ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the manner in which racial ideology and meanings were manifested in state policy in Zimbabwe during the colonial and early post-colonial period. The state is the social institution that exerts control through law and force over certain peoples and territory. The colonial state is intimately involved in the economy, because state policy is the vehicle through which the foreigners can mobilize the indigenous population to produce to meet the needs of the metropole. By 1963 Zimbabwean Africans had developed a racial consciousness for the political purposes of national liberation. Although ethnicity played a crucial role in the internal politics of the Zimbabwean revolution, all nationalist parties, revolutionary and accomo-dationist, projected themselves as anti-racist to global society. The growth of colony-wide racial consciousness among Africans was accelerated by the establishment of responsible settler government that consolidated racial, political, and economic institutions.
