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Southern Rhodesia turned, in the 1960s and 1970s, into a very complex problem. Joanna Warson discusses the ways in which France’s African diplomacy attempted to have a role in the processes concerning a former British colony. She analyzes this unknown facet of a French Rhodesian policy and its effects on the British vision of decolonization. According to Warson, these French activities existed both at a state and private level, being comprised of direct military, financial, diplomatic and cultural involvement, and were crucial to the course of events on the ground and to the wider story of Anglo-French relations in the post-war era. In this context, France’s Rhodesian policy was (at least in part) shaped by its own experiences of decolonization in Francophone Africa, and thus closely intertwined with forces that crossed the Channel and the artificial national boundaries in Africa.

This chapter explores Washington’s response to the apartheid debate. It explains U.S. policy through the eyes of Mennen Williams, who served as an Assistant Secretary of State during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The first part of the section explains Williams’s worldview and explicates his policymaking difficulties in the early 1960s. The second part of the chapter looks at the nature of Williams’s influence during the Johnson years. Although Williams never shaped U.S. policy toward hotspots like the Congo, he exerted important influence over the apartheid question. His arguments about racial justice and liberal internationalism gained traction in 1965–66, and by the time he left Washington in 1966 to pursue the Michigan senate seat, many of his colleagues supported the idea that the United States would have to confront South Africa over apartheid.

This chapter demonstrates that human rights, at least in the cases of Greece and Southern Rhodesia, were important considerations in US foreign policy in the Johnson years. More specifically, it explores how US policymakers balanced a commitment to human rights with other interests such as strategic concerns, which often gave American leaders incentive to overlook human rights abuses in friendly nations. Attention to human rights, which re-emerged as a policy priority in the 1960s, presaged the subsequent rise in interest in human rights in later decades. Much scholarship focuses on those later years, but this chapter shows that the 1960s are an important period in the larger story of human rights in the twentieth century.

Doris Lessing's In Pursuit of the English (1960), based on her experiences on first arriving in England from Southern Rhodesia and trying to find somewhere to live, provides an excellent point of entry into the extensive body of her work. It also allows us to begin to understand some of the contexts and intertexts that have been important in her writing. Issues of exile and migration are at the centre of this text and her work as a whole, suggesting the importance, but also the instability, of identity. Lessing is interested in ideas about class, nation, ‘race’ and gender, but, more importantly, in the links between these concepts and in the ways they overlap with and merge into one another. The generic indeterminacy of In Pursuit brings to the fore Lessing's critical relation to the constraints of genre and her qualified suspicion of categories such as realism and experimentalism, fiction and autobiography. Her constructive and complex use of autobiographical material also creatively interacts with her interest in the writer or artist as both figure in and producer of the text.

The United Nations (UN) Security Council consistently delegates its Chapter VII powers to UN Member States. Interestingly, although the first few instances of Korea and Southern Rhodesia were seen at the time as being exceptional sui generis cases, they only now, however, appear as part of a continuum in this practice. The Council has delegated its Chapter VII powers to Member States for the attainment of the following five objectives: to counter a use of force by a State or entities within a State; to carry out a naval interdiction; to achieve humanitarian objectives; to enforce a Council declared no-fly zone; and to ensure implementation by parties of an agreement which the Council has deemed is necessary for the maintenance or restoration of peace. This chapter examines whether the UN Security Council has complied with the requirements that flow from the legal framework governing delegation of its Chapter VII powers.

This chapter examines the Homecraft movement in colonial Zimbabwe and the ways it encouraged women to move beyond the confines of their homes, to join in common cause with non-kin, and to name their desires. Colonial white women who were members of the Federation of Women's Institutes of Southern Rhodesia (FWI) turned to political activism with the founding of Homecraft Clubs for black women. The FWI's systematization of knowledge about home economics was concomitant with the white women's heightened sense of Rhodesian nationalism. As white women taught domesticity and community service to black women, the latter began to assert themselves in the public sphere. The chapter also considers how events such as Kitchen Teas mobilize women's cultural knowledge about who should participate with whom on which occasions in order to bring women together for a celebratory event in honor of a bride. The chapter concludes by describing the decline of Homecraft and suggests that the movement was rife with cruel optimism.

This chapter deals with the extensive poisoning of the environment to exterminate mhesvi. Given the massive amounts of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) dumped into the environment to kill mhesvi, OCPs present an opportunity to explore the question of pollution and its health effects. The chapter introduces and accounts for the specific circumstances by which OCPs arrived in Southern Rhodesia. In fact, by the time organochlorines like DDT, BHC, and dieldrin and organophosphates like Thallium were deployed in combat against mhesvi, hutunga, hwiza (locusts), and zvimokoto (quelea birds) after World War II, Southern Rhodesia's farmers had been dispatching mhuka, shiri, zvipukanana, and hutachiwana with chepfu through ingestion, inhalation, and skin contact for over fifty years. The chapter therefore starts from this earlier history, well before DDT and its peers, in search of antecedents that profoundly shaped and offered a broader context for the use of OCPs.

Chemoprophylaxis refers to the administration of medication to prevent disease or infection. This chapter first gives a historical overview of chemoprophylaxis in Southern Rhodesia, then turns to the problem of drug resistance and photosensitization, which is a clinical condition in which the skin's negative exposure and reaction to sunlight is heightened due to phototoxic drugs and chemicals. This photosensitivity occurs when these substances absorb sunlight (ultraviolet radiation), triggering a burning sensation, redness, and swelling. The chapter ends with a case study of chemoprophylaxis operations in Southern Rhodesia, exploring how the early promises of chemoprophylaxis ended with unforeseen complications that poisoned instead of cured animals of n'gana. The argument made is one about pollution of the most intimate kind: within the body, both of the animal and hutachiwana itself.