City Versus State in Zimbabwe: Colonial Antecedents of the Current Crisis

Abstract

There is currently a major urban crisis in Zimbabwe. This expresses itself in failures of provision of water, electricity, medicines, transport, housing etc. Descriptions of conditions in the high density townships of Harare and Bulawayo today are strikingly reminiscent of the last great urban crisis – in the late 1940s of colonial Rhodesia. Two other features are common to both crises. One is the problem of governance. The other is the relation between the city and the state. In both periods there was a great debate about what consituted urban ‘citizenship’, with the great majority of African residents in the cities believing themselves to be unrepresented by illegimitate institutions of local government. In both periods, too, there was deep tension between the city and the state. In the Rhodesian as well as in the Zimbabwean period there was debate between the two over who was responsible for the urban crisis and over who should take what steps to resolve it. To many Zimbabweans the present crisis, and the contemporary clashes between the government and the cities, seem unprecedented. This article seeks to explore its colonial antecedents.

Introduction: The Contemporary Urban Crisis

Since 2000 the Zimbabwean state has radically intervened in urban local government. Elected executive mayors have been dismissed; whole municipal councils have been sacked; commissions appointed by the state have attempted to run cities. A whole series of new state authorities – governors for both Harare and Bulawayo; district administrators for the townships – have been inserted above and into the cities. Notoriously the Zimbabwean state launched in June 2005 a massive ‘clean-up’ exercise, Operation Murambatsvina, which demolished the houses of tenants and the unemployed and sought to destroy the informal urban economy, particularly in Bulawayo and Harare.1

The Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA) has identified the Urban Councils Act as the core of the problem:

On the one hand it bestows a degree of local autonomy to residents through local council elections, yet on the other it confers almost dictatorial power upon the Minister of Local Government … This legislative confusion has given rise to the serious conflict that has undermined the good governance of the capital city.

The CHRA has campaigned ‘for the fundamental rights of residents to elect their representatives who are then accountable to the electorate in particular and the citizens in general’.2 Beginning with representations to the parliamentary portfolio committee on local government, and with appeals to the courts, CHRA has become steadily radicalised. It has called for a total boycott of rates; it has organised street protests; it has summoned the citizens of Harare to re-capture their city.

For their part the Zimbabwean authorities have deployed police to assault CHRA officials and demonstrators; accused the organisation of plotting regime change; and in October 2006 cordoned off its head office and searched it for arms. Similar scenes have taken place in Bulawayo, rising to a height on 16 November 2001, when the City Hall was stormed and ransacked by war veterans searching for the mayor, headed by a man who until recently had been Minister of Home Affairs. The Municipal Fire Brigade was stoned and hundreds of council employees beaten.3 Such confrontations between the state, municipalities and ratepayers strike most Zimbabweans as both deplorable amd unprecedented. Yet a report on the Zimbabwean urban crisis by Action Aid insists that it ‘must be understood in a historical context’:

The current government has resorted to using colonial era measures of social control and repression. What emerges is a crisis in governance, a panicking government whose record of policy failure … is now so evident and has created so much paranoia that it seeks to use what look like colonial measures to deal with its unhappy people simply to retain power and sustain an otherwise unpopular rule. ZANU-PF, just like the colonial government it replaced, has now entered an advanced stage of its obsolete phase.4

This article, too, insists that the confrontations between state and city in contemporary Zimbabwe are not just the result of the present conjuncture. Rather they are an extreme expression of structural tensions which have operated from at least the 1920s. There is indeed a colonial backdrop to the present agonies of Harare and Bulawayo.

Prelude: H. U. Moffat and the Bulawayo Location

In many ways, of course, this introduction has too dramatically situated colonial tensions between state and city. They very much existed, as we shall see, but they did not result in the storming of city halls or the allegation that ratepayers were preparing an armed coup. What the Zimbabwean government has done to the municipalities far exceeds even the frustrated desires of Rhodesian Prime Ministers. Moreover, much as we may deplore the Zimbabwean state's brutal interventions, we may find ourselves more sympathetic to Rhodesian governments confronted with ‘neanderthal’ white city councils. Even today there is a confusion in the rhetoric of the CHRA between ‘the electorate in particular’ and ‘citizens in general’. That confusion was much greater so in colonial Rhodesia where ratepayers were exclusively white and where blacks tried desperately hard – and in vain – to assert their claims to ‘citizenship’. Today it is possible to credit the CHRA's democratic pretensions. It was very different during the Rhodesian period when governments often wished to intervene to save African residents of the cities from the neglect or repression of councils claiming to represent the interests of white ratepayers.

It seems paradoxical that such tension existed between the Rhodesian state and the cities. In 1923, after all, white Rhodesians had voted for ‘responsible self-government’ and for an administration which directly represented settler interests. But as Lynette Jackson has recently reminded us, this was intended to bring about the creation ‘of a modern self-governing settler society’. Rhodesian prime ministers wanted to break decisively from the reactionary sloth of the British South Africa Company. They wanted modern and efficient cities rather than the cabal of local interests which had grown up under Company rule. And so it was that self-governing Rhodesia's second prime minister, H. U. Moffat, entered into conflict with the municipal councillors of Salisbury and Bulawayo barely five years after the emergence of settler self rule.5 The conflict intensified under his successor, Godfrey Huggins, and has produced crisis today.

One issue, though, has remained constant – the problem of the African townships, nowadays known euphemistically as ‘high density areas’. How were these to be constructed? How were they to be controlled? What kind of facilities should they provide? What sort of representation should their residents be given? And who should be responsible for the construction, the control, the services and the consultation – the state or the municipalities? These questions have been at the heart of the tension between government and the cities from the 1920s to the present.

In this article I intend to trace this tension as it operated particularly in Bulawayo, Rhodesia's second city and up until the 1950s the most dynamic industrial and transport centre.6 The political balance between the cities and the Rhodesian state was of course very different from the present. No Rhodesian party could win parliamentary elections solely on a rural vote, no matter how much white Rhodesians liked to think of themselves as pioneer masters of the bush. Rhodesian governments had to take city voters seriously, however irritated they were by city councils. And Bulawayo's whites needed especially careful handling. The town was the centre of Rhodesia's railway system and hence of white artisan militancy. The white railway strike of 1929 threatened to bring down the government of Howard Moffat. Long thereafter Bulawayo parliamentary constituencies provided the main support for the Rhodesian Labour parties. Moreover the commercial elites who dominated the municipal council joined with white worker representatives in their suspicion of the the effete, bureaucratic capital city, Salisbury. White Bulawayo was determined to do its own thing. In particular the council was determined to run its African location in its own way. The location, which came to be known as Makokoba, was the oldest in the country. The regulations which governed it had been drawn up in 1895 before any government rules had been laid down. The location was controlled by the council's own police force. In Bulawayo in the 1920s the railway administration controlled its own ‘native’ compounds; various employers housed African workers on their stands; and the municipality ran the location. The Rhodesian government had no direct authority over urban Africans and no responsibility for their housing.

And yet what happened in the Bulawayo location affected the Rhodesian government. Lewis Gann remarks that at the end of the 1920s Howard Moffat, ‘the Rhodesian Premier, for the first time found himself facing a small emergent “Africanist” movement’.7 Many of these emergent Africanists lived in the Bulwayo location and complained bitterly about conditions there. They demanded a hospital, a government school, a recreation hall, compensation for the owners of houses which were being destroyed to create neat lines of municipal accommodation, better sanitation, and the removal of ‘Indian traders who hold the monopoly of all trade in our native location, so that the natives can establish their own businesses’.8

Throughout 1929 the most radical ‘Africanist’ organisation, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), focused its attack on white Bulawayo in general and the council in particular. Masotsha Ndlovu, the organising secretary of the ICU, lived in the Bulawayo location. At a meeting on July 20 1929 he attacked local white Labour spokesmen and then broadened his attack to the council as a whole:

We are the workers. We make houses and lay roads. Any reasonable person can see that we are the workers … [yet MPs and councillors] speak for the white people as labour leaders. The Europeans are united. In Bulawayo certain men are elected to govern the people. They are called Councillors. They make laws to raid your Location. 9

Two weeks earlier on July 6 1929 Masotsha compared Bulawayo to Gatooma's ‘good Council’:

The Bulawayo Council treat us like thieves in our own location. They are always sending the CID [Criminal Investigation Department] to raid us … Do you like your women to have the blankets pulled off them? How long are you going to allow this? The white man pays rent for his house, that is his house and nobody can go into it without his permission. Why should we be raided. My blood boils to see my people so badly treated in the Location … We don't want to live here; there is a devil here; we are like prisoners in here; we are kept here to pay money to the Council.

Another speaker, John Mphamba, added that he did not blame ‘the King’ or ‘the Governor’: ‘I blame the Council because it makes our laws’.10 The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the Native Department tried to impress on Moffat that the ICU had become a threat to the state. In December 1929 the Chief Native Commissioner minuted Moffat that: ‘I do not mean that the gunpowder awaiting ignition is … close, but it is not utterly remote … The ICU is becoming a potential danger’. 11

Yet Moffat remained totally unconvinced. He knew that the ICU's real target was the Bulawayo municipality and that it was appealing away from city to the state. As the Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo, had noted in June 1929:

Not so very long ago it was the Native Commissioners who were the subject of their subversive utterances, if not the Chief Native Commissioner too … Now it is the Town Location Superintendent.12

Moreover, Moffat thought that the spokesmen and women of the Bulawayo location had very real grievances, arising out of an archaic and obsolete system of location management. If these could be met by government intervention and reform any threat to the state from urban Africans could be dismissed.13 As a mining and railway man Moffat knew Bulawayo well. Before he became Prime Minister he had maintained an establishment in Hillside and had met some of the black political activists. One of these worked for Moffat as cook and waiter. This was Mafimba Ncube, an active member of the Matabele Home Society and later a colleague of Masotsha Ndlovu in the ICU:

Masotsha came with the ardent nationalist spirit … I was with him organising the masses … Moffat sympathised with the Africans since he was the son of a missionary. He was not happy with what was happening. Moffat liked Africans. That is why his actions were not liked by Europeans.14

Masotsha himself remembered fifty years later that ‘Moffat was far much better’ than his successor, Godfrey Huggins. He was ‘prepared to listen and attend to our grievances’. Masotsha recalled discussing African education and advancement with Moffat. ‘The Europeans began to hate Moffat. They said “He has put a fifth wheel on the wagon” ’.15

And indeed in late 1929 Moffat met regularly with African spokesmen despite the warnings of the Native Department. The various African associations had long called for the establishment of a fifth wheel – a standing commission on ‘Native Affairs’, which would include missionaries and men involved in ‘welfare’. Such a commission could provide alternative advice to that of the Native Department. The Bulawayo ‘Africanists’ urged that its first task should be to report on their location. Moffat decided to appoint such a commission and to ask it to begin by investigating Bulawayo.

Moffat only got around to informing the Bulawayo council that their location was the first on the new commission's list when he visited the city in November 1929. As the council later complained, when Moffat met the Mayor and Town Clerk and other officers on 5 November:

at the conclusion of business the Premier mentioned casually that he intended to appoint a Commission to assist him in the administration of Native Affairs … The Council considered when the conditions of appointment were reported to them that there was no reason to think that the administration of the Bulawayo Location was singled out for individual inquiry.16

Two days later Moffat met ∣representatives of Bulawayo African organisations. Moffat met delegates from the ICU, the Matabele Home Society, the Women's League, the Bantu Voters’ Association, and other smaller location organisations.17 Moffat told them that the newly established commission would investigate the location. The associations began to gather their evidence. They were better prepared for the commision hearings than the Bulawayo council was.

The four members of the commission were chosen with Bulawayo particularly in mind. One of them, John McChlery, had been a liberal mayor of the city; another F. L. Hadfield, had been a missionary in Matabeleland and was about to launch the Native Mirror, a paper based in Bulawayo and designed for African Christians. A third, H. M. G. Jackson, was the retiring Chief Native Commissioner (CNC), who had long desired more state control over urban locations. Hadfield is described by Lewis Gann as ‘an outspoken negrophile’.18 In 1924 he had chaired the Native Education Commission out of whose recommendations the Native Development Department had emerged in 1929. CNC Jackson himself came from a missionary family and had worked with Hadfield to foster African ‘welfare’.19

Their appointment caused a storm even before they had even begun to investigate the location. On 7 March 1930, the day on which the commission first formally visited the Bulawayo location, the Bulawayo Chronicle reported ‘one of the most largely attended [meetings] that has been held for a long time’. This had been summoned by the Bulawayo Farmers and Landowners Association which thought the commission was needless, expensive, negrophile and ‘a perfect abomination’. The Association's main spokesman, A. G. Hay declared that ‘the personnel of that Commission does not appeal to 80 per cent of the people of this country’. He would never have supported Moffat had he imagined he would do this:

All the trouble among the natives I put down to the Mission work that is going on … All over the country you have teachers disseminating what is almost sedition under the cloak of religion and what I don't like about the names on this Commission is that they savour too much of the missionary way of thought.

A resolution to annul the commission was carried unanimously.

Meanwhile, the municipal council had also taken up arms. When the membership and mandate of the commission became known the Bulawayo council protested that it appeared that ‘the so-called Commission was really a Committee of Inquiry sent to adjudicate on the administration of the Location by the Bulawayo Municipal Council’. Had council known the true purpose of the commission it ‘would have had something to say on the personnel of the Commission itself’.20

In April 1930 the Bulawayo Labour MPs, Keller and Davies, joined with others to vote against the commission in the Legislative Assembly, rallying seven votes against the eighteen who supported Moffat.21 A few days earlier Moffat himself had deplored the speeches made at the Bulawayo Farmers and Landowners Association meeting:

We are becoming more civilised. Natives in this country have learnt to organise and are organising to a very great extent. I have here a list of 18 Native organisations [including] the ICU, the Matabeleland Home Society and ending with the Bantu Womens League. (Laughter) … If there is to be a clash … it will not be political but economic. The economic question is rising and is being directly raised by the natives. During the past year I have had 50 or more representations made … from various associations and individuals … These economic questions which are coming up require direct investigation. The first task of the Commission had been an Inquiry into the Bulawayo Location affairs and to this he could anticipate no objections. 22

But Moffat was very much mistaken. Several fat files in the National Archives, Harare, contain the evidence collected by the commission, its report, and the furious reply of the Bulawayo council. In March 1930 the commission heard many African witnesses, some representing location associations and some speaking for themselves. The commissioners met ‘a gathering of all societies in the Native Location … under the Indaba Tree’ – 350 Africans attended.23 Witnesses complained about low wages and high rents; about ‘the demolition of our houses’; ‘the inadequacy of accommodation in the houses and the lack of privacy’.24 At the meeting under the Indaba Tree Masotsha proclaimed ‘we are different from the natives of 20 years ago, we are leaders of the present generation and we hope we will be heard’. He demanded ‘a voice in the management of the Location … We ask that an Advisory Board, consisting of natives elected by the people … [be elected] to act as a buffer between the natives and the Municipal Council’. This was endorsed unanimously. He demanded that Africans once again be allowed to build their own houses on as lavish a scale as they could afford. Masotsha added that ‘we express our thanks to the Government for sending the Commission to hear us’. Another ICU member, Solomon, protested:

against the attitude of the Land Owners and Farmers Association, who denounced the appointment of the NAC [Native Affairs Commission]. We regard their attitude as being against the interests of the natives. We are glad that we have been given an opportunity to express our wishes to the Government's representatives … We want a legislation to be introduced which will be drastic in its measures and unquestionable in its effects.25

When it came to the turn of European witnesses, the Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo, Colonel Carbutt, said he did ‘not think that the Government should take control but it is desirable that Government officials should be enabled to establish a closer contact with the natives living in the Location. Hitherto there has been the idea that the Location is a private reserve of the Municipality’. Major Brundell of the CID declared that ‘the control of the Location is a national matter. The Municipality cannot control effectively. The Government is trustee for the natives’. At the very least ‘Government might reasonably impose statutory obligations on the Municipality’.26 By contrast municipal officials insisted that ‘the Location is the property of the Council’ and should contain only ‘sojourners’. If government wanted ‘decent’ long-term residents then it should provide a village settlement. But the council did not take the commission seriously and put up a lack-lustre defence.27

The commisions’ report was devastating.28 It noted dryly that ‘the Location Superintendant appears to have had unfettered control of the Location since its inception’, adding that last year the Superintendent had been convicted of misappropriation. Yet:

The Government has a responsibility towards the urbanised Natives of this country which has been imperfectly realised and still more imperfectly met … We wish to say definitely that the responsibility for their future material and moral development is on the shoulders of the Government no less than on those of the Municipality. It is hard to understand how the Government or the Bulawayo Municipality could have been satisfied for so many years with the still current Location Regulations of 1895 … Location Government has apparently developed on the assumption that the Location is the private estate of the ratepayers and until lately with the minimum of responsibility from landlord to tenant. The Location is not part of the [Bulawayo] township. It is an ill-defined and unfenced part of the Commonage. It has been in the past loosely controlled by a Superintendent and a small force of ‘police’ who are not police at all.

The commission blamed both the ‘apathetic corporate conscience of the burgesses at large’ and the ‘body politic and its Government which applied no legislative stimulus or Government control over the fates and fortunes of some thousands of natives’. Something had to be done. But what? It had been suggested that the location ‘should be directly controlled by the State rather than by the Town Council’. But that would seem too great a break with the past. The commission thought that ‘Government control should mainly be exercised through more efficient and thorough legislation’ and by ‘inspectorial means’. The government Locations ordinance of 1906 should be applied. There should be an Advisory Committee and a Native Advisory Board of ‘six natives living in the Location’. Government should audit municipal accounts to prevent any further ‘diversion’ of location revenues for other purposes. Africans should be allowed to build their own houses ‘in accordance with plans to be approved by Council’. Rents should be reduced. A clinic should be established and recreational facilities provided. In short, the commission endorsed almost all the recommendations made by African associations in the location.29 It seemed to give Moffat exactly what he needed to try to push through legislation which was being prepared in the Prime Minister's office. It was a remarkable moment and might even have been a turning point in Rhodesian urban history. But in fact nothing turned. Government did not act against Bulawayo. The council continued to administer the location under the 1895 ordinance just as before. When the Land Apportionment Act was passed later in 1930 it contained provisions for municipalities to set aside ‘native urban areas’ so that the rest of the city could be legally segregated. Moffat expected Bulawayo to do this and to proclaim the location as a Native Urban Area (NUA). But the council refused to do so, clinging to the 1895 ordinance, even though this meant that they could not remove Africans from the rest of the city nor insert racially exclusive clauses into urban property transactions.

Why was there this anti-climax? Part of Moffat's failure to impose his will on Bulawayo was due to the storm of protest which the commission's report produced. Those who had criticised the personnel of the commission for being negrophile now proclaimed that their suspicions had been fully justified. And the Bulawayo council produced one of the most ferocious documents in the whole history of city/state relations in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

The commission's report, it said, was ‘most misleading, incorrect in certain details and if allowed to go unchallenged might lead to harmful consequences’. It was clear that before they began proceedings the commissioners ‘had already formed the opinion that things in the Bulawayo Location were far from what they should be’; they asked leading questions to witnesses ‘such as would never be tolerated in a court of law’. They ‘proceeded to enter into discussions with witnesses and even to argue with them in an obvious endeavour to get them to alter the views which they had previously expressed’. And they gave the council no opportunity to reply. ‘Any accused person [should] be fully informed of the indictment and be present during the whole of the time the case … is being heard and have the right to cross-examine witnesses’.

All of the ‘preconceived ideas’ of the commissioners were mistaken. There was no obligation on the council ‘either legally or morally’ to ensure that all the surpluses obtained from beer hall profits ‘should have been devoted entirely to objects for the benefit of the natives. Such an idea is entirely fallacious’. Africans ought to contribute ‘towards carrying on the highly necessary and essential services of the town as a whole’. The council ‘absolutely and emphatically’ denied that it exercised no control over the location Superintendent and showed no interest in African welfare. It quoted an eloquent passage from the commisson's report which praised ‘the indestructability of the material of which the African is compounded’ and his ability to ‘adjust under unpromising circumstances to a soil and atmosphere of so alien and formidable a type’. This was:

an example of Claptrap which one is surprised to find in a report of a Government Commission … Its terms can only be regarded as extravagant and a stigma on the European civilisation of the Colony … If the Commission's report is made public the statements might disturb the peaceful relations that exist at present between the European and the native.

The commission's recommendation that government control should be exercised through legislation and inspection ‘really constitutes an impertinence’. A location Advisory Board ‘would only be a means of leading to conflict and trouble [and] might easily get into the hands of, or become influenced by, a very undesirable type of native agitator’. It was absurd to suggest that ‘accommodation provided in the Municipal Location should be such as to meet the indefinite requirement of an African family and their visitors’; Africans could not be allowed to build for themselves because they only erected ‘unsightly and insanitary premises’. The commissioners seemed to think that ‘the native population should never have to bear any proportion of the obligations of citizenship’ and showed ‘a complete lack of consideration of the interests of the European population’.

The council's reply ended uncompromisingly:

If the Council is to be subject to criticism and threats and restrictions of the nature recommended in the Commissions's report there will probably be an end of all co-operation … Many of the ill-advised statements in the report may be used by native agitators. Should the Govermment decide to put into force all the recommendations of the Commission then they need look for no assistance from the Municipal Council and it is suggested that the best course would be for the Government to expropriate and take over the whole of the Location and administer it as a Government.30

On 7 June 1930 both the commission's report and the council reply were published in full in the Chronicle. An editorial thought that the reply was: ‘The most complete condemnation imaginable of a body which owes its existence to the desire of the Premier to have at his service a group of special investigators’. The paper remarked that the municipal response revealed ‘a loss of temper which ill becomes a Council’. Nevertheless, these ‘very serious charges against the Commission’ would have to be thoroughly investigated before it was given any more work to do.

Also on 7 June, the Chronicle reported that the Missionary Conference of Christian Natives meeting in the Bulawayo location had passed a resolution:

That this missionary conference places on record its grateful appreciation of the formation of the Native Affairs Commission and the selection of its members, to whom it extends its best wishes for the success of its work … This conference congratulates the Prime Minister and those who stood by him in the House when the Commission and its members were being opposed and attacked. If there is anything which the Govermment has done for the native people of this country worthy of all praise, it is the appointment of this Commission which this conference hopes will be a standing institution.

The conference urged Moffat ‘to instruct the Native Affairs Commission to inquire into native wages in this country’. But there was now no chance of that. There was to be no inquiry into African wages in Bulawayo until a Labour Board was appointed in 1948 as a response to the general strike.31

Despite this polarisation of white and black opinion, Moffat might still have called the Bulawayo council's bluff and taken up their suggestion that government should just expropriate the location. Despite the strength of its reaction there were several weaknesses in the council's position. The defiant reply to the commission's report had only been approved by five votes to three with two councillors being absent. Even among Bulawayo's ratepayers there was much unhappiness with the council's position. In late June 1930 the Bulawayo Ratepayers Annual Meeting declared that things were ‘not right at Town House’. The Ratepayers had not been provided either with the commission's report or the council's reply. Nevertheless their president, H. Issels, owner of the city's main engineering and founding firm, said that ‘we do know that location matters have been far from right for many years. We look to the Council to effect great changes’. To this Mayor W. H. Peard and other council members reacted fiercely – let the Ratepayers ‘tackle the big questions and stop pin-pricking’. The Chronicle thought that the council's ‘fierce resentment of criticism of any kind is very marked today and it cannot be said that its attitude holds out any hope for creating that atmosphere in which co-operation could be established’.32

In fact Moffat decided not to tackle Bulawayo on its own. But he persisted with the Native Affairs Commission despite all criticisms of it. On 6 August 1930 he wrote to the mayor of Salisbury saying that he wanted the commission to look into the the Salisbury location too, and then go on to Gatooma:

It is unneccessary for me to mention the fact that the Government are directly responsible for the control and general welfare of all the Natives of this country and I feel as the minister directly responsible that it is essential that I should have full information in regard to the position of the Natives in the various Municipal Locations.33

The commissions’ inquiries into Salisbury and Gatooma were much less contested than their Bulawayo investigation. They wrote to Moffat on 14 January 1931 summing up their findings:

After investigating conditions at three native locations we are convinced that a most persistent and serious danger lies in the relation of Native finance to general Municipal finance. It seems as though the ethical standards applied by individuals in their own cases are departed from the case of corporate bodies comprised by the same individuals. We regard it as of the utmost importance that it should be made impossible in the future for Native finance to merge into and become indistinguishable from Municipal finance. We foresee a serious source of interracial antagonism if the position is not safe-guarded once and for all.34

At long last Moffat acted speedily. By early March 1931 a Native Locations Amendment Bill had been drafted which ‘intended to make it clear that Ordinance 4 of 1906 can be applied to areas which have been previously set aside as Locations’, as was the case in Bulawayo. By the end of April 1931 the bill had been passed without amendment. Government was now able to intervene in the Bulawayo location. But still it did not. Municipal opposition was still too strong and Moffat's own position was weaker. Moffat's urban reforms were fast running out of steam.35

He might have been able to carry through his policy of placating ‘reasonable’ Africans by allowing them to share in ‘development’ had Southern Rhodesia actually been developing. In fact the colony was very hard hit by the depression of the early 1930s. In 1931 and 1932 the civil service was heavily reduced and its salaries cut – it was not the time to assume fresh government responsibilities. As Lewis Gann puts it ‘discontented railwaymen and civil servants, artisans without a job and farmers in economic distress – most of whom had voted for Responsible Government – now began to turn against the Rhodesia Party’. The Party could not afford to take on the cities. It tried to save itself by dumping a leader who had become increasingly suspect as a ‘negrophile’ and as a friend of missionaries. In November 1932 Moffat agreed to stand down after the next parliamentary session; in July 1933 George Mitchell became the prime minister; Moffat lost his seat in the general election which followed.36

With its patron a lame duck the Native Affairs Commission just withered away. Hadfield's new paper, The Native Mirror reported in April 1931 the death of John McChlery, ‘a great loss to the Native Affairs Commission’. At the Native Missionary Conference in Salisbury in June 1932 complaints were made:

that this Commission was not functioning as fully as had been hoped for. Mr F.L. Hadfield, who said he was the only living member of a dead body, stated that Mr Moffat had explained to him that it was impossible, owing to the shortage of funds, for any commission to operate’.37

Drama: The Setting

Looking back on these events in 1981 the old township activists saw Moffat's downfall and Godfrey Huggins's electoral victory as the end of hope. ‘When Huggins came’, says old Mafimba Ncube, ‘the spirit of hatred for Africans prevailed’.38 But in the context of Bulawayo this is too simple a contrast. For one thing Moffat's own cordial relations with Masotsha Ndlovu and the ICU had come to an end two years before he ceased to be Prime Minister. Moffat could not restrain the newly vindictive attitude of the Native Department, and in particular of the Superintendent of Natives, Colonel Carbutt, who was soon to become Chief Native Commissioner. In July 1930 Masotsha and a colleague were charged with defamation, Masotsha having allegedly declared that Carbutt was ‘the man who is oppressing us [and] killing us’. The trial was attended by ‘a large number of well dressed native men and women’ – exactly the constituency Moffat had hoped to reconcile.39 By the time Moffat resigned as prime minister the ICU – spied on, infiltrated and prosecuted – was effectively dead.40 But more importantly Huggins’ election did not bring the tension between the Rhodesian state and the Bulawayo Municipality to an end. If anything it intensified it. The tension was structural and persists today. A managerial government could not tolerate an instransigent and reactionary city.

As early as January 1934 Huggins asked for a memorandum on the South African Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1922. He must have read the memo with mingled envy and pleasure. The South African Act enabled government ‘to compel the local authority to make some or all of the provision’ of locations, native villages, native hostels, and ‘if the local authority does not do so then the Minister can carry out such work and charge the local authority. The local authority has to set up a Native Revenue account … Rents are fixed by the Minister. Native Advisory Boards of not less than 3 Natives and a Chairman are to be established’.41 This was the programme of Moffat's commission resurrected. It took Huggins until 1946 to achieve a Rhodesian equivalent. But meanwhile he kept up the pressure on Bulawayo.

In April and May 1934 Huggins told the Bulawayo council that the location should come under the Native Urban Location Ordinance ‘rather than continuing under the present regulations’. The Town Clerk replied that the council was ‘not desirous’ of such a change.42 It was insistent that it alone could approve regulations for the location. Bulawayo was being as irritating to the new regime as it had been to the old. In June the Acting Chief Native Commissioner, Charles Bullock, advised Huggins’ office:

In my opinion we shall not successfully control our natives for their own welfare and that of the Colony until locations etc are brought back into the unified control of the Government. The situation calls not for piecemeal amendment of the Native Locations Ordinance but for a comprehensive Act, embodying some of the features of the Native (Urban Areas) Acts 1922 and 1930 of the Union, but broader in its scope and wider in its vision. It is not proper for the Municipal Council to suggest that no rules and regulations should be made by the Governor unless such rules and regulations are first approved by the Municipality. His Honour the Minister may be aware that some years ago a Commission animadverted on the Bulawayo Location.43

In 1937 and 1938 government became anxious about what would happen when African workers living outside the location on European-owned farms around Bulawayo began to be evicted under the Land Apportionment Act. Great official pressure was put on the council to build more accommodation. But, as the Superintendent of Natives Bulawayo wrote in February 1938:

Natives are continually being advised in terms of the Land Apportionment Act their agreements are likely to be terminated in 1941. The Council's present rate of progress in providing accommodation for Natives employed in Bulawayo is most unsastisfactory – they are merely demolishing old buildings and rebuilding on the sites. As far as I can see it will be impossible to remove Natives off private farms by 1941 if an industrial crisis is to be avoided.44

Huggins was determined to change things – initially towards a more rational and complete system of segregation and subsequently towards recognition of the fact of a permanent black working class in the towns. The Bulawayo council wanted to change nothing. Everything should be as it had been in 1895 when the location ordinance was drawn up; employers should make use of short-term migrant labour; the minimal facilities such workers required should be paid for by Africans themselves out of rents and beer-hall profits. The council had remained totally unaffected by Moffat's commission and its recommendations. It carried on just as before, increasingly irritating and frustrating Huggins, until its hand was forced by a Rhodesian government which blamed its ‘stone-age’ attitudes for the 1948 general strike. But although the tension was structural it was also personal. In Southern Rhodesia's tiny municipal councils and equally tiny parliament large issues easily became a joust between two rival champions. Between 1934 and 1948 the question of how Bulawayo and other cities should develop was fought out between two men, Huggins and the ‘city boss’ of Bulawayo, Donald Macintyre.

Drama: The Characters – Donald Macintyre

Macintyre was a very unusual man. But in some ways he was typical of the most successful strain in Bulawayo's white ruling class. He was a Scot, and Scots played a very prominent role in establishing the city's economy. The Caledonian society, which brought all these industrous and thriving Scots together, was the city's most influential association and its annual Burn's Night dinner was used by national politicians to make policy statements.45 The Scottish strain in Bulawayo was not, however, entirely or typically bourgeois. Even the most successful Scottish entrepreneurs prided themselves on down-to-earth frankness, very different from the false politeness of the English gentleman. Moreover, many Scots in Bulawayo had begun adult life in Scotland as lowly apprentices. Thus, in 1972, James Stuart McNeillie, who had risen from blacksmith on Rhodesia Railways to Labour member of parliament and Mayor of Bulawayo, recalled the indignities of his distant apprenticeship in Scotland which had left him with a lasting contempt for authority: ‘Even in the army I had always a little feeling of resentment when anybody was being sat on … I had a quicker mind and certainly less fear than the fellows I was associating with’. McNeillie came to Rhodesia in 1919 as a supporter of the the white railway workers’ trade union.46 Macintyre combined these two Scottish characteristics. He became a very successful entrepreneur; and he carried from his apprentice days in Scotland a Labour, sometimes even a Socialist, set of ideas. He had been apprenticed to Hubbard's Bakery in Glasgow and to the end of his career took pride in being a Master Baker, often acting as President of the Rhodesia Master Bakers’ Association. He came to Bulawayo in 1920 and took over the existing Osborn Bakery and its tiny tea-room. He rapidly developed a characteristic Bulawayo enterprise, based like so many others on processing agricultural products.

Macintyre first appears in the records of the Bulawayo council, which he later on dominated, as a successful bidder to cater for municipal entertainments.47 He flourished as a businessman and at the end of the 1930s he took part in the establishment of Rhodesia's first Iron and Steel works, close to Bulawayo. He became shareholder, chairman and director of the company. But his part in the enterprise lasted only five years and ended when iron and steel were nationalised in 1942. It was as a baker that he continued to make his money. As we shall see, he thought about labour conditions and wages as a baker rather than as an industrialist.48

This business success did not dampen Macintyre's Labour opinions. In 1933 he was elected to the Southern Rhodesian parliament as a Labour candidate for a Bulawayo seat. During the Second World War when some leaders of Labour, including the Bulawayo white railwaymen's leader, Jack Keller, joined the Godfrey Huggins government in a coalition, Macintyre stayed out, becoming in 1940 leader of the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party and official Leader of the Opposition. To his roles as businessman, Master Baker, and Labour MP Macintyre added what often seemed like a full-time career as Municipal councillor. He was Deputy Mayor between 1934 and 1936 and was Mayor in 1936–37, again in 1937–38 and again for three years between 1944 and 1947. He was chairman of the finance committee, which was then responsible for the affairs of the location, from 1938 to 1943 and again from 1947 to 1953. Between 1943 and 1947 he was chairman of the general purposes committee. In short he was the dominant figure on the Bulawayo council for twenty years.49 For almost all that time he was one of Bulawayo's delegates to the Municipal Association's annual conference and usually a member of its executive. He became the most powerful, and famous, city councillor in Rhodesia.

In all these roles Macintyre outdid everyone else through sheer attention to detail. He dominated or sought to dominate every discussion he took part in, whether in the Bulawayo council or the Municipal Association or in parliament or in testifying to a commission. In all these roles he played up to his assumed Scottish characteristics. As chairman of the Bulawayo council's finance committee he boasted of an inherent thriftiness and gloried in being called mean. It was a joke among fellow parliamentarians that Mcintyre had a special machine in his bakery. It put ham into a ham roll at one end and took it out again at the other.50 He also gloried in what he called Scottish plain speaking. To most other people this amounted to plain rudeness. The minutes of parliament and the Municipal Association are rich with Macintyre's interjections and insults and the offended complaints of other delegates. ‘The Hon. Member thinks he is licensed in this house to say rude things that anybody else would not say’, complained an affronted minister of finance in May 1943.51 McNeillie vividly recalled Macintyre's abrasiveness: ‘He liked nothing better than to have a crack at whoever was Prime Minister … He was very bitter against anybody that opposed him … Rude, you know, he didn't mind who he was rude about … Macintyre was always very rude to Huggins’.52 The clashes between Macintyre, the archetypal Scot, and Huggins, the archetypal Englishman were sometimes so loud that they woke up slumbering members. ‘I do not think that this house is a shouting house’, complained one such member as Macintyre and Huggins confronted each other over the Native (Urban Areas) Accommodation and Registration Act in November 1944.53

Contemporaries sometimes debated which of these roles – baker, employer, socialist, city councillor – predominated in Macintyre's loyalties. It was easy to mock their inconsistency. During the June 1942 debate on the nationalisation of iron and steel Macintyre took the line that as a socialist he favoured total state control of planning, but that until that blessed day dawned he believed that the shareholders should be given generous compensation. Huggins mocked him: ‘I was horrifed at the Hon. Member one time when he was talking like a right-wing Tory, but he did his usual quick come-back to remind us that there was no future for this country unless we had a completely socialistic state. It was a good old Tory speech up to a point’.54

Labour members of the ruling coalition joined in the taunting. Macintyre claimed ‘to represent the workers of this Colony’, said the old railway trade unionist and Bulawayo MP, Jack Keller. Yet white workers at the Iron and Steel factory – and Keller was concerned only with white workers – got low wages and the system ‘represents one of the most pernicious systems of sweated labour that I know of: The Hon. Leader of the Opposition would not tolerate a trade union in his own establishment … and I doubt very much that he would tolerate speaking to the leaders of his employees about the conditions of labour’.55 And if there were serious inconsistencies in Macintyre's relation to white labour this was even more true of his position on African workers. Because Macintyre's Southern Rhodesian Labour Party (SRLP) was supported by genuinely left-wing people like Gladys Maasdorp and Doris Lessing, and because the Salisbury supporters had managed to set up an SRLP branch in Harare township, Macintyre was sometimes given credit by African spokesmen. Thus Lawrence Vambe included Macintyre in ‘an impressive team, a brave group of people [advocating] a revolutionary school of thought’.56 In fact Macintyre disliked the Harare branch and intervened to stop an African branch being formed in Bulawayo. 57

Macintyre's basic identities were those of master baker and Bulawayo councillor. Speaking from these identities he took a very different line on African urbanisation and proletarianisation than did the African trade unionists and intellectuals who formed the Harare branch of the SRLP. His real views emerged clearly when he and other Bulawayo councillors gave evidence to the Howman Commission in November 1943, Macintyre doing nearly all the talking. He attached ‘the selfish view of the industrialist’ who was demanding ‘a steady labour force’ and accommodation for wives in town. In his view, as master baker and as the man responsible for the municipal workforce:

the best Native today has very often got a wife in the country, who looks after the mealies and the cattle. I have 10 or 12 boys who come in and work for a certain period and then they write to their opposite number and he comes and takes his place. Between them they carry on and it is no trouble to us at all. [Settled married life in the towns] will not be for the benefit of Native life in the Colony. I think the best thing is for them is to live in the open spaces of the Colony, running their cattle … To suggest that you [ought to pay] a boy 3 pounds minimum now is sheer nonsense. I have 100 boys and I can get another 100. They have all the food they want. What they like is a place where they can eat. They go away at the end of twelve months as fat as butter and come back in another twelve months as thin as sticks. We have no trouble in getting boys … and we don't pay them particularly high wages, 30/ to 35/ [a month] at my place. If you establish all the Natives working in town as urban, I believe you will be creating the biggest problem that Rhodesia has ever had. The best Native is the Native who comes in for twelve months and goes away and his place is taken by another Native.58

As councillor Macintyre was determined to keep costs down for the ratepayer. ‘Boys’ who came in and out on twelve month rotations did not need elaborate welfare, medical, educational and welfare provision. During the 1944 parliamentary debates on the Natives (Urban Areas) Accommodation and Registration Bill, which Macintyre opposed single-handed, one of his Bulawayo Labour opponents, Wing Commander Eastwood, delivered a stinging attack on him:

During all the years I spent on the Bulawayo Municipality as Councillor, the attitude of the Hon. Member who seems to oppose the Bill was always to see how much he could get the central government to pay, how much he could shift the obligation on to the central government. During his period as Mayor and as Chairman of the Finance Committee, he seemed to think he was doing the ratepayers of Bulawayo a service if he could ensure letting those ratepayers avoid meeting their just obligation, and that he would get into their favour if he was shrewd or cute enough to bamboozle the government into accepting the obligations of the Bulawayo Municipality. It is not altogether Scots blood. Usually Scots blood applies only to the individual. He is usually not prepared to shed his blood on behalf of the rest of the ratepayers.59

But to Macintyre shedding his Scottish blood on behalf of the white ratepayers seemed the noblest of causes. In parliament he constantly spoke in the interests of white ratepayers. ‘It is not equitable’, he declared in May 1942, ‘that the Government should expect ratepayers in towns to provide medical attention when the diseases are contracted in the Government areas, while they, the Government go off with the taxes collected in the towns’.60 ‘I am opposed’ he declared in May 1943, to any weakening of the safeguards of the ratepayers’, whether against industrialists or the state. Government, he complained, had time and time again broken faith with what he called ‘the Junction City’, Bulawayo.61 To Huggins chagrin, he boasted in parliament that the Bulawayo council, unlike Salisbury or the other towns, enjoyed ‘entire control in the Location without restrictions by the Government or any other body’. But in the same speech he demanded that government assume the responsibility for African housing rather than expecting the ratepayers to finance it.62

Nothing outraged Macintyre as much as a threat to Bulawayo's autonomy or a criticism of its ‘native policy’. He had rejoiced in the council's ferocious repudiation of Moffat's commission in May 1930. He soon came to lead Bulawayo's resistance to Huggins. By the time the Howman Commission on the state of the towns arrived in Bulawayo in November 1943, however, legislation had at long last been passed controlling municipal beer hall revenues. Macintyre remained defiant. He bitterly complained that ‘the last Kaffir Beer Act’ had made it impossible to use the surplus for housing so that ‘in the future there will be only one source, the European rates of the town’. Africans could not afford economic rents but if non-economic rents were set ‘the European rates would have to be far more’. There was only one solution: ‘the Government should supply the money’:

To take ratepayers’ money to subsidize [African housing], then I think we are reaching a stage where we are subsidising unscrupulous employers who are paying too little money … Even in the years when we have made profit, owing to the fact that the houses were originally built out of the beer hall profits without interest, we were able to show only a small profit … But immediately the Government stepped in and said we could not use these profits we showed losses of thousands a year. That is cast-iron proof that building of houses originally with beer hall profits was helping the Natives for all time.

If government could or would not pay for African housing, the council could do little even if they were falling behind demand. In any case it certainly would not build housing for married Africans. Like Macintyre himself, the council believed that it only needed ‘single’ workers:

We don't accept the responsibility of a place like Luveve [the government village

outside Bulawayo for married couples]. We believe that Luveve caters for an entirely different type of Native, a semi-urbanised type. We propose to provide just for the Native who works in town.63

As we have seen, Huggins was putting increasing pressure on Bulawayo to increase rates, spend money, borrow more energetically, and generally to accept their responsibility for housing the workers on whom the city's prosperity depended. But Macintyre remained contemptuous of Huggins. At the annual meetings of the Municipal Association he insisted that ‘I do not want the government to tell me whether we are spending money correctly in accordance with the desires of the ratepayers’. Government might be ‘threatening’ the municipalities but ‘threatened people live long, and the Municipalities will live long despite Government threats if we stand together’. When he was told that Huggins had announced that he was determined to introduce Native Urban legislation, Macintyre merely replied that the Prime Minister ‘will change his mind next week if you leave him’. 64

Drama: Huggins's Bulawayo

By 1944, however, Huggins was determined to compel Bulawayo to change its mind. He had attempted in the late 1930s to cajole the city into meeting its responsibilities. Increasingly he came to identify Macintyre as his main obstacle. Years later in 1945 he told parliament:

When I walked round the Bulawayo Location with a town councillor [Macintyre] shortly after I had become Minister of Native Affairs, I saw a few nice houses and I saw many not too nice houses and I said to the town councillor: ‘When are you going to build some more of these modern houses and get rid of these filthy places’, and he said: ‘When the natives drink more beer’. That was my introduction to Municipal native housing … It was an odd remark by an odd person, and it should never have been made, but it illustrates the outlook of these people when they suggest that housing should be built out of beer-hall profits.65

In July 1936 Huggins wrote to Macintyre urging that the council build houses ‘for Native workers who are needed for the interests and convenience of its ratepayers’ by drawing on ‘loan provision’. No reply was received for a year, though Huggins followed his letter up by meeting Macintyre for ‘a talk about this matter’.66 In September 1937 he again wrote to Macintyre to ask for a projection of the rate of municipal building. Macintyre gave assurances that the council had a building plan. But in early October he again raised problems of finance: ‘Councillors have sometimes taken the view that we should not, for the erection of native buildings, borrow money under the authority of the Municipal Act when the ratable property of the town is the security for such loans’. Government must offer especially favourable loan terms which would enable building without ‘eroding our loan authority’ which was ‘required for other Municipal services’.67 ‘There would be no towns of any size if there were no Natives’, replied Huggins. Yes, answered Macintyre, ‘I agree that there would no towns of any size were it not for the Natives, but how do you square this with the policy of excluding them from towns?’68

Huggins was becoming so irritated by Macinytyre's obduracy that he avoided meeting him whenever possible. In March 1938 he more or less wrote Macintyre off: ‘You know what an obstinate fellow Macintyre is and it would appear that there is no hope for the Bulawayo Location as long as he has any influence there’.69 But there was no hope of waiting Macintyre out. In 1938 his domination of the Bulawayo council and his control of the location had only just begun. It was to last until 1952. In March 1944 Huggins was still complaining that Bulawayo was not building enough accommodation for African workers: ‘I have been trying to get something done for ten years [he wrote in a memo of 2 March]. Meanwhile Bulawayo have suggested that the Government buy land outside the commonage and run villages for their ratepayers’ servants. [African workers] should have been given the commonage!’70

By this time Huggins had given up hope of persuading the city councils to act. In his view they, and particularly Bulawayo, were responsible for the urban crisis. They took a dangerously narrow view of the interests of white ratepayers, whose security was in fact threatened by African discontent; the interests of white employers, who could not get efficient labour; and the interests of white workers, whose monopoly of all building work in the location made expansion there absurdly expensive. If the ratepayers had been made to take their proper responsibility, he thought, they would soon have abandoned such a costly policy. The old segregationist, whose appeals to the Bulawayo council to build more houses had initially been based on the desire to carry out the Land Apportionment Act around the city, had now moved to an acceptance of the permanence of Africans in the towns. As we shall see, the new bill which he was about to introduce was designed to recognise and organise this reality. By law, ratepayers would have to pay for facilities; employers would have to pay for rents; councils would have to accept administrative authority for whole clusters of townships. At the same time the new bill was designed to achieve segregation in and around the towns for the first time. At long last formal and adequate Native Urban Areas would be declared; all Africans would have to live in them and none could continue to reside in compounds in the cities or as rent-payers on farms around the commonage.71

Plot: the Native Urban Areas Accommodation and Registration Act

The ingredients of the Native Urban Areas Accommodation and Registration Act (NUAARA) had been around for a long time. They dated back essentially to the Chief Native Commissioner's proposal on 8 June 1936 ‘for a comprehensive Act embodying some of the features of the Native (Urban Areas) Acts 1922 and 1930 of the Union, but broader in its scope and wider in its vision’. As long ago as November 1937 Huggins had proposed to Macintyre a solution which became the centre-piece of the N(UA)ARA. ‘I suggest for your consideration and reaction that we consider compelling the employer to house or hire accommodation for their Native workers or servants; this would mean that the European employer would pay the rent in Locations, not the Native as at present’.72 In 1937 Huggins got no response to his suggestion; by the early 1940s he was preparing to enforce it.

In October 1941 the Secretary for Native Affairs announced that ‘it was the intention of the Government to introduce at an early date legislation making it compulsory for employers to provide housing’. In April 1942 Minister T. W. Beadle told the Town Clerk, Salisbury, that ‘the way forward was to proclaim a Native Urban Area under the Land Apportionment Act’. When all the municipalities had done this government would introduce both an Urban Areas Act and a Native Urban Housing Act. No municipality acted under the LAA, so Huggins decided that he would combine an Urban Areas Act and a Native Urban Housing Act into one compulsory measure under which municipalities would be obliged by law to declare and administer Native Urban Areas and employers bound by law to pay for their workers’ accommodation.

In May 1943 Huggins opened the Municipal Association conference. His mood was both jocular and ferocious. ‘There is far too much bickering between central and local governments’. Some municipalities, particularly Bulawayo, ‘would have to learn to accept “No” for an answer’. But in any case all smaller issues should be set aside. They must all focus on the problems of urban Africans:

The problem of the health service and housing of Africans in the urban areas will demand considerable expansion. I know this is difficult because you cannot go faster than public opinion and unti it is generally accepted that in diet, housing etc the African is entitled to at least the same consideration as is given to domestic pets and livestock, the whole problem bristles with difficulties.

‘I have been told’, he added, ‘that in recent public speeches I have treated the audience as if they were enemies or potential enemies. It is possibly owing to war conditions and it is subconscious’. Macintyre, conscious of being cast in the role of enemy, reacted sourly. ‘The Prime Minister made it quite clear this morning when he took the agenda not what he was going to consider but what he was going to do. I suggest to the conference that the next time they ask the Prime Minister to open a Congress they ask him to open it after the Congress is over’.73

By this time there was obviously an urban crisis in Southern Rhodesia. African urban populations were growing; locations were turning into slums. Report after report emphasised the terrible conditions of the townships, their details uncannily prefiguring newspaper reports today. On 1 February 1944 Huggins broadcast to the nation about the urban emergency, quoting the missionary Percy Ibbotson's report on African urban conditions, and deploring the terrible state of municipal locations. He was determined, he said, to do something about it. At the next Municipal Association Conference in May 1944 the more diplomatic opening speaker was the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring. He, too, spoke about Africans in the towns:

The historian of the future, when he comes to write the history of the present period in Southern Rhodesia, will conclude his survey by remarking that this problem of the natives in the urban areas was one of the most important problems with which Rhodesian of the forties were faced, and that the steps which were then taken to solve that problem had a profound effect on the conditions of life in the folowing years in Southern Rhodesia. History, of course, is an impartial judge, and the historians will make few distinctions. He will not say that this was a problem for the Government or for the Municipalities. He will say, I think, that this was a problem for the Europeans of Southern Rhodesia as a whole’.74

The conference was not disposed to take this impartial view. Speakers attacked Huggins's broadcast, saying that the municipalities had pressed for a Housing and Slum Clearance Act and that Huggins had displayed ‘masterly inactivity. This would be remembered ‘when the time comes to put another government in power. I want – and I am sure this Conference wants – a Government which will do something, especially about housing’. 75

In November 1944 the government at last did something. Huggins, as Minister for Native Affairs, introduced a motion for legislation making the establishment of Native Urban Areas compulsory; making employers responsible for the rents of their workers, at a fixed rate for both ‘single’ and ‘married’ workers so that the former could subsidise the latter; making municipalities responsible for native administration and pass control in the towns, and giving them power to licence private premises on which African servants could reside. ‘There is nothing overbearing in this’, he assured parliament on 23 November, ‘because local government is merely a delegation of government in certain matters’. ‘Omissions by local government’ had had ‘deplorable effects’. Now they must take responsibility. ‘I do not suppose any coercion [of municipalities] will be necessary, but powers will have to be taken on the lines of the Native Urban Areas Act of the Union of South Africa’.

Huggins stressed the importance of ‘decent living conditions for married natives … to get away from the unnatural life of males living together without their wives … We have to realise that a permanent urban class is arising’. The debate about whether ratepayers or taxpayers should meet the cost of African urban housing was irrelevant: ‘It is not a national liability, it is not a Municipal liability but a liability of the employers and a duty of the Municipalities to provide the facilities to their ratepayers at cost and in the most reasonable fashion’.76

This was the moment Macintyre had been waiting for. He still smarted over the beer hall funds; he deeply resented the assertion that the municipalities were to blame for the urban crisis; he feared state regulation of the new Native Urban Areas; he did not favour housing provision for married families. He was able to summon up in opposition most of his multiple personalities – a staunch Bulawayo patriot, an employer, even a socialist radical. The proposed legislation would make ‘the native a feudal serf, tied to his employer for his and his dependants’ accommodation, occupying it only at the pleasure of his master … That era has been buried without regret [together with] those responsible for such a system as the industrial age of Great Britain’. It would not stabilise urban marriages but break up informal liasons. Municipalities would not just tamely accept new responsibilities unless they were given complete authority and adequate finance. ‘There will be compulsory provision for the municipalities to provide housing, and I would like to know how the Prime Minister proposes to enforce this. If the municipalities refuse to impose a rate to meet the cost does the Government propose to impose a rate?’.77

Huggins replied to Macintyre on November 30. ‘I have been negotiating with these people for ten years’ and still ‘the Hon. Member was meandering’. And, yes, government was prepared to take powers:

The Central Government takes power when the local Authority will not do its duty properly … to take over from them and carry out the necessary works and levy rates as taxes on the local inahbitants. That is how you overcome the recalcitrant local authorities when the Central Government is thwarted, when they will not do their duty.

Macintyre and Bulawayo had been warned. The draft bill was not published for a further year, on 23 November 1945. The actual legislation was not introduced into parliament until January 1946. Meanwhile African workers moved towards strike action, particularly in Bulawayo where black railwaymen were strongest. But against this ominous background Macintyre mobilised all his constituencies to oppose the bill – Bulawayo, the Municipal Association and the Southern Rhodesia Labour Party.

He was re-elected Mayor of Bulawayo on 8 August 1945, and re-elected parliamentary leader of the SRLP on 16 September.78 At a party Congress in Salisbury, where nationalisation of all industries was adopted as a policy, Huggins's plans were repudiated, the Harare branch taking a leading part in the debate. ‘Nothing worth while’ said Macintyre ‘could be achieved by the adoption of the Prime Minister's plan to make the native worker a serf for all time’.79 In late December the Bulawayo council debated Huggins's proposals behind closed doors; it elected Macintyre and four councillors as delegates to an extraordinary conference of the Municipal Association to be held on 19 and 20 December. They were mandated by ten votes to one to carry with them a resolution that ‘without the co-operation of local authorities … proposals contained in the Bill would be impracticable’. It should be sent to a Select Committe on which the municipalities would be well represented.80

Macintyre took the Municipal Association by storm. He attacked virtually every aspect of the Bill. ‘The local authorities were being asked to assume control over the largest section of the people without any assistance, which rightly it was the Government's obligation to do … The repercussions of the Bill are enormous and will affect the whole Colony … It is immoral that the Bill should be rushed through Parliament at this stage’. He carried an amendment by fourteen votes to seven that the municipalities be not compelled to provide housing, but that ‘the Government should implement the Land Appotionment Act that dealt with Village Settlements, thus solving the whole urban native problem’. Unless this happened the cities themselves would be swamped and the Land Apportionment Act undermined. ‘The Bill aimed at destroying tribal life and putting nothing in its place’. Although some delegates objected to this melodrama, Macintyre's motion that a Commission of Inquiry be appointed was carried unanimously. Macintyre warned that ‘the Prime Minister would constitute a commission of men who would incline to his views’, but it would buy time. Surely even Huggins would now accept that ‘to delay the passage of the Bill would be a wise and statesmanlike action’, since ‘unless he gets the co-operation of the municipalities it will be impossible to put the Bill into operation’.81 Huggins told the Herald on 21 December 1944 that he had hoped the munipalities would offer constructive amendments but that clearly they did not understand the bill. ‘There is nothing to be gained by having a commission or a select committee’. The bill would be introduced into parliament on 15 January 1945. The stage was set for a last titanic, if one-sided, battle between Huggins and Macintyre.

Huggins began by noting that ‘there was considerable criticism outside the house by politicians, budding, mischeievous and otherwise. This died down until the Bill was published and had a mixed reception. Some city fathers … [received the Bill] with the thumbs placed to their noses, with the forefingers extended’. Opposition was rooted in Bulawayo – ‘I look forward to calm waters in Salisbury’. And in Bulawayo the root of opposition was one man – Macintyre. Macintyre said that co-operation was needed but he ‘was speaking with his tongue in its cheek. It takes at least two to co-operate’. In the Municipal Association resolutions ‘I see the hand of the Mayor of Bulawayo’. The Bulawayo council had sent a letter of objection; the SRLP had forwarded a resolution from its African branch. But: ‘here again we see the same individual producing more noise and opposition, the Mayor of Bulawayo, the leader of the SRLP and the chief noise in the Municipal Association’.82

Throughout the days which followed Macintyre did indeed fight a single-handed battle, moving and losing innumerable amendments, insulting Huggins and enduring innumerable insults in return. It was a ‘monstrosity of a Bill’ which would ‘destroy many of the fundamental rights which have been built up for the native population of the country … taking away tribal life and replacing it with nothing else’. It would ‘create an unwholesome increase in the number of women and children who will be living in the urban area … There will be a very large, almost unbearable burden placed on the ratepayers within the towns’.83 In return he was attacked by W. M. Leggate for trying to combine in one unholy union the radical rhetoric of the SRDLP and his own interest ‘as an employer who wanted to keep wages down’. He was attacked by W. H. Eastwood for seeking to forward only the interests of his ratepayers and for trying to combine advocacy of industry with the view ‘that it was far better that these natives should go home to their reserves as frequently as possible’. He was attacked by J. B. Lister, a Labout stalwart, for representing ‘town councillors, mostly men who are property owners … more concerned with saving the rates on property than they are in improving the conditions of those who cannot buy their own property’.84 Huggins took his chance to destroy Macintyre's credibility as a radical. Macintyre embodied ‘the early Victorian capitalist … and [wanted] to wait for strikes and bloodshed. The Hon. Member would wait for the trouble instead of seeing that these people have better conditions now’. Meanwhile he had mischievously put it into the heads of Africans ‘that we are tightening up conditions against them’. But it was untrue that employers acquired houses from which they could eject employees; workers were secure as long as they found other employment. Macintyre's allegation ‘is not even good electioneering because it is palpably absurd’.85

Macintyre called on all his resilience and rudeness to carry the doomed fight through the committee stages of the bill. ‘There is no use the Hon. Prime Minister getting shirty’, he told an irritated Huggins. All his amendments were voted down. The bill was read for a third time on 4 February 1946. Macintyre made a last oratorical effort. Government had failed in its responsibility to the ‘subordinate race’. They had failed in their duty to the Europeans as well:

There is an entire difference between the provisions of the Land Apportionment Act and what would take place under this Bill … The door is left open for a large number of natives to reside in the European area. We must have a huge influx of native women and children into the urban areas and it seemed that this is the intention of Government. It has been so often said that we should build up a constant supply of native labour to develop Southern Rhodesian industry but the people of Southern Rhodesia do not desire that’.86

With Macintyre as the only dissentient, the bill was passed.87

Postlude: Huggins forces Bulawayo to apply the Act

Macintyre retired bruised to Bulwayo. But in one thing he had been right all along. As his Bulawayo critic, Eastwood, had warned parliament on 4 February 1946, Macintyre could still try to undermine the bill by encouraging city councils to ignore it. ‘For no other reason will it ever fail’.88 Under the new act it rested with city councils to implement it. Macintyre was certain that Huggins would be very reluctant to invoke his coercive powers. ‘Masterly inactivity’ might still prevail. So while Salisbury hastened to implement the new act, Bulawayo did nothing. For a further four years Huggins held his hand. During this time Macintyre was helped by one upheaval of African urban protest and then fatally damaged by another. The first was in Salisbury; the second in Bulawayo.

Macintyre was helped by Salisbury's clumsy and brutal enforcement of the N(UA)AR act in July 1947. Its implementation was a disaster. All Africans, including educated and professional men who had managed to retain a foothold in the city, were now swept into the location; thousands of women, unable to provide proof of marriage, were driven out by great police raids. Before Murambatsvina it was the greatest upheaval that the Africans of Harare had ever experienced. As Lawrence Vambe writes, ‘a militant, if unholy alliance’ was forged between ‘influential white town councillors of Salisbury and Bulawayo,’ who ‘joined the affray with fierce vehemence’, and African spokesmen and women. ‘A fierce battle’ erupted.89 For the last time Macintyre's alliance with the Harare branch of the SRLP, and particularly with Charles Mzingeli, seemed natural and effective. As Tim Scarnecchia has described, Mzingeli orchestrated powerful black opposition to the implementation.90 Macintyre was able to say that he had told everybody what would happen.

Even his old missionary adversary, Percy Ibbotson, who had so deplored Macintyre's use of beer money, had long wanted the Bulawyo location to come under official control and who in general favoured N(UA)ARA, now condemned the Salisbury council. ‘The greatest measure of tact, patience, sympathy and understanding should have been shown’; educated Africans should have been given exemption from pass demands. ‘It is both undesirable and dangerous to classify all Africans as alike and impose the same restrictions and limitations on all’. The immediate drive to expel women and children from the ‘European’ areas had imposed ‘ruthless hardships’. Implementation had resulted in ‘increased racial tension and intolerance’ and ‘brought intense antagonism from a section of the African population’.91

By contrast Macintyre, once again mayor of Bulawayo, looked good for doing nothing. His refusal to put the act into operation, however irritating to Huggins, was highly popular with African leaders. But his policy of ‘benign neglect’ meant that conditions in the location and compounds became even worse. When Hugh Ashton was finally appointed Bulawayo's Director of Native Administration in 1949 he found:

The housing was unbelievable, it was horrible. I went into the municipal compound [where council workers were housed] It was so disgusting there that I felt sick … There was Makokoba, which was grossly over-crowded, and when you went around the street at night … you would see people sleeping outside the houses. I have never seen people living in such conditions … Terrible. I'm not suprised that people struck.92

Huggins had told parliament that Macintyre ‘wanted to wait for strikes and bloodshed’. When he arrived Ashton found that the council ‘was then under the influence of a very prominent councillor called Macintyre. He was very negative; he was very reactionary; and he did his best to prevent the council taking over. Eventually there were two great strikes [the railway strike of 1946 and the general strike of 1948] … and in both cases one of the causes of the strikes was dissatisfaction with appalling housing conditions’.

But the general strike which broke out in Bulawayo in April 1948 was about wages as well as about housing, and here too Macintyre and the council were at the heart of the problem. In the months before the strike it was the municipal workers who were threatening industrial action and being fobbed off with displays of Macintyre's masterly inactivity. The Commissioner for Native Labour, A. J. Huxtable, knew that African trade union leaders had tried as hard as they could to avert a strike. Sipambaniso Manyoba Khumalo, who was Masotsha Ndhovu's successor, as leader of Bulawayo protest and trade unionism, made desperate efforts to talk to Macintyre. There were direct negotiations between municipal workers and the council for months. In October 1947 the workers submitted what Huxtable thought were perfectly reasonable demands. The Council refused them:

There is no doubt [wrote Huxtable in a private memo just before the strike broke out] that the City Council committed a grave blunder … The Council has put itself in a most difficult position and has consequently caused the Government considerable embarassment. It is difficult to understand the attitude of some of the Councillors, who show an extraordinary lack of vision and foresight in dealing with their African employees. I was astounded at their views.93

The Secretary for Native Affairs, in his correspondence with the Prime Minister's office during the desperate days before the strike broke out also put the blame on the Bulawayo municipality:

The Minister will remember that we hoped all big employers would put their houses in order themselves [but] the Bulawayo City Council appears to have been extraordinarily dilatory in getting into the claims of their employees, the more so in that various strikes have been narrowly averted by the efforts of the Native Commissioner, Bulawayo and the Commissioner for Native Labour. Their patience is now evaporating, and if they decide to go on strike, I am afraid that others will follow.94

‘I hope the Chief Commissioner’, noted Huggins, ‘will point out to the Council what a bad lead they are giving to all employers’.

As always the Bulawayo council paid no attention to the promptings of government. In a 1947 act government had given itself the power to appoint labour boards to inquire into wage levels in particular industries. Railway workers had received an increase in wages after their strike. Now the municipal workers asked for a labour board and most other Bulawayo workers were also demanding one for their industries. The Council, of course, was implacably opposed. Government itself was nervous that the concession of one board would open the floodgates to general wage negotiations. So officials persuaded the municipal workers to delay a formal request for a board and meanwhile warned the council that if one were made it could not be refused. The Acting Native Commissioner, Bulawayo, B. B. FitzPatrick, urged council on 16 February 1948 ‘to do all in its power to bring this matter to a conclusion … should the Council be unable to satsify the request of the African Committee by the 27th instant your employees will ask for a Labour Board. There should be no need for this if the conditions of service of your employees be given priority over all other business of the Council’.95 Led by Macintyre the council took offence. They ‘objected strongly’ to this ultimatum. FitzPatrick should tell the workers that the council offer was a generous one and that ‘the appointment of a Native Labour Board should be a last resort’.96 Huxtable made a last deperate trip to Bulawayo. He had to report on 8 March 1948 that the council ‘was unanimous … that the Government should not appoint a Labour Board. Councillors went so far as to say that the threat of a strike amongst their employees should not be permitted to influence their attitude … Preparations to operate essential services in the event of a strike are now in hand’. Council believed that it could upon the army to suppress any more general strike. Huxtable warned them that ‘the repercussions of such a movement would be felt in every industry in the Colony. The Council, however, has a parochial outlook and was more interested in its own domestic affairs’.97

At this crucial moment, with the Federation of Bulwayo African Workers Unions, and its leader Sipambaniso Manyoba Kumalo, pressing for a general wages board, the Rhodesian government failed to act. Throughout the whole story the reluctance of the government to confront the Bulwayo council was remarkable. Now Huggins was away, the Acting Prime Minister, faced with the urgent advice of all his officials to appoint a labour board, still delayed:

I would prefer not to make a decision in the absence of the Prime Minister. I suggest you inform the Union that the Prime Minister is away – he will return on the 6th. He will consider the matter immediately on his return and I anticipate will appoint a Board.

He added that he would cable the Prime Minister that a board will have to be appointed if ‘the stalling does not work’.98 And so it was that a Matabeleland Regional Native Labour Board, with instructions to examine ‘in as wide terms as possible the general conditions among the Bulawayo African Municipal Employees’ was not announced until 9 April 1948, only four days before the outbreak of the general strike. Given what they asked for the municipal workers did not join the strike. Nor did the railway workers. But everyone else did.

In May 1948 Huggins accepted some of the blame though allocating most of it to Macintyre. He regretted:

My delay in appointing a Board for the Bulawayo Municipal Board employees, whose conditions are just about as bad as the Railways – in other words are scandalous. I told Bulawayo I had to appoint a Board to stop a general strike, but at their request waited too long. I told … Mr Macintyre before the strike that I was not interested in their dispute and the clever arrangements they had made to meet it, but as I knew it was a signal for a general strike I could not let them sit pretty while the rest of the county went up in flames.99

Macintyre almost embraced the blame. Just before the general strike he denounced Huggins for appointing a Labour Board and obtained a unanimous condemnation from a meeting of municipal and other employers in Salisbury. This disgusted Huggins but it also led to bitter denunciations of Macintyre at mass meetings in Bulawayo of the Federation of African Workers Unions and of the African Workers Voice. He was identified as the main enemy by the municipal workers. After the strike both he and the Bulawayo council were on the defensive. At labour board meetings they were blamed by Native Department officials for having been prepared to face down a strike. Macintyre stubbornly persisted in giving evidence that the municipality did not need to provide for married men and that bakers could not survive if they had to pay higher wages. His strange combination of interests and ideologies fell apart. He could no longer be plausibly viewed as a radical socialist. In mid-1948, indeed, he left the SRLP and successfully contested his Bulawayo seat as a member of Huggins's United Party! In the long run this led him on to a second political career which climaxed after 1953 with his appointment as Federal Minister of Finance, a post which gave ample room for his ‘Scottish’ ancestry – including refusing loan facilities to Bulawayo. But immediately it meant that he had to give up most of his previous affiliations – and he had to give up his strident criticism of Huggins.

But it did not mean he had to give up his obstructionism on the Bulawayo council. Even there though he could not prevent the council's appointment of J. P. McNamee, an experienced South African urban administrator, at the end of 1948 to make recommendations on the future of African administration. McNamee's report was an unequivocal condemnation of the present system and an unequivocal endorsement of the NUAARA. He criticised control by a Town Clerk whose ‘knowledge of the practical side of native administration amounts to just about nothing … he has probably never come into contact with the native section of the community as a group’. Location regulations were out of date and ‘it is not surprising that native affairs in your city have been causing some anxiety’. Accommodation for Africans was outrageously crowded and insanitary. ‘The rate at which you have been building in the past is altogether inadequate’. The Municipal police were ‘a dead loss’; relations between the council and Africans were ‘strained’. All these were things which had been said by Moffat's 1930 commission. Then Macintyre had joined in a ferocious rebuttal. The time he kept silent. McNamee went on: ‘The remedy for the present unsatisfactory state of affairs is to be found in the Native Urban Areas Accommodation and Registration Act’. A municipal department of native affairs must be set up with authority over every aspect of African urban life. Above all, there must be a crash programme of building ‘since this Act must remain a dead letter so far as this city is concerned until such time as additional accommodation has been provided’.100

Reluctantly the city council accepted this report and began to search for a director of native administration. As McNamee foresaw ‘the position will be a most difficult one here where so much leeway in native administration has to be made up and where probably some opposition to any new innovation by the City Council will have to be overcome’. Hugh Ashton was the only applicant. ‘There was no contest [but] they were very reluctant to take me. They thought I was a liberal. Anyway they had to get on with establishing this and they had no choice’. But councillors, and especially Macintyre, still refused to give the new department adequate resources. Huggins found a way to force them at long last to build more houses:

When Huggins saw the Council was still lagging he waved a big stick and said ‘Look if you don't get on with housing, the Government will not approve the transfer of any industrial stands. Now the Council were very keen indeed to bring industry to Bulawayo and the thought of not being able to have any industry was the sort of pressure that was needed. I give great tribute to Sir Godfrey Huggins’.

Huggins's ban was imposed ‘without warning’ on 3 January 1950. In his first report as Director, in July 1951, Ashton was able to record ‘that after considerable negotiation the Government finally recognised the magnitude of the Council's effort and in December 1950 the Minister of Native Affairs formally announced that this ban had been withdrawn. The way has now opend up for consideration of very large housing schemes’. But Macintyre and his allies were still dragging their feet, protesting that ratepayers could not carry the burden of loans. In Ashton's memory, therefore, ‘the big breakthrough came a few years later [in 1953] when the Federation was created and Councillor Macintyre was made the Minister of Finance in the Federal Government and he had to resign his position as councillor for Bulawayo. Up to that time he had been a big ciy boss. We got a new chairman in that position … and from then on the Council began to realise that housing was necessary’.101

Conclusion

After 1953 the terms of the relation between Bulawayo and the central government changed. Ashton's building programme on the western commonage created a network of townships, some of which satisfied the aspirations of entreprenurial Africans by means of long leases and the eventual prospect of freeholds. The Bulawayo council began to take pride in its new reputation for excellent housing and progressive administration. After 1962, when the Rhodesia Front was elected to government, Bulawayo irritated the state because of its too great liberality rather than because it was too reactionary. The Bulawayo council had accepted in 1960 that the ideal was elected black city councillors and it stuck to this ambition throughout the Rhodesia Front's attempts to set up separate African urban authorities. A single advisory board was created in Bulawayo which ‘shadowed’ the city council, its committees mirroring council committees. Training for municipal citizenship and control was initiated and the result after 1980 was a very effective African city council in Bulawayo, overwhelmingly consisting of supporters of Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU, which irritated the new Zimbabwean government because of its oppositional efficiency. The days of Macintyre were very long gone, save that the new black councillors displayed a dogged independence not too different from his, when police harassed municipal firemen and dustmen in the mid 1980s. There was a kind of Bulawayo tradition which has persisted to this day.

There was also a Bulawayo tradition of ‘slum clearance’ which was revived in 2005. During the late 1920s and 1930s the council acquired and demolished African-built houses in the location, replacing them with straight rows of brick cottages. At the opening of Ashton's own administration there were police raids and the eviction of ‘illegals’. In July 2005 Operation Murambatsvina fell upon the old location, Makokoba, this time as a state enforcement of colonial building regulations against the opposition of the current Bulawayo council:

Police in Zimbabwe [reported the BBC's Themba Nkosi on 17 July 2005] have fought running battles with residents of one of the oldest townships of the second city, as they demolished illegal structures. Makhokhoba was the centre of resistance to colonial rule. One woman stripped naked in protest after police destroyed her shack. Even the well-respected traditional doctors in Makhokhoba township were not spared as riot police ordered the healers and their patients out of their shacks before setting them on fire … Makhokhoba has been a vibrant and colourful township for many decades. From the shacks of this township have come some of Bulawayo's top football players and theatre actors … It is a totally chaotic situation with people running in different directions.102

When the United Nations envoy, Anna Tabaijuka, came to Bulawayo to head yet another commission of inquiry into the location, the roles of seventy-five years earlier were ironically reversed. The new officials whom the state had appointed to over-rule Bulawayo – the Governor, Cain Mathema, the provincial and district administrators – tried to prevent Tabuijuka from meeting city officials without themselves being present. In a scene straight out of Macintyre's Bulawayo, the mayor and the town clerk locked themselves into the mayor's office for a private meeting with Tabuijuka while the Governor hammered vainly on the door!

Acknowledgements

Greatly varying versions of this article were presented to seminars at the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Toronto, and the University of Edinburgh. the London School of Economics and the University of Helsinki. I am grateful to the participants on these occasions for their clarifying and corrective comments.

Notes

1. Kamete, ‘The Return of the Jettisoned’; Potts, ‘Restoring Order’.

2. Zimbabwe United Residents Association (ZURA)/Combined Harare Resident Association(CHRA) Advocacy Workshop Report, 24.

3. Kunene ‘War Vets Rampage through Bulawayo’.

4. Olakeye and Tungwarara eds., An Analysis of the Demolitions in Zimbabwe. Tabaijuka's UN report ‘Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe'described it as ‘a disastrous venture based on a set of colonial era laws and policies’, pp. 22–24. I take these citations and the material on the CHRA from Ennie Chipembere, ‘History and Advocacy-Oriented Action Research’.

5. Jackson, Surfacing Up, 134.

6. I choose Bulawayo as my case study because it has the most dramatic story of confrontation with the Rhodesian state and because it has been the object of my own research for the last few years. I am writing a book to be entitled Bulawayo Burning. Where assertions are made about Bulawayo in this article they are derived from my reseach unless otherwise attributed. I have published two articles drawing on this research: ‘Dignifying Death’ and ‘The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa’. Two important treatments of the social history of Bulawayo, both unpublished, are Stephen Thornton's draft doctoral thesis for the University of Manchester, ‘A History of the African Population of Bulawayo’, written in the late 1970s but unfortunately never submitted, and Stuart, ‘Good Boys, Footballers and Strikers’.

7. Gann, History of Southern Rhodesia, 269.

8. These are the demands made in the poster calling for a ‘cosmopolitan public meeting’ to take place in the location on 30 November 1929. ‘Roll up! Roll up! Roll up in your numbers to protest against the action of the Mayor and the Councillors of Bulawayo's actions in the Bulawayo Native Location’. This poster is reproduced in Raftopoulos and Phimister eds., Keep on Knocking, 21. For an ICU poster calling for a mass meeting under the Indaba trees on 11 January 1930 on ‘What is Wrong and What is Right with the Bulawayo Council’ see Nyathi, Masotsha Ndlovu, 27.

9. Zimbabwe National Archives (ZNA) Harare, S 138 22, CID reports to Chief Superintendent, 21 July and 24 July 1929.

10. ZNA, Harare, S 138 22, CID report to Chief Superintendent, 6 July 1929.

11. ZNA, Harare, S 138 22, Chief Native Commission (CNC) to Prime Minister, 23 December 1929.

12. ZNA, Harare, S 138 22, S/N, Bulawayo to CNC, 28 June 1929.

13. Moffat's desire to curb the authority of the Native Department and to work with missionaries and the Native Development Department is detailed by Murray, The Governmental System. Murray remarks that ‘in the late 1920s … the colony's government made some effort to increase its involvement [in urban affairs] as part of the general policy of gaining control of the direction of development’, 315.

14. National Archives (NA), Bulawayo, Interview with Mafimba Nucbe, 9 October 1981.

15. NA, Bulawayo. Interview with Masotsha Ndlovu, 8 October 1981.

16. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19, ‘Reply of the Bulawayo Municipal Council to the Report of the Native Affairs Commission on its Inquiry into the Matter Concerning the Bulawayo Native Location’, 6 May 1930.

17. ZNA, Harare, S 138 22, ‘Natives who interviewed the Minister of Native Affairs in Bulawayo’, November 1929.

18. Gann, 242.

19. Murray, 288–89.

20. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19, ‘Reply of the Bulawayo Municipal Council’, 6 May 1930.

21. Chronicle, 10 April 1930. H.W.Davies was the member for Bulawayo South; Jack Keller the member for Raylton, the white rail workers’ suburb. Both men objected to the complex and restrictive municipal franchise and spoke for one man-one vote for all white residents. ‘It was entirely wrong that men should suffer simply because they did not own property, and big interests would always rule the country through the votes of their representatives’. They did not think of extending this principle to African residents of Bulawayo, however. Chronicle, 8 and 9 April 1930.

22. Chronicle, 3 and 4 April 1930. Hay and Peel persisted in their objections, ‘Native bodies had approached the Premier on all sorts of questions, and he was taking notice of them, although apparently he was going to ignore the European farmers. I take back nothing I said. I do not think we spoke strongly enough. Mr Moffat, with his big majority, has got a bad attack of Mussolinism’.

23. ZNA 1/1/1, Evidence of Madhlinga on behalf of the Matabeleland Home Society, NA Harare.

24. ZNA 1/1/1, Evidence of Madhlinga on behalf of the Matabeleland Home Society, NA Harare., Evidence of Magavu Indebele: ‘It is customary for our kraals to have separate rooms for our sons, daughters, ourselves and our parents-in-law. In the Location we have but two rooms, there is no door between these rooms’. Jackson of the Northern Rhodesian Bantu Association said he had worked in Southern Rhodesia for 28 years but was still ‘unmarried because there is no suitable accommodation for a wife in the Location’.

25. Evidence of Magavu Indebele: ‘It is customary for our kraals to have separate rooms for our sons, daughters, ourselves and our parents-in-law. In the Location we have but two rooms, there is no door between these rooms’. Jackson of the Northern Rhodesian Bantu Association said he had worked in Southern Rhodesia for 28 years but was still ‘unmarried because there is no suitable accommodation for a wife in the Location’.

26. Evidence of Magavu Indebele: ‘It is customary for our kraals to have separate rooms for our sons, daughters, ourselves and our parents-in-law. In the Location we have but two rooms, there is no door between these rooms’. Jackson of the Northern Rhodesian Bantu Association said he had worked in Southern Rhodesia for 28 years but was still ‘unmarried because there is no suitable accommodation for a wife in the Location’.

27. Evidence of Magavu Indebele: ‘It is customary for our kraals to have separate rooms for our sons, daughters, ourselves and our parents-in-law. In the Location we have but two rooms, there is no door between these rooms’. Jackson of the Northern Rhodesian Bantu Association said he had worked in Southern Rhodesia for 28 years but was still ‘unmarried because there is no suitable accommodation for a wife in the Location’.

28. The draft report can be reconstructed from two files in the National Archives, Harare, ZNA 2/1/1 and S 235/394.

29. The draft report can be reconstructed from two files in the National Archives, Harare, ZNA 2/1/1 and S 235/394.

30. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19, ‘Reply of the Bulawayo Municipal Council to the Report of the Native Affairs Commission’, 6 May 1930.

31. The mainstream Missionary Conference met in Bulawayo later in June. Its president, Louw, thanked Moffat for the appointment of the Native Affairs Commission. Chronicle, 27 June 1930.

32. Chronicle, 24 and 25 June 1930. The newspaper wrote on 10 July about the Rate Payers ‘monthly recreation of hauling Town Councillors over the coals’; when four council seats came up for election in July it urged that the Rate Payers should put up candidates. Otherwise ‘there is little likelihood of a contested election for any of the vacancies’. In the event three retiring councillors were re-nominated without opposition.

33. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19, Premier to Mayor of Salisbury, 6 August 1930.

34. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19, Premier to Mayor of Salisbury, 6 August 1930., Native Affairs Commissioners to Minister, Native Affairs, 14 January 1931.

35. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19, Premier to Mayor of Salisbury, 6 August 1930., Acting CNC Charles Bullock to Secretary, Premier, 8 June 1934.

36. Gann, 294–96.

37. Native Mirror, 15 June 1932.

38. National Archives, Bulawayo, Interview with Mafimba Nucbe, 9 October 1981.

39. Chronicle, 25 July 1930. Masotsha's rage had been aroused by Carbutt warning the Missionary Conference against the ICU as dangerous agitators,

40. Phimister, Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 199–202; Nyathi, Masotsha Ndlovu, 30–32.

41. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19 Private Secretary, Premier, Memo, 17 January 1934.

42. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19 Private Secretary, Premier, Memo, 17 January 1934. Private Secretary, Premier to Town Clerk, Bulawayo, 20 April 1934; Town Clerk to P.S.Premier, 3 May 1934; P.S.Premier to Town Clerk, 7 May 1934.

43. ZNA, Harare, S 482 789/19 Private Secretary, Premier, Memo, 17 January 1934. Acting CNC to Secretary, Premier, 8 June 1934. In default of comprehensive new legislation the Native Department kept a vigilant eye on urban locations. File S 1542 L14/1933–39 in the ZNA deals with departmental interventions. In August 1936 the Native Commissioner, Selukwe, for instance, fined the location superintendent for assault and ensured his dismissal and that of all the location police. ‘The record discloses a pitiful state of affairs in the Location, no supervision and petty assaults. The [Town Management ] Board is composed of illiterate and ill-educated men for the most part – quite ignorant of dealing with natives’. The Chief Native Commissioner himself met Africans in Gwelo location and heard their complaints in October 1936. He then urged the municipality to dismiss its location superintendent. Such direct interventions were impossible in the unique case of Bulawayo.

44. ZNA, Harare, S 1542 L14/1933–39. Superintendent of Natives Bulawayo to Chief Native Commissioner, 21 February 1938. In the event the application of the Land Apportionment Act was postponed until after the second world war.

45. Macmillan, ed., Rhodesia and Eastern Africa, 263, 284, 286, 292, 296, 303, 307, 311.

46. ZNA, Harare, ORAL/MA5, Interview with J.S.McNeillie, Bulawayo, 9 February 1972.

47. ZNA, Bulawayo,Municipal Records, Bulawayo, B 1/10.5R, Box 17. Town Clerk to Osborn's Bakery, 13 June 1929.

48. D. J. Murray argues in his Governmental System of Southern Rhodesia, 165, 346 that in the 1930s and 1940s Rhodesian industry and commerce did not need representation in national politics because their interests were catered for at municipal level. In Murray's view, the municipalities, especially Bulawayo, represented the emerging industrial class. Macintyre, with his interests in iron and steel, is seen as an outstanding example of a councillor dedicated to industry. This article argues a rather different case.

49. City of Bulawayo : Some Facts About the Municipal Government of Bulawayo, December 1962

50. I owe this anecdote to Sir Garfield Todd. Grace Todd put a more charitable gloss of Macintyre's legendary thrift, describing how throughout his career, ending as Federal Minister of Finance, he did not move from his modest house in western Bulawayo, not far from the location.

51. Southern Rhodesian Hansard, 18 May 1943, column 812.

52. McNeillie interview.

53. Hansard, 30 November 1944, column 3378.

54. Hansard, 28 October 1943, column 2216.

55. Hansard, 23 June 1942, column 1746.

56. Lawrence Vambe, From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe,161.

57. McNeillie recalls that Macintyre told him ‘I don't want them … Some were trouble-makers’.

58. ZNA, Harare, S 1906/1, evidence to the Howman Commission, 26 November 1943. Joshua Nkomo, the Bulawayo labour activist, could never have taken Macintyre's reputation as a political radical and ‘friend of the natives’ seriously. Nkomo describes in his autobiography how in October 1937 he qualified as a driver of public service vehicles. His first job was as driver of a half ton delivery truck for Osborn's Bakery. His pay was £4 a month, which he thought ‘pretty good’ until he discovered that Coloured drivers were getting £12 a month. ‘I went to Mr Macintyre and asked why it was … He explained first that I was native and the others were coloured; second that natives did not need beds and wheat bread and knives and forks, because they were happy with just a couple of blankets and some mealie porridge and a plate to eat off. I told him that if he would pay me £12 a month I should be very happy to sleep on a bed and eat meat with a knife and fork. So of course he sacked me’. Nkomo, Story of My Life, 27–28.

59. Hansard, 23 November 1944, column 3137.

60. Hansard, May 1942, column 959.

61. Hansard, May 1943, column 452,

62. Hansard, 1942, column 959.

63. ZNA, Harare, S 1906/1, evidence to the Howman Commission, 26 November 1943.

64. Proceedings of the Municipal Assocaition, Bulawayo, 1942.

65. Hansard, 1945, column 3150.

66. ZNA,Harare, S 482/469/39, Memorandum, Secretary of Native Affairs, July 1936; Sec/NA to Sec/PM, 24 August 1936; Huggins to Macintyre, 8 September 1937.

67. ZNA,Harare, S 482/469/39, Memorandum, Secretary of Native Affairs, July 1936; Sec/NA to Sec/PM, 24 August 1936; Huggins to Macintyre, 8 September 1937., Macintyre to Huggins, 1 October 1937.

68. ZNA,Harare, S 482/469/39, Memorandum, Secretary of Native Affairs, July 1936; Sec/NA to Sec/PM, 24 August 1936; Huggins to Macintyre, 8 September 1937., Huggins to Macintyre, 15 November 1937; Macintyre to Huggins, 18 November 1937.

69. ZNA,Harare, S 482/469/39, Memorandum, Secretary of Native Affairs, July 1936; Sec/NA to Sec/PM, 24 August 1936; Huggins to Macintyre, 8 September 1937., Prime Minister to Minister of Internal Affairs, 11 March 1938.

70. ZNA, Harare, S 482/163/1. Huggins to Danxinger, 2 March 1944. The common age was a large circle of land around the city which the British South Africa Company administration had ceded to it for future growth. It had been used for the erection of white suburbs to the east, for cattle grazing and market gardening. The growth of townships in the 1950s did in fact take place on the Western Commmonage but in 1944 there had been no development there and the council was trying to push African housing beyond it.

71. The municipalities, of course, had a completely different view of where the blame lay for the urban crisis. Government was responsible for ‘prevarication and procrastination’. Macintyre had proposed a motion in parliament on 26 May 1943 calling for African housing and slum clearance legislation which would establish these projects as a Government responsibility. Government did not respond so at the Municipal Conference in May 1944 a resolution was passed saying that in default of such an Act government must ‘grant to the local authorities in this country the same financial aid as is at present being given to the local authorities in the Union of South Africa’. In October 1944 Salisbury municipality joined Bulawayo in a declaration that if no financial aid was given councils would accept no further ‘responsibility for the erection of additional houses in the Native Location’. NA, Harare, S 482/163/1, Town Clerk, Salisbury to Prime Minister, 12 March 1945.

72. ZNA, Harare, S 482/469/39, Huggins to Macintyre, 15 November 1937.

73. Proceedings of the Municipal Association, 1943, 7,46.

74. Proceedings of the Municipal Association, 1944, 5.

75. Proceedings of the Municipal Association, 1944, 127–29, Sir Ernest Guest, the new Minister of Internal Affairs, told the conference that before he took office ‘I suspected that the relations between the local government bodies and the central government bodies, to say the least of it, left a good deal to be desired, but after my appointment as a Minister, I found that my worst fears were realised’. Meanwhile municipal delegates, once they had pinned the blame on the government, allowed themselves to outdo Huggins. Urban Africans were ‘living in filthy, abominable conditions which are a disgrace to civilisation’. The Mayor of Salisbury, Charles Olley, notorious for racist attacks on Africans, even allowed himself to express some worker solidarity: ‘We are perpetuating in out treatment of the natives the very treatment us from Home received, the treatment that was meted out to wage-earners in Britain’.

76. Hansard, 23 November 1944, colums 2500 et seq.

77. Hansard, 23 November 1944, colums 2500 et seq., columns 2562–2575.

78. Chronicle, 9 August 1945. A subsequent report on 31 August documented some popular opposition to Macintyre and demands at a meeting of the Civic and Ratepayers Association that he resign either as mayor or as mp. Macintyre replied that ‘he believed in fighting for his own way if he believed he was right. It was a coward's way to resign’.

79. Chronicle, 17 September 1945.

80. Chronicle, 18 December 1945.

81. Herald, 21 December 1945. A letter from the Secretary of the Municipal Association to the Minister for Native Affairs, dated 20 December 1945, is in ZNA, Harare, S 482/163/1. This noted the view of the conference that if government were determined to proceed ‘it will be better for the Government to assume sole control over native affairs throughout the Colony, to acquire from the local authorities all movable and immovable assets relating to their native administrations’.

82. Hansard, 16 January 1946, 3074–3092,

83. Hansard, 16 January 1946, 3103–3110.

84. Hansard, 16 January 1946, 3149–3153

85. Hansard, 16 January 1946.

86. Hansard, 4 February 1946, 3686–3688.

87. Even then Macintyre would not give up. Through the SRLP he contacted liberals in England and asked them to protest in parliament about the bill. Lord Faringdon put down a motion in the House of Lords for discussion on 19 February 1946 drawing attention to the ‘severe conditions of disabilities and restrictions to which Africans will be subjected by the operation of the Bill’ because of its tightening up of pass laws and its giving the Rhodesian government the power to regulate assemblies. Faringdon asked the Colonial Secretary to refuse assent. Huggins was asked to comment and did so on 15 February. If my narrative has suggested that Huggins had become ‘liberal’ his reply to the Governor makes a useful corrective: ‘It must be remembered that the great majority of the Natives are uncivilised barbarians and their emergence from this condition will entail many teething difficulties. The complete lack of sense of proportion by the present leaders of urbanised Natives was well illustrated in the recent Railway strike … In the event of firebrands gaining control the situation that would arise would be similar to the position that a rose in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia in 1940 and 1942’: ZNA, Harare, S 482/163/1 Huggins to Governor, 15 February 1946. This reminder of shared difficulties, Huggins having sent troops to the Copperbelt, was enough to secure royal assent.

88. Hansard, 4 February 1946, 3691.

89. Vambe, Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, 236–37.

90. Scarnecchia, ‘Politics of Gender and Class’; ‘Poor Women and Nationalist Politics’.

91. Historical Reference Library [HRL], Bulawayo, ‘Rough Draft’ of Ibbotson's report on NUAARA, 4 February 1949; Brad Mnyanda to Ibbotson, 8 January 1949, Mnyanda expressed forcibly the ‘pernicious’ effects of the Act on decent and civilised people.

92. ZNA, Bulawayo, oral interview with Hugh Ashton, 1 June 1994. The typed text in the Archives collection is very garbled. I quote from my own transcription from the tape of the interview.

93. ZNA, Harare, S 2793/5 Commissioner for Native Labour to Secretary, Native Affairs, 30 March 1948.

94. ZNA, Harare, S 2793/5 Commissioner for Native Labour to Secretary, Native Affairs, 30 March 1948., Secretary, Native Affairs to Secretary, Prime Minister, 13 March 1948.

95. ZNA, Harare, S 2793/7, Acting Native Commissioner to Town Clerk, 16 February 1948.

96. ZNA, Harare, S 2793/7, Acting Native Commissioner to Town Clerk, 16 February 1948., Town Clerk to Acting Native Commissioner, 4 March 1948.

97. ZNA, Harare, S 2793/7, Acting Native Commissioner to Town Clerk, 16 February 1948., Commissioner for Native Labour to Secretary for Native Affairs, 8 March 1948.

98. ZNA, Harare, S 2793/5, Acting Prime Minister Memo, 1 April 1948.

99. ZNA,Harare, S 482/49/40/1, Huggins to Major Darby, 10 May 1948.

100. HRL, Bulawayo, J. P. McNamee, Report on the Native Urban Administration in the City of Bulawayo’, 2 December 1948.

101. ZNA, Bulawayo, oral interview with Hugh Ashton, 1 June 1994.

102. I hope to tell part of the colourful story of Makokoba politics, culture and violence in Bulawayo Burning. The Social History of an African City, 1893 to 1960, forthcoming.