The Hole in Rhodesia's Bucket: White Emigration and the End of Settler Rule*

Racial population matters were of central importance to the fate of Rhodesia's white settler regime, and contributed greatly to the regime's ultimate collapse in 1979. The relative size and demographic trends of the black and white populations were recognised at the time to be of great political significance, both inside and outside of Rhodesia. Population matters were never far from the minds of Rhodesian Government officials and were the backdrop for some of Rhodesia's most important political events, including the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. This article examines the phenomenon of white emigration from Rhodesia, and its crucial diplomatic, political, military, economic and social importance in the last years of white rule. Historians have cast white emigration exclusively as a by-product of the war, explaining state efforts to halt emigration as simply an adjunct to the war effort. Yet white emigration, the anxieties it engendered, and the policies formed to address these fears, long preceded the escalation of war in 1972. It was not merely those within the Rhodesian Government who sought to alter white migration patterns, but also British and American bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians, African nationalists and guerrillas. The article concludes that white society's lack of rootedness in Rhodesia, as evidenced in part by high turnover rates, rendered it vulnerable to disintegration when confronted with a decline in standards of living. The war thus accelerated Rhodesia's collapse by exacerbating pre-existing strains and vulnerabilities.