A General History of Rhodesia

Peter Baxter's Book

Welcome back, and thank you for reading! As mentioned on Tuesday, I still owe paid subscribers another paywalled article, so I am sending that out today. It is a review of Peter Baxter’s Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980, a book with much to commend and some that I disliked. For those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, and read this article in full. I think this ~10,000-word article, and the others like it, are interesting and informative enough to be worth the cost. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

What I find fascinating about Rhodesia is that in less than a century, it was able to go from a patch of landlocked territory stuck in the Stone Age to a First World Nation characterized by ordered liberty, cultivation of human excellence, and immense prosperity. It was then destroyed because it stood by the very outlook and virtues that had given rise to its immense and rapid success.

Birthed by a European civilization atop Olympus¹ and fathered by the Colossus of an imperial movement that aimed to pick up the white man’s burden and civilize the world—while making a tidy profit from creating new worlds—it was the progeny of and last stand for the height of traditional Western Civilization. A glorious fighter for the Old World’s hierarchical, excellence-oriented worldview, it stood by such beliefs and values even as the civilization from whence it came destroyed itself in an indulgent orgy first of self-criticism and then of self-suicide that followed the Second World War.

But then that decayed and dying civilization came for it and pulled out every last stop to destroy it, all in the name of the very thing that had destroyed the Old World itself—equality.

What Peter Baxter does in Rhodesia: A Complete History is tell how that happened. He describes how Cecil Rhodes gazed upon an unconquered territory that essentially remained in the Stone Age, and used it as the foundation atop which he built a powerful new nation named after him and defined by its being settled and populated by the cream of the imperial crop. Baxter then tells how Western liberalism stepped in the path of Rhodesia’s ascent during what should have been a glorious period of achievement for it, and how the demands of the egalitarians sent the country that had built the First World out of the Stone Age on the path back to the Stone Age.

In this review, I’ll first tell that story, from the Pioneer Column to the end of the Bush War, by highlighting what I think is important from Baxter’s book. I’ll then give a review of the book itself, with what I found was excellent and problematic with it.

As past readers have enjoyed the book excerpts I have included, I have included all those I thought immediately relevant in the article, and many more good ones that add interesting information in the footnotes. Enjoy! And check out the audio version of the article here:

[Audio] The History of Rhodesia

The Story of Rhodesia, A Land Both Fair and Great

Discovering the Dark Continent

The Africa into which the British marched over the course of the 19th century as they explored what their conquest of the Cape Colony during the Napoleonic Wars had won them, or at least put them near, was still very much the Heart of Darkness. Gluttonous cannibals and hard-faced Arab slavers from Zanzibar ruled the Congo, as Dr. Livingstone found.² The Gold Coast was hell on Earth, at least until the British finally conquered it…after that, it was “just” deeply unpleasant, but at least the cannibals were gone.³ The Dutch, German, and Huguenot people-groups who were coalescing into the Afrikaners of South Africa were stolid and religious, yet hard to rule. The Zulus against whom they fought were vicious, but at least not cannibals.

And to the north of the Cape Colony, below the Belgians and their Congo, lay an entirely undeveloped territory populated by two tribes—the Shona and Ndebele—known mainly for violence and treating cattle better than the humans they conquered. As Baxter notes: