‘An Era Where Racism is Religion’

Abstract

In August 1978, Joshua Nkomo, the long-serving leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), spoke the words of this review’s title in reference to Zimbabwe’s ongoing liberation war at a solidarity conference in Addis Ababa to justify ZAPU’s controversial decision to shoot down a Rhodesian passenger jet. For historians today, when the importance (if not the meaning) of decolonising the academy is so obvious, Nkomo’s statement is important not just as historical rhetoric but because it calls us to re-evaluate how racism shaped the late twentieth-century global order. This is the stated aim of Timothy Scarnecchia’s Race and Diplomacy, an expansive diplomatic history of Zimbabwe’s ‘long’ liberation war, which sets out to show how racial ideological frameworks shaped the highest levels of diplomatic decision-making up to and after Zimbabwe’s independence. To this end, however, Race and Diplomacy is actually a lot less about race than it is about diplomacy, and specifically US and UK diplomacy. As such, Scarnecchia provides a compelling new account of the American and British diplomatic efforts that shaped the end of Zimbabwe’s liberation war and its first years of independence, wherein race played an important but contingent role. Based primarily on UK, US, and South African archives, the book is an impressive example of how to deal with an extraordinarily complex subject. As Scarnecchia shows, diplomacy was a multilayered, constantly changing feature of this war, involving a mind-boggling number of actors: Zimbabwe’s two fractious nationalist movements, the governments of five frontline states who hosted and supported these movements, the white minority Rhodesian regime, internal Black Rhodesian movements, apartheid South Africa, the UK, the US, and Soviet Union, and others, including Cuba and China. Scarnecchia foregrounds how diplomatic initiatives were shaped by these actors’ institutional politics, particularly those of the two nationalist movements, as well as key personalities such as Henry Kissinger, Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe, Ian Smith, and Christopher Soames. Chapters One and Two gallop through the period’s first fifteen years (1960–75), from the moment when Rhodesian decolonisation deviated from other British colonies to the pivotal events of the mid-1970s, when Southern Africa replaced Southeast Asia as a global centre of the Cold War. Rather than hone in on the 1960s diplomatic debates about Rhodesia’s illegal claim to sovereignty, Scarnecchia instead focuses on the diplomatic response to often opaque and deadly nationalist leadership struggles, particularly those within the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), whose chairman, Herbert Chitepo, was assassinated in 1975. The book becomes much more focused in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, which deal with the diplomatic events following the release of