Title:	The Collapse of Rhodesia
Authors:	Josiah Brownell
Keywords:	Collapse
Issue Date:	2011
Publisher:	I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
Description:	In the final decades of white rule in Rhodesia, the settler state fought and lost two parallel wars.2 One of these wars was always more voluble and violent, visible, and bloody. This war would escalate into an increasingly deadly civil conflict, with guerrillas and counter-insurgency forces clashing inside and outside Rhodesia, and have far-reaching regional and international political significance. This was the better known of the two wars, and the one to attract the attention of most historians studying the last years of settler rule. This more conspicuous war was also the only one retrospectively acknowledged by the participants on both sides of the conflict, and the only one that has seeped into the shared memories of Rhodesians and Zimbabweans alike. The story of this war has been recounted many times. But there was another war in Rhodesia being fought alongside this more visible war: a war of numbers. In some respects this was a hidden war, and instead of the settler state and African guerrillas fighting over hills and villages, isolated farms, and rural roads, this was a contest over racial birth rates and death rates, immigration and emigration patterns, racial boundaries and head counting. Victory in this war would be determined not by the number of combat deaths reported in newspapers nor captured territory on maps, but by trends and growth rates in statistical reports and censuses. This war of numbers was perhaps more important, and certainly no less political, than the louder and bloodier war, even as its political nature was somewhat obscured by an apolitical, coded language. Because of this coded language and the political incentives of the participants on both sides of this conflict to downplay this parallel war, historians have looked past the numbers war to the more striking images beyond, as though those more violent dramas represented the entire story of Rhodesia’s collapse. Yet it was the settler state’s defeat in this war of numbers that sapped the morale of, and had profound psychological effects on, white society; heaped unbearable economic and ecological pressures on the state; further undermined the white regime’s international and domestic legitimacy; and rendered the military conflict unwinnable. The role this parallel war played in the collapse of the regime was therefore pivotal, despite the historical silence.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/56667
ISBN:	978 1 84885 475 8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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