Rhodesia was never a meritocracy. However, like the United States, indeed like all British Colonies and like Britain herself, for it is in Britain that the seed of civic nationalism originates, Rhodesia was from its inception on a trajectory towards greater meritocracy as encapsulated in Cecil Rhodes’s famous wording “Equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambesi.”
The trend towards meritocracy accelerated during the federal era (1953-1963) and reached its apex during the late 1970s. Barriers to meritocracy, which is to say, to equality of opportunity, existed at three levels. First, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930. Second, segregation laws such as the segregation of public school below the university level, miscegenation laws and laws governing the sale of alcohol, and municipal laws segregating certain public spaces. Third, mannerisms in the minds of the populace to the effect that Africans must wait to be served in stores until whites have been served, must give up their seats to whites, etc. While such discrimination was not mandatory, it was legal and at the discretion of the business owner. The cities were majority white and most businesses there, and indeed most sizable business anywhere, were white-owned. This kind of low-level discrimination was not only practiced by many white business-owners, but expected by many white customers and had come to be a way of life.
Most political pressure brought to bear on the Rhodesian government focused not on any of the these three very real forms of discrimination, but on broadening the franchise. This was ironic, since the franchise did not make any reference to race, or at least did not until 1969. Nevertheless, this was the lightening rod of political pressure the British government brought to bear on the Rhodesian government beginning in the early 1960s. In 1961, Southern Rhodesia agreed to adopt a new constitution that somewhat broadened the franchise and most negotiations over independence in 1964-1965 focused on broadening it further. And of course, black opposition was uniquely focused on this issue in those years, as was evident in the ubiquitous call and response chant “One Man... One Vote!”
And yet, during this last quarter century of Rhodesia’s existence, most legal forms of discrimination had been removed. Even the mannerisms in the minds of the people were evaporating fast. As Ian Smith said to the nation in 1976:
I think we have got to accept that in the future Rhodesia is a country for black and white, not white as opposed to black and vice versa. I believe this is wrong thinking for Rhodesia. We have got to try to get people to change their line of thinking if they are still thinking like that. This is outdated in Rhodesia today.
Certainly, any whites who had been in Rhodesia to enjoy preferential treatment had left by 1980. And ZANU even got their one man with his one vote. Yet the result was not meritocracy with any of its attendant advantages of peace, justice, and productivity, neither for Rhodesia nor for its successor state, Zimbabwe.
In fact, two statistical imbalances made meritocracy completely unworkable. The first was the demographic ratio of blacks to whites, which was at least 20:1. The second was the extreme difference in marketable skills between these two races. The white-to-black pay differential of 10:1 is often cited. Of course, some differences in pay were likely due to flat-out discrimination, but an imbalance this extreme also points to more structural differences. Differences in skill, literacy, and acumen at every level were widespread at the time, even if they are not as simple to quantify as pay rates.
Precisely as advances were being made towards meritocracy, these two imbalances tightened and became a vice that strangled Rhodesian society and broke its neck. The ensuing poison and bad blood left any chances of stability or prosperity in Zimbabwe stillborn.
The demographic imbalance meant that any increase in meritocracy was from the beginning associated in the public mind with expectations of black rule. This linkage gave rise to two very destructive forces. First, an objection to meritocracy on the part of a significant number of whites who insisted on legally enshrined privileges. Second, the equation in the minds of many blacks of black rule as proof of meritocracy. This led large numbers of blacks to reject as a sham any change that would not lead to immediate black rule. As more efforts towards meritocracy were rejected, the vision of black rule came to mean not only a black government, but the replacement of whites at every level of the economy and public life.
We see here the first two limits of meritocracy. First, meritocracy does not ensure proportional representation in any given sphere let alone in society as a whole, even in the long run, let alone the short run. Second, people only support meritocracy in so far as they believe it will benefit them. In the abstract, meritocracy can be shown to improve everyone’s lot relative to what it otherwise would have been. But no one will support it for this reason alone. In the west, whites, Jews, and Asians tend to support meritocracy. And it tends to benefit them directly. No one has documented this phenomenon better than Thomas Sowell, who points out that in Malaysia, the Malaysian majority opposes meritocracy because they believe it helps the Chinese minority. In Rhodesia, many whites opposed meritocracy because they believed it would help blacks, but blacks overwhelming came to oppose it because they believed it helped whites.
There is no doubt that the Edgar Whitehead government of 1958-1962, with 17 out of 30 seats in parliament, sincerely intended to remove all barriers to meritocracy, including the Land Apportionment Act. But it was clear that without a change to the franchise, this would not lead to a black government being elected in the next election. While the new constitution of 1961 did broaden the franchise to increase black representation in politics, it would still not lead to a black majority in the coming elections. How long it would take for a black government to come power under this system was a popular subject of debate at the time. Most observers thought it would take at least several more decades. Ian Smith volunteered that it would probably not happen in his lifetime. An honest understanding of this era demands the acknowledgment that all commenters were speaking of the timeframe of an outcome that was by design inevitable under the current system and that none of them were proposing to impede. Smith was unfairly tarred for the rest of his life and beyond with his words being interpreted to mean that he vowed to never allow black rule in his lifetime.
The escalating demand for black rule by any means necessary is evident in the positions taken by Joshua Nkomo during the Whitehead years. Nkomo was at the time a rising leader in the labor movement and one of several black delegates who negotiated the terms of the 1961 constitution, which he supported at the time it was ratified. But by the time of the 1962 election held under the terms of that new constitution, he disavowed it and denied ever having supported it. This was not only because the crowds enthusiastically chanting “One man, one vote” would by that time have rejected any leader who supported it, but also because foreign leaders such as Kenneth Kaunda in what would soon become Zambia and almost certainly the British government as well, were telling Nkomo that they supported him as national leader. Nkomo must have concluded, with Smith, that such leadership was unlikely “in his lifetime” under the current law. Why play by the rules to spend the rest of your life as leader of a black minority party when the local crowds and the rest of the world are telling you that you can have it all right now?
Escalating violence in the late 1950s and early 1960s led Whitehead’s government to enact more extreme laws to allow the arrest and imprisonment of greater numbers of people on flimsier charges. Smith was later blamed for these laws, but they were all in place before he got there. Thus by 1962 Whitehead, the great liberal who had been elected to bring about meritocracy, was voted out of office in ignominy leaving nothing but a whiff of urban unrest and newly filled detention camps.
The two prime ministers who followed, Winston Field and Ian Smith, were themselves meritocrats in a country that had largely, black and white, turned against meritocracy. Over the next 18 years, their thankless task was to try to thread the needle of continuing meritocratic trends, staving off white demands for South African style apartheid while also building schools and creating jobs fast enough to convince blacks that meritocracy was real and was good for them. It didn’t work. It would not have worked even if the country had not soon found itself at war for its survival and under international sanctions.
From at least the 1950s, advancing meritocracy was closely bound to two other goals in the public mind: inevitable black rule, and independence from Britain. In the 1960s, the British linked these two goals in a doctrine known as NIBMAR “no independence before majority African rule.” In the 1970s, after UDI, it became ever clearer that Rhodesia could not expect to obtain international recognition without “majority African rule,” a concept that itself was being redefined to mean something more far-reaching than merely a government of black officeholders elected through a universal franchise.
The rallying plea of Rhodesia’s last decades was “responsible government.” At the time, this was universally dismissed as a thin euphemism for “white government”. But what Rhodesians meant by it was: white government until the skills gap could be closed fast enough to supply enough blacks to make up a government of comparable competency, this process to occur not by violence or by fiat, but seamlessly by processes legally enacted. Today, as the government in power in Zimbabwe since 1980 has been incontrovertibly about as far from “responsible” as could be imagined by any definition, it is worth reexamining this antiquated Rhodesia idea.
As the vice of demographic imbalance and skill gaps tightened, something had to give. In 1978, Smith buckled under and agreed to majority rule under the coveted “one man, one vote,” but he still attempted to go about it in the most “responsible” way possible. He made sure the mostly white electorate under the old system was on board. His referendum passed with over 85% of the vote. He convened a governing council and invited all interested black leaders to join, including those of ZANU and ZAPU. His only stipulation was that they must disarm and prepare to run in the election of 1979. Some lower level revolutionaries took up his offer, but big fish Nkomo and Mugabe demurred.
The election of Abel Muzorewa in 1979 ended all legal barriers to meritocracy. It is hard to imagine many whites harbored racism in their hearts at this point. The vast majority had voted for the referendum and those who were hell bent on not treating blacks as equals had left the country in a huff. But none of this made any difference.
Outside the country, the 1979 election was regarded as illegal and the resulting government as mere puppets of Smith and his white cronies.
Many, if not most, blacks in Rhodesia probably viewed it in similar terms. No one who had been fighting for twenty plus years for “majority African rule” was satisfied to see a black prime minister with a caretaker government of black faces preside over what was still the same country run by white judges, white generals, and white business tycoons, and all the way down to all but the lowest levels of employment in non-menial professions. It was essentially the same labor-segregated country with an African cherry on top. And the reason for this was that replacing the white premier and his ministers with a black premier and his ministers did nothing to mint even one single additional black barrister, engineer, doctor, army or police officer, entrepreneur, mid-level manager or civil servant. It turned out that even “one man, one vote” was itself a scam to keep the whites in power.
All this changed after 1980 with the return of British rule and Robert Mugabe. Immediately, the entire officer class was dismissed from the army and the police to make room for black officers. The same racial purge soon followed in the judicial system and civil service. The obvious problem in this was that there were clearly not enough qualified black professionals to replace the departing whites. But no matter, surely the most qualified blacks would at least be chosen. With time, they would acquire the needed skills. The dismissed whites volunteered to stay on to train their replacements, for the good of the country. They made their peace with certain sacrifices being made at meritocracy’s expense for the sake of racial goodwill.
And here we see the third limit of meritocracy come into play: meritocracy does not scale down well. When any other consideration is allowed to come to the front besides merit, merit will not be a deciding factor. If the black official entrusted with excluding whites from consideration for a job is also a Shona, he will also tend to exclude Matabeles. And if he is a Zezuru, so he likely prefers Zezuru over other Shona. And among the Zezuru, he will probably prefer members of his own family. And among his own family, etc. and so much for meritocracy.
Thus the quality of services in Zimbabwe began to degrade almost immediately while corruption and inefficiency grew. The judicial system held out a little longer than might have been expected and even made a few important rulings against the government, which the government proceeded to ignore. The effects of all this took a few years to be noticed for three reasons.
First, the end of the war, the end of sanctions, and the influx of foreign investment capital picked up a lot of the slack in the early 1980s.
Second, whites remained dominant in the private sector and took advantage of the increased availability of capital to expand their businesses. As Smith had predicted all those years ago, in the absence of the Land Apportionment Act, white businessmen quickly bought and developed new property that had previously been set aside for blacks. Whites saw this as doing good for their new country by doing well for themselves. They thought that this was their reward for ceding the public sector peacefully and that the government appreciated their contribution.
Third, the government spent most of its first decade eliminating independent centers of Matabele and white political power in the run-up to one-party rule. The white business sector had never much liked Smith or the RF anyway and they did not like his new party, the CAZ, either. They had always thought that UDI was bad for business and considered Smith’s expungement from politics a necessary unburdening in the new political environment.
But despite the business success of certain whites, the economy was crumbling as the government spent more and more and increasingly crowded out the private sector. Foreign investment slowed. The population was still growing and most blacks were still hopelessly poor. Some 100,000 whites out of a high-water mark of 300,000 had left by 1980. Approximately another 100,000 left by 1990, despite the absence of any organized action against them to that date.
In fact, the government viewed the entire private sector as suspect precisely because they could not hire and fire people there at will. They also disliked white people because their success in business undermined the promise of “majority African rule” in any convincing way. If, ten years after independence, whites, even in their decreased numbers, were still disproportionately running successful businesses and farms, then how was ZANU-PF any less of a sellout than Muzorewa and his UANC had been? This was an impression they could not afford to allow to take form, especially given rising unemployment, shortages, and the drying up of foreign money. It is a mistake to blame Mugabe as some kind of wrecker who, due to his personal defects, ruined a perfectly good country. All these trends are structural and follow inevitably from the dynamics of the previous half-century.
Things came to a head in the year 2000 with the referendum on Mugabe’s proposed changes to the constitution intended to pave the way for permanent one-party rule. And here we see again the death-trap inherent in a disproportionately white business class embedded within a disproportionately propertyless black populace. It is simply not conducive to politically stable outcomes. The voters, 55% of whom voted against Mugabe’s proposal, were mostly black. But the businessmen who bankrolled the “No” movement were visibly disproportionately white. Neither Mugabe nor any other political leader in his position could allow this to pass, especially not after ten years of consolidating power, the complete corruption of the civil service, and emasculation of the courts. It fed the deep-seated African belief that no matter what you did, white people secretly controlled everything anyway.
The result, the so-called “farm takeovers” period, solved all of Mugabe’s problems, as it would have for anyone else in his position. First, the chaos it unleashed returned Mugabe to an environment he was comfortable functioning in. Second, it allowed him to use violence against his political opponents, the nascent MDC party that had grown spontaneously from the “No” movement. Third, looting of white property let Mugabe reward his faithful and brandished his bona fides as a liberator from the last vestiges of white rule. This gave him everything he could have hoped for from a change to the constitution, but without having to get his hands dirty in peaceful electoral politics, which he still, it seemed, was not particularly adept at.
So what if the economy had been destroyed to the point that life expectancy fell by a third from what it had been in 1990? Now he had more grounds to ask for foreign aid. Don’t you know children in Africa are starving? The government preferred it that way. Foreign aid allowed them to control who ate and who didn’t, with no competing sources of income around to fund opposition activity.
Aside from sports, the free market is the ultimate meritocracy.