ABSTRACT
The Central African Federation was a period of unprecedented economic and demographic growth. The expansion of certain industries and high turnover of labour meant that new migrants, social groups, ideas and ideologies were continually being introduced into the labour force. These new additions meant that the socialisation of new arrivals into normative behaviours was a continual process. This chapter examines a strike of European firemen on Rhodesia Railways in 1954 and the deportation of one of the strike’s leaders who was judged to hold deviant and dangerous views which threatened settler society. It demonstrates the presence of some radical non-racialist currents in the Southern Rhodesian workforce and underscores deep fears held by the settler state regarding white worker militancy. In doing so it militates against the tendency to present reified, albeit internally differentiated, white worker ideologies, beliefs and cultures by stressing the dynamism of class formation and the ongoing and contested production of white worker identity.
