Settler Ideology and African Underdevelopment in Postwar Rhodesia

Abstract

A largely ignored aspect of underdevelopment in Rhodesia, which plays a crucial role in legitimating the dominance, policies and status of the ruling group in the economic structure, is the conception, construction and transformation of ideology. By ideology is meant what Plamenatz has called the ‘sets of ideas or beliefs or attitudes characteristic of a group’.' The group whose ideology is being examined here is essentially, though not exclusively, the white community’s whose ideas, beliefs about and attitudes towards black economic structures, enterprise and labour have created an ideology, sometimes unsophisticated and in other instances sophisticated, which has been readily expounded to ‘explain’ African underdevelopment in Rhodesian society.