| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Michael O. West. The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 324. Cloth $49.95, paper $22.95.
This is a detailed account of a development that technically was never supposed to—and perhaps did not—happen: the rise of a black bourgeoisie in the heyday of colonialism in Zimbabwe. Michael O. West has given scholars and students of Zimbabwean history plenty to ponder: a focused, detailed revision of his doctoral dissertation that presents a new pretender for the throne of driver of nationalist progress. We have had great men, the trade union movement, and even behind the scenes gender struggles proposed as the reason for the progression from assimilationism to accommodationism to anticolonialism. West proposes, instead, that a group of blacks he calls interchangeably the middle class, elite, or petty bourgeoisie of colonial Zimbabwe were pivotal agents as the indigenous response to colonial invasion and oppression moved from "proto-national" to "national" and finally on to "nationalist" opposition.	1
West persuasively chronicles the shared antipathy of successive white rulers of colonial Zimbabwe to the idea of "kaffir/native/African" advancement based on the acquisition of book learning provided by Southern Rhodesia's missionary corps. This is familiar territory, and West traverses it ably. What is original about his account, however, is his contention that not only was there an "emerging elite" (a euphemism in which many authors have taken refuge) in Southern Rhodesia, but that, at some point, this group concluded its emergence and identified itself as a conscious group for itself. Education was its bedrock strategy: a goal "courted" by many Africans, and achieved by some, male and female.	. . .

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