Introduction

It is not often that an author can honestly point to a footnote as the starting-point from which his book has developed. But in this instance such a claim would be true. Colin Leys, in his European Politics in Southern Rhodesia, observed in a written aside that there had been no properly conducted sample surveys carried out in Rhodesia.1 By the time I began my work, however, some studies based on sample surveys had been undertaken, but the fieldwork had been completed in the 1950s and much had occurred, both inside and outside Rhodesia, which suggested that the time had come in the middle 1960s to organise another one.2 As I prepared to carry out such a survey, I became more conscious than ever that such a piece of research needed to be situated in a specific historical and social context and that there had been no studies of local politics and local communities which could guide me in deciding the most important questions which needed to be asked. Consequently, I decided to concentrate less on the detailed description of the attitudes and political beliefs of white Rhodesians and more on the historical, economic, and social factors from which their political behaviour and beliefs stemmed. Thus the basic purpose of this book is to examine in detail the growth of social and economic institutions over time in one rural area in order generally to throw some light on the politics of Rhodesia during this century and, specifically, to illustrate the often incongruent interplay between central Government policy and local demands.