Collaborators, mercenaries or patriots? The "problem" with African troops in Southern Rhodesia During the First and Second World Wars

The use of indigenous peoples for military purposes was common to most imperialist powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Indian subcontinent had been a proving ground for this policy in the eighteenth century when both the British and French East India Companies had deployed Sepoys to overcome the Indian principalities, to fight alongside European units in their struggle for supremacy and then, in the case of Britain, to police the vast region. The problem of providing sufficient white manpower to extend and police the British Empire was a chronic one, and 'native' manpower was the obvious answer, the concomitant of the exploitation of potentially vast quantities of cheap labour in the commercial sphere. The perils of this policy for the maintenance of British supremacy and the problem of 'policing the policemen' were made bloodily clear in the Indian Mutiny. Despite this setback to the policy of using native levies the principle nonetheless remained intact. Indigenous troops were used throughout the Empire, including Africa, as in the Zulu War, the campaigns in Egypt and the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s and in East Africa and Nyasaland in the 1890s. In the latter case the disparate territorial units which came to make up the King's African Rifles in the early 1900s were first formed in the 1890s to aid in the imposition and consolidation of colonial rule

A history seminar paper on how imperialist powers used indigenous manpower in their Southern Rhodesia colony to further their military interests during the First & Second World Wars. Paper Presented In Seminar Room, University of Rhodesia, Mt. Pleasant, Salisbury, May 11.