The Wretched of The Empire

Are we to be a momentous or a momentary people?’  Should Rhodesians, for the sake of moral conduct, risk political suicide or should we abandon moral principles in favour of self-interest and our civilisational survival?

This is a novel about how these questions tormented the white inhabitants of the self-governing British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1962.

Faced by the collapse of the British Empire in Africa and Zimbabwean nationalists demanding their surrender, anxious white Rhodesians must choose a destiny. They must decide between yielding to the uncertainties of a multiracial compromise to win independence from Britain, or to continue as a minority racial regime, leading to the certainty of an armed confrontation with the African majority.

In Sebakwe, a town deep in the heartland, an array of characters favouring either compromise or conflict confront each other in an ideological struggle for the soul of Rhodesia. Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, the ‘Lion of Marimba’ a titan of the liberal Anglophile United Federal Party (UFP) Establishment seeks to navigate a middle course between black revolution and white counterrevolution by supporting reform from above. Fitzgerald confronts two adversaries. The first is Tommy ‘Watchman’ Burroughs, a proponent of rebellion against the British Crown, and a leader in the newly formed populist Rhodesian Front (RF) party. The second is Alfred Kanengoni of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), an unrelenting revolutionary of armed struggle to overthrow the Rhodesian state.

The struggle for supremacy by these three men in Sebakwe becomes a microcosm of Southern Rhodesia’s political crisis. The dramatic result of the 1962 election sets Rhodesians on the road to being the ‘momentous people’ of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, followed by the blood-soaked bush war of the 1970s that ends in the creation of Zimbabwe in 1980.