¹ Under the Land Apportionment system, no African can acquire, lease, or occupy land in a European area; similarly, Europeans are ineligible to own land in areas set aside for the use of the natives unless the Governor determines that the interests of the African peoples would be advanced thereby. In Southern Rhodesia, only 39 per cent of the land area of the territory is available to the Africans. Quantitatively the proportions are more favourable to the Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Excluding the zones infested by tsetse fly, the European area takes up about 16 per cent of the available land. In both Rhodesias, the most fertile agricultural lands, as well as those best served by the transport network, are European.

² In Southern Rhodesia, the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1934 (reaffirmed in 1945) gives legal backing to the colour bar. This Act allows only Europeans to bargain collectively and provides that scales of minimum pay be established for all jobs subject to trade union organization in the urban areas of the colony. Technically, the employer is free to select workers without regard to race. But he is obliged to pay whomever he engages for skilled and semi-skilled work at the stipulated rate, i.e., at the artificially high rate set for the Europeans. In practice this has meant, with only a few exceptions, that the Africans have been prevented from climbing the industrial ladder. The colour bar in Northern Rhodesia has no legislative support. Rut the pattern of social behaviour which has developed in the territory has given racial discrimination in employment a powerful status.

³ This concentration is strikingly brought out in the returns of the government marketing boards; see Reports of the Production and Marketing Branch, Department of Native Affairs, Southern Rhodesia and the Annual Reports on African Affairs, Northern Rhodesia.

⁴ Under the traditional arrangements, there was only one significant exception to this practice of shifting cultivation. The Barotse peoples of Northern Rhodesia, with the unique advantage of fertile flood plains, worked out techniques of settled cultivation which afforded them higher material standards than could be found elsewhere among the tribes of Central Africa. For details of the unique characteristics of Barotse life, see Gluckman's, M. studies, especially his Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, Rhodes-Livingstone Institute Paper no. 7 (1941).Google Scholar

⁵ Political considerations have influenced the administrators in arriving at this assumption. The preservation of political and social institutions in the native areas is regarded as offsetting the denial to the Africans of an effective voice in the political process of the settlers. In theory, the absence of more than half the men from the native areas might threaten the integrity of the institutions there, but in practice little effort has been made to prevent a higher rate of exodus.

⁶ Based on national income accounts prepared by the Central African Statistical Office.

⁷ Drawn from Annual Reports of the Chief Native Commissioner, Southern Rhodesia; Reports on African Affairs, Northern Rhodesia; and Census Reports, Southern and Northern Rhodesia.

⁸ In the 1930's, roughly 60 per cent of the African wage earners in Southern Rhodesia came from outside. In the 1950's, the proportion has been roughly 50 per cent. Meanwhile the number of indigenous Southern Rhodesian Africans employed in the money economy has expanded roughly threefold. See Reports of the Chief Native Commissioner, Southern Rhodesia; and Reports on the Census.

⁹ Millin, Sarah Gertrude, The South Africans (London, 1926), 55.Google Scholar

¹⁰ By 1957, the average annual wage of African workers in the Federation as a whole was approximately £73. The figures are derived from calculations of the global African wage bill prepared by the Central African Statistical Office and from the Chief Native Commissioner s reports on the average number of Africans employed throughout the year.

¹¹ European employers are required by law to provide either a standard ration or its equivalent in cash. These adjustments are based on the money cost of the standard ration as calculated by the Central African Statistical Office.

¹² Drawn from the price indices prepared by the Central African Statistical Office. As the official index is based on the expenditures of European households, it is not a perfect indicator of the changes in the Africans' money cost of living. Nevertheless, this index probably affords a reasonable approximation of general movements in the prices of consumers' goods.

¹³ In 1955, for example, the average for the 35,000 Africans in the Northern Rhodesian copper industry was approximately £143 per annum. See the Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Unrest in the Mining Industry (the Branigan Report) (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1956).Google Scholar

¹⁴ In 1954, the Southern Rhodesian government amended the Act to allow some Africans to acquire leasehold tenure to residential property in selected sites in urban areas. In addition, the government planned to provide long-term mortgage financing to prospective African home owners. Thus far, this programme has been hampered by lack of finance and only a few thousand African families have been affected by it.

¹⁵ After negotiations with the European Mineworkers Union spanning a period of nearly fifteen years, agreement was reached in September, 1955, which permitted African workers to fill twenty-four categories of jobs which had previously been reserved for Europeans.

¹⁶ Legislation was introduced in Southern Rhodesia in 1957 to amend the Industrial Conciliation Act and to permit Africans to join European trade unions, to hold jobs formerly reserved for Europeans, and to receive European rates of pay. These reforms were actively pushed by the former Prime Minister, Garfield Todd, but have been given little attention since his defeat.

¹⁷ Plans for implementing this programme (the Native Land Husbandry Act) call for “standard holdings” of six acres of tillable land and sixty acres of pasture per African family; the size of this standard holding, however, is adjusted in individual cases to take account of variations in rainfall. On the basis of these calculations, the native reserves of Southern Rhodesia at present have about 66 per cent more African families than the calculations of their capacity in standard holdings would allow. For details, see Report of the Director of Native Agriculture, Southern Rhodesia (1957).

¹⁸ See: Censuses of Manufacturing, Southern Rhodesia; Reports of the Chief Government Mining Engineer, Southern Rhodesia; and Reports of the Department of Mines, Northern Rhodesia.

¹⁹ Reports on the Census, Southern Rhodesia.