Colonial Zimbabwe’s Industrialisation in Retrospect

This book has offered an alternative historical account of colonial Zimbabwe’s industrial policy formulation and implementation which places industrialists, through their successive representative organisations, at the centre of the country’s industrial development. Local nascent industrialists and other local capital interests challenged the metropolitan ‘tradition’, which did not favour industrial development in colonies. That Southern Rhodesia was a settler colony with relative independence from metropolitan control helped, as it was able to formulate its own economic policies that were contrary to the British manufacturers and exports. However, the settler colonial state in Southern Rhodesia did not willingly introduce its economic policies. In many cases, this happened at the behest of the various economic interest groups. Manufacturing development was a case in point. With minimal government direction, and aided only by the smallest degree of protection afforded through the customs tariff, selectively granted only after careful consideration of various factors, industrialists risked their money and laid a sound base for the sector and the diversification of the economy evident in Southern Rhodesia by 1965. Although the government attitude changed between 1966 and 1979, its pro-industrialisation stance was not of its own volition. Industrialists and the state, each determined to protect their own interests, worked closely to sustain the economy under the weight of economic sanctions, international ostracisation, and the escalating armed liberation struggle.

The book has built on the observation – which scholars of Zimbabwean industrialisation have surprisingly ignored or overlooked – that the manufacturing sector in Rhodesia generally suffered from ‘the lack of state support … right up to the Federal period, through UDI and sanction’, a reality conceded in 1971 by the government, through the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Jack Mussett. According to Mussett, whose view is reinforced in this study, economic growth

But even the claim by Mussett that the government introduced tariff protection towards the end of the Federation is contestable. For example, the Phillips Report of 1962 discussed in Chapter 5 showed that the government still believed that the manufacturing sector was dependent on agriculture and mining for its growth.