In her autobiographical first book Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller describes a childhood of financial hardship and instability in Rhodesia. And yet her family had several black servants. Even the family of the impoverished Salisbury trade unionist described by Doris Lessing in Going Home who could never save up enough to return to England, employed a black servant.
One of the stereotypes most beloved of critics of Rhodesia such as Lessing, Frank Clements, and Robert Blake is that it was a haven for useless whites who just wanted to be waited on hand and foot by Africans. Yet even Blake admits that the skill levels of whites in Rhodesia were on average measurably higher than of those in England:
A survey conducted in 1952 showed that whereas 30% of Rhodesian school leavers had passed the Cambridge Overseas Certificate and some 7% the Higher Certificate too, the number achieving the same standard in Britain was 12-15%. In 1954 17% of Rhodesian school leavers were going on either to universities or into some other sort of training which would qualify them for the top professional and managerial posts — Social Class 1 in the British and Rhodesian census forms.
Even in a society somehow perfectly free of race prejudice, such a group difference in skills would lead to group differences in income, a surplus of cash among one group and a surplus of job seekers among the other. Over the better part of a century, such a state of affairs surely led to a de facto social stratification along racial lines.
And of course Rhodesia was not a society free of race prejudice. It was a society of industrialized Europeans building cities and industry among Africans who within living memory had known only iron-age feudalism. It is probably impossible to completely understand all of the side effects this contrast must have produced. But the ubiquity of black servants is an obvious one.
Two Jewish children who grew up in the 1970s, Steven Abramowitz of Salisbury and Marlyn Butchins of Bulawayo, both recount childhood memories of sneaking off to the servants’ quarters to eat sadza, their favorite food. This was food the servants would prepare for themselves. It seems it was considered inappropriate in some way for white families to serve sadza at their own tables, even if their children liked it.
It was this lived experience impression that blacks should be servants and whites masters that ended with the election of Robert Mugabe in 1980 that had not ended with the election of Abel Muzorewa a year earlier. A humorous song from the period urges white people: “Don’t say goodbye to Rhodesia,” but instead to “stay here and give it a go,” but chides anyone who does that he will now have to “wash his own dishes” and “do his own chores.”
Many white Rhodesians have fond memories of their servants and write about them in their memoirs. Some even kept in touch. But the practice of having black servants must have all but vanished at some point in the 1980s. It would be interesting to hear direct testimonies of this aspect of social change from people who lived through it. The pressures to give up servants must have been more social than economic as most whites who stayed did not become poorer and most blacks who were not among the party elite did not become richer.
Pressures on wages for unskilled labor may have been alleviated somewhat in the early 1980s by foreign capital inflows and government hiring of blacks to replace whites in government jobs. But these alleviations almost certainly ended at a certain point and were more than overturned soon enough by the hundreds of thousands of military-aged men attempting to rejoin the labor force after the end of the war, both those who had fought for the government and those who had fought for the rebels. And add to this likely hundreds of thousands of the newly unemployed who had worked for generations as servants. These people had often been able to send money home to their relatives in the TTLS where a little cash went a long way. So the permanent loss of this form of employment was likely felt far beyond just their personal lives.
By the 1990s, the term “wovets,” short for “war veterans,” had come to refer to angry mobs of the unemployed regardless of age or military history. These were the kinds of people so successfully mobilized by Mugabe in destroying farms and property and committing wanton acts of violence that destabilized the country economically and socially and allowed him to remain in power unchallenged for decades.