Rubber Production in Northern Rhodesia During the Second World War, 1942-1946

Introduction

The outbreak of the Second World War had profound effects on Africa. The immediate social, economic and political effects of the war on Africa were immense.¹ One of the most important economic effects of the war on African societies was the search for substitute products to replace or augment those that had become scarce due to war conditions.² The need for research on the economic impact of the Second World War, especially with regard to the wartime production of less known cash crops such as rubber in African colonies provides the justification for this study. The focus of the article is British Africa. The article seeks to broaden our knowledge of developments in Northern Rhodesian commerce during the Second World War. Although the country’s main economic contribution to the Allied war effort was the production and export of copper to the Allied nations at a fixed price, Northern Rhodesia also revived the production of non-prominent raw materials such as rubber, beeswax, strings, iron, curcas oil and leather. Unlike the trade in copper during the war, the success of rubber was shortlived, but while it lasted, it generated its own history which needs attention from academics. Few historians have investigated the impact of the Second World War on civilian industries involved in the production of non-traditional cash crops as part of the war effort.

A lot has been written on the relationship between Africa and the Second World War. This article focuses on the effects of the war on British Africa. One of the most popular themes on the subject has been the recruitment and mobilization of military labor for the war effort. David Killingray, Ashley Jackson, Louis Grundlingh, Albert Grundlingh, Hamilton Sipho Simelane, and Mary Nombulelo Ntabeni analyzed the manner in which African men were encouraged to enlist for war service, and the different responses to the enlistment drive.³ It has been argued that Britain’s success in mobilizing her Empire to help her in the war against the Axis Powers was reflected in the fact that she was able to recruit approximately half a million men from her African colonies.⁴

Many studies have been made of the impact of homecoming servicemen on the societies to which they returned. It has usually been assumed that the men who were recruited and participated in the war came back as new men with new ideas, wider experiences, and broader horizons such that they fought for the independence of their countries. Gabriel Olusanya and Eugene Schleh belong to this category of scholars.⁵ They claim that soldiers returned home from the Second World War politicized due to their war-time experiences and looked forward to occasions to extend new ideas acquired through contacts with nationalists in Asia. Ultimate proof of the effect of demobilized soldiers on post-war politics is often seen in their participation in the Gold Coast riots of 1948. Such views are shared by Michael Crowder. In his interrogation of the effects of the war on West Africa, Crowder concluded that “some returning soldiers were to play a vital role in the formation of the political parties that gained independence in the fifteen years that followed the war. Many were no longer content with the colonial situation as they left it.”⁶

Subsequent studies shifted somewhat from the above perspective. Some scholars even dismissed nationalist feelings among ex-combatants as mere myths. Richard Rathbone and Simon Baynham accused historians of exaggerating the influence of the war on former Gold Coast war veterans.⁷ They argued that ex-servicemen in colonial Ghana did not constitute a coherent activist group within the nationalist movement. Nor did they become a distinct social, political, or economic group.⁸ A more nuanced approach to this theme was undertaken by Adrienne Israel who, unlike Rathbone and Baynham, suggested that African ex-soldiers’ contribution to the rise of politics of independence depended on local conditions, ethnicity, educational levels, military occupations and class origins.⁹

On the other hand, Rita Headrick suggested that more important than political awakening during the Second World...