“On the Wrong Side of the People”: Southern Rhodesian African Nationalists' Strategies to Access American Funds in the Early 1960s

There is a conventional wisdom in earlier studies of American Cold War diplomacy with Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) that the United States took a public line of support for British diplomacy toward majority rule while secretly trying to build relations with African nationalists to assure a pro-American majority government should one appear in the imminent future (between 1960-64). Americans, like African nationalists, discounted the ability of the white minority to forestall majority rule for another 16 years, so a great amount of effort was invested in courting the African nationalists in the early 1960s. Based on work in Zimbabwe and the US National Archives and the George Meany Memorial Archives of the AFL-CIO, this paper presents a new interpretation of the diplomatic negotiations carried out during this crucial period. This paper starts with an exploration of sell-out politics in Southern Rhodesia, where rival nationalists competed with each other and dealt with their rivals by accusing them of being “imperialist stooges” or “Tshombes”--the latter in reference to Moise Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway Katanga Province in the Congo, who came to personify an African leader controlled by Western imperial interests. In Southern Rhodesia, the nationalist leaders first attacked the trade union leaders Reuben Jamela as a sell out in 1962, destroying his control of a large, 30,000-member trade union congress. In 1963, the split in the nationalist leadership left Joshua Nkomo and his supporters attacking Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe as sell-outs and imperialist stooges. My paper argues that while this strategy of sellout politics was played out with increasingly violent consequences in Southern Rhodesia, the leaders of the various factions and parties continued to compete internationally for funding from a variety of Cold War sources.