Trump echoes Rhodesia’s racist white nationalists

Similarly, Donald Trump has appealed to an American electorate that feels overwhelmed by the forces of globalisation. The Trump administration’s sceptical approach to aid in Africa and antagonism of China is a throwback to the Dominion Party’s protest against providing social services for Africans and its strident warning of a communist onslaught in newly independent countries.

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was inaugurated in 1953 with the encouraging, albeit vague goal of promoting racial partnership enshrined in its constitution.

The same year, the moderate, albeit highly paternalistic missionary Garfield Todd became Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia’s territorial government. (The Federal government was led by the vastly more conservative Godfrey Huggins who reportedly defined “partnership” in the sense of a horse and its rider.)

The country’s violent liberation struggle of the 1970s, which saw about 20 000 deaths as the whites refused to accept majority rule, seemed a distant prospect at the time.

But the Federation dissolved in 1963 and the southward march of independence, particularly the chaotic transfer of authority in the Belgian Congo, rapidly radicalised the small white population.

Much as Trump promised to his followers the security of a wall on the Mexican border, whites in southern Africa saw the Zambezi River on Zimbabwe’s northern border as a fortress to protect what they called “responsible government” and “civilised standards”.

In 1962 the Dominion Party merged with several smaller conservative parties to form the Rhodesian Front. In the elections that December, the Front, like Trump, defied popular predictions and emerged to form the next government.

The Front set about increasing its stranglehold on the government and engaged in widespread censorship of the media. No candidate running on the all-white voter’s roll was ever able to defeat it.

Its key strategy was to position itself as the lone guarantor of white security. A propaganda pamphlet – Rhodesia and You in the Super 70s, available at the University of York’s Borthwick Institute – proudly stated, “In 1962 the people of Rhodesia made their historic decision to stand and fight on the Zambezi; this was in contradistinction to existing trends of surrender and appeasement to the evils of pan-Africanism”.

In 1965 the small band of Rhodesians defied world trends and declared their own independence from British rule. Harper, Smith and 10 other white men signed the declaration. Its opening lines contained many similarities of both syntax and content to that of the United States’.

Both referred to an “entitlement of separate and equal” rights that were in reality only accorded to a minority.

While Trump may not be directly inspired by white Rhodesian political strategy, many white American nationalists are.

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