Nicola Ginsburgh and Will Jackson
“White Africans”: the term is loaded with mystification and pathos. In its combining of racial identity and geographical belonging, it carries both the conviction that people of European descent can become truly African, as well as the countervailing doubt that – in the anomalous quality of their continued whiteness – they must remain apart. It is unsurprising, then, that the term attracts controversy at the same time as it replicates that element of ambivalence so characteristic of settler culture in Africa. Today, the term conveys the anachronism of any self‐identification that derives from the settler colonial past. But, while many of those citizens of African states with European ancestry may avoid the idea of themselves as “African,” those that do (whether or not they preface the term with “white”) typically enjoy access to worlds beyond Africa, as well as privileges within it, that the vast majority of black Africans do not. In 1993, on the cusp of a nonracial universal franchise, South Africa’s Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) attempted to resolve the question of whether nonindigenous peoples could be accepted as African. PAC general secretary Benny Alexander distinguished “two strains” of African, the first comprising those who “historically cannot be traced out of Africa,” the second comprising whites and Asians “whose only home and sole allegiance” was to the continent (Sparks 1995). Alexander was attempting to extricate his organization from a controversy over the “one settler, one bullet” slogan, then current in militant circles. His logic is tortuous – not all whites were “settlers,” according to Alexander, only those who did not identify with Africa – but it does raise the serious question of the degree to which Europeans continue to appropriate certain elements of “Africa” for their enrichment and self‐identification while protecting themselves from harsher realities.
While, at base, we might define settlers as all those migrants with the intention and the opportunity to stay – to make themselves “at home” – we can hardly view the settler in isolation from the supporting social and political structures that helped determine whether those ambitions were fulfilled. In other words, there can be no talk of settlers without a corresponding attention to settler states. Nor can we contemplate “the settler” without some consideration of those peoples whose prior occupation of the land the settler undermined. Frequently, settler colonies have been discussed within analyses of imperialism or colonialism more broadly. As recent theoretical work has shown, however, settler colonialism needs to be understood as a particular social‐historical formation in its own right. Whereas colonialism is traditionally understood as a relationship premised upon the exploitation of an indigenous majority by an alien minority, settler colonialism, as Patrick Wolfe argued, is centred on a logic of elimination (Wolfe 2006). According to Lorenzo Veracini, colonialism seeks to reproduce itself to enable continued exploitation while settler colonialism is geared toward its own annihilation – to erase the indigenous presence altogether (Veracini 2011). It is a formula that works best when applied to what were once called the “white dominions” – those territories settled by anglophone migrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that subsequently won the right to rule themselves: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. South Africa is often included in that list but it stands apart, not merely because a minority of the country’s white settlers were British or because South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1960, but because in South Africa whites never exceeded 20 percent of the total population.1 Indeed, African settler colonies are marked by their comparative inability to erase the indigenous presence. Yet the failure to exterminate African populations should not indicate an absence of a genocidal impulse within African settler mentalities.
The implications of this are several. First, fantasies of extermination were shaped and curtailed by dependence upon indigenous labor. Starkly racialized social hierarchies were contrived: Africans would do the work. In this, the African settler colonies are closer, typologically speaking, to India than they are to Canada or New Zealand. (Nor should we forget the presence of missionaries, travelers, and colonial administrators – the nonsettler personnel of the settler state – who did as much to shape the futures of the settler colonies as they did those of the nonsettler colonies.) Second, settlers, sensitive to their demographic minority status, attempted to create uniquely enclavic cultures in which the need to differentiate “white” from “native” was intensely felt. The copresence of European immigrants and black Africans, however, meant that this differentiation was never achieved, hence the particular anxious quality of race in the African settler states. Elimination, according to Wolfe, involved not just physical erasure but also biological assimilation, through state‐sanctioned projects of child removal and intermarriage.2 Settlers in Africa could not tolerate racial mixing; miscegenation remained the central frame for understanding – or denying – the fluidity of race.
That denial was manifest in a cult of separation. The legally sanctioned alienation of land from Africans, the demarcation of native reserves, the control of subject peoples’ movement through technologies of registration and surveillance all served to constitute “the native” through the manipulation of space. Subject to an array of legal, political, and economic sanctions that located them outside the settler body politic, indigenous populations were routinely imagined as living beyond the boundaries of civilization. Across central and southern Africa the idea that Africans were inherently rural and tribal was a central prop in legitimizing migrant systems of labor that allowed Africans to be paid at single men’s wages. Settlers felt keenly the colonial distaste toward “detribalization” but at the same time pursued economic and political policies that made “traditional” African society untenable.
Third, unlike the so‐called white dominions, African settler states were never able to pull clear of the metropole. Their lack of numbers meant that settlers remained dependent on the European powers that sponsored them. To be sure, South Africa was accorded dominion status in 1910. Its considerable mineral wealth ensured that South Africa was penetrated by large‐scale international capital to such an extent that its racial regime was perpetuated by investment from within the very nation‐states – Great Britain and the United States of America – whose publics were most visible in expressing popular opposition to its injustice. Therefore, just as African settler colonies combined aspects of both the colony and the settler colony, so decolonization in these contexts requires its own analytical framework. Settler colonies and the European nations from whence their settlers came separated tortuously and incompletely. Legacies of empire in independent African states remain entwined with those of the old imperial powers.
Of all the settler states in Africa, South Africa went furthest in breaking from the constraints of metropolitan rule and from the burdens of imperial and international norms regarding the treatment of “native” peoples. Decolonization consequently arrived latest here. Only Algeria had a settler population of comparable proportions but here too the “native” remained in the majority. Other settler colonies had fewer settlers still. In Northern Rhodesia, Kenya and South West Africa European populations failed to reach 100,000. Elsewhere, settlers seldom accounted for more than 5 percent of a colony’s total population. In light of wider migratory patterns, Africa was never able to sustain an appeal as a settler destination to match the popularity of the Americas or Australasia. The combined Portuguese migration to Angola and Mozambique was dwarfed by the near 1.5 million migrants who traveled to Brazil in the 100 years after 1850 (Bender 2004). Germany’s only settler colony, South West Africa, lasted only 30 years, and was populated at its peak by just 14,000 settlers. Above all, settlers in Africa were weak. Their ambitions were fantastical, and their visions of the future mortgaged to the rigidity of their racial thinking. Indeed, their histories might well be thought of in terms of an unraveling; of the gradual marooning of “white men’s countries” beneath the twentieth century’s historical tides.
It would be a mistake, however, to equate that weakness with historical insignificance. Precisely because they were able to mobilize the resources of their sponsor European nation‐states, settlers had a transformative effect on African political structures, environments, and social institutions. Settlers made the difference between protracted, violent decolonization and (relatively speaking) smoother transitions. Settlers complicated the ideological arithmetic of empire. They reached down deeper into the colonized ground than other colonial personnel. Despite – or because of – their limited numbers, their importance was profound.
Settler colonialism in Africa has a 500‐year history and its defining characteristics vary over time. Portuguese activity in modern‐day Mozambique dates from 1505 when a trading and refueling station was founded at Sofala on the Indian Ocean coast. At the same time, France established its own trading post, the Bastion de France, on the Algerian coast. The Dutch began the colonization of modern‐day South Africa in 1652 with the establishment of a refreshment station at Table Bay. All these nascent settlements serviced other ends, specifically commercial expansion – in the Mediterranean for the French and in the Far East for the Dutch and Portuguese. Nowhere in these places were settler societies envisaged from the start. At Sofala, settlement proceeded only fitfully as the commercial value of the Zambezi Valley came to be understood at the same time as competitor Arab trading networks were disrupted or displaced. While it is meaningful to speak of a Portuguese settler population by the mid‐seventeenth century, it is important to recognize that African chiefs continued to hold considerable sway. Those Portuguese who did prosper, moreover, did so largely beyond the control of Lisbon, their success due primarily to their involvement in local African politics. The lack of any meaningful military or administrative structure meant that Portuguese settlers accumulated power largely on their own account. Not until the establishment of a bureaucratic state in the later nineteenth century did a coordinated settler colony emerge (Newitt 1973; Isaacman and Isaacman 1976).
The French conquest of Algeria was similarly haphazard. Explicable in part as an attempt by the French king Charles X to bolster his popular support, in part as the culmination of a diplomatic wrangle between the dey of Algiers and the French consul, and in part as an attempt to pre‐empt British maritime ascendancy over the Mediterranean, the French invasion in 1830 was never intended as the founding of a settler colony. Limited at first to the coastal cities of Algiers, Oran, and Bône, the French took over 40 years to spread themselves throughout the Algerian hinterland. While settlement proceeded apace, from 37,000 in 1840 to 412,000 in 1880, only half these migrants were French. Spaniards, Italians, and Maltese comprised the rest. Only from the late nineteenth century onward did these diverse groups come to share in a common settler identity as Algerians.3
To the south, the initial impetus for settlement at the Cape of Good Hope had been to service ships of the Dutch East India Company en route to and from the eastern seas. That early Dutch settlement crossed traditional African grazing grounds; when conflict broke out between the Dutch and the Khoikhoi in 1659, the Dutch commander Jan van Riebeeck decided to lay out a boundary from the mouth of the Salt River at the north of Table Bay to the eastern flank of Table Mountain. Composed in part of the natural barrier afforded by the Liesbeek River, in part of a wooden stockade, and in part of a purposively planted hedge of bitter almonds, this first and formative settler frontier speaks eloquently of the fact that, while settlers strove always to insinuate themselves into Africa, they exerted no less energy on keeping Africa – and specifically, Africans – out. Such a defensive, laager mentality is most frequently associated with South Africa’s Afrikaner population but it is no less applicable to settlers of British, French, or German descent and represents, moreover, one of the big continuities traceable from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first.
Definitions of society, as Raymond Williams has noted, involve relationships and institutions (Williams 1976). If settler societies are premised upon the differentiation between settler and native (whether the latter be eliminated or not), it follows that a settler society can be taken as given only once racialized forms of governance (institutions) and sociabilities (relationships) have come to exist. These pertained unevenly and inconsistently. Race concretized with variable pace and intensity (Cahen 2012). Through the nineteenth century, Africa loomed ever larger in Europe’s popular consciousness. The abolition of slavery, the cultural dissemination of explorer’s travels, and the rise of missionary activity on the continent made the “white African” thinkable in the first place. At the same time, both in Europe and in colonial Africa the idea of society was being increasingly qualified by race. On the ground, the civic institutions that structured settler society rose to prominence, first, in the mobilization of violence and, later, to pre‐empt the erosion of racial boundaries. Settler militias were the formative social institution of the frontier. In Algeria, the first colons were children of France’s military occupation. During its first 40 years the colony lacked the legal apparatus of the modern settler colonial state but the process of pacification militarized the settler mind – and traumatized Algeria’s Arab and Berber inhabitants. Dutch‐ and French‐descended settlers in South Africa became entangled in African wars. Until 1834 slavery was the keystone institution shaping settler society at the Cape but it was complicated and to some extent subverted by the relationships that developed between masters and slaves and between both these groups and the state (Ross 1983; Shell 1994; Dooling 2007).
Relationships distorted the settler colonial ideal. Settlers looked to the state to enforce their various interests; the domestic bourgeoisie pushed for preferable market regulations; workers demanded protection from cheap African labor; and farmers relied on the allocation of fertile land and state subsidies, as well as the inhibition of African producers. Racial ideology was never homogeneous but was refracted through a prism of competing interests. While, to a great extent, legislation did operate in line with settler demands, not least in the coerced mobilization of African labor (Berman 1990), it also reflected a growing commitment on the part of metropolitan governments toward the humane treatment of “native” peoples (Lester and Dussart 2014). By the later nineteenth century, advances in communication technology were recasting the terms according to which settler colonization would proceed. Ships – from the mid‐1800s under steam – brought sub‐Saharan Africa closer to Europe. The development of railway systems created new opportunities for movement and migration, opening up the hinterland to the coast and creating new opportunities for the evasion as well as the exercise of social control. At the same time, advancements in medical science, including the discovery of antimalarial quinine prophylaxis in 1840, eased anxieties concerning the impossibility of whites living in tropical and semitropical climes.
The mobility of the high imperial age, however, was not a “white man’s” preserve. Settlers shared migratory networks with no less mobile racial others. Chinese immigrants in South Africa labored beside Africans and Europeans (Bright 2013). In Kenya Indian immigrants outnumbered whites (Aiyar 2015). In Algeria only through processes of acculturation did immigrant non‐French Europeans – from Italy, Majorca, Spain, and Malta – earn inclusion as colons. Challenged by the polyglot character of their colonies, settler advocates in Africa and Europe lobbied for stringent, racially exclusive restrictions on entry into the colony and on social and political privileges within it (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Most settler states imposed restrictive immigration policies to prevent white “undesirables” from entering settler colonies. Endeavoring to uphold this dichotomy, settler authorities worked hard to socially engineer their settler populations and to instill in them the necessary mentality and aptitude to rule (Shadle 2015).
The mining of gold in South Africa from 1886, copper in Northern Rhodesia, phosphate in Algeria, and diamonds in German South West Africa spurred the super‐exploitation of indigenous land, labor, and mineral wealth. It also brought hundreds of thousands of new would‐be settlers into the settler colonies. Social as well as geographic topographies were dramatically reshaped. Where mineral deposits were found cities sprang up. The old archetypal settler farmer became anachronistic practically overnight. At the same time, private companies (in British East Africa,4 Mozambique, and Southern Rhodesia) built quasi‐state structures (including the raising of police and military forces) dedicated to the coercion of labor and the exploitation of land and mineral wealth.
By the 1920s, more than 70 percent of the pieds noirs in Algeria were city dwellers (Stora 2001). A few hundred would‐be aristocrats in Kenya were as nothing to the millions of urban working whites populating the towns and cities of southern Africa. On the South African Highveld the intensification of mineral extraction, compounded by successive waves of agricultural depression, ripped the ties that bound those Afrikaners with control of land to those without. Between 1904 and 1911 the number of whites living on the Witwatersrand increased by almost 50 percent (Callinicos 1977: 28). In the port cities, Durban, Cape Town, Luanda, and Delagoa Bay, they were joined by new arrivals: Argentinean cattlemen, Armenians, Americans, and the euphemistically labelled “continental women,” as well as men who found in the illegal trade of liquor, hides, and horn some compensation for lack of social standing (MacDonald 2014; Hyslop 2014).
While Kenya has retained a lasting image as an aristocrat’s colony, most settler states struggled to reconcile the reality of social differentiation within the white population with an image of unfettered wealth and privilege. The Carnegie Commission of 1929–1930 found that over 300,000 Europeans in South Africa were living below “white” standards of living. Known collectively as degredados, Portugal’s typical colonial migrants were drawn from the lowest strata of Portuguese society: criminals, prostitutes, the destitute, and orphans (Coates 2001; Bender 2004). Algeria also became known for its impoverished “petit blancs,” popularized by Albert Camus who chronicled what he saw as mental as well as material degradation (Strachan 2013). Like many poorer settlers across Africa, pieds noirs undoubtedly lived a privileged lifestyle compared to the indigenous majority, but most settlers were salaried urban workers rather than wealthy landowners and pieds noirs were certainly no better off than they would have been in France; 72 percent earned around 15 to 20 percent less than their French counterparts, despite sharing a similar cost of living (Stora 2005).
The socialization of new immigrants was always a worry for settler regimes, but in the twentieth century the figure of the “poor white” provoked particular concern; poor whites were believed to be more likely to engage in miscegenation and to live, eat, socialize, and work with other unsavory elements without regard to the propriety of race (Bundy 1983; Morrell 1992; Errante 2003; Yedes 2003). In nonsettler societies – in India, for example – the poor, the elderly, and the sick could be transferred “home” to Europe. In the African settler colonies, bound to the fantasy of white indigeneity, repatriation was problematic (Jackson 2013). The poor white problem thus emerges as one of the great unifying themes common to all the settler states in Africa where the project to uplift the deviant and the degenerate emerged as a vital part of settler ideology: only if requisite standards of whiteness were maintained could the settlers’ claim to be guiding Africans from backwardness to civilization be maintained. With their far greater numbers, it seemed obvious to the architects of settler societies that “native” populations would inevitably fill the lower social orders.
Urbanization, however, meant the proletarianization not only of Africans but of immigrant Europeans as well. This produced a profound contradiction for white workers, many of whom had been radicalized by their experiences of industrial struggle in the metropole and who in the early twentieth century saw themselves as part of an international white working class (Hyslop 1999). In Africa, white workers felt themselves threatened from all sides – by the forces of global capital from above and by black and “colored” workers from below. It is unsurprising, then, that white worker militancy provoked a mixed response by the state. In 1922 the South African authorities deployed the army and police against miners striking to uphold the color bar, leaving hundreds dead. Over the following two decades, however, both South Africa and Southern Rhodesia implemented Industrial Conciliation Acts, formalized color bars, reserved particular jobs for whites, and prohibited black trade unions in order to placate white demands and institutionalize skin color privilege over African workers (Alexander 2000; Krikler 2005).
Despite the protection of color bars, however, the fear of undercutting or replacement by indigenous laborers remained a constant feature of white workers’ existence, intensifying from the mid‐twentieth century with the growth of manufacturing industries that demanded skilled workforces in numbers that could not be filled by the white population at superficially inflated rates of pay. In Rhodesia, Doris Lessing noted that “many of the white artisans are right to be afraid”:
Many of them are poor human material; not only are their standards of skill very low, but they are degraded by their attitude towards the Africans, who are, after all, their fellow workers. Faced with competition from Africans, who are avid for education and new skills, with all the irresistible energy of a suppressed people, they know they will go to the wall unless protected: white trade‐union policy is in essence to protect that section of the white workers who intend to rely not on their skills or their industry or their education, but on the colour of their skins.
(Lessing 1996: 87)
Lessing’s commentary here goes beyond a merely economic account. “Poor human material” intimates a lack of mettle (or, as imperialists saw it, “character”). While some employers regarded their white laborers with disdain, white workers themselves saw their own presumed characteristics – skilled labor and hard work – as foundational qualities of their race. Whereas nineteenth‐century writers had agitated over the possible degeneration of Europeans on contact with Africans, Lessing saw poor whites as degraded by their racial insecurity. For settlers, however poor, race was non‐negotiable – because their position of (relative) advantage depended on it. As work on the psychology of settler rule in Africa has shown, that inflexible commitment to an ideology of racial difference generated particular kinds of anxiety and foreboding (Krikler 1993; Swart 2009; Jackson 2013a, 2013b; Shadle 2015). What needs to be further explored are the ways in which this particular psychology contributed to the quality and extent of settler violence. Consider, for example, the following account of a manslaughter trial held in Kenya in 1934:
A European woman and four Africans were convicted of manslaughter after having beaten five Africans so severely that one died. After the beatings the Africans were locked in a [storeroom] for the night; the next day the farm owner said, “I cannot allow baboons to be placed in my car,” and the men were obliged to walk to Kitale some seventeen miles away, arriving in a state of collapse. The European woman was ill and her husband dying; in consequence she was awarded a light sentence of one year. The husband, a former Indian Army major, had arrived in Kenya in 1920 and the years since then had been ones of financial struggle and of declining health; the violence was the outcome.
(Clayton and Savage 1974: 174)
Violence reflected failure; financial struggle and declining health resulted in what Lessing referred to as racial degradation. The stress of the settler’s struggle to succeed spilled over into random acts of violence, perpetrated upon – one might be tempted to think – whichever “native” was nearest to hand: a universal hate object. In fact, the kinds of social situations in which violence flared up are themselves significant. The dispersal of alienation and anxiety through the settler population was highly variegated: the projecting of settlers’ fears onto Africans was itself structured by the peculiar contradictions of class, culture, and respectability in the settler colony.
Significantly, the case that comes closest to the exterminatory syndrome associated with Wolfe’s “elimination” thesis is that of the continent’s shortest‐lived settler colony: German South West Africa. While some historians have linked the massacres of the Herero in 1904 to the genocide of the Jews during World War II, an alternative framing might connect genocidal violence in South West Africa to an earlier “poor white problem” within Europe itself (Zimmerer 2007; Conrad 2013). Settlement overseas offered one way to improve national population stocks “at home.” If the killing of the Herero anticipates the killing of the Jews, both are anticipated by the prior identification of the work‐shy and the unfit within Europe itself throughout the nineteenth century. Nineteenth‐century work camps in Germany were part of a program of social engineering that had its mirror in the clearance of African land to make way for the German settler. The anachronism of the settler colony – that saw redemption from industrialization in honest manual work – was reflected in the fantasies of the work colonies in both Europe and southern Africa (Roos 2011).
Certainly, this improving impulse was not limited to Germany. It is evident in the French use of Algeria as a depot for rebels following the 1848 Revolutions, in the organized emigration of impoverished children by the British to the Cape in the 1840s (and to Southern Rhodesia 80 years later), and in the settlement of ex‐service personnel in Kenya in the wake of World War I (Duder 1993; Boucher 2014). The designs of Portuguese authorities to rid the metropole of unwanted elements meant that poor whites formed the backbone of settlement in Angola and Mozambique, both of which were incorporated into Portugal’s wider global system of penal exile that lasted into the mid‐twentieth century.
While the Namibian case comes closest to the eliminations of indigenous peoples in New Zealand, Australia, and North America, comparable episodes of exterminatory violence can be found across the continent, from the French suppression of Algerian resistance in the 1840s to the Eastern Cape frontier wars to the pacification of the Nandi in British East Africa in the 1900s. Settlers in Africa did not succeed in reducing indigenous peoples to social marginality, but the genocidal impulse can nonetheless be clearly discerned, not least in the anticipatory consciousness by which settlers steeled themselves for native rebellion. Despite their attempts to keep themselves apart from Africans, settlers in Africa could not help but encounter on a daily basis the very phenomena that settler culture had constructed as carriers of contagion and objects of disgust. At the same time, settlers could never forget their professed historical role as bearers of peace and progress and as role models for civilization. Few took seriously the idea that Africans would develop sufficiently to render the settlers’ own position in Africa irrelevant but they were bound nonetheless to repeatedly and publicly profess the imperial mantle of a civilizing mission, not least because, so long as they remained minorities, settlers remained dependent on their “home” nations for ideological replenishment no less than for material support.
This state of dual dependence – on populous African populations on the one hand and on metropolitan powers on the other – was the perennial feature of the settler colonies in Africa. That dual dependence also explains the implications of the settler colonies for Europe itself. It is an axiom of the new imperial history that metropole and colony be envisaged within a single analytical field. But the African settler colonies implicated the metropolitan powers in the unraveling of their empires in ways that colonies without settlers did not do. The experiences of Algeria, Angola, German South West Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, and Southern Rhodesia brought the empire home, to London, Paris, Lisbon, and Berlin in decisive and particular ways. Histories of white Africans are necessary, then, to any understanding of “Europe” itself.
The French concept of assimilation reflected this interpenetration. Unlike British imperial ideology, the French considered their colonial possessions as indivisible from France itself. While in the British experience it was the rule of racial difference that legitimated the unequal distribution of power, for the French assimilation held out the future prospect of creating French men and women from colonized populations. In Algeria that prospect was flawed, first, by the undeniable reality of cultural difference (North Africa was not France and could not be rendered as such, regardless of the extent to which indigenous culture was denigrated or disavowed) and, second, by the no less uncompromising insistence on the part of the settlers that France without Algeria was unthinkable. The Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) represents the culmination of these antagonistic forces. Notably, of the 984,000 Europeans in Algeria at the start of the war, over 80 percent had been born in the colony. Since the start of the century, and markedly since World War I, meanwhile, a coherent French Algerian identity had taken root. Hence, the apparent contradiction of an increasing indigenization of the European settlers alongside an intensification of their attachment to a “home” elsewhere.
The fragility of the settlers’ position here is key. Settlers’ claims to belong in Algeria were negated always by the presence of “native” Muslim Algerians. Only the idea that Algeria was in fact a part of France could make settlers feel at home there. The war dispelled that myth. But, beyond the collapse of the settler colony, the Algerian war reverberated through the subsequent histories of both Algeria and France. So mutually entangled had the two become that their pulling apart created legacies of profound and lasting human loss. During the war itself, 300,000 mostly Muslim Algerians died. Millions were displaced. Torture was routine (Horne [1977] 2006). But it was the very conceptual premise of the French possession of Algeria – that, in the words of François Mitterand in 1954, “Algeria is France” – that determined both the intractable nature of the conflict and the nature of its repercussions for the postcolonial nation‐state.
As was also the case in Kenya, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies, an anticolonial struggle contained its own inner conflict (Finnegan 1993; Kriger 2008; Branch 2009). At independence, the Harkis, Algerians who found themselves on the French side of the war, were massacred in their tens of thousands. Many of those who survived fled to France, unwelcome reminders of a history that the French themselves preferred to forget. In Vincent Crapanzano’s words, the Harkis were like figures in a Greek tragedy, “betraying and betrayed, abandoned, ostracised and exiled to an alien land where they would always remain strangers” (Crapanzano 2011: 4). They were joined by 1 million settler refugees and over 2 million conscripted French soldiers. Today, the legacy of France’s overseas empire has little to do with Vietnam and the South Pacific and everything to do with Algeria and the Muslim world (Shepard 2006).
Of the British settler colonies, it is Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 that is most closely comparable to the Algerian settlers’ steadfast denial of decolonization (White 2015). Here, too, it is the settler presence that explains the violence of the anticolonial struggle. Unlike the French in Algeria, however, the British were not prepared to lend the settlers military support. In part, that reflects the degree of self‐determination that Southern Rhodesia already enjoyed; in part it reflects a straightforward matter of timing: by 1965 British policymakers had reconciled themselves to the conversion of their empire to a commonwealth and the realignment of British interests through European integration and the American alliance. By 1965 white minority rule was, to large sections of British popular opinion, anachronistic. Yet more significant, British policy in southern Africa was shaped by the earlier experience of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. Militarily, that conflict had been won but its contribution to the dawning political realization that metropolitan and settler interests were no longer compatible was profound. The popular disclosure of beatings, torture, and summary execution in the course of the British counterinsurgency, meanwhile, fatally undermined the credibility for mobilizing an armed intervention on behalf of settlers who refused to accept (or perhaps did not yet understand) the new ideological climate of the postwar world.
It has been a central theme of this chapter that settler communities in Africa were weak: anxious, ideologically anachronistic, torn by competing demands, and unable to attract enough settler migrants to constitute independent nation‐states. During the period of decolonization, however, a clear divergence becomes apparent. In Algeria, Mozambique, and Angola, settlers left en masse. In the anglophone colonies, “white flight” was a much more protracted affair, with many moving to South Africa from Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, and elsewhere on the continent. For those who remained, retaining British citizenship ensured a right to belong combined with the luxury to leave. At the same time, the number of international expatriates (in Kenya in particular) has increased significantly. Theirs is a cosmopolitan cultural and political intuition but their relations with black Africans are framed nonetheless by their status as resource‐rich outsiders (McIntosh 2016). While outlier figures dominate media interest (consider the homicide trial of Thomas Cholmondeley in Kenya or the murder of Eugène Terre’Blanche in South Africa), far more complicated continuities of colonial (or “neocolonial”) power persist. Tourist travel, international development, and media discourse each present hugely significant constellations of power and knowledge that not only have their roots deep in the settler colonial past but have today transformed what were once the pioneer and prospector towns of the settler colonies – Nairobi and Johannesburg in particular – into major regional hubs for the transformation of the continent itself. Scholarship on settler societies, meanwhile – our own emphasis on urbanization notwithstanding – has begun to signal a return to what remains the keystone of the settler colonial dispensation: land (Beinart 2008; Foster 2008; Hughes 2010; Neumann 2013). Today, struggles over environmental resources pit local communities against powerful competitors both within the state and beyond the nations’ borders. The construction, control and consumption of the African environment – indeed the very idea of the African environment itself – now raise new questions over what it means to be a settler, a migrant, and indeed an African.