Kith and Kin" or "Rhodesia First

"Kith and Kin" or "Rhodesia First?":Kenyan decolonisation and inter-party competition in Southern Rhodesian politics, c. 1950–62 Brooks Marmon In April 1960, the US Consulate in Salisbury, the capital of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, dispatched a five-page memo on a recent resolution of the Federation's Parliament that proclaimed solidarity with White settlers in Kenya and Tanganyika. The consul-general, Joseph Palmer, reported, "this represents the first time in our recollections that the Government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland has seen fit to associate itself with so formal an expression of its concern for the essentially internal affairs of another state."1 However, the political leaders of that body had been absorbed with developments in East Africa for the past decade. As early as June 1950, the Southern Rhodesian Parliament debated "the future of the white race" in Kenya and elsewhere in the region.2 When the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya erupted in 1952 and stirrings of anticolonial nationalism became more evident, Southern Rhodesia's residents became further preoccupied by wider African issues. The establishment of the Federation in 1953, dominated by Southern Rhodesia but also incorporating Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (today's Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, respectively) under a professed policy of multiracial Partnership, was explicitly positioned as a manoeuvre to shore up White dominance in the region, albeit under an internationally palatable guise. From 1948–58, the elements that became known as the United Federal Party (UFP) dominated the legislative bodies of both Southern Rhodesia and the Federation. However, as the imperial infrastructure in Africa weakened, the UFP was similarly enervated. It lost power in Southern Rhodesia in 1962, in large part because the White electorate came to believe its policies were aligned with Africa's broader decolonisation trajectory. Concern for settler "kith and kin" became subsumed by a "Rhodesia First" mentality. White Rhodesian anxieties around the fate of their colonial "kith and kin" in East Africa, particularly in Kenya, became a key political issue among the colony's settler community. Arguably, the most important consideration driving these calculations was not Mau Mau, but constitutional and electoral reforms that weakened White dominance in Kenya. White Rhodesians were overwhelmingly united in condemnation of Britain's imperial retreat from East Africa, but its implication for their situation was disputed.3 The UFP held that Rhodesia's position in Africa was best maintained by preserving a White presence throughout the subregion. Conversely, its leading opponent to the right, the Dominion Party (DP), which reconstituted in 1962 as the Rhodesian Front (RF), abhorred the demise of White dominance in Kenya, but believed Rhodesia could not afford the distraction of intervening in support of White settlers to the north. The rapid pace of Kenyan decolonisation soon rendered the debate moot. However, in the dynamic "wind of change" era, the "Rhodesia First" position of the DP/RF became dominant among Rhodesian Whites.4 The Rhodesian right-wing's invocation of White precarity in Kenya as a tragedy to be avoided, rather than managed, as the UFP advanced, helped bring the opposition to power for the first time in almost thirty years in December 1962, almost exactly a year before Kenya's independence and the demise of the Federation. Background and Literature Context A shared heritage of significant White settlement provides the basis for several comparative studies that jointly explore Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. Dane Kennedy's and Paul Mosley's monographs considered cultural and economic issues, primarily among the White settler communities; Christopher Youé devoted more attention to the intersection of Black and White conflicts in both territories.5 The violent anticolonial guerrilla resistance offered in 1950s Kenya by Mau Mau and in 1970s Rhodesia by armed liberation movements also spurred a small body of comparative scholarship.6 From a postcolonial framework, the late 1970s saw the rise of efforts by academics, journalists and even the British government to discern if Kenya's independence and President Jomo Kenyatta's pro-Western stance in postcolonial Kenya held insights for Zimbabwe's impending transition to majority rule.7 A common denomination in these studies is that they seek to compare factors across the two colonies, or extrapolate lessons

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