Rise and Fall of the Middle Class
19 June 2026
It is a fair critique of the Rhodesian Front to say that a major reason they opposed universal suffrage was that under it — they would lose elections. Whatever other high-minded justifications they had, there is no question that if all or even most black people in the country could vote, the RF would be reduced from a large ruling party to a small opposition party. This had always been true and it is indeed what happened when universal suffrage was finally introduced for the elections of 1979 and 1980.
But they were not the only faction in Rhodesia who had a problem with certain black people voting. ZAPU and ZANU, like their precursor, the NDP, demanded that black voters boycott all elections under the qualified franchise. Whether through persuasion or intimidation, the boycott was largely successful. The 1961 and 1965 constitutions featured a novel voter roll — the “B roll” for the express purpose of increasing the black franchise and black voter participation. The rolls were not explicitly racial. The “A roll” would have same requirements as the common roll before 1961, while the “B roll” would have laxer requirements.
Since previously most white Rhodesians had qualified to vote on the common roll and most black Rhodesians had not, it was expected that most “B roll” voters would be black. And so they were. While this system was in effect, over 90% of “A roll” voters were white while over 90% of “B roll” voters were black. And blacks as a whole were still a minority of the electorate. Most didn’t qualify for either roll. Additionally, in the elections of 1962 and 1965, fewer than 25% of registered “B roll” voters actually voted.
ZAPU and ZANU did not just boycott these elections by not running their own candidates in them. They used gangland-style violence to suppress voter participation. And they too had high minded justifications. They opposed this franchise because they demanded universal suffrage: “One man... One Vote!” as their popular rallies would have it. But it is also highly probable that had they run candidates under such a system, they would have fared poorly, even among “B” roll voters. The qualified franchise was a system designed to empower the middle class.
The struggle for power in Rhodesia was a class struggle as much as it was a racial struggle. It is hard to see this because race and class were so strongly confounded. As Robert Blake observes, industrialization in Rhodesia had produced a proletariat that was almost entirely black. The early racial unrest that unfolded in the years immediately after WWII had been labor-related. It only became politically racial in the late 1950s when it was joined by the fledgling urban black middle class.
As pointed out by both Blake and Doris Lessing, the goal of the UFP under Southern Rhodesian prime ministers Garfield Todd and later Edgar Whitehead had been to recruit this political black middle class to support the Rhodesian project. This issue became particularly acute as it became ever more clear that the Central African Federation was nearing its end. While Blake is not sure successful recruitment of the black middle class was ever possible, he regards the attempt with some sympathy. Lessing, a card-carrying communist at the time, regarded it with scorn. What everyone can agree on is that it failed.
This failure led to a wave of urban violence that by the early 1960s had ended both Whitehead’s career and the UFP as a party and led to the rise of the RF. The fact that Britain strung Whitehead along on the issue of independence for the entirety of his tenure as prime minister severely weakened his position and left him politically isolated.
For the remainder of the 1960s, black voter participation continued at a limited level and some competent black candidates were elected to parliament as independents and members of small opposition parties like the United People’s Party and later the Centre Party. These were mostly professionals and businessmen supported by voters like themselves. Like ZAPU and ZANU, they tended to favor universal suffrage, or at least some kind of system that would lead to a majority black government in the nearer future. But unlike ZAPU and ZANU, they were law-abiding and willing to work within the constitutional framework. Ironically, such law-abiding people could only be elected in Rhodesia under a restricted franchise of the kind they themselves opposed.
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These centrist parties were devastated by the conversion of the “A” and “B” rolls into “white” and “black” rolls under the new constitution of 1969. The “A” and “B” system had existed for less than a decade, but it had achieved its principal aim: getting black politicians into parliament. True, only whites had so far been elected to “A” seats, but there were no categorically racial limitations and one white man, Ahrn Palley, had been elected to a “B” seat. Once seated, there was no legislative or other procedural distinction between the two types of electoral paths. And the number of seats of each type in each election depended entirely on the census of qualified voters. Thus the number of black voters and parliamentarians might have expanded without limit with no need for additional changes to the electoral system.
The 1970 racial system fixed the number of white seats at 50 and number of black seats at 16. While this was approximately the same proportion of whites to blacks that had existed prior and all legislators still had the same powers as before, it served to engender a feeling of naked segregation. There was a provision in the new constitution for increasing the number of black seats as more blacks began to pay taxes. But for whatever reason, this was never done during the remaining decade of this system’s existence and few could have been surprised.
Furthermore, only half of the black seats were elected as in the previous system. The other half were elected by a sort of an electoral college of tribal chiefs. While this was done in an attempt to give more of a voice to the millions of Africans in Tribal Trust Lands who did not qualify to vote, it weakened the development of the small centrist parties that had grown up in the “B” roll era.
The centrist parties were reduced to further irrelevance with the political fallout of the disastrous Home-Smith Negotiations of 1972. The ire of the crowds that turned out to support Abel Muzorewa and oppose ex post facto British recognition of the Rhodesian constitution served to dissuade all remaining serious black politicians from seeking re-election lest their businesses and even their lives come under threat. After that, black voter participation fell to such low levels that the results of elections in 1974 and 1977 in black precincts can hardly be said to signify anything.
Whites continued to dominate national politics until 1979 and to dominate the business sector until the 1980s when the ZANU-PF government gradually dismantled the civil society that business and the middle class require in order to function.