The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898-1965

Michael O. West. The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898-1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xiii + 324 pp. Notes. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $22.95. Paper. Michael West, a sociologist at Binghamton University, has published extensively on Zimbabwean social and political history. This book is offered as the first full-length study of the African middle class in the former Southern Rhodesia from the creation of the Native Affairs Department in 1898, after the suppression of the second African revolt against rule by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, to 1965, when Ian Smith unilaterally declared his settler state independent of Britain. The author's research is grounded in an impressive command of the literature on the black bourgeoisie in colonial West Africa and southern Africa, as well as on links between Africa and its diaspora and on general British imperial policy. He also draws extensively on archives in Zimbabwe and Britain, South Africa, and the United States. As West notes at the outset, a black elite was not part of the colonial project in Africa, especially in a colony created for white settlers or investors and to exploit an increasingly proletarianized peasantry. Yet a (primarily urban) middle class developed, striving to preserve and even expand its tenuous status. The author discusses two abortive attempts at a cross-class alliance with the African masses. The first, at the end of the 1920s, was led by the South African-based Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union. Supported by only part of the elite, it fell apart in the Depression. The second effort, at the end of World War II, initially had broader elite support but collapsed when urban workers went ahead with a poorly organized general strike in 1948 against the opposition of elite politicians and labor leaders. For the most part the black middle class stood apart from the masses, according to West, seeking vainly to realize Rhodes's mantra, "Equal rights for all civilized men," which to the elite implied equality with "civilized" whites and better treatment than that of "raw natives. " Led by the couple of hundred Africans enjoying the common roll vote under a very discriminatory franchise based on literacy and freehold tenure, the elite faced constant humiliation and attempts to eliminate even this limited suffrage. The struggle for inclusion climaxed in the "politics of partnership," promoted by the few white liberals at the outset of the Central African Federation in the mid-1950s-a period marked by what West rather annoyingly describes repeatedly as "tea drinking"-with allegedly patronizing whites seeking to detach the black elite from the growing threat of African nationalism. West argues that when in 1958 white hard-liners ousted the pro-"partnership" Prime Minister Garfield Todd, the spurned black elite drifted toward mass-based African nationalism. The African middle-class became radicalized by a regime led by ever more avowed white supremacists, who banned successive nationalist parties, led by a black elite now seeking to mobilize African workers and peasants in order to transfer power to itself rather than continue the failed project of multiracial partnership. Ironically, as West poignantly notes, since the structures of power were not reformed when the nationalists took control after a brutal war, juridical independence did not lead to democracy or social justice: The mass of Zimbabweans were thus "twice dispossessed" (240). West makes a strong case for his model, but he ultimately produces less a full-fledged study of the black middle class than a general political history of Zimbabwe, albeit focused on the shifting nature of African elite politics. The book is divided into two parts, devoted respectively to the "social" and "political" construction of the middle class. In practice, this division proves rather artificial: Political issues pervade part 1, while concerns about social status permeate much of the elite's political struggle discussed in part 2. …