Rescuing children, reforming the Empire: British child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia

Abstract

This article examines a child migration scheme which aimed at permanently resettling British children to Southern Rhodesia during 1946–1962. First, the philanthropic scheme was framed in terms of child welfare; it sought to benefit selected children by removing them from their homes and resettling them at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school and children’s home. Second, the scheme aimed at advancing Empire building more broadly by increasing the number of white citizens in Africa. The article considers how the Fairbridge scheme distinctively combined physical and social mobility. The children were expected, through first-class education, to rise to privileged positions, thus maintaining the colonial, racially segregated social hierarchy. By focusing on implicit forms of education at the boarding school, analysed as a ‘Goffmanian’ total institution, the article considers the ambiguous intents and outcomes of a very particular project of colonial social engineering.

Keywords:

• child migration
• Rhodesia
• imperial identities
• colonial citizenship
• boarding schools
• total institutions

Archival collections (UK)

The National Archives, Public Record Office, Kew (TNA)

University of Liverpool, Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool (ULSCA)

Notes

1. Outline of the Scheme 1939. D 296/K2/4/1, (ULSCA).

2. Ellen Boucher situates modern child emigration in the Victorian child rescue movement which was grounded on a conviction that children needed to be educated and freed from the burden of labor and that these ideals should be extended to the laboring poor (2009, 917–918, 2014). See also Grier (2002), Paul (2001), Harper and Constantine (2010).

3. The exact number of child migrants is difficult to ascertain. Boucher (2014) and Harper and Constantine (2010, 248) estimate that from 1869 until the late 1960s roughly 95,000 children were permanently relocated in the settler dominions.

4. The research is supported by the Kone Foundation post-doctoral research grant.

5. The territory of Southern Rhodesia became part of the British Empire in 1890 when it was conquered by the British South Africa Company. It gained a status of a self-governing colony in 1923. In 1953 Southern Rhodesia joined Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland to form a Federation. Towards the end of the 1950s African resistance to white minority rule grew vocal and the Federation dissolved in 1963, followed by Northern Rhodesia’s independence as Zambia and Nyasaland’s as Malawi. The nationalist movements in Southern Rhodesia also demanded independence, while the white populist Rhodesian Front party campaigned for the continuity of white rule. In 1965, Ian Smith, the leader of Rhodesian Front, declared the country unilaterally independent. The UDI was followed by almost two decades of civil war between the nationalist movements and the white-ruled Rhodesian state. Zimbabwe finally became independent in 1980. An estimated 100,000 whites emigrated from the country during the first years of independence.

6. Publicity brochure, May 1948. D 296/K2/3/2, (ULSCA).

7. D 296/K2/4/2, (ULSCA).

8. The white population rose from 1,500 in 1891 to about 70,000 in 1941 and 232,000 in 1979. Whites remained a clear minority throughout the colonial rule; Africans outnumbered Europeans by approximately twenty to one (Kennedy 1987; Lowry 2010). While trying to attract the ‘right kind’ of immigrants, Rhodesia also actively restricted immigration. Prospective settlers needed to have employment or sufficient capital to prevent the problem of ‘poor whites’. But, according to Mlambo (2000, 141), what mattered most in defining the right type of migrant was not wealth but the ‘being of British stock.’

9. D 296/K2/1/2, (ULSCA).

10. Legislative Assembly meeting, 28 October 1937. DO 35 844/7, (TNA).

11. Proposed Establishment of a Fairbridge Farm School, 3 September 1938. DO 35/697/5, (TNA).

12. I use pseudonyms to protect the identity of my informants. Real names of the authors are used for published texts.

13. Christie Davies (1989) has further developed Goffman’s concept. She considers (1) the degree of openness or closedness, (2) the explicit purpose and (3) the dominant mode of eliciting compliance in various institutions. Accordingly, Fairbridge College may be considered an intermediate total institution, because the pupils were, in theory, free to enter or leave the institution, and they could aspire to move in the internal social hierarchy. Secondly, the purpose of the institution was to transform its inmates (rather than to lock them away) into ‘useful or at any rate conforming adults’ (Davies 1989, 88). Thirdly, the dominant mode of compliance was normative, not coercive or remunerative (Davies 1989, 90).

14. A promotional booklet, 1954. D 296/K2/4/5, (ULSCA).

15. It needs to be said that some Fairbridgians did find letter-writing meaningful. Catherine Maunder, for example, writes: ‘I had ample proof of [mother’s] love when I discovered that she had kept every letter, card, school report and photo that I had ever sent her. My life was there, laid out in an old leather trunk’ (Windows 2001, 53).

16. According to a student list provided by one of my informants, of the slightly over 100 former Fairbridgians whose place of residence was known in 2013, close to 30% live in the United Kingdom, nearly 30% in South Africa and 30% in Australia and New Zealand. Only four people were known to still live in Zimbabwe. About 20% of former Fairbridgians are known to be deceased.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katja Uusihakala

KATJA UUSIHAKALA is Researcher in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki.