The African immigrant factor in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1930 : The origin and influence of external elements in a colonial setting

The founding of the colony of Southern Rhodesia created a plural
society quite in keeping with the Furnivall model and very much
characterized by dissensus, conflict and coercion as features of general
interaction between the dominant and the subordinate strata of this
newly founded society. In reality, a three-tier social segmental system
evolved in the new society, with the foreign African elements representing
an interpolating median between the dominant white settler classes
and the subject African indigenous societies. Introduced, at first, as
simple menials, military auxiliaries and necessary adjuncts to missionary
enterprise, the foreign Africans, then largely from South Africa,
were gradually reinforced in their numbers by numerous other immigrant
groups brought into the country later, at various stages, as labourers,
but with various degrees of success. The Abyssinians, Somalis and
Arabs from North East Africa and Aden, for example, failed to provide
Southern Rhodesia with a perennial external source of labour supply
either because these recruits would not accept employment under the
chattel labour conditions prescribed by Southern Rhodesia's repressive
colonial setting or because of the reluctance of the territory's
colonist employers to reform these conditions in question. Indian
labour supply would not materialise because the plan obviously ran
counter to the relatively liberal political philosophy of the colonial
government of India at Simla; a philosophy that was expected to take
into consideration issues of relevance to universal British imperial
citizenship and trusteeship. Chinese labour supply raised so much
controversy and fragmented the white colonial front in Southern Rhodesia
so seriously that it had to be abandoned. The Mfengu settlement scheme
was only a temporary success, as far as its labour value was concerned.