A synopsis of a case-study of Southern Rhodesia's move to become Zimbabwe can provide a knowledge of certain conflict resolution strategies. The British began settling Southern Rhodesia in 1890. The first movement to rename thisarea came in 1895 when that land was taken by the British colonists and renamed Rhodesia, after Rhodes, one of theBritish leaders in the early settlement who had died about that time. Between 1895, when Machonoland becameRhodesia, and 1934, very little conflict surfaced even with the escalating domination and oppression of the blacks bythe white empire. In 1934 the first African National Council organized and began holding strikes protesting whitepower. The strikes were very poorly organized and the white control so massive the strikes quickly subsided, havinggained nothing.The conflict remained repressed--and stable--until 1946. Another power imbalance occurred when a new wave ofsettlers came from the British empire and Europe, after World War II, thereby increasing the number of whiteEuropeans in Rhodesia. The result, from 1946 to 1955, was intensified white oppression.In 1955 there was a new attempt to organize the blacks under the African National Youth League. This group, withJosh Nucomo as leader, staged some bus boycotts similar to the strikes held by the ANC in 1934. In 1957 Nucomotried to merge the National Youth League with the ANC, but as soon as an opposition party was formed, theleadership was imprisoned and the whole movement outlawed. This temporarily halted resistance efforts. No one wasable to continue the move against the oppression. This pattern was repeated in 1960 with the formation of theNational Democratic Party (NDP). As soon as the NDP was formed, leadership emerged and power looked like itwas developing, the NDP was banned and its leader imprisoned. Without leadership, again, the movement ended.This illustrates a typical problem in ethnic conflict--when one person leads a movement with...
