New Historical Express

As part of my growing interest in digital archives, as well as my interest in Southern Africa during the Cold War and decolonisation, I have been undertaking a project to scan various publications produced in this region which are increasingly difficult to find. Previous endeavours have included scanning copies of ZAPU’s Zimbabwe Review from the mid-1970s.

Over the last year, I have been scanning issues of Rhodesian/Zimbabwean History, the academic journal of the Central Africa Historical Association, based at the University of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe from the 1960s to the 1980s. The Central Africa Historical Association and the History Department at the University was influential in the historiography of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, as well as Southern Africa more broadly. Names such as Ray Roberts (editor of the journal) and Terence Ranger loom large in the historiography, although as Clapperton Mavhunga wrote for Africa is a Country blog, the historiography of Zimbabwe has been overshadowed by its shaping by outsiders, primarily from Britain and North America.

The Central Africa Historical Association was its peak during the years following Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the national liberation struggle fought by ZAPU and ZANU. The university unintentionally fostered an environment of historical research while the settler colony surrounding it waged a war to maintain white minority rule. The irony of the ‘golden age’ of Rhodesian/Zimbabwean historiography was highlighted in a recent article by Gerald Chikozho Mazarire:

This was hardly possible in Rhodesia, where Africans were hounded out of the university and forced to trek to mission universities in South Africa or Lesotho before proceeding to the UK or American institutions for further training, but were still prohibited by racist laws from teaching at the local university when they qualified. Despite this, newly qualified African historians were active in the Central African Historical Association run from the University of Rhodesia and frequently published in its journal Rhodesian History. The ‘golden age’ for African historical scholarship in Rhodesia was therefore reached in this colonial period and achieved by African and radical white scholars in exile even under state repression. By 1970, when Rhodesia was declared a republic, the university had shed most of the SOAS staff, while the predominantly white History Department had strengthened its relations with and provided academic services to the state. In the process, however, it set its own milestones: it graduated a record number of PhDs, ran a world-class journal and incubated new academic departments. Political Science grew into a full-scale department out of History, while War and Strategic Studies maintained a subtle, if subversive, presence within the History Department, run and taught by active military personnel of the Rhodesian army or moonlighting British ex-servicemen.

The first issue of Rhodesian History appeared in 1970, with the expressed aim of providing ‘a forum for the dispassionate study of the history of Rhodesia’. It appeared annually until the early 1980s, with articles contributed by historians in Africa, Britain, North America and Australia throughout its issues. In 1979, as the end of Rhodesia loomed, the journal changed its name to Zimbabwean History.

As we know, the aim of ‘dispassionate history’ is folly, particularly for a country with a very contentious history like Rhodesia. I am interested in how the history of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe was expressed through the journal over the years and hope to write something on this in the future. I am not sure if an archive of the Central Africa Historical Association exists, but this would be another avenue to explore.

The academic work of the CAHA can be contrasted with the Rhodesiana Society, which was an organisation established for enthusiasts of a popular history of Rhodesia. It was formed by two civil servants in 1953 and changed its name to the History Society of Zimbabwe in 1981. It produced a journal called Rhodesiana. The Internet Archive has scans of issues of the journal from 1969 to 1979, the same time as Rhodesian History journal. David Kenrick wrote an academic article about the Rhodesiana Society here.

The scans of Rhodesian/Zimbabwean History run from 1970 to 1981 and can be found here.