Luise White. Unpopular Sovereignty

Luise White has written an extraordinarily detailed book about Rhodesia’s years of illegal independence from Britain (1965 to 1980) under the rule of the Rhodesian Front (RF) party. White’s main objective is to examine “how Rhodesians debated what it meant to belong to that nation and what they would do in order to belong to it” (xii). To achieve this goal, she examines contestation about the African franchise in federal and territorial franchise commissions and debates covering five constitutions: 1961, 1965, 1969, 1979, and 1980. In addition, White looks at sanctions-busting deals and military conscription in the 1970s during the guerrilla war. The breadth and depth of this history is impressive, as is the use of wide-ranging sources. White gathered material from archives and libraries in southern Africa, the U.S., and the UK; held interviews in all of these places; drew on Rhodesian memoirs and novels and journalists’ accounts; and used secondary sources.

Colonialism · Decolonization · Front (military) · Geography · Independence (probability theory) · Memoir · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Sanctions · Sovereignty · White (mutation) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies