David Hughes has done good work in the past on black identities in the south-eastern Zimbabean lowveld. He is now working his way out of being an anthropologist of Zimbabwe, a task which he says has become impossibly difficult. His work once involved dressing down to mix with an African peasantry. Now, on his route out of Zimbabwe, he has done some dressing up, smartening himself at least enough to be an acceptable guest in the houses of white commercial farmers in southern Zimbabwe. Having finished with problems of black identity he has turned to the problem of white.

This is a problem sharply posed by much new work. Recent demographers have stressed the inadequacy and instability of white Rhodesians. There were never enough of them. In the early days they might define themselves as ‘South African’ or ‘Imperial’ by contrast to the despised ‘settler’. Later the only way to attract enough white immigrants was to dissolve this tangle of British identities and to welcome Afrikaners, or eastern and southern Europeans. Ian Smith threw off the previous constraints of selection with the result that by the end of ‘white Rhodesia’ the majority of whites in the country had arrived there since the declaration of UDI, and had little stake in the ‘Rhodesian’ values they were supposedly defending. Rhodesia was a state in search of a patriotic citizenry.

And yet Rhodesian websites still flourish, redesigning a national coat of arms and working out how a restored Rhodesia might do better a second time around. The anniversaries of Rhodesia are still celebrated in exile. So in 1990 white Rhodesians in South Africa celebrated the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the Pioneer Column in Fort Salisbury, creating a Rhodesianaland in the northern Transvaal bush, complete with passports and immigration control, historical re-enactments, and Rhodesian banquets held in a ‘country that reminded us’, wrote one participant, ‘with great nostalgia of the Rhodesian countryside’.

Here perhaps is the clue. Rhodesian identity lay in landscape. So at least Hughes argues. Arriving in the territory which became Rhodesia, early whites found it impossibly difficult to identify with its human inhabitants. But the landscape itself, with a little tweaking, could become the marker of their identity. The key tweaking, Hughes argues, concerned water. Rhodesia was a territory with two great rivers but with no lakes. Whites needed lakes to achieve a proper landscape, and they gradually constructed them.

Hughes offers two case studies. The first is of turning a river into a lake with the damming of the Zambezi at Kariba. Of course, the Kariba dam was not originally intended as a scenic feature that would produce a truly Rhodesian landscape. If it was a symbol of ‘whiteness’, that was because it was an expression of Rhodesian dynamism and ambition. The dam would power industry. It did not matter if it ruined nature. And so in the early stages of dam construction, which Hughes barely discusses, there were two great ecological disasters – the drowning of thousands of animals and the displacement of thousands of Tonga: the first much publicised at the time, with the launching of Operation Noah, while the second was barely noticed by white Rhodesians. Hughes’ real subject is the extraordinay process by which ecological disaster was tranformed into a landscape triumph. Kariba Lake became the ‘real’ wild – the ‘true’ Rhodesia.

Kariba has been treated with greater sensitivity and sophistication by other recent scholars, particularly by JoAnn McGregor. Hughes' second case study is the more original and successful. This deals with the white creation of dam lakes after African majority rule in 1980. In the period of ‘reconciliation’ between white Rhodesians and Mugabe, white farmers in southern Zimbabwe fell back contentedly on to their own land. Rhodesian landscapes could be created on white enclaves in Zimbabwe; commercial agriculture boomed; and dozens of dams were built. Maybe a successful Rhodesian identity was made after the end of Rhodesia.

It is an interesting idea. It now remains to be seen how these little dam lakes and the huge Kariba are indigenised and become part of a truly Zimbabwean identity.