Background to Southern Rhodesian white labour

From the turn of the twentieth century, the steady growth of mining and railway industries across Southern Rhodesia brought a steady stream of white migrants from Britain and South Africa. Yet the bulk of the territory’s unskilled labour needs were met by coerced African labour. In many fledgling industries, profitability rested on the super-exploitation of Africans who toiled in oppressive, violent conditions.⁶ White workers fiercely struggled to protect their monopoly over skilled work and feared undercutting from low-paid African labour. Despite this relative privilege, in the first decades of settlement white workers laboured under harsh conditions and struggles to establish trade union organizations were met with fierce resistance from management.⁷

The position of white workers was strengthened with the outbreak of the First World War. As shortages of skilled white labour deepened, a lightning strike of firemen at Bulawayo in 1916 saw the men gain an extra shilling a day, and the Rhodesian Railway Workers’ Union (RRWU) was established in the same year. Two successful strikes in 1919 and 1920 saw railway workers secure a 25 per cent raise and eight-hour day and white trade unions gradually proliferated across the colony.⁸ Although the RRWU had sought to unite European men from all grades, a rival craft union, the Amalgamated Engineers Union, was successfully established in 1916 and proved more attractive to most of the skilled workers on the railways and mines.⁹ Yet by the 1920s white trade unions were weakened as the post-war slump intensified and unemployment steadily rose.¹⁰ For Rhodesian rail workers, 1922 saw reductions in pay and in the cost of living allowance, an increase in working hours and the removal of the eight-hour working day. These events form the context for the first half of this chapter. The second half focuses on the Great Depression as conditions for white workers worsened and fears of unemployment and economic degradation flared.

Pride in wage labour

Emotions, Barbara Rosenwein contends, result from judgements made about whether something will be pleasurable, painful or impact upon us negatively or positively but are also the product of cultural practices, morals and language. As such, particular social groups – including trade unions – have their own ‘systems of feeling’ and rules for the expression of emotions.¹¹ This chapter shows how white workers’ emotional expression was shaped by bourgeois imperial notions of masculinity and femininity and was rooted in white workers’ antagonistic relationship both to their white employers and the African majority. It shows how white trade unions attempted to proscribe and encourage particular forms of emotional expression, and that they wielded emotions to discipline those who were deemed to be failing to meet ‘white’ standards.

Expressed emotions were central to the ways in which white workers imagined themselves as a distinct community. Despite the fundamental heterogeneity of Southern Rhodesia’s white labouring class – divided by skill, gender, occupation and nationality – emotions of pride, shame, anger and empathy created a sense of shared identity and experience based on perceived collective injustices which offered a route to subsume these divisions. In RRWU’s journal the Review, different classes and racial groups were imagined as mediums for different emotions, which reflected perceived and actual threats to white worker status. Emotional states marked class and racial boundaries as well as trade union identity. Thus, while the phrase ‘happiness and contentment’ was repeatedly attached to active participation in the RRWU and Rhodesia Labour Party, Africans and upper-class whites were presented as sources of distress – parasitical figures that drew upon the strength and productive capacity of the white worker.¹²

White labouring men invested in a hypermasculine identity which relied heavily on their occupations and pride in work. This was contrasted with African manual labouring, which was seen as unskilled, repetitive work in which Africans took no care or pride. For white male workers, respectability was accrued by a relative education and skill, a claim to pioneering spirit, sobriety and provision for dependants. But it was the feelings of pride in ‘white work’ which underpinned a shareable, amorphous white worker identity. Certainly, as Jon Lunn has demonstrated, where white men undertook unskilled or semi-skilled work, they redefined the work as ‘skilled’ in their own minds in order to feel this sense of pride and thus differentiate themselves from Africans.¹³ For white male workers, manual work was not something to be ashamed of, or something that only non-whites did, but something in which to take pride, even if the middle classes and white-collar workers perceived such blue-collar work as defiling. As one poem printed in the Review asserted:

to wish is the play of an office boy:

To do is the job of a man.¹⁴

These white workers both borrowed from dominant constructions of masculinity and challenged and reformulated their own sense of manliness through work. This labouring ideal was positioned as the authentic expression of maleness.

Those who remained un-unionized were castigated as ‘nons’ and ridiculed as lazy and effeminate workshy cowards. One article began with the assertion that:

If you haven’t got manhood enough to be concerned with the comfort and welfare of your own family, then do not read this article. If you haven’t got the backbone enough to be a free man in a free country, then stop reading right here, for this article is intended for the real he-men, who do not shiver in their boots when the Roadmaster passes; men who are men enough to fight their own fights; men who are not too cowardly to demand a wage sufficient to properly care for their families whether the railroad officials like it or not.¹⁵

Manliness was claimed through union activity and taking a stand against management; union successes were explained through the actions of ‘men – white men who were not prepared to knuckle down to it’.¹⁶ One letter to the Review explained that intimidation and the blacklist had lowered attendance at branch meetings but went on to encourage men to overcome these fears, to ‘brace up … make a firm stand and come out boldly as one solid body of workers … In conclusion brothers, “be white.”’¹⁷ For these workers, being white was about experiencing and fighting against injustices; it was about courage and mastering and overcoming the fear of failure and of employer reprisals. ‘Nons’ and those who failed to support the trade union were presented in contrast to this bravery and portrayed as slaves to fear.

Maintaining racial difference took on a pressing significance for workers who worked alongside Africans. The gold miner H.J. Lucas’s reflections upon his early experiences show how emotional and psychological distance from African workers was maintained despite physical closeness:

many smallworkers did not employ an assistant and in the remote parts might not see a white man for a month or more at a stretch … it was a lonely life for the white man. He could not sit and gossip with the Africans but often of an evening he would watch the boys laughing and gossiping around their fires and wish he could join in.¹⁸

On the railways there was particular concern over gangers – railway workers who looked after a particular stretch of line and were often stationed many miles away from established areas of white settlement. The Review bemoaned the position of the ganger as ‘practically an outcast, who knows no joy of human society’.¹⁹ Antony Croxton, an ex-railwayman, described the ganger’s outposts in the ‘heavy rain in the lonely forest, with lions, leopards, elephants and other wildlife as neighbours and only a momentary glimpse of the infrequent train [which] induced nerves and depression’.²⁰ The Africans who worked under the ganger are erased in this picture. Loneliness and self-imposed ostracism seemed preferable to fraternization that could endanger the respectability of white workers and throw the racialized performance of labour into disarray.

Shame was also particularly important in the policing of racial boundaries. Those who appeared to be offering support for certain non-white organizations were publicly castigated. In 1927 a European railwayman signed a petition in support of an Indian-led campaign to remove a European Market Master from his post after he had called Indians ‘Coolies’. The Review joked that ‘our comrade must have come off a long and tiresome shift and signed the petition without realising what he signed’.²¹ Solidarity beyond the boundaries of whiteness was unthinkable, and the European railwayman who crossed this line was publicly ridiculed in the pages of the union journal for providing support. In this sense, not only did the platform serve the function of policing white workers’ behaviour, it also acted as a warning to others: loyalty must only be given to other white workers.

Pride and domesticity

White male workers rallied against the employment of Africans in semi-skilled and skilled work, but they also tried to prevent white women from entering the ranks of formal wage labour. White male workers generally opposed the employment of white women not only on the basis that women represented a form of cheap labour which threatened to undercut their own wages but also because they represented a psychological threat. White women’s wage labour undermined the ability of men to prove their manliness by being the sole breadwinner. The RRWU and Rhodesia Labour Party (RLP) consistently argued that women should stick to their ‘natural roles’ in the home as mothers and wives. As one trade unionist put it, female wage labour endangered ‘a most sacred law of nature that a father must provide food and all necessities of life for his family’.²²

More generally, white women’s presence in the colonies was envisioned as a calming force and natural corrective to the male excesses and general rowdiness which were seen to characterize early settler societies.²³ Cullen Gouldsbury, a keen observer of white Rhodesian society who wrote verse for the glory of Empire, surmised that white women were important ‘to lessen drink, to tame the bachelor colonial’, but stressed that their role was one which was essentially subordinate and passive, indeed ‘hardly more than ornamental’:

to swish the skirt: to smile: to flirt,

to captivate the detrimental! –

To spend our cash, to cook our hash;

To sew for us the sportive button,

…

Yet still, we fear, the day draws near

When women will no longer heed us,

When beings in skirts will scorn our shirts,

And bid the heathen savage feed us²⁴

White women were encouraged to feel and express emotions in ways which supported existing gendered and racial hierarchies. Outside of the home and out of the control of their husbands, white women became a source of anxiety.

As homemakers, white women were required to maintain white standards in the domestic sphere and to provide a barrier between their children and corrupting racial influences.²⁵ They were encouraged to take pride in creating homes, producing children and investing in community activities, such as organizing dances or craft competitions.²⁶ White women were generally absent from white trade union journals. Articles directed at women usually reaffirmed social norms, addressing cooking skills or giving domestic tips. One poem in the Review, written by a white woman, described the position of railway wives in the 1920s:

We knew it when we married him

Some twenty years ago –

That he would be away a lot,

In fact he told us so,

But the real truth we didn’t guess,

Not all… or even half –

…

They have no hours, these railroad men,

Their work is never done,

They just remember that it’s night

When everyone goes home.

We wives and mothers learn to smile,

The young as well as old –

And keep the meat from burning up,

The beans from getting cold.

We go to church and club, alone,

To pictures, lectures too,

We rear the children, cook the meals

And pay the bills when due.

The youngsters get the whooping cough,

And measles, mumps and grippe –

We carry on both day and night,

And don’t give up the ship.²⁷

Women could feel pride in the labour of the home and motherhood by keeping a ‘tight ship’ and by struggling through loneliness and using ingenuity to stretch wages to cover household costs. To ‘smile’ and to ‘flirt’; women were expected to manufacture an air of contentment to reassure the working man. Moreover, the process of investing status into these tasks of domesticity acted as a form of cognitive dissonance, manufacturing a sense of fulfilment to suppress dissatisfaction. Here, women’s feelings of distress were accepted as a part of their daily experience, yet it was the endurance of these feelings of isolation and the suppression of emotions which was also valorized as a source of pride. Like the white male workers who laboured beside Africans, they were expected to promote emotional disengagement from the Africans they or their children were most likely to form bonds with – their domestic staff. Again, loneliness was lauded as a sign of differentiation; racial propriety meant one would rather endure and publicize the pain of being alone than engage friendliness or intimacy which could damage racial boundaries.

Mobilizations of shame

Lower-class whites never achieved the image of respectability, status and skill that they manufactured. In reality, a substantial disjuncture existed between idealized representations of white workers and the daily experiences of a heterogeneous social group who failed to maintain ‘white standards’. Many workers in fact proved to be acute sources of embarrassment for the trade union bureaucracy. There were numerous complaints that rank-and-file members had failed to educate themselves, as well as concerns over sobriety, porous racial boundaries and the dubious racial status of some who identified as white. The desired respectable and masculine characteristics that labour organizations were attempting to project were not automatically possessed by all white male workers. The Review argued that white labour was ‘entitled’ to a ‘standard of respect’ but that a cross-section of workers from different social and industrial grades were endangering the reputation of the majority:

The term ‘common railway man’ hurts the feelings of the great majority of railway workers, who are as respectable and noble-minded as any class in the land. If those members of our craft, who act in such a manner as to lower the status of railway men, would pause and think of the intense injury they are inflicting on themselves and all other railway workers.²⁸

The consequences of this inability to educate oneself and attain respectability were not confined to the individual violating expected standards of whiteness but were recognized as a source of embarrassment and hurt for the white labouring class in its entirety. White workers were again encouraged to take pride and joy in their work: to see it as something that required fierce protection and to educate themselves in order to protect white workers’ prestige.²⁹

As many men increasingly failed to think and feel in ‘white’ ways, the RRWU encouraged women to use familial and gender ideologies to police male workers’ behaviours. Women were encouraged to wield shame to discipline men into correct behaviours; they were directed to humiliate men who were unable to provide, who remained un-unionized or who did not pay union fees. In one such piece, a railwayman detailed how he had resisted joining RRWU until his wife had shamed him into doing so: ‘she reproached me for letting other men fight her battles and the children’s. We were not quarrelsome about it, but she clinched the argument when she said, hotly, one night: “do you want me to think my husband a cad, Jim?”’³⁰ The RRWU also suggested women should manage their husbands’ finances, making sure they did not spend too much on drink.³¹ The role of the railwayman’s wife, according to the Review, was one of support, reproduction and regulation, all of which should enforce gendered norms.

Depression

These attempts to maintain a respectable white working-class identity based upon the skilled working man who provided for dependants were put under increasing strain as the Great Depression reverberated across the global economic system.³² The settler administration effectively used the African population as a shock absorber to protect Europeans from economic strife, but white workers were not completely protected. While the numbers of whites registered as unemployed in the early 1920s had never reached 350, by September 1931 Bulawayo district alone noted 417 unemployed men and 600 dependants.³³ Decreasing traffic on the railways saw at least 1,600 railwaymen retrenched from 1930 to 1932 as the white workforce on the railways was reduced by around 25 per cent. Although retrenchment on the railways primarily targeted African workers, with the number of black workers falling from 18,492 in April 1930 to 7,898 just three years later in June 1933, unemployment was nonetheless conceptualized as a white, and specifically male, affliction.³⁴

Southern Rhodesian approaches to poverty and unemployment were largely influenced by international debates surrounding ‘poor whiteism’. Poor whiteism was fundamentally an ideological construction; a set of beliefs embedded in the association of poverty with miscegenation, racial decline and the inability of whites to live and rule in Africa.³⁵ Poor whiteism meant much more than material impoverishment. It signified a range of behavioural and racial defects. The Southern Rhodesian Report on Unemployment defined poor whites as ‘men accustomed to and content with a very low standard of living’ who lacked any sense of ambition or responsibility, and who preferred to live with continual assistance from the state. They continued that the poor white should be treated differently to the ‘impoverished European’ as it was ‘by the standard of living, and the psychological traits, more than actual financial position, that the class is defined’.³⁶

While accepting many dominant ideas about eugenics and poor whiteism, white worker organizations tried to recast discussions around unemployment and white poverty in order to reject stereotypes of sloth and protect the character of white workers. The RRWU and RLP argued that the numbers provided by unemployment registries could not be trusted, as the individual pride of white workers prevented many from openly admitting that they were unemployed and seeking government help.³⁷ Men and women who sought government relief were required to undergo a rigorous application process, which included providing statements to the unemployment officers and the Criminal Investigation Department followed by an interview, and the taking of fingerprints. Leading trade unionists argued that this ‘criminalization’ of the poor and the ‘indignity’ of the process of applying for relief was so demeaning that many Europeans would rather starve than go through it.³⁸ Negotiating wider assertions about poor whiteism, shame was used to dispute official unemployment statistics and was also held up as proof of lower-class respectability; that they would ‘rather starve’ than compromise their dignity was heralded as a testament to white workers’ moral strength.

Yet this shame was expressed differently by men and women, and anxieties over poor whiteism had clearly gendered dimensions. For white labouring men, poverty was imagined as a process of emasculation. Not only did it remove the ability of men to provide for dependants, it also endangered the ways in which their racial and gendered identities were expressed through work. The Review noted with alarm how unemployment would lead Rhodesian whites to endure social debasement, writing that the unemployed men of South Africa ‘must consort in slums with negroes and half castes to whose jeers and insolence he and his womenfolk especially are then subject’. This, they argued, led to white men selling liquor to Africans and white women forced into prostitution.³⁹ As a temporary measure, white male workers argued that unskilled work which was previously performed solely by Africans should be allocated to white men; these unskilled roles were subsequently reformulated as character building and sources of pride. White female employment was also reconfigured as a necessary temporary measure to prevent the shame of poverty and prevent Africans taking ‘white’ jobs.⁴⁰

Despite trade union attempts to reconfigure emotional response to economic crisis, black peril anxieties flared as white women entered wage labour.⁴¹ In 1928 one leading white trade unionist claimed that

near the large towns there is scarcely a week goes by without hearing of a sexual offence being committed by natives and the white women of the towns are becoming more and more afraid of venturing outside the precincts of their own dwellings; indeed, it is hardly too much to say that even within their own houses they do not feel safe.⁴²

The RLP and RRWU increasingly stressed the vulnerability of white women and children as they strove to mobilize sympathy for figures of white wretchedness. The Review remarked upon white children who walked around in the street barefooted.⁴³ RRWU described ‘horrible dens … insanitary conditions, families of ten wandering about the sanitary buckets, picking up crusts on account of inability to get sufficient rations from the Department’.⁴⁴ Images of white women and children, distressed and endangered, encouraged shared feelings of empathy and community, but also acted to emphasize white women’s weakness as traditional gender roles came under threat.

Poverty and gendered shame

White women predominantly expressed anxieties over poverty through the idiom of the home, conspicuous consumption and ‘fitting in’ to white social life. Novelist Doris Lessing, who had moved to Southern Rhodesia with her family in 1925, recalled that her childhood friend, Cynthia, an impoverished white who lived by the railway line, confided in her one day her intense shame of having to buy fabrics from the Indian store. Cynthia lamented, ‘it’s so horrible to be poor. It’s horrible to have people despising you’.⁴⁵ Daphne Anderson, a self-described ‘poor-white’, expressed acute anxiety over her clothing which she recognized visibly marked her as an outsider. At school she wore ill-fitting cast-offs: ‘a blouse or a gym frock borrowed here and there from another’s cupboard … as a result of all this my inferiority complex threatened to overwhelm me and I no longer worked hard, feeling it would make no difference to my life and that no one really cared’.⁴⁶ Even as an adult this shame inhibited her participation in community functions: ‘the real reason I refused invitations was that I did not possess a bathing suit or the most elementary clothes for outings … [I] was determined not to make a fool of myself again’.⁴⁷

Hylda Richards, a British middle-class migrant from Kent, detailed her experiences of the Depression in her autobiography Next Year Will Be Better. Hylda and her husband Tom had settled in Southern Rhodesia in the early 1920s to pursue a new life in tobacco farming. Yet their hopes of quickly establishing themselves as wealthy producers were dashed as the reality of the arduous and unpredictable nature of white agriculture set in. Attempting to ‘wipe out a little of the awful sense of failure that rankled’ her, Hylda turned her hand to master the domestic sphere where she produced an inedible cake and failed to complete basic laundry tasks. She recalled how she found her ‘woollen socks covered with black-jacks and grass seeds like hedgehogs’. What disturbed her most, however, was the realization that ‘I had been the washer [as] I would never trust woollen socks with the boys’. In response her ‘temper raged’ and she lamented, ‘I was inefficient, foolish, criminally careless. I was no good. I wish I were dead.’⁴⁸ Such an acute sense of anger and self-loathing emerged from a complex of interrelated anxieties regarding the failure to reproduce British bourgeois culture and rapidly establish economic and domestic success in the colonies. It also reflected Hylda’s deep discomfort with her dependency on African staff, whom she both despised and feared. Significantly, what these memoirs reveal is that both middle- and lower-class white women repeatedly expressed broader anxieties around poverty and economic failure through the language of domesticity.

Economic insecurity uprooted idealized gender roles but also deeply affected the nuclear family and interpersonal relationships. Emma Griffin’s work on the emotional bonds of love – or their absence – in British working-class mother–child relationships explores how poverty and economic precariousness seeped into the core of Victorian family life. Working-class autobiographies demonstrate that bonds of familial love were neither universal nor static and that emotions of affection were deeply shaped by the material reality of poverty.⁴⁹ With regards to Southern Rhodesia, an edition of the Review from 1922 suggests that bonds of affection within the white family unit were often expressed through affirmations of idealized gender roles. When asked as a competition for the ‘Children’s Corner’ of the Review ‘which member of your family do you like best and why?’, the responses of the children who wrote in were strikingly similar:

Ripe Fig: ‘I love my father because he teaches me boxing and my mother looks after my clothes’

…

Pleasant One: ‘I love my father best as he is the one who is working to provide us with food and clothing and he has such a gentle heart and forgiving spirit’

…

Buster: ‘I like my mother and father because she mends my clothes and my father buys me books’

…

‘Jolly Joan’ … likes her mother best: ‘All my dainty dresses she strached and ironed for me. My meals I always find in good time and all other luxuries of comfort in general. Also correcting my manners so that I can be polite and ladylike. She very seldom has to correct me in my manners.’⁵⁰

The emotions of familial love were expressed in highly gendered ways. This affection valorized male provision and female domesticity and rewarded kindness and forgiveness, but also recognized the role of white mothers in reproducing racial and gendered sensibilities.

In contrast to the bonds of affection recorded in the Children’s Corner of the Review, Daphne Anderson’s memoir, The Toe-Rags, provides a vivid depiction of strained and abusive parent–child relationships in a context of white poverty. Anderson’s childhood memories of the Depression are characterized by emotional and material neglect inflicted by both her immediate and extended family. Notably, because of her parents’ poverty, Anderson’s servant, Jim, took what was deemed an inappropriate role in her upbringing: her relationship with her servant was so close Anderson’s first language was not English, but Shona. In this context, familial material and emotional neglect encouraged the formation of meaningful affective bonds which crossed over the racial divide. Certainly, poverty was widely acknowledged as compromising white women’s abilities to reproduce racial boundaries in the home.

As a young child Anderson was unaware of the perceived incongruous nature of her contact with her servant, but as she aged, she struggled with this emotional attachment. Anderson wrote that the affection she felt for Jim became tainted by fears that he could turn into a ‘savage’ and murder them, which in turn plunged her into an intense guilt for allowing such thoughts into her mind.⁵¹ When Daphne’s mother eventually abandoned her and her siblings, their father and aunt were forced to intervene to separate them from the servant, reintegrate them into white respectability and instruct them in the appropriate relationships and performances regarding Africans. Anderson, in other words, had to be instructed in shame, how to perform it and when to feel it. Moreover, these familial interventions appear to be motivated by a collective shame of having poor whites in the family, rather than any deep-rooted affection of the aunt or father for Daphne and her siblings. Nevertheless, Anderson’s rehabilitation into white respectability and white modes of feeling was partially successful. As Anderson entered adulthood, she increasingly recognized the impropriety of the affection she held for her past servants, which consequently incited feelings of shame and fear that it could compromise her social standing. Conversing with a wealthier friend, Anderson wrote, ‘what would she say if I told her that I had been brought up by native servants and had been treated as one?’⁵²

Anger

As the Depression deepened, white male workers increasingly turned to anger to reassert their own sense of pride and attempt to demean and frighten those social groups they saw as a threat. Anger had always been a part of white masculine expression amongst workers; by no means an exclusively ‘male emotion’, it was nonetheless cultivated more explicitly amongst men as part of their white gendered identities. Within the adversarial culture which pitted bosses against workers and white workers against Africans, anger – when channelled through appropriate mediums such as the trade union – became a mark of righteousness and was tolerated and encouraged in various forms. Anger was seen as a natural reaction when the liberty or dignity of the white man was encroached upon. Expressing righteous anger was an important demonstration of principles, characterized as a natural reaction to exploitation and to those who were disloyal to the trade union and industrial action.

Violence and anger directed at Africans had always served an important role for white workers in maintaining racial hierarchies. Lawrence Vambe, a prominent African journalist, noted that the Depression had intensified the level of bile and hatred directed from white workers to Africans:

Especially deep was their humiliation arising from the fact that they were seen doing pick-and-shovel tasks by the Africans, who walked or rode their bicycles past them. As it was, the Africans did not have to starve or go on the dole. If they lost their jobs, they simply returned to their villages, where they grew their own food. Probably for the first time, the European workers understood that black people had a freedom which they themselves did not possess. The indigenous people seemed unaffected by the white man’s financial system that had gone so crazily wrong and brought poverty, insecurity and bitterness to men who had always behaved like demi-gods … Their bitterness showed itself openly in the streets and on outlying roads. Those of them who knew our language swore at innocent black passers-by, using the most obscene terms in Chisezuru.⁵³

In this scene white men work with a pick and shovel, using their hands in the mud and dirt, while Africans appear carefree, riding bicycles, the image of urban, recreational modern life. Whites had continually preached the virtues of European culture and systems of governance, but this system had created unemployment and threatened the ability of white workers to lay claim to their presumed racial superiority. Whites, whose self-identification as the productive driving force in the country, creating wealth and prosperity on what would otherwise be unprofitable, disused land, were now confronted with figures of Africans whose links to rural villages were able to provide for them during the Depression.⁵⁴ Moreover, Africans seeing whites working menial jobs and living in relative poverty brought the assumption of white racial superiority crashing down. Liberal MP Jacob Smit outlined why whites walking the streets – their unemployed and destitute status laid bare for all to see – were a particular problem, as ‘it might have to some extent a very bad effect on the minds of the natives when they see these white people doing the work which in the past was only done by natives’.⁵⁵ For Smit, the debased white gave the black man confidence, and this confidence was despised and feared. The confidence to challenge white authority, to refuse to follow instructions or display submissive behaviours, was the same confidence that led to revolt and rebellion against white rule.⁵⁶

As white workers suffered and felt their racial prestige under attack, they turned to violent intimidation and hostility to reassert their presumed superiority. Letters to the Review proliferated, complaining of Africans laughing, talking or walking in the street.⁵⁷ In part, the transgression lay in the incursion of African bodies into those urban and residential spaces imagined as white, but it was also the visible reminder of African contentment and individual agency. White workers desired Africans to perform their own humiliation; for them to accept that they were a lower race and to behave accordingly, observing the emotional norms prescribed by whites. When automatic deference was not forthcoming, frustration and bitterness resulted.⁵⁸ Increasing levels of anger were directed at the government and its refusal to prevent Africans fulfilling skilled jobs. Africans seen to be performing ‘white work’ were routinely harassed. White workers also complained to management, attempted to shame those firms that hired African staff in skilled positions and threatened industrial action in a bid to maintain their racialized monopoly over certain jobs.⁵⁹ Here anger was characterized as a natural reaction of white men to this transgression, intimately tied to performances of white masculinity. Anger offered a route through which white men could restore their masculinity just as their confidence in their manhood was undermined by poverty.

Conclusion

In white lower-class communities, what was regarded as legitimate, or rational, emotional expression was constituted within existing racial, gendered and class power relations. White workers’ emotional expression was conditioned by fears of racial degeneration, African agency and threats to traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, as well as the threat and lived experience of material impoverishment. Trade union journals were inflected with passion, outrage and anger, but white men and women were encouraged to experience and wield emotions in highly gendered ways which reaffirmed existing social norms. For white men, anger was a legitimate expression of righteousness against employers or Africans who were deemed to be a threat to their position in the racial hierarchy. Pride in specific types of wage labour offered a route of differentiation to white workers, both from white elites, and white women and Africans. Particular emotions were projected onto racialized and gendered others: emphasizing the fear and distress of women and children in descriptions of poverty protected masculine pride and allowed for damning assessments of those deemed responsible, and positioned women as weak and frail to counteract their increasing autonomy outside of the home. For white women, on the other hand, emotional expression was conditioned by their experience in the domestic realm and the failure to perform an idealized white femininity.

Expressions of loneliness were conspicuous testaments to white workers’ vigilance in maintaining emotional and physical distance from Africans. Yet, the regularity with which lower-class whites publicized their loneliness spoke to underlying anxieties; fears that some whites – particularly the poor, isolated workers or low-class housewives – were engaged in transgressive interracial interactions. To help quell these anxieties, settlers compelled Africans to express themselves in specific ways which supported racial hierarchies; for Africans, simply appearing to be happy in the presence of anxiety-ridden whites could make them the target of white violence. Yet white skin was never an uncritical source of consolation or pride. Shame was instrumentalized and used by lower-class whites to lay claim to white racial propriety. Fundamentally, this shame was also deeply felt by individuals, as tensions between the idealized white worker and their experiences of material insecurity disrupted self-imaginings of an inherently superior race.

Notes

1. 1.  H. Fischer-Tine and C. Whyte (eds.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Basingstoke: Springer, 2016).

2. 2.  D. Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987).

3. 3.  A. Shutt, ‘ “The Natives Are Getting Out of Hand”: Legislating Manners, Insolence and Contemptuous Behaviour in Southern Rhodesia, c.1910–1963’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 33 (2007), 653–72.

4. 4.  W. Jackson, ‘Bad Blood: Poverty, Psychopathy and the Politics of Transgression in Kenya Colony, 1939–59’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39 (2011), 73–94; A. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

5. 5.  D. Posel, ‘Whiteness and Power in the South African Civil Service: Paradoxes of the Apartheid State’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 25 (1999), 99–119.

6. 6.  See I. Phimister, An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890–1948: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle (London: Longman, 1988); C. van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

7. 7.  M.E. Lee, ‘Politics and Pressure Groups in Southern Rhodesia, 1898–1923’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1974), p. 166.

8. 8.  Phimister, Economic and Social, p. 189.

9. 9.  Lee, ‘Politics and Pressure’, p. 170; L.H. Gann and M. Gelfand, Huggins of Rhodesia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 61.

10. 10.  Phimister, Economic and Social, p. 93.

11. 11.  B. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45.

12. 12.  J. Keller, ‘Who Pays?’, RRR (March 1923), p. 19.

13. 13.  J. Lunn, Capital and Labour on the Rhodesian Railway System, 1888–1947 (Basingstoke: Springer, 1997), p. 83.

14. 14.  R. Lord, ‘The Tally’, RRR (August 1922), p. 7.

15. 15.  J. Keller, ‘Solid Reasoning: Are You Helping to Starve Your Own Family?’, RRR (April 1928), pp. 19–20.

16. 16.  RRR (December 1930), p. 37.

17. 17.  ‘Correspondence’, RRR (December 1922), p. 10.

18. 18.  H.J. Lucas, ‘Early Days on a Small Working’, Rhodesiana, 20 (1969), 14–15.

19. 19.  J. Keller, ‘The Truth about the Rhodesian Railwayman’, RRR (November 1921), pp. 2–9.

20. 20.  A. Croxton, Railways of Zimbabwe: The Story of the Beira, Mashonaland and Rhodesia Railways (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1982), p. 107.

21. 21.  ‘Umtali Branch Notes’, RRR (June 1927), p. 36.

22. 22.  H. Killeen, ‘Female Unemployment’, RRR (November 1921), p. 35.

23. 23.  P. Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?’, in Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 8. See also D. Jeater, ‘No Place for a Woman: Gwelo Town, Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1920’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26 (2000), 29–42.

24. 24.  C. Gouldsbury, ‘For Women Only. Land Settlement in Rhodesia, Rider Haggard’s Report Condemned’, Rhodesian Rhymes (Salisbury, 1969). Every reasonable effort has been made to locate the copyright holder and we will aim to rectify any omissions in future reprints or editions should further information be brought to our attention.

25. 25.  A. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).

26. 26.  For a deeper discussion of white femininity, domesticity and work in Southern Rhodesia, see U. Kufakurinani, Elasticity in Domesticity: White Women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890 to 1980 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

27. 27.  J.M. Scott, ‘What Every Railroad Woman Knows’, RRR (December 1928), p. 64. Every reasonable effort has been made to locate the copyright holder and we will aim to rectify any omissions in future reprints or editions should further information be brought to our attention.

28. 28.  Givelo, ‘Musings without Method’, RRR (April 1922), p. 18.

29. 29.  Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Native Industrial Position and Problems in the Congo Belge’, RRR (November 1922), p. 9.

30. 30.  ‘Am I to Think You a Cad Jim?’, RRR (December 1928), p. 111.

31. 31.  ‘Branch Notes Salisbury: What the Women Can Do’, RRR (August 1929), p. 41.

32. 32.  See chapter 4 in Phimister, An Economic and Social History.

33. 33.  Southern Rhodesia Report upon the Census taken on 3rd May 1921, p. 17. National Archives of Zimbabwe, S480/95 C.H. Berger’s Records of Unemployment. ‘Editorial’, RRR (December 1931), p. 15.

34. 34.  Lunn, Capital and Labour, p. 125.

35. 35.  R. Morrell (ed.), White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940 (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 1992); S. Dubow, ‘Race, Civilisation and Culture: The Elaboration of Segregationist Discourse in the Inter-War Years’, in S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds.), The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1987), pp. 71–94; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.

36. 36.  G.E. Wells, Report on Unemployment and the Relief of Destitution in Southern Rhodesia (Salisbury, 1934), pp. 24–5.

37. 37.  Debates of the Legislative Assembly (Southern Rhodesia, 1932), p. 412.

38. 38.  ‘Plight of the Workless’, RRR (December 1931), p. 19.

39. 39.  ‘The Story of a Crime’, RRR (January 1925), p. 19. See also Debates of the Legislative Assembly (1932), p. 421.

40. 40.  ‘Women Workers of the Past’, RRR (December 1930), p. 55.

41. 41.  See also T. Keegan, ‘Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca.1912’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 27 (2001), 461.

42. 42.  ‘The General Election’, RRR (September 1928), p. 16.

43. 43.  P. Levine, ‘States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination’, Victorian Studies, 50, 2 (2008), 189–219.

44. 44.  ‘The Unemployment Problem’, RRR (June 1934), pp. 7–18.

45. 45.  D. Lessing, Going Home (London: Panther, 1957).

46. 46.  D. Anderson, The Toe-Rags: The Story of a Strange Up-Bringing in Southern Rhodesia (London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1989), p. 154.

47. 47.  Anderson, Toe-Rags, p. 235.

48. 48.  H. Richards, Next Year Will Be Better (Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, 1975), pp. 78–9.

49. 49.  E. Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood: Love, Culture, and Poverty in Victorian Britain’, The American Historical Review, 123 (2018), 60–85.

50. 50.  ‘Our Little Children’s Little Corner’, RRR (September 1922), pp. 32–3.

51. 51.  Anderson, Toe-Rags, pp. 45–6.

52. 52.  Anderson, Toe-Rags, p. 197.

53. 53.  L. Vambe, From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 58–9.

54. 54.  W. Dopcke, ‘ “Magomo’s Maize”: State and Peasants During the Depression in Colonial Zimbabwe’, in I. Brown (ed.), The Economies of Africa and Asia in the Inter-War Depression (London: Taylor & Francis, 1989), pp. 29–58.

55. 55.  Debates of the Legislative Assembly (1932), p. 419.

56. 56.  B. Shadle, The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

57. 57.  ‘A SUFFERER’, ‘Letters to the Editor: A Complaint against the Native’, RRR (July 1933), p. 21.

58. 58.  On prestige, see Kennedy, Islands of White; Shadle, Souls of White Folk.

59. 59.  Vambe, From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, p. 165.

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