From Federation to ‘White Redoubt’: Africa and the Global Radical-Right in the Geographical Imagination of UDI-Era Rhodesian Propaganda, 1962–1970

Abstract

This article argues that, in the wake of decolonisation across most of Sub-Saharan Africa, white Rhodesia's rulers shifted their political allegiances to a new Southern African bloc, allied to right-radical actors across the Cold War world. It examines the discourses emanating from Rhodesia's Department of Information, identifying the new mental map of affinity and identity that was forged throughout the 1960s. After briefly explaining information policy under the Central African Federation, it illustrates how an influx of radical right-wing actors, embedded in transnational white supremacist networks, used the Department to transform the rebel colony's global orientation. Taking control of the formerly independent media, the Rhodesian Front embarked on a project to remould white political culture in the years surrounding UDI in 1965. In the discourses they produced, Rhodesia's geographical identification with a British-controlled Central Africa was replaced with the avowedly white-supremacist Southern Africa. This study is at the heart of important innovations in the transformative study of Africa's Cold War and late-colonial ideology. It hopes to facilitate the growing, transnational study of settler resistance in Southern Africa, the counter-revolution against the wave of decolonisation that broke on the Zambezi in the mid-1960s.