lobbied for union, banking on South African markets and the promise of imperial security.²

Yet the vision was far from universally shared. Memories of Company rule were bitter, but the prospect of Pretoria’s centralised authority and the Union’s awkward bilingualism sowed distrust. English-speaking Rhodesians feared a loss of status; women, newly enfranchised, were anxious about losing the vote to South Africa’s more restrictive policies. Economic objections proliferated. Farmers and ranchers worried about new taxes, central tariffs, and, not least, a flood of poor whites into their labour-scarce lands. Control of the vital railways remained a sticking point. Above all, the spectre loomed of ‘South African problems’ imported wholesale, and of a lost ‘Britishness’. Campaigners waved banners: ‘Rhodesia for the Rhodesians, Rhodesia for the Empire’.³

Smuts, ever the strategist, put generous terms on the table: a decade of subsidies and development grants, parliamentary representation, a hefty payout for the Company’s land and assets. The offer, ‘exaggeratedly magnanimous’ according to Die Burger, was not enough. When the votes were counted, 59 percent favoured responsible government, 41 percent union. Rhodesia would become, in time, the only territory in imperial history to pay London for the privilege of self-government.

For black residents, excluded entirely from the process, the referendum was a cynical performance: a fresh chapter in the entrenchment of white minority rule.⁴ Yet for Smuts, and for the wider project of Southern African unity, the defeat in Bulawayo marked more than the end of one plan. Smuts’s ‘United States of Africa’ – a federation stretching from Cape Town to the Equator – would remain a tantalising might-have-been.⁵

A century has passed. The world, and southern Africa with it, has changed beyond recognition. But the question lingers: what if the dream had not died? What if, today, we returned to that vision, a vision not of imperial consolidation, but of a voluntary union, one fit for the realities of the twenty-first century?