By Brooks Marmon
I only met Reg Austin once, in 2018, when I was still a fairly green American PhD student from the University of Edinburgh conducting historical research in Zimbabwe. Most of my work was archival; I was focused on the political situation during the Federation years of the 1950s and early 1960s and written documentation was more reliable than old memories.
However, in the more than half a year I was based in Harare, I invested significant resources in conducting dozens of interviews. One of the most enlightening was with Reg Austin, who recently passed away in the UK, days after celebrating his 91st birthday.
While none of Austin’s reminiscences made their way into my doctoral thesis or the book that emerged from it, the encounter vividly illustrated how he was personally transformed by the ‘wind of change’ that gusted across Africa from 1958 to 1961 as a young lawyer in Bulawayo.
Austin was the son of a miner who worked across the colony. Despite this working class background, Austin noted that the political and economic situation in the then Southern Rhodesia was a very favorable one for his family. He told me, “[whites] had the privilege of having a very well provided for life in terms of education, living standards, health and general well-being,” but added that he was “aware of the fact that white Rhodesian life was very narrow.”
One of his very first memories of protest in Rhodesia was the 1948 general strike which started in Bulawayo before spreading across the colony. The agitation started around the time of Austin’s 13th birthday, when he was a student at Milton High School.
Bewildered by their discontent, he recalled interacting with some strikers on the streets, engaging with them, and finding them quite receptive to his queries and “friendly.”
The same year the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was instituted, 1953, Austin went off to the University of Cape Town. He stayed there for five years, first studying history, then shifting to constitutional law. He told me that with the rise of the National Party and Apartheid, he initially felt that race relations in South Africa were much worse in South Africa than in Rhodesia.
However, upon his return, he was disabused of that notion. He realized that this was merely an “illusion.” Austin became a civil servant, a public prosecutor based in Bulawayo. He had not been back long when a state of emergency was first declared in Southern Rhodesia, and later, throughout the entire Federation in 1959.
Hundreds of Malawian nationalists were held in Rhodesia and due to his court appearances, Austin crossed paths with them. He told me, “quite by chance I got into conversation with these guys from Malawi and why they were there and I got an insight into black nationalist thinking at the time.”
He began to form substantive friendships across the color line and to venture into the black townships. One of his most formative connections was with Eshmael Mlambo, who was then teaching prior to his relocation to the US and UK to pursue higher education and professional opportunities. Mlambo became a prominent official in Muzorewa’s African National Council in the early 1970s who subsequently aligned with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union after Muzorewa and Joshua Nkomo had a falling out. Mlambo played a significant role in recruiting Austin to be active with Zimbabwean nationalist politics when the two were in exile in London.
Another close relationship was with Don Naik, of Indian descent and a Gujarati interpreter at Bulawayo’s courts who was active in nationalist politics. Around this time Austin met Joshua Nkomo and “was impressed by him as a nice sort of guy.” He also encountered Dumiso Dabengwa, then a clerk at Barclay’s Bank.
A key contact in the white community was a German-born, British-raised European, Leo Baron, Nkomo’s personal lawyer. The two sparred professionally but became close personally. Austin noted that Baron “was a very tough and very good lawyer and he became a sort of mentor to me.” Baron was a political prisoner in the early years of UDI, before serving as a judge in both Zambia and independent Zimbabwe.
As Austin sought to become more overtly engaged with Zimbabwean nationalists, he and his wife formed a close relationship with a Pat Batty (sp?), a social worker and municipal civil servant in Bulawayo’s Department of African Administration.
The portrait that Austin painted of Batty was fascinating – I had never read about her anywhere else in the historical literature (nor have I since). Austin noted that as her work frequently took her into Bulawayo’s townships, she had an atypically strong level of relationships with politically active blacks. Austin believed that she was used to vet him and to report back to Bulawayo’s nationalist leaders as to whether it was advisable to become close to him.
The Zhii disturbances in Bulawayo in July 1960 resulted in 12 deaths and marked the institutionalization of a more violent political culture in the colony. The unrest came amidst the turmoil in the newly independent Congo and the influx of thousands of white ‘refugees’ into Bulawayo. Austin witnessed this disturbance first-hand.
Due to the unprecedented nature of the violence, Austin was personally called upon to assist with processing the large number of detainees held by the security forces. Almost 60 years later, he vividly recalled two contrasting interactions with a young white member of the British South African Police, a recent immigrant with a rural English background.
The individual that Austin encountered on the first day of the unrest was “deeply, deeply shocked by what happened.” However, the very next day, as the protests continued, it was Austin’s turn to be shocked by how quickly the officer, boasting visible bruises and blood, had hardened and embraced the state’s use of violence.
Austin found the events in July 1960 to be a turning point in the city’s race relations. The Rhodesian response was to take a more hardline position – Austin believed this a grave mistake – he condemned the Law and Order Maintenance Act which was the cornerstone of the state’s reaction as “a classic piece of fascist, authoritarian legislation.”
The two racial groups took divergent views in the aftermath of Zhii. Per Austin “the nationalists believed that independence coming was inevitable, but in Rhodesia the [white] response was quite the opposite….the nationalist movement [was] moving into more uncompromising positions and the Rhodesian believe[ed] they had the ability to contain the situation with the minimum of concessions.”
A supposedly reformist minded constitution adopted in 1961 failed to alleviate the situation. However, it provided Austin an opportunity to deepen his connections with the nationalists as he helped Nkomo’s NDP organize a parallel unofficial referendum that illustrated the depth of black opposition to the proposed constitution. He also attended NDP rallies and speeches.
In September 1961, “conscious of the fact that things were not going well”, Austin and his wife left Rhodesia. He was influenced by counsel from Baron, and the example of the Federation’s former Chief Justice, Robert Tredgold, who resigned in an act of protest against the Law and Order Maintenance Act. He praised Tredgold’s action as emboldening him to reject the injustices of Rhodesian society.
Austin embarked on a Master of Law at the University College of London, becoming increasingly involved in the exile politics of the ANC and ZAPU in the UK. We maintained episodic contact after our only encounter and he never hesitated to offer a nugget or two about Zimbabwean history and politics.
In response to one of my recent papers, which explored how his one-time ZAPU comrade, Nelson Samkange, was gradually co-opted by ZANU-PF, Austin generously wrote me in late 2025: “it was great revisiting the history and your analysis of the birth and consolidation of ZANU-PF’s skills in violence and co-option to create our “stable autocracy”!”
Brooks Marmon is a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria and the author/editor of the recently published Edson Sithole: Law, Liberation and the Cost of Dissent.