Catalogue - Reprints (Africana General)

One Man's Hand
by J.P.R. Wallis

Books of Zimbabwe, 1972
Facs. repro 1950 edit. 254pp
ISBN 0869200429 (standard) and 0869200437 (delux)

A CARFFUL biography of Sir Charles Coghlan, Southern Rhodesia's first prime minister (1924-1927), and the man responsible for almost every advance in the country's political evolution during the quarter of a century prior to Responsible Government - the transition which he engineered.

Sir Charles came to Rhodesia from South Africa in 1900, was elected to the Legislative Council and sat as Member for Bulawayo for 19 years. To him fell the task of piloting the country along the road from British South Africa Company administration to the status of self-governing Colony within the British Commonwealth. He was considered, after Rhodes, to be the greatest Rhodesian. (He was honoured among those who deserved well of their country by his burial, near Rhodes's grave, on World's View in the Matopo Hills.) He was, says his biographer, "a high-spirited Irishman who fought a brave fight for Southern Rhodesia, the land of his adoption, and in the end can fairly be said to have sacrificed his life that she might enjoy constitutional independence . . . He did his work modestly, unselfishly, without blaring of trumpets or assertive clamour. He, like his countrymen, bore himself with loyalty and self-restraint under accumulated provocations, and because they were too self-respecting to be aggressive or truculent they could safely be disregarded, especially by unpolicied Secretaries of State amenable only to rebellious violence or to fear of opposition in Parliament."

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