Search

During the First World War, 312,891 men and women from Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) were recruited as porters. Their task was to ensure a steady supply of food and artillery from Northern Rhodesia to the northern border into German East Africa (modern Tanzania and parts of Rwanda and Burundi) and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). There is a growing body of literature on African porters who served in the East Africa campaign during the First World War. Despite the recognition of the importance of African porters, the experiences of those from Northern Rhodesia remains understudied. Therefore, this article examines the experiences of Northern Rhodesian porters – the mtenga-tenga – in the East Africa campaign. It also explores the porters' reactions to their wartime experiences. The article argues that negative experiences in the war altered these men and women in many ways. Significantly, these experiences adversely affected their relationship with the traditional authorities. This shook the very foundations of established traditional authority. The article draws extensively on new primary data stored in Zambian museums and archives, which hitherto have been underutilised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interaction of settler farmers, miners, and the state in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1895 to 1923. The governing authority, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), was a private commercial mining entity, which sought to maximise its earnings through mining, particularly gold extraction. Its mining bias set the stage for subsequent friction between the country's miners and the fledgling settler farming sector over the control of labour, land, wood and water resources in the new state. The end of BSAC rule in 1923 and its replacement with settler government has often been explained in economic terms, as an indication that farming had become more economically important to the state than mining. This article suggests, rather, that mining interests continued to be economically powerful, even when political power shifted towards the farmers. We show that the farmers' struggle (post-1910) for recognition, for fairer resource allocation and other rights, especially through the 1912 tax strikes and other political actions, set in place developments that eventually led to the end of Company rule in 1923. However, although this farmer-led activism transformed the political landscape, the politically combustible issue of miners' privileged access to resources in the Great Dyke (where Gold Belt Titles were mainly tenable) remained unresolved until 1961, when the Mines Ordinance was finally amended to give farmers some share of the environmental resources with miners on farms in the Gold Belt areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how nineteenth century inter and intra-dynastic Shona politics influenced the outcome of British and Portuguese attempts to carve out territories and exercise authority on the Zimbabwean plateau's northeast. It mentions process of British South Africa Company (B.S.A.C) occupation and the delineation of the border between territories. It also mentions ruling lineages which the BSAC appropriated to construct traditions about paramountcies and exercise indirect rule.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, deputations of African chiefs, or their envoys, travelled to Britain from southern Africa. While he was in Britain in 1882, the Colonial Office placed stringent controls on Cetshwayo, the deposed Zulu king, because he was regarded as a prisoner of war visiting Britain under parole. These controls served as a template for the treatment of future deputations who were subjected to a recognisable pattern of constraints, the most disempowering of which was the imposition of the Colonial Office's choice of interpreter – through whom it could exercise control over the deputation. In 1907 a deputation of Basuto chiefs broke with the pattern of controls imposed on the earlier deputations. They did this with the help of two black activists. Josiah Gumede, a mission-educated, English-speaking African of Zulu descent, acted as both advocate and interpreter for the deputation, thus avoiding the imposition of an official, or officially endorsed person, appointed to act as their interpreter and, by extension, assuming the right to ‘take charge’ of them. Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian-born pan-Africanist, sought support for the deputation from the white humanitarian community in Britain. Seeing the reluctance of the Aborigines' Protection Society to assist deputations of Africans in Britain, Williams sought to fill this vacuum in the humanitarian lobby. Though it involved a compromise with his pan-African principles, he formed a committee of radical white humanitarians to act as a respectable front for the Basuto deputation to approach the Colonial Office. In doing so, Williams attempted to reconfigure the humanitarian landscape of early twentieth-century Britain. He and Gumede, breaking with the old pattern of controls imposed on previous deputations, pointed the way towards a more effective strategy for traditional African chiefs and their followers to pursue their claims to the heart of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores on the history of the Ndebele people and features their King Lobengula Khumalo. Topics mentioned include the delegation of the African countries without the British military, the eruption of the Matabele War between the British South Africa Co. against the Ndebele Kingdom and the death of author Tim Couzens.

The international Rhodes Must Fall campaign has reinvigorated public interest in the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, Empire and the production of historical memory. But it has also been subject to a fierce backlash in the rightwing media, which has fought against the campaign at an Oxford college to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes both on the grounds of free speech (and the right to offend) and on the grounds that Rhodes must be judged by the standards of his time. Here, the author revisits Rhodes' legacy in Africa, detailing not only his imperial exploits via the British South Africa Company but the way he was reviled by British politicians, thinkers, and writers at the time - even at Oxford itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses miner-farmer relations in post-1923 Southern Rhodesia as a lens to delineate the protean nature of state policy in dealing with sectorial interests of the two foremost primary sectors of the country's economy, highlighting how agriculture eventually toppled mining from the apex position by 1945 – both economically and politically. It discusses how government policies inclined towards supporting farmers and implications thereof to the mining sector, especially changes implemented to cushion settler farmers from the impact of the Great Depression and the levying of a Gold Premium Tax (GPT) on gold producers. The paper will demonstrate how this tax system was detested by gold miners and how it ultimately led to a marked decline in gold mining by 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British colonial rule in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries straddled a contradiction between promoting radical social transformation and maintaining political order. This article explores the relationship between changing techniques of rule and the stability of rule; in particular, the proletarianization and dispossession of African populations and production of an extractive economy in colonial Zambia. The 1920s saw the transition from charter rule by the British South Africa Company to the Colonial Office and the end of widespread rural unrest. Using archival and secondary sources, two key interventions marked a new mode of governing and spatial reorganization of power are examined: indirect rule through Native authorities and the constitution of Native reserves. These interventions sought to rework the political landscape and align relations between men and things in ways that furthered the aims of both extractive capitalism and colonial rule. The consequences and limitations of these new forms of intervention are examined by bringing together Marxist ideas of dispossession and the contradictions of colonial rule and Foucault's work on governmental power. In the final sections, a wider set of relations and processes beyond the state that worked to produce economic forms of subjectivity are explored, before arguing that the hallmark of techniques of rule that became widespread in British colonial sub-Saharan Africa is that they stabilized dispossession and worked to resolve central contradictions of colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For more than ninety years, between 1921 and 2012, our knowledge of the Broken Hill Man phase of human evolution has been provided by scholars who have been able to access the skull in England, where it was taken in 1921. This paper presents findings of the circumstances under which the skull was discovered in Northern Rhodesia and taken to England, its significance to science, and issues relating to its return to Zambia. The study grew out of the disillusionment of Zambians due to the reluctance of the Natural History Museum in London to repatriate the skull to its country of origin. The study has established that despite the existence of a legal framework in Northern Rhodesia to regulate the removal of relics from the territory, which was then under the administration of the British South Africa Company, the Rhodesia Broken Hill Mine Company donated the skull to the British Museum (Natural History) without obtaining an export permit. It is within the context of the findings and arguments advanced by the parties involved in the claim of ownership that this paper advocates for the return of the skull to Zambia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the remainders of the stamps issued by the British South Africa Company (BSA Co). It states that the colony administered by BSA Co. in central Africa produce its own stamps, which were based on the design used for the last Rhodesian stamps issue by the company. It mentions that in September 1923, BSA Co. decided to dispose their remaining stamps. It adds that collectors are still searching for some of the missing stamps.

The article discusses cricket, warfare, and British imperialism in early Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, focusing on the period 1890 to 1899. It examines the central role of British imperialist and businessman Cecil John Rhodes and the British South Africa Company. The author comments on the Pioneer Column, a force raised by Rhodes to annex the territory of Mashonaland, the Matabele War of 1893, and the Jameson Raid of 1895-1896. Cricket in the areas of Mashonaland and Manicaland is discussed, and aspects of masculinity and civilization are explored.

The colonisation of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), like that of several other colonial African nations at the time, was characterised by tension and antagonism between the settlers and the indigenous people. This paper argues that in Southern Rhodesia, one of the ways antagonism was reflected was through the naming process, which started immediately after the occupation of the country by the British South African Company (BSAC) and continued until national liberation in 1980. Hence, the settlers used the naming process to assert their claim and authority over the newly acquired space, while the indigenous people, where possible, employed it to communicate their displeasure with all that the new political dispensation represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of European settlers in Southern Rhodesia between 1890 and 1914. It considers how the British colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia differed from the rule of most British colonial possessions during the period in that it substituted direct rule over the indigenous population as opposed to using an indirect rule approach to governance. Subjects considered include the settler identity of white colonists, the historiography of Southern Africa, Britishness, language and identity, and politician and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes and his chartered British South Africa Company.

The contemporary social and political struggles between the city of Bulawayo and the Zimbabwean state over the control of water are reminiscent of earlier contestations during the first three decades after Bulawayo's establishment in 1894. During that period, the Bulawayo City Council (BCC) was locked in conflict with the Bulawayo Waterworks Company (BWC), a private concern, which won rights from the British South Africa Company (BSAC) to supply water to the fledgling colonial city in 1895. Supported by the city's white ratepayers, the Bulawayo municipality was successful in taking over the city's water supply in 1924. This article examines the conflict between the BWC and the BCC. It emphasises that the BCC's municipal power over Bulawayo was predicated upon water control, among other things. The article argues that, with the current postcolonial state's attempts to seize the role of water supply from the BCC, and hand it over to ZINWA - a parastatal created in the wake of the 1998 Water Act - the control of water in Bulawayo has come full circle. It further contends that the intensity of the recent (2007) opposition to ZINWA's overtures in Bulawayo has its antecedents in the rejection of the BWC by the municipality in the formative years of Bulawayo. When the BCC and the Bulawayo residents invoked the history of the city's ownership and infrastructural development of its water resources a century later, they were referring to the days when the municipality of Bulawayo took over water provision from the BWC. This sense of ownership was rooted in the work of their forefathers who had built and invested in a formidable reticulation structure. This conflict exemplifies the centrality of water to municipal power in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces how the Catholic Church negotiated with the Zambian government at various stages in its ongoing effort to provide Catholic schools for Catholic children. Discussion on the arrival of the Catholic Church in Zambia; Perspectives of the British South Africa Co. on education; Control of Catholic primary schools.

The article presents the details about the postage stamps published by the mining company British South Africa and on list of the unsold and damaged stamps from various lots printed between 1981-1942.