The Last Rhodesians: Society Adrift

The Last Rhodesians: Society Adrift

An evolutionary saga , The Last Rhodesians is the definitive insight on this culture’s origins, identity and imprint in Africa. Then 16 years of war led to the demise, sunset and ‘fall’ of Rhodesia. Negotiations ended the state in 1979: but Rhodesians ‘never died’. The war was fought in numerous bush battles, across adjacent states, in espionage, sanctions-busting, for rural hearts and minds, and in covert diplomacy. Fault lines in history, with Cold War powers in Moscow and Peking – with East Bloc belligerents, ethno-nationalist armies and Western interests – coalesced in revolutionary war. This multi-ethnic society – tagged ‘the jewel of Africa’ - bequeathed an inheritance that Zimbabwe squandered. Its inheritors crafted a failing state beset by genocide, economic regression and social malaise. Yet its economic bedrock of 90 years, hidden or unacknowledged, still exists. Zimbabwe was birthed from those legacies. Literature, art, poetry, icons, images, symbols, lingua franca and cyber-Rhodesiana sustain this social identity worldwide. The Last Rhodesians provides critical review of this culture as seen by eminent authors, historians, novelists, journalists, thinkers, politicians, soldiers, troopies, spies, diplomats, poets, satirists, academics, cartoonists, economists, ‘Rhodies’, ‘Whenwes’, and foreign critics - in hundreds of works, fiction and non-fiction, documentaries, music and film, about Africa’s ‘white tribe’ of ‘scatterlings’, found in 60 countries. Those remaining are under 5 per cent of Rhodesians worldwide, 0.7 per cent of Zimbabwe’s populace. Fifty years of Rhodesian exoduses marked this ‘disappearance’. The ‘House of Stone’, the inheritor state, remains. After its false dawn, the ‘jungle grew back’, leaving an imperfect future for all. Duncan Clarke writings in the last fifty years are found on dgclarke.com , including Rhodes’ Ghost: The Conquest of Zambezia, 2020.