ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the so-called “Undesirable”, whites immigrants into Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s and 1960s. By moving away from focusing on Rhodesia strict immigration regulations and policies, this chapter offers nuanced ways of thinking about Rhodesia settler community’s construction of desirable and undesirable whites and the meaning of whiteness and Britishness. It argues that despite Rhodesia’s strict immigration regulations, notions of white undesirability were also central in the construction and meaning of whiteness in the Rhodesian settler community. This chapter shows that nations of desirability and undesirability were socially and politically constructed, contested, fluid and constantly shifting depending with context and time. The Rhodesian settler community conflated race, class, and culture to label other white immigrants and settlers as “undesirable”. Although the country was prepared to accept mainly British immigrants of the “right type”, this chapter demonstrates that some whites of questionable social and political standing entered Rhodesia. It reveals that some white immigrants became undesirable after deviating from the Rhodesian settler standards of white respectability, moral purity and acceptable behaviour, high wages, class and criminality amongst other colonial rhetoric virtues.
