White working-class disunity: the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party

Abstract

in the literature currently available on the Southern Rhodesia Labour Party (S.R.L.P.) and cognate trades and political organisations operating during the Second World War, the theme of white working-class disunity has received less scrutiny than the more spectacular theme of conflicting attitudes towards race, as epitomised in the controversy surrounding the African Branch of the S.R.L.P. Whilst that issue was the overt and immediate cause of the disintegration of the party before the 1946 general election, it also served as a convenient pretext for fission, thereby obscuring a long history of rancour and discord due to personality differences, party organisation and policy considerations, which was of equal significance. Doris Lessing deftly summarised the motives underlying the manipulation of the African Branch as a politically emotive issue in her partisan but perceptive interpretation of H. H. Davies’s behaviour at the abortive reunion conference at Gwelo in 1945: ‘The issue that was fought out on the surface was the question of the colour bar. This was exactly as Mr. Davies had intended, because whenever racial questions are discussed reason flies out of the window, and people become unbalanced