Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia

The story

"Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia" was the national anthem of Rhodesia from 1974 to 1979. Rhodesia, a self-governing British colony, was ruled by a predominantly white minority government under Prime Minister Ian Smith, which on 11 November 1965 unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom rather than accept the British condition of majority rule. The declaration was not recognised, and the United Kingdom and the United Nations imposed economic sanctions. Smith's government still counted Queen Elizabeth II as Queen of Rhodesia and kept "God Save the Queen" as its anthem, which, in the words of the London Times, gave Rhodesian state occasions "a faintly ironic tone". The government began looking for a new anthem when it adopted a new flag in November 1968, and after the mostly white electorate voted for a republic in June 1969, the royal anthem was dropped with the formal declaration of the republic in March 1970.

For more than four years the republic had no anthem. On 28 August 1974 the government announced its chosen music: the "Ode to Joy" from the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which the Council of Europe had adopted as the Anthem of Europe in January 1972. The Council was displeased but did not object, since Beethoven's music was long in the public domain, though it warned that using its own arrangement, by Herbert von Karajan, could bring a plagiarism suit; Rhodesia instead used an original sixteen-bar arrangement by Captain Ken MacDonald, bandmaster of the Rhodesian African Rifles. John Sutherland and Stephen Fender note that the choice embarrassed Britain's Labour government, whose leaders now had to stand for a melody tied to Rhodesia at European functions.

A national competition with a prize of R$500 was held for the words, and on 24 September 1974 the winner was named as Mary Bloom, a company director, music critic and poet of Gwelo who had moved to Rhodesia from South Africa in 1947. She called her text "Voices of Rhodesia", but its first line became the title. Reactions in Salisbury were mixed: some welcomed the anthem, while many regretted that no original tune had been commissioned, and the Rhodesia Herald's music critic, Rhys Lewis, called the choice unoriginal and feared that a tune so tied to international brotherhood would make an isolated Rhodesia an object of ridicule. Phinias Sithole, head of the African Trade Union Congress, a federation of Black trade unions, said that he did not believe most Black Rhodesians would identify with a song chosen while people of their race remained largely absent from the top levels of government. The British journalist Richard West wrote of squirming with embarrassment when Rhodesian television closed each night with the anthem.

The anthem stayed in use when the country became Zimbabwe Rhodesia, under a Black-led government, between June and December 1979; that state too went unrecognised by Britain and the United Nations. It lost its legal status on 12 December 1979, when the United Kingdom took back interim control of the country, which became independent as Zimbabwe in April 1980. "Ishe Komborera Africa", a Shona translation of Enoch Sontonga's Xhosa hymn "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", became Zimbabwe's first anthem, replaced in 1994 by "Simudzai Mureza wedu WeZimbabwe".

Because of Rhodesia's anthem, the "Ode to Joy" remains controversial in Zimbabwe. According to the historian Josephine Fisher, its playing at foreign embassies on Europe Day at first shocked Zimbabwean officials who had not known of its European use. In the 1980s Derek Hudson, conductor of the Bulawayo Philharmonic Orchestra, needed long negotiations with the authorities before he could give Zimbabwe's first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and at Christmas 1994 the tune in a fundraising organ recital at a Harare church provoked angry protests.

What it says

A national anthem in praise of Rhodesia, its land and its people, written for the white minority state; solemn and hymn-like.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.