UDI AND THE UK

Wilson's ‘five principles’ became iconic almost at once: sometimes they were referred to as a whole, sometimes by individual number, but almost always to denote a calculus by which Rhodesia would be deemed acceptable to Britain, if not the wider world. The actual principles were: (1) the intention of ‘unimpeded progress toward majority rule’. Since by 1965 both British and Rhodesian officials insisted that the 1961 constitution promised eventual majority rule, the first principle required that the 1961 constitution be ‘maintained and guaranteed’; (2) There would be no retrogressive amendments of the 1961 constitution; (3) African access to the franchise would be improved; (4) There would be ‘progress towards ending racial discrimination’; and (5) The British government ‘would need to be satisfied’ that any ‘proposed independence’ was ‘acceptable to the people of Rhodesia as a whole’.Footnote ⁶

In the year of failed negotiations before UDI, the initial response of the Rhodesian Front government to the five principles was intransigent: why would a white minority ever allow for a constitutional amendment that could bring about a black government? By the time they came to London in October 1965 Rhodesian negotiators were more measured; they pointed out the logic of their objections and explained in some convoluted detail that Rhodesia had already done much to implement the first four principles. It was the fifth principle that troubled them. The RF negotiators acknowledged that Britain had the right to seek such satisfaction, but ‘as a whole’ was – and was to be – a problematic turn of phrase. Rhodesians claimed first that a 1964 meeting of chiefs had already satisfied the fifth principle. It was the Conservative government in Britain which found this unacceptable – as unacceptable, Smith noted, as a procedure that relied on one man, one vote would be to the Rhodesian government. In 1965, when the Labour government suggested ‘a four race referendum’ – Europeans, Asians, Coloureds and Africans – Rhodesians objected. Such a referendum would involve the ‘invidious business’ of assigning people to racial groups, one of which, the Asians, constituted only 1 per cent of the population and therefore should not be allowed veto power. And while Africans were a large percentage of the population, they were ‘not as advanced as Europeans’ and thus should not be allowed veto power either. Ian Smith opposed any kind of inclusive referendum. Constitutional issues were far more complex than voting for a candidate, he said, and ‘involved sophisticated judgments which the ordinary African could not comprehend’.Footnote ⁷

Indeed, Africans had few opportunities to vote in the years following UDI. By the end of the 1960s, some kind of settlement became the primary goal of white moderates and businessmen, who wanted Rhodesia to make peace with Britain and accept the idea of progress toward majority rule. For them, recognition was part of the battle, as was the lifting of sanctions, but the idea of settlement was to make Rhodesia compromise, to have a ‘conventional constitution’ with appropriate safeguards, to be less reactionary, less like South Africa. The great danger of sanctions, Rhodesia's business community had learned, went beyond ‘bankruptcy, business closures, unemployment, immigration, and brain drain’; sanctions caused a growing hatred of Britain and, worst of all, ‘a destructive isolationism’.Footnote ⁸ There was no real discussion of recognition as a specific condition, aside from ending the kinds of indignities Rhodesians savored, as when Rhodesia was not allowed to compete in the 1968 Olympics.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, in the 1960s and during the Pearce Commission's visit, ‘recognition’ became a synecdoche, the part of the larger whole of settlement that came to represent the whole.

Between 1968 and 1970, however, Rhodesia redefined its own legal status. In 1968 Rhodesia's courts rejected the final appeals by the detainees who sued that the 1965 constitution was in fact illegal: the judges ruled that the facts on the ground demonstrated that Rhodesia was now legally independent of Britain.Footnote ¹⁰ Many Rhodesian moderates thought the ruling might offer a new opportunity to press for some kind of settlement with Britain.Footnote ¹¹ Historians have argued that it was the guerrilla war in the north-east of the country that pushed the RF to seek a settlement, to exchange part of its ‘internal utopia’ for recognition and an end to sanctions.Footnote ¹² The war was important, but so were changes in the Rhodesian state and the British government. The RF fractured over the 1969 constitution: dissidents accused Smith of ‘clandestine racial integration’ and left the party to form another one.Footnote ¹³ In 1970 Rhodesia became a republic. No-one seriously thought this would make any political difference – Rhodesia had been ignoring the Privy Council for at least two yearsFootnote ¹⁴ – but the new status, coupled with the new constitution that all but stripped Africans of access to the institutions of representative government, created a new set of anxieties about Rhodesia in London. Without a legal relationship to Britain and the Commonwealth, Rhodesia could become ‘an armed frontier on the Zambezi’, involved in ‘a bloody war’.Footnote ¹⁵ When Conservatives came to power in 1970, they were willing to water down the five principles in order to achieve a settlement.Footnote ¹⁶

WHITE PAPER, AFRICAN POLITICS

The White Paper of November 1971 renounced Britain's claim to rule Rhodesia; it promised to legalize Rhodesian independence so long as Rhodesia made efforts to conform to the conditions of the post-decolonized world: increasing African access to the franchise, ending forced labour, limiting detention without charges to six weeks. This would require gutting the 1969 constitution or returning to the 1961 constitution, which had held the possibility, albeit a distant one, of majority rule or of an equal number of African and European seats in the legislature.Footnote ¹⁷ The proposals for settlement contained some distinctly postcolonial elements as well: amnesty for actions committed by disciplined security forces, and a £5,000,000 in matching funds from Britain and Rhodesia to develop African areas.Footnote ¹⁸ However much these proposals might have seemed commonplace in 1971, Rhodesian officials insisted that they represented a significant compromise.Footnote ¹⁹

Even as the proposals were being negotiated, battle lines were drawn around them. When Bishop Abel Muzorewa and a group of African clergymen met with Douglas-Home in Rhodesia, the former thought the meeting a waste of time. The proposals were inconsequential; disputes between Rhodesian leaders and the British had nothing to do with African goals, especially majority rule.Footnote ²⁰ Muzorewa, consecrated United Methodist Bishop of Rhodesia in 1968, had long been an outspoken critic of racial oppression in Rhodesia. He led the African organization that was to successfully oppose the settlement proposals in 1972, and a year later – the same year he was awarded the United Nations Prize for Human Rights – he began his own negotiations with the Rhodesian Front government. Julius Nyerere charitably said that Muzorewa should have returned to the pulpit in 1972; within a few years, he was to be widely denounced as a puppet, a weak and vain man.Footnote ²¹ Muzorewa's political party maintained credibility with political parties and armies in exile until he became the figurehead president of the short-lived Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and his guerrillas became a private army. Muzorewa's willingness to be stage-managed by a truly wide variety of political interests is part of the argument of this article, that an archaeology of political affiliations was understood by participants as normal, everyday politics. Each layer of affiliation complicated the labyrinth of political belonging, but no single layer closed down possibilities and openings.

Even without Muzorewa, Africans understood the White Paper to mean a loss of all access to legal protections from Britain, with little in return.Footnote ²² Property qualification would still determine the franchise, and race would determine representation in the legislature. The proposals actually offered less than the 1961 constitution had done, although they reversed the most regressive aspect of the 1969 constitution, in which African representation would increase proportional to Africans' contribution to the national income taxes.Footnote ²³ The few African MPs elected to parliament on the African roll objected to proposals negotiated without their participation. They complained that consulting chiefs was ‘a very lame and wrong interpretation’ of African politics, and made it clear that without African involvement in the proposals there was no one to persuade ‘our people’ to accept them.Footnote ²⁴ In mid-December 1971, Muzorewa announced the formation of the African National Council – the acronym of which had a deep history in Rhodesia's African nationalist politics – to oppose settlement. Shortly thereafter, several African groups were formed to promote the case for settlement and a few white groups were formed to encourage both white Rhodesians and their African employees to support the proposals.

By 1971 Rhodesia faced two banned and exiled African political parties, both with armies at war with Rhodesia: the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU, formerly the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress, the National Democratic Party, and the Peoples' Caretaker Council, each formed when its predecessor was banned). Both denounced the proposals. The ANC, Muzorewa told the commission in January, had only been formed in December 1971 ‘as a spontaneous grass-roots reaction to the announcement of the terms of the Anglo-Rhodesian proposals.’Footnote ²⁵ Yet it was common knowledge that the ANC was an invention of the banned political parties. In his autobiography, Muzorewa described how the ANC had been created by a joint ZAPU and ZANU committee. He had been selected as a ‘neutral leader’, and was promised the full support of the two leaders still in detention, the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole and Joshua Nkomo. The ANC's executive committee would be equally divided between the two parties.Footnote ²⁶ Years later, Nkomo claimed that he and Garfield Todd had looked for someone they could trust to coordinate African opposition in the terms they themselves would have used. They initially wanted Bishop Abel Muzorewa to be treasurer of the new organization – ‘if a bishop cannot raise money, who can?’ – and Josiah Chinamaso, of ZAPU, its chairman, but decided that the ANC would have a broader appeal with Muzorewa as chairman.Footnote ²⁷ By the time the commission arrived in Rhodesia, Chinamaso was detained; some said this was when ZANU came to dominate the ANC.Footnote ²⁸

Douglas-Home insisted that the settlement would provide jobs for Africans and that this, more than majority rule, was what everyone in Rhodesia wanted.Footnote ²⁹ Moderates and the white business community were cautious but they actively supported the proposals; they had long wanted some settlement with Britain. Within a few days of the publication of the proposals African pro-settlement groups emerged, seemingly from nowhere. Some, like the Congress National Union, existed only on paper. Others, like the Rhodesia Settlement Forum, were formed right after the ANC was formed. The RSF had almost no credibility among Africans: its chairman was a former ZAPU member who had been arrested on his return from Tanzania and released the next day. For many observers this proved he was a police informer. More to the point, the RSF had its offices in a building owned by an RF MP. Its publications seemed to speak to a broad community of businessmen, promising an end to sanctions. Rhodesia's illegal status and isolation cost its public sector interest-free loans that other African nations obtained to improve everything from the livestock industry to lake ports. If there was a settlement, the RSF was confident that Rhodesia could draw on loans from the World Bank, Canada, and West Germany.Footnote ³⁰

The RF government, meanwhile, hedged its bets on the proposals. It did not campaign for an African to accept the proposals in part because Lord Pearce had asked them not to interfere in the commission's work. Instead it reissued newspaper editorials as pamphlets arguing that whatever the objections, the proposals would keep Rhodesia from drifting toward apartheid.Footnote ³¹ At the same time, both the Rhodesian Front government and party supported and funded the African pro-settlement groups. Two white pro-settlement groups, founded and funded by the remnants of the multi-racial movement, were formed in January and February of 1972. People Against Racial Discrimination (PARD) was headed by former Capricorns. It supported settlement but wanted to appear apolitical, and so took no stands on anything else. The all-white Committee to Organize Support for Settlement (COSS) included former members of Garfield Todd's United Rhodesia Party; it was funded in part by Lonrho and sought to encourage businesses and industries to encourage their African employees to support the proposals.Footnote ³²

NORMAL FOR RHODESIA

The royal commission was headed by Lord Pearce; two of the commissioners had been colonial governors, and many more had been in the colonial service. This worried any number of Rhodesian officials, who feared these men ‘hated our guts’. They were ‘colonial office types’, who had an ‘inbred hostility’ to Europeans in Rhodesia.Footnote ³³ To counter their influence, Rhodesia offered to send the former secretary for native affairs, Stanley Morris, to London to advise the commission on how to proceed. Morris was what Rhodesians called a ‘racial biologist’. He was a strict segregationist who had served on the commission that drafted the 1969 constitution; the press called him ‘Bantustan Morris’.Footnote ³⁴ The Pearce Commission rejected Morris, and arrived in Salisbury in January 1972 to test the acceptability of the Anglo-Rhodesian proposals. Even the choice of dates made Rhodesians suspicious. Ian Smith later wrote that Rhodesians had expected the commission to come in December and be gone by Christmas. Otherwise ‘dilly-dallying would play into the hands of mischief makers bent on sabotaging the agreement.’ When the commission announced it would come in January, after the holiday season, Smith's lieutenants saw the heavy hand of the Foreign Office, long out of step with the new Conservative government on the Rhodesian question.Footnote ³⁵ The commission, however, did not see the problem as one of when it came but of how long it stayed in Rhodesia: it understood that it was the source of ‘rioting and tension’ – especially after the riots on the day of its arrival – and that there would be no ‘calming down’ until the proposals were accepted or rejected.Footnote ³⁶

More important than the timing was the question of how ‘the population of Rhodesia as a whole’ was to be constituted and how it might be tested for the acceptability of the proposals. Everyone understood that the ‘population’ was subdivided into Europeans, Asians, Coloureds, and Africans, but as the test was designed and the report leaked, published, and countered, a new set of terms were deployed by the government. There was ‘the silent majority’, ‘responsible opinion’, ‘expert opinion’, ‘ex-detainees’, and the people Ian Smith referred to in parliament as ‘the happiest Africans in the world’.Footnote ³⁷ Most of the happy Africans lived in the Tribal Trust Lands, but there was no way most rural Africans could be polled: as Smith kept telling everyone ‘the vast majority of them had never exercised a vote in their lives.’Footnote ³⁸ By January 1972 the government did not oppose the idea of a test, but white moderate groups did: COSS in particular relied on arguments Smith would later use, that there was too much intimidation for the test to yield reliable results, that tribal Africans always shouted ‘no’ to ideas they did not wholeheartedly support.Footnote ³⁹

How the commission would ascertain the opinion of those Africans with whom it could meet became an issue of great importance. The proposals had to be translated into local languages. They were to be simplified, perhaps even dumbed down, ‘for persons not used to official documents’. The translation began by stressing the importance of the people of Rhodesia making a decision, which boiled down the issue of settlement to that of legalizing UDI: Rhodesia would become an independent nation, and Britain would give up its claim to make its laws.Footnote ⁴⁰

The practice of the test was another question altogether. The commission initially believed that scientific sampling could overcome any political situation. Social scientists had assured the commission that a representative sample of 1,200 Africans could be devised and sampled by twenty local assessors. These 1,200 Africans would be ‘completely representative’ of the population; they would not know in advance they were being sampled. If someone refused to talk to the assessors it would not show evidence of fear or intimidation; instead it would demonstrate the resilience of scientific method. People who refused to talk would give the commission the opinion of the ‘silent majority’.Footnote ⁴¹ Once on the ground, even with experienced survey research teams and more than enough data from which to construct a sampling frame, the best scientific methods proved impossible. Local experts in survey research withdrew their offers to help, urban officials refused to allow the commissioners into several African townships, and African interviewees became less and less willing to be associated with the project.Footnote ⁴² The commission then decided to keep the survey to a minimum and in the end followed the fiction of the 1969 constitution, that all African politics were conducted in their tribes by their chiefs. There were to be meetings – wherever possible and as large as possible – in the Tribal Trust Lands, with chiefs present.

Political setbacks followed methodological setbacks. Even the commission's requirement of ‘reasonable political activities’ was subverted; Judith Todd recalled a translator reading ‘no more’ for ‘normal’.Footnote ⁴³ The commission sought to ‘balance’ the need for public debate about a matter as critical as the settlement proposals with the ‘existing restrictions’ on rural African political meetings. The minister for internal affairs concurred, but warned the commission that ‘the tribal system’ did not permit individual Africans to ‘undermine established authority’. Witnesses before the commission were to be given immunity for their statements, and canvassing for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote was permitted, but ‘violence and intimidation were not’.Footnote ⁴⁴ During the commission's visit, ‘vote’ became the operative shorthand for the many kinds of responses the commission would receive: written submissions, oral answers, shouts or a show of hands at public meetings – groups of twenty or more – were all described in the vocabulary of the ballot, which tended to obscure how much of the commission's work went on in public. The public nature of so much voting worried the Rhodesian Front government. Rhodesia had released 57 detainees in accordance with the settlement proposals, which Smith considered an enormous risk: ‘the tribal Africans were a simple and primitive people who were highly susceptible to intimidation’, which the ex-detainees would certainly attempt.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, there were over sixty African politicians still in detention, and by the time the commission arrived the former prime minister, Sir Garfield Todd, and his daughter, Judith, and some well-established African nationalists, most especially Josiah and Ruth Chinamaso, had been detained as well. The commissioners were taken aback by these recent detentions: they believed these people had been jailed to stifle their political influence.Footnote ⁴⁶ Commissioners met with these and many other detainees, and noted that as a group, political prisoners seemed exceptionally well-informed.Footnote ⁴⁷

The commission was adamant that the vote, for all its indeterminacy, was to be quantitative rather than qualitative. If the test had asked some version of ‘ought the proposals to be accepted’, or if part of the proposals were acceptable, then the opinions of ten wise men would outweigh those of ‘10,000 foolish men’. But the test was about whether to accept the proposals as a package. If someone – perhaps an African – approved of some parts of the proposals and did not agree with other parts, he would make a personal choice to support or reject them with his vote, ‘as an individual’, rather than as part of a larger group of ‘people’. This is why the vote had to be quantitative: the commission could only ascertain the opinion of groups by counting the individuals in those groups. Thus it did not matter if Africans rejected the proposals because they rejected the RF government, or if they rejected the proposals because of some of the conditions of the settlement. The commission took written evidence from the European, Asian, and Coloured communities, and from some Africans. In written submissions almost 97 per cent of Europeans favoured the proposals, and 96 per cent of Asian respondents did. More than 80 per cent of the 51,000 African written submissions opposed the proposals; these included letters, memoranda, and petitions, and mimeographed forms. The petitions and letters were signed with signatures, slogans, and Xs, which lead the commission to place little weight on them, other than to note that they overwhelmingly opposed the proposals.Footnote ⁴⁸ The bulk of the African votes came from public meetings in rural communities.

Everyone agreed that these meetings were tumultuous. Commissioners found them ‘boisterous’ but ‘friendly and good-natured if sometimes noisy’ and nowhere did commissioners feel threatened.Footnote ⁴⁹ The crowds were large, sometimes ‘tense’ and sometimes ‘touching’. Africans asked lengthy questions, rich with allusion and sometimes, much to the chagrin of the commissioners, spoke in riddles.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although Muzorewa claimed that chiefs and headmen had been bribed with beer and meat to support the proposals, he seemed to agree with the commission that this added to the festive atmosphere of the meetings. Crowds estimated at as many as 4,000 shouted and danced when a speaker rejected the proposals; men and women waved placards – some ‘handmade and mis-spelt’, some printed – all saying ‘no’ when asked their opinions. There were ‘stentorian cries’ of ‘kwete’ (no) or ‘big big no’, or ‘no to the proposals.’ Chiefs who had supported the proposals scrambled to announce they now rejected them. ‘I am chief of my people’, one said, ‘If my people reject these proposals, I also say ‘kwete’.’Footnote ⁵¹ Security forces, however, felt an ‘undercurrent of tension’ in the crowds Muzorewa described as ‘jubilant’. A young policeman noticed the youths in jeans and sunglasses who walked through the crowds at rural meetings, haranguing the crowd as they tried to listen to some version of the proposals read in Shona. His superior officer told him that these young men were making sure the vote went ‘their way’ by making it clear that anyone who voted ‘yes’ would be beaten, or worse. There was no point in arresting these youths. ‘This is Africa’, his superior said, ‘and any vote here hinges on threats and intimidation.’Footnote ⁵² The combination of beer and noise, of easily bullied chiefs and of young men in their urban best and implicit threats, shows how popular – in the sense of ‘people as a whole’ – these meetings were.

It is tempting to see these meetings as similar to the carnival of voting in Britain and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the franchised and the disenfranchised came together amidst drink, bribes, and men armed with clubs, to determine the outcome of an election. Such gatherings, like those of the Pearce Commission, were scenes of implicit if not actual violence.Footnote ⁵³ Historians of Zimbabwe have tried to walk a fine line between historicizing political violence and dismissing it as a Rhodesian imaginary. It was a Rhodesian theme, of course, and one that intensified in the early 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁴ But political violence was also a fact of African politics that had emerged in the early 1960s, flattening class and gender divisions in order to ensure participation in protests and strikes. Political parties came to rely on their youth wings to mobilize, if not manufacture, support.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, many Rhodesian moderates blamed the rural disruptions on university students, sent home when the government closed the university to keep Salisbury quiet during the commission's visit.Footnote ⁵⁶

The commission, however, clearly believed that most Africans opposed the proposals and did not think intimidation was the reason Africans voted ‘no’; the crowds were not sullen or apathetic, as one would expect from people forced to vote in a certain way.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the evidence for intimidation and threats was strong, although in the commission's summary it appeared that the intimidation by supporters of settlement may have matched that of its opponents. There were vague and anonymous letters written to known African supporters of settlement; a few notices appeared in rural trading centres threatening the crops of anyone who voted ‘yes’; the offices of two African MPs who supported the proposals were attacked; another African MP left the Centre Party, which supported settlement, because he was now an ‘obvious target’. Many employers insisted that their employees opposed the proposals because they had been threatened; many of those employees said they were not threatened, but that they read the proposals and did not like them. The commission also recorded intimidation, threats, and general pressures imposed by district officers, police, and security forces. Some told chiefs that the proposals had already been accepted, others took great care to make sure chiefs instructed their people to vote ‘yes’. There was an exchange of dossiers: the one provided by the government consisted of newspaper clippings and the one provided by independent journalists detailed administrative abuses.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the end, the commission was convinced that the overwhelming majority of Africans rejected the proposals. It insisted that most Africans had voted no on the proposals and that ‘no’ meant ‘no’: the commission heard no silent majority within the ‘no’ votes, nor did it think a ‘no’ could be construed as an unspoken ‘yes’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, it gave little credit to the activities of Muzorewa's ANC for organizing the ‘no’ vote; the commission thought the group itself was surprised at its success, and could not have expanded as quickly as it did if there had been widespread support for the proposals.

Indeed, the commission wrote of the ANC as if it were a new and spontaneous entity. Outside of Rhodesia, Muzorewa was keen to suggest as much, and claim that the ANC had superseded ZAPU and ZANU. On a visit to the United States in February to protest the Byrd Amendment, which allowed for the import of Rhodesian chrome, Muzorewa told everyone he met that ‘we no longer have ZANU and ZAPU’ and the question of “where do you belong?” This division was one of our worst enemies in these last years.’Footnote ⁶⁰ But it seems unlikely that the commission did not know the genealogy of the ANC. At least one of their translators – who travelled with commissioners for weeks at a time – knew at whose behest the ANC was formed.Footnote ⁶¹ If nothing else, the Centre Party, which was to present itself as a link between white, moderate opinion and the ANC, made it clear in memos and newspaper articles that ZAPU was constantly in the background of the ANC. African members of the Centre Party blamed the township violence on ZAPU youths; the largely ZANU leadership of the ANC was unable to contain it: ‘the old ZAPU/ZANU split is still very real.’Footnote ⁶² But the Pearce Commission did not report this, nor did it trace the various genealogies of some of the groups formed shortly after the ANC, especially the RSF, PARD, and COSS, all of which actively opposed the ANC.

But if the ANC was really ZAPU (or ZANU and ZAPU), and if the African pro-settlement groups were really RF and the white pro-settlement groups were really Capricorns and the Centre Party or Garfield Todd's old party, how do we understand politics in Rhodesia? Were political organizations a matter of substitutions and stand-ins, a careful layering of names and interests that almost all Rhodesians, black and white, understood, but visiting commissioners chose to ignore? Were ‘normal political activities’ evident in these archaeologies of parties and organizations? In the absence of legal political activity, of commonplace rallies and demonstrations and political meetings, did older parties, even those as decrepit as the Capricorns, found and fund proxies to carry out their goals? The political activities the Pearce Commission described, and those they failed to describe, were not only normal, they were multi-racial, and deeply rooted in Rhodesian political history, and obvious to all whom knew that history well.

THE MANY MEANINGS OF ‘NO’

The report of the Pearce Commission was to be published in May. In March and April, representatives of the ANC and the Rhodesian government, among others, travelled to London to make the cases they had not been able to make in Rhodesia. Here Muzorewa alluded to the ANC's origins so as to make it clear that he had broken with his party's past. The new ANC would recruit organizations, not individuals. At a press conference at the House of Commons, Muzorewa announced to everyone who knew the ANC's history that he had diluted the ZANU and ZAPU influence in the ANC, having expanded the executive committee from nine (in which ZANU and ZAPU each had three representatives) to 55.Footnote ⁶³ For whom was such an announcement intended? There were many other venues from which Muzorewa could have spoken to Rhodesians in exile. Was he speaking to the Pearce Commission and the foreign and commonwealth secretariat then drafting the report? Was Muzorewa telling the commission that what it had heard in Rhodesia was no longer accurate, that the ANC was now disentangled from its origins the previous December?

In April, J. F. Gaylard, secretary to the Rhodesian cabinet, arrived in London to meet with Douglas-Home and others in the Conservative government. Ian Smith, he reported, expected the proposals to be accepted; the very idea that they might not be made his message shrill. A ‘no’ vote would indicate that the test was flawed. Had it not been the responsibility of the British government to ‘ensure the right answer because this was the best solution for all in Rhodesia?’ Given all the advantages of the proposals, the proper evaluation of Rhodesian opinion would give a ‘yes’ answer. Everyone but Africans – European, Asian, Coloured – had accepted the proposals ‘and the Africans with little understanding of the proposals should not be allowed to cast a veto.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The commission had not talked to enough Africans: the ‘silent majority’ had accepted the proposals through their chiefs; the Centre Party, which had African members, recommended a ‘yes’ vote, and when industrialists polled their employees they found that 85 per cent of them supported the proposals.Footnote ⁶⁵ Douglas-Home was uneasy about the silent majority and the figures supporting it. He had been told these figures and assumed that Africans agreed with the White Paper.Footnote ⁶⁶

Douglas-Home wondered if the proposals could remain on the table. If there was an expansion of the franchise, for example, perhaps moderate Africans and Europeans might work together, especially if they thought the only alternative was the 1969 constitution. Gaylard responded that Africans had already rejected moderates' opinions; Smith had no other choice than to restore the position of the governing party. White Rhodesians would feel let down by the British government and by Africans and ‘there would be a reaction against Africans.’Footnote ⁶⁷ It took Denis Greenhill from the Foreign Office to remind Gaylard that if the vote was ‘no’, the only way to keep Britain involved was to keep some of the proposals on the table: if Rhodesia went back to the 1969 constitution it would get no sympathy from Britain, and the contempt of the United Nations.Footnote ⁶⁸

Smith was bitterly disappointed when Greenhill arrived in Salisbury to tell him the report said ‘no’. By then, Greenhill was impatient with Rhodesian Front bluster. The commission had created political difficulties for all concerned, but the report was ‘a political fact’ and the British could not now implement any of the proposals. However much Britain wanted to recognize Rhodesia and lift sanctions, this was not possible because the report said ‘no’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Smith called the report ‘irresponsible’. The commissioners had done their jobs badly: they associated ‘with people like university academics’ and sought the views of ‘loafers’. The real problem, according to Smith, was the interpretation of evidence, implicit and explicit. The report ‘indicated a lack of understanding of the African and how very susceptible they were to intimidation.’ The release of detainees and ‘known intimidators … could put fear into a mass of people by merely appearing in their midst … they had a magic effect on crowds of Africans.’ The report had justified intimidation as a way nationalists could further their aims. Smith never invoked the history of the ANC, but instead repeated some of the themes of the debate around the 1969 constitution. Although Smith had rejected most of these at the time, he now insisted that traditional leaders spoke for Africans. ‘Tribesmen never spoke unless they wished to object.’ Thus there was a silent majority which, properly counted, voted ‘yes’. Such a count would have shown that Africans accepted the proposals. The report condemned government and chiefs and went out of its way to praise the ANC, at one point calling it ‘tolerant’. Such a ‘jolt law and order wise’ meant that the government had no choice but to continue under the 1969 constitution.Footnote ⁷⁰

When the Rhodesian House of Assembly debated the report in June, Smith argued that the proposals had been negotiated between governments; the people should never have been asked to approve or reject them. The vote on settlement failed because of African intransigence and British incompetence. British incompetence was of two parts, an unwillingness to understand Rhodesia and an inability to count Africans. The Commission had been ‘deceived’ by ‘the loud roar of the mobs’. Indeed, this must have been the only time in history ‘when the least responsible elements in a country were able to influence the future … simply by shouting “No” sufficiently loudly and often.’ Rhodesians would compromise no more, Smith said. For the first time in months, he invoked the tropes of the first years of UDI: there would be no ‘abandoning of our standards of civilization’. RF MPs amplified Smith's rhetoric, complaining that the commission ‘came down on the side of the mob’. Others blamed Africans: either they were ignorant of the import of the proposals or they ‘permitted unruly numbers’ to reject the proposals and all that they offered. A ‘no’ vote from illiterate tribesmen vetoed the ‘yes’ of responsible elements. MPs recited the mantra of numbers, of how many Africans were polled and where the commission found them. The British had a franchise based on age; Rhodesians had one based on qualifications: how then could the British commission ascertain a ‘majority’ of the people? African MPs – even those who had left the Centre Party over the issue of settlement – were trapped by the confines of the 1969 constitution. The tiny number of Africans enfranchised under the new voter qualifications left them with little legitimacy. One African MPs question admitted as much: what was the role of African MPs, he asked, if the government maintained that chiefs were the real spokesmen of African peoples? Indeed, when another African MP said his constituents supported the commission's findings, a white MP shouted out, ‘all fifteen of them’.Footnote ⁷¹

Smith's reply to the debate added deception to the list of the commission's incompetent decisions. It was now clear, he said, that the commission itself may have misled Africans about the true purpose of their visit. The ‘charade’ that was the constant use of the Union Jack, the reprise of ‘God Save the Queen’ that preceded every radio announcement may have made many Africans believe that British authority had been reinstated in Rhodesia, and it was to this that they voted ‘no’. Smith criticized the African MPs for ‘adhering slavishly’ to the commission's findings. Did they believe there were any Africans happier than those in Rhodesia? ‘Are they any happier in Zambia or Burundi, or Uganda …?’ Even as there were widespread arrests of rural ANC members, Smith announced it was now up ‘to the African people of Rhodesia’ to show that the verdict of the Pearce Commission was incorrect.Footnote ⁷²

In July 1972 Muzorewa spoke to a multi-racial audience in Salisbury. He denounced the proposals again, but insisted that ‘our people’ would work for an orderly transition to democratic rule that guaranteed peace and prosperity for all Rhodesians.Footnote ⁷³ Such open support for something like the 1971 proposals seems to have encouraged Douglas-Home to suggest in September that he could return to Rhodesia to see if further talks were possible. Rhodesian officials said no: all talks should be between governments, not individual ministers. But by September there was greater interest in, and lobbying for, settlement in Rhodesia than there had been in January. Several white groups – the Rhodesia Progressive Liberal Forum, the Settlement Council, the National Democratic Convention – that had sprung up in the wake of the Pearce report were all meeting and seeking ways of getting the proposals accepted, Special Branch reported. There were a few African pro-settlement groups as well, either too small to merit police surveillance or, already controlled by the RF. The most prominent groups were the African Settlement Council and the Rhodesian Youth Association; all had ties to white businesses and RF MPs, as had the restructured RSF.Footnote ⁷⁴

Nevertheless, Rhodesia's Special Branch thought it necessary to have an established African political group support settlement. They had already asked a Centre Party lawyer to approach Nkomo to see if he would support the 1971 proposals. When this failed Special Branch recommended releasing Garfield Todd, to show a more magnanimous side of the RF. But the real issue seemed the ANC. The government had begun to orchestrate ‘a complete dissolution’ of the ANC. By October it was deeply in debt and its leaders' passports had been withdrawn. Special Branch now recommended that it would be ‘more politic’ to find a way to pressure its leaders to believe that supporting settlement would be in their best interests. ‘The bait of international recognition as an official opposition in any new parliament might be enough to persuade the ANC to rethink their opposition to the proposals.’ It was suggested that Special Branch drop hints of proposed legislation to well-placed ANC leaders, so as to find a way for them ‘to have a credible change of heart’. There were some worries within the RF about restoring the ANC to its full force, but most thought the risk acceptable in the short run. Besides, once the ANC was recognized by the government it could never regain its credibility.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the first months of 1973, the British Foreign Office had met with ANC leaders, their passports having been reinstated. The foreign office was relieved that the ANC did not demand majority rule, and that there were conditions under which the ANC would support a settlement. Based on these meetings, Douglas-Home suggested new proposals that the Rhodesian government and ‘responsible Africans’, including the ANC, could review in advance of any public test. But the Rhodesian government did not want new proposals; the old ones had been part of a package deal that had already granted far-reaching concessions to Africans. Douglas-Home then asked if it might be possible for the government and ‘responsible Africans’ to meet privately and reframe the issue for Africans, as a choice between the 1971 proposals and the 1969 constitution. That would amount to reversing the Pearce Commission's verdict. Douglas-Home was not willing to go ahead unless there was significant support for this in Rhodesia. Should he go through the effort of steering this through parliament and ‘arrange for sanctions to be lifted by the UN’, something would have to save the face of African opinion in Rhodesia. The face saving would be Muzorewa's task. Was it possible to enhance his reputation as a world leader of African opinion? Rhodesia's Special Branch did not think so; he lacked leadership qualities and largely did whatever senior ANC officials told him to do.Footnote ⁷⁶

Did Special Branch, with its long history of surveillance of African nationalists, not know who these ANC leaders were or who constituted the rural ANC? That seems unlikely, however flawed Rhodesian intelligence might have been. Was Special Branch hesitant to put such information in writing? Did it think the ANC was now so detached from African politics that such information was irrelevant? Whether Special Branch thought Muzorewa cynically ambitious or easily controlled hardly mattered, however. What mattered was that Douglas-Home wanted ‘responsible Africans’ to meet with an RF that was now eager to do so, and Muzorewa was available to be remade for that purpose. In July 1973 Muzorewa met with Smith: Smith had reports that Muzorewa now thought his opposition to settlement was a ‘mistake’ while Muzorewa said the ANC had received information ‘in private’ that the RF had softened somewhat. The meetings, and presumably some of the communication, were arranged by Greenfield and Gaylard. The meetings accomplished nothing more than a show of good faith to Britain and less good faith to ZANU and ZAPU. Muzorewa himself called the talks ‘a meaningless exercise’, although he continued to meet with Smith well into 1974, even as he struggled against an increasingly critical executive committee. By mid-1974, however, Smith was quite pleased: he had received a personal message from Douglas-Home ‘commiserating’ with him for the difficulties and setbacks of negotiations, and suggesting the best way forward was to make an agreement with ‘responsible black leaders’ within the country.Footnote ⁷⁷

The talks between Smith and Muzorewa, however, had great meaning to African nationalists. ZANU denounced them when they began. A letter from Salisbury Prison signed by Ndabaningi Sithole, Robert Mugabe, and four other members of ZANU's central committee not only denounced the ANC for meeting with Smith, but went to great lengths to disassociate ZANU from Muzorewa's party. ‘ZANU had always been an organization apart from and independent from any other … and no organisation has authority to speak on ZANU's behalf.’Footnote ⁷⁸ However many reinventions and dilutions the ANC had undergone in the last year, its founders still acknowledged their ties to the organization, if only to sever them.