Manners Make a Nation: Racial Etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1963 by Allison K. Shutt (review)

How does an author select a topic for a book? In some cases there is a historiographical “gap” that (perhaps) needs to be filled. Or one might stumble across a dazzling document that, like true love’s kiss, awakens one to a new way of seeing a historical event or period. Other times, one grinds through days and weeks of archival work, only slowly recognizing a pattern, a name or word that appears too many times to be inconsequential. It was this last route that took Allison Shutt to the study of etiquette in Southern Rhodesia. Like camouflaged insects in the sand, one can hardly avoid noticing them once one becomes aware of the presence of keywords like “etiquette,” “manners,” “prestige,” and “insolence.”

As Shutt convincingly argues, etiquette was no small matter in the colony. It was meant to guide every interaction between Africans and Europeans, to force Africans to act out their lower place in the colonial hierarchy. Etiquette or manners were “the rules for daily living that people obeyed, flaunted, reworked, and improvised” (4). All manner of things fell under “proper behavior”: when encountering a European, Africans had to tip their hats, not argue or raise their voices, obey orders quickly and unquestioningly, and not poke fun. (In “Shooting an Elephant” [1936] George Orwell wrote that “every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”) Any failure on the part of Africans in this little dance implied a questioning of the entire structure of colonialism. “Manners and domination,” Shutt shows, “were inseparable” (31). If Africans did not show proper etiquette, whites reacted with violence or, in the case of government officials, through recourse to the Native Affairs Act, which “criminalized insolence” (21).

In the first several chapters Shutt provides compelling, detailed evidence of how etiquette helped shape relations in colonial Zimbabwe, while in the final chapters she uses etiquette as a lens to reimagine politics in the postwar years. By examining mundane daily interactions, state-sponsored celebrations, and nationalist movements, she demonstrates how both white and African politics were tied up in questions of etiquette. Nationalists attacked the daily indignities suffered by Africans, both to improve Africans’ lives and as a way to marshal their followers’ emotional energies. This work, such as the fight against the color bar in the late 1950s, did not come without criticism. Some argued it made little sense to fight for seats in restaurants instead of seats in Parliament, but nonetheless insults and humiliations kept the anticolonial fires burning. Some whites sought to eliminate racial conflict not by addressing land and labor issues, but through better understanding between the races. Hence a privately sponsored “Courtesy Campaign,” which tutored Africans on how to be a modern, polite person and encouraged whites to act as they knew that they should. This kind of etiquette was new, but if everyone obeyed the rules it would (allegedly) permit the easy functioning of what remained a brutal, racialized hierarchy.

Shutt might have done more with the divisions among whites, particularly in the prewar period. There is little attention here to “poor whites,” those who were feared by government officials and elite whites in every colony. Whites who failed to appear “civilized” threatened to expose the hollowness of white racial supremacy, to lower white prestige, and to invite Africans to jettison rules of etiquette. (Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing [1950] is perhaps the best insider’s view in this regard.) Shutt notes that in the 1950s long-time residents did their best to inculcate in new white immigrants the ways of being Rhodesian. But these intrawhite attempts to discipline one another had a longer history, perhaps most importantly between Britons and Afrikaaners. Similarly, the very definition of “white” remained a matter of debate, as Shutt...