The history of the three colonial states that, for a short period of time, constituted the Central African Federation – Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia – is a fascinating one, and it often provides us with a particular lens with which to focus on specific issues in the history of colonialism and decolonization in Africa. In this book, Christopher J. Lee takes on just such a provocative viewpoint to trace the history of a group of people that did not fit into the racial and ethnic categories that the colonial state established and which left a permanent mark on postcolonial nations. In both Rhodesias and Nyasaland, Anglo-Africans challenged state and social relations in the colony by their mere existence, but soon also by organizing and campaigning for representation and legal status.
Lee connects intimate personal and family histories with the administrative and legal systems to trace the fault lines in the racial and ethnic divisions introduced into African societies. It was the colonial state that introduced fixed racial and ethnic categories, in legal, administrative and scholarly realms. The continuation of colonial categorizations in academic writing about Africa, Lee argues, glosses over complicated histories that blurred cultural and social distinctions.
To write the history of Anglo-Africans means to question these categories, because, at the intersection of histories of family and state, it shows how fragile and artificial they were. Anglo-Africans, Lee surmises, defied the separation of colonial subjects into ‘native’ and ‘non-native’, and continually challenged the state to deal with this obvious negation of one of the central tenets of colonial ideology. Lee traces this challenge over several social, administrative and legal aspects central to colonial society: education, the judiciary, political activism, employment, and urban segregation.
Lee starts with a description of interracial sexual relations in the colony. He questions colonial archives and their complicity in upholding the established social categories in the colonial state, thereby imprinting them on postcolonial scholarship. Interracial relationships were common but problematized by the administration. A close reading of archival sources illustrates the fundamentally conflictual nature, the power imbalances and agency at the heart of Anglo-African family history. Interestingly, these complex circumstances do not seem to be reflected in the family histories that Lee has produced through selected interviews.
The second part of the book asks how the ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ state dealt with the problem posed by the existence of a group that defied its categories. As British citizenship shifted from jus solis to jus sanguinis in reaction to increasing mobility within the Empire, the education of mixed-race children and their rights to housing or jobs constituted problems for the state: ‘Multiracial people continued to fall beyond the legal distinctions of native and non-native. They occupied a legal space between customary law and non-native entitlement, yet often remaining beholden to the power of each’ (p. 109).
Anglo-Africans reacted to these policies in a way that might seem confusing at first: by adopting racism both as an outspoken element of policy and as inherent in the colonial situation itself. Lee titles this chapter ‘Racism as a weapon of the weak’, an apt expression of how Anglo-Africans employed the racist foundations of colonialism for their own gain. He also explains the underlying logic of their choice of discourse: ‘This reasoning with blood signalled a transformation of the carnal knowledge that had resided in gossip and rumour into a political language intended to achieve non-native entitlement’ (p. 168).
The third part of the book is dedicated to Anglo-African agency. Lee's discussion of the struggle to get rid of the designation ‘Coloured’ in favour of ‘Eurafrican’ or ‘Euro-African’, ‘Indo-African’ and so on is fascinating. Anglo-African intellectuals complained that they were ‘non-Africans’ only when it was to their detriment, but not when it would be an advantage. The terms Eurafrican, Euro-African and Anglo-African were supposed to provide a ‘more precise indication of familial, cultural, and political affiliation’ (p. 185).
Lee explores an important desideratum in African history that allows him to focus and critique some central tenets of Africanist scholarship. However, although he mentions some recent revisionist works that challenge nationalist narratives of postcolonial history, he does not provide a more thorough discussion of this literature and the context it provides for his project of studying ‘the question of how this colonial multitude reflected and informed the making of African history under imperial conditions’ (p. 11). In recent years, historians of Zambia including Jan-Bart Gewald, Giacomo Macola, Miles Larmer and Bizeck Jube Phiri – none of whom is included in Lee's bibliography – have argued for an analysis of Zambian nationalism that considers the political and social complexities of the country, be it the constant struggle between regionalism and nationalism, or the question of the relationship between British liberalism and Zambian nationalism. Also, chapters jump between the three colonies – family histories are based on interviews conducted in Malawi, but the chapter on commissions relies exclusively on reports from Southern Rhodesian lawmakers. Given the complexities and differences between the three territories despite the constitutional roof of the Federation, it is unclear how much these commissions influenced administrative and judicial behaviour in Nyasaland.
Nevertheless, this book remains an important and valuable addition to the ongoing discussion of late colonial ideology and its social, political and academic consequences, and challenges readers to rethink their own categorization of African historical agents.
