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 Why have I chosen
to write about Welensky? As an undergraduate at Duke University, I developed a
budding academic interest in the history of southern Africa, and
wrote a senior thesis on part of Northern Rhodesia (now
Zambia)--a
place Welensky once ruled. But the first time I really thought about
him was at an undergraduate history seminar that same senior year.
One of my classmates--who turns out to be, still, my best friend--presented a paper
on Welensky. Though the presentation was somewhat thin in research
(hey, it was spring of senior year!), it was powerfully argued, in
keeping with the tenor of the times. Welensky was nailed as the
Defender of White Supremacy in central Africa until his unlamented
demise in the face of the African nationalist revolution. His image
resonated in my mind, the mind of a white southerner, with George
Wallace. There was, and is, considerable truth to this image.
Leap forward to
years of writing my doctoral dissertation and a book based on it--work
centered on another part of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, the Tonga
Plateau. Though I was researching an essentially agrarian history, I
was constantly drawn to the railway line which bisected that
region. The line was quite simply the critical underlying fact of
the entire twentieth century experience there. It connected the
area and the local Tonga people to markets for their produce, maize
and cattle, and touched off a "cash-crop revolution." It made
possible white agricultural settlement, which for the Tonga meant
loss of a significant part of their land. And all along the line,
for hundreds of miles north and south, arose the towns and cities
which, as they have all over the world, became the magnets for the
young, the ambitious, the disaffected, the desperate. No wonder
mention of "injanji" (ciTonga for the rail line) pervades recordings
of so many interviews I conducted with elderly, rural Tonga. A
number had worked for a time for the railways. There they directly
encountered working whites, including men like Roy Welensky.
In short, I was
developing an interest in the urban, labor side of recent African
history, and in the railways so critical to it. Some quite famous
people--besides Welensky-- got their starts on the railways, and in
railway trade unions, it turns out. To mention one, Joshua Nkomo,
often considered the "father of African nationalism" in Zimbabwe,
went from the railways to head an anti-colonial movement, command an
anti-Rhodesian guerilla force, and eventually became a
vice-President of independent Zimbabwe. So, I began to think: if
railways and the people who ran them were at the crux of colonial
experience, if the folks who started there often wound up prominent
in the wider political system, this is pretty damn important.
So back to
Welensky. I thought some more about him, too. I have always been
fascinated by the capacity of persons, and movements, and
religions, and whole nations, to be both progressive and backward,
liberating and repressive, left and right. It is tempting to add:
both good and bad. To cite an example, some famous words on human
freedom were written by a man, Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves.
Question I:
Don't terms like "good and bad" imply moral judgments? Should
biographers be making moral judgments of their subjects? To what
extent? Or should they just record the facts? Do you think it's
possible for biographers to avoid judgments? Should they try?
In Welensky's
case, the paradox could be summarized like this: Welensky was deeply
committed to a movement, trade unionism, which is usually identified
as "leftist," "liberal" or "progressive.'' Yet he was equally
committed to a version of white supremacy (a milder version than
South African apartheid, but a version nonetheless)--and this is
usually identified as "backward" or "reactionary" or "racist," etc.
As an undergraduate, a child of the '60s, I had really only appreciated
the second characterization. But things now seemed, the man now seemed,
a little more complex.
I began to do
serious research on Welensky, in secondary and archival sources, and
this complexity deepened for me. Particularly with the passage of
time, the popular simple images of Welensky in his heyday--Heroic
Defender of Civilization, or Demonic Defender of Racism,
etc.--seemed inadequate. Maybe Welensky was several things.
As other sources
on this website have pointed out, biographers almost inevitably
choose to emphasize some aspects of their subject and de-emphasize
others. For me doing Welensky, the focus on came
easily: by concentrating on Welensky AND LABOR, I was indulging my
newer interest in Africa's urban and labor history,
AND--crucially--giving myself the best angle I could think of to
analyze the paradoxical, contradictory sides of human nature
described above. So clear, and relatively narrow, is my focus that I
even abjure the term biography; I am calling my work a "biographical
study." I hope that a man's life can shed light on labor history,
and that labor history can shed light on a man's life. Hence my
working title is "Roy Welensky and the World of Central African
Labor."
Question II:
Even from the little information you've been given, can you suggest
other focus areas which other biographers of Welensky might choose?
At a certain
stage I made a serious decision which will undoubtedly affect my
biographical study: I contacted Welensky himself. One reason was to
ask for access to his papers, which were closed at the time (they
have since been opened). But another--quite exciting to me--was to
see if he might be willing to be interviewed.
Somewhat to my
surprise, Welensky agreed to both of my requests. Between 1987 and
1991, I had about ten substantial conversations with him, all of
them at his home in Dorset, a rural region in southwest England.
Seven of these interviews, ranging from one to three hours each,
were tape recorded, and subsequently transcribed.
I had exercised
an option which simply isn't available to many, perhaps most,
biographers, because their subjects are dead. What do you think of
my decision?
Question III:
What advantages did I gain by interviewing my subject in his home?
Are there any disadvantages, dangers, or pitfalls? In my shoes,
would you have done the same thing? Is there a need to "balance"
what I heard from Welensky? How might you do so?
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