page_title: Southern Rhodesia in World War I
section_title: Propaganda and public opinion
hierarchical_section_title: Southern Rhodesia in World War I / Home front / Propaganda and public opinion
caption_attribution_description: English: British recruiting poster&#160;: REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA THE JURY'S VERDICT SAYS: "We find that the said deceased died from their prolonged immersion and exhaustion in the sea eight miles south-south-west of the Old Head of Kinsale on Friday, May 7th, 1915, owing to the sinking of the R.M.S. 'Lusitania' by a torpedo fired without warning from a German submarine." "That this appalling crime was contrary to international law and the conventions of all civilized nations, and we therefore charge the officers of the said submarine and the Emperor and Government of Germany, under whose orders they acted, with the crime of wilful and wholesale murder before the tribunal of the civilized world." IT IS YOUR DUTY TO TAKE UP THE SWORD OF JUSTICE TO AVENGE THIS DEVIL'S WORK ENLIST TO-DAY
context_page_description: When the United Kingdom declared war on Germany at the start of World War I in August 1914, settler society in Southern Rhodesia, then administered by the British South Africa Company, received the news with great patriotic enthusiasm. The Company administrator, Sir William Milton, wired the UK government, "All Rhodesia ... ready to do its duty". Although it supported Britain, the Company was concerned about the possible financial implications for its chartered territory should it make direct commitments to the war effort, particularly at first, so most of the colony's contribution to the war was made by Southern Rhodesians individually—not only those who volunteered to fight abroad, but also those who remained at home and raised funds to donate food, equipment and other supplies.
  Starting immediately after the outbreak of war, parties of white Southern Rhodesians paid their own way to England to join the British Army.
context_section_description: Mass media on both sides in the conflict tried to motivate their respective populations and justify the war's continuation by creating an image of the enemy so grotesque and savage that surrender became unthinkable. Like the major newspapers in Britain, the Rhodesia Herald and the Bulawayo Chronicle became key propaganda tools, regularly printing stories of German atrocities, massacres and other war crimes alongside articles simply entitled "War Stories" that told of British Army soldiers carrying out deeds of Herculean bravery. Anti-German sentiment abounded in the territory throughout the conflict, and periodically intensified, often concurrently with the reporting of particularly unsavoury incidents.
  During the initial peak of Germanophobia, which lasted the first few months of the conflict, many German and Austrian men of military age who lived in Rhodesia were arrested (officially as "prisoners of war") and sent to internment camps in South Africa. Gertrude Page, one of the colony's most famous novelists, wrote an open letter in response, vouching for the loyalty of a young German in her employ, and received a number of replies accusing her of being unpatriotic. The second period of intensification began following the sinking of the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915. The Rhodesia Herald ran an editorial soon after calling on the Company administration to intern all remaining German and Austrian residents and to close their businesses. A town assembly in Umtali sent the administrator a resolution asking him to confiscate all property in the colony owned by subjects of Germany and Austria within 48 hours "in view of German barbarity". Most of Southern Rhodesia's remaining German and Austrian residents were soon sent to the camps in South Africa.
  Further periods of intensified anti-German feeling in the Rhodesias followed the execution by the Germans of the British nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium in October 1915 ("the Crowning Crime", the Bulawayo Chronicle called it), the escalation of bombing raids by German Zeppelins on British cities during 1917, and the British reportage the same year of the Kadaververwertungsanstalt atrocity story—that the Germans supposedly rendered down battlefield corpses from both sides to make products such as nitroglycerine and lubricants.
  A small elite of black urbanites, mostly raised and educated at Christian missions, existed in Southern Rhodesia by the time of the war, and these generally identified themselves strongly with settler society and, by extension, the war effort. But the vast majority of black people in the colony retained their traditional tribal lifestyles of rural subsistence farming, and for most of them, as McLaughlin comments, the war "could have been fought between aliens from different planets for all their connection with events in Europe". Some felt obliged to "fight for their country", seeing the travails of Rhodesia and the Empire as their own also, but the great bulk of tribal public opinion was detached, seeing the conflict as a "white man's war" that did not concern them. Those who favoured the latter line of thinking cared not so much about the conflict itself but more about how its course might affect them specifically. For example, widespread interest was aroused soon after the outbreak of war when rumours began to fly between the rural black communities that the Company planned to conscript them. News of the Maritz Rebellion prompted a fresh rumour among the Matabele that Company officials might confiscate tribal livestock to feed the white troops going south. None of this actually occurred.
  The Chartered Company's native commissioners began to fear a possible tribal rebellion during early 1915. Herbert Taylor, the chief native commissioner, believed that foreign missionaries were secretly encouraging rural black people to emulate the Chilembwe revolt in Nyasaland, and telling them (falsely) that the British were exterminating the natives there. There were few actual attempts to topple the administration in Southern Rhode
caption: A British propaganda poster urging men to "take up the sword of justice" to avenge the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat
exif: {}