The “normal standards of due process” did not apply when dealing with less “civilized” peoples, especially the Africans of what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. Such was the ruling white government’s approach to increasing indigenous political dissent and physical protests in the 1950s. Africans, writes this careful scholar of the evolution of the law and its place in Zimbabwean society, were “discursively constructed as simpletons or errant children”
This book discusses the use of the law in all of its social extension to repress African aspirations from 1890 to 1980, to take farming lands away from Africans, and to curtail their access to urban life and amenities. Segregation, an apartheid-lite regime, was legally arranged as well as socially observed through World War II and, to some extent, afterward. The law, as the author indicates, was deployed creatively in the interest of ruling whites, a small minority of...