Using racial etiquette as an analytical framework, Allison Shutt's monograph Manners Make a Nation: Racial Etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1963 explores how racial tension and manners shaped daily interaction among Southern Rhodesia's racial groups. The book makes a welcome contribution to Southern Rhodesia's historiography by demonstrating the significance of racial etiquette in ‘shaping Africans’ political consciousness’, in addition to revealing its repressive and exclusive colonial political, social, and economic policies. Tenets of racial etiquette in Southern Rhodesia stated that Africans ‘should defer to whites by stepping aside whenever the two met, doffing their hats to officials but also to ordinary whites and sitting on the floor of officials’ offices … all to acknowledge whites’ authority and hence their prestige’ (3). According to Shutt, etiquette was a ‘fundamental tool of governance’ and, therefore, significantly contributed to the molding of the Southern Rhodesia state from 1910 to 1963. Shutt introduces the reader to literature on racial etiquette in the American south and colonial Africa and offers new insights into historiographical debates not only on the specifics of race and status; this book also contributes to studies on gender and African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia up to 1963.

In this chronologically arranged study, Shutt uses an impressive list of archival documents to effectively and authoritatively explore various themes. In the second chapter, ‘Insolence and Respect’, she demonstrates that racial etiquette had long been in flux. Using native commissioners’ court records on insolence cases, she illustrates how Africans were expected to adhere to a particular decorum specified by the 1927 Native Affairs Act, which criminalized such actions as ‘laughing at officials, appearing angry or agitated and generally refusing to acknowledge colonial power’ (15). African chiefs were not spared; they were supposed to exhibit high levels of loyalty and subservience to colonial authorities. Africans, however, continuously challenged this law code. Shutt demonstrates how these struggles crossed the racial boundary as shown by a clamor of native commissioners for more power to prosecute and judge Africans convicted of insolence. The definition of insolence changed after the Second World War when offences such as normal anger and frustration were no longer punishable using the Native Affairs Act.

Chapter Two illuminates the political environment and the exclusive and repressive colonial policies promulgated by the post-1923 government. Drawing on the significance of the hat as a status symbol among educated Africans, Shutt uses the story of Lennox Njokweni, who was a Clerk at the Inyati Boys Industrial and Agricultural Institution, to show how Africans used cracks inherent in social practice to claim their personal dignity in the 1930s. After having his hat knocked down by Robert Tapson, the acting native commissioner, during one of his regular visits to town, Njokweni launched a complaint and Tapason ultimately apologized. A complement to Njokweni's case was Rose Le Noir Comberbach's challenge to the state's handling of cattle sales, a conflict that highlighted the lack of unity among whites and the vulnerability of the colonial state to open criticism.

The 1940s were characterized by a marked increase in the number of immigrants flocking to Southern Rhodesia. In Chapter Three, Shutt explores the integration of such immigrants as they became Southern Rhodesians. The country's demographic structure was thus a crucial component in shaping race relations. Shutt alludes to this differentiation, but an in-depth analysis could have further illuminated intra-settler race relations prior to 1940. As demonstrated by a number of scholars, the various interests of English and Afrikaner settlers significantly shaped the county's political trajectory. Such differences also had a bearing on racial etiquette.

Shutt provides a reconsideration of Southern Rhodesia's history for the 1950s and 1960s using a unique but convincing analytical framework. She questions the use of an exclusive racial code that discriminated against Africans and their use of public spaces such as courtrooms, offices, stores, stairways, elevators, hotels, restaurants, and, by the early 1960s, swimming pools (10). Chapter Four explores the different ways Africans challenged racial etiquette in public spaces as well as the ways that they registered their discontentment with ‘the indignity of segregation and the humiliation of racial prejudice’ (17). Chapter Five delineates how African nationalists moved beyond the politics of partnership and multiracial cooperation propagated during the federal period. This shift was marked by an intensification of anti-color bar campaigns and a growing desire for sovereignty. The significance of racial etiquette is epitomized by the outcome of the 1962 election, which ushered the Rhodesia Front into power. Manners Make a Nation is surely an interesting read. It breaks new analytical ground by providing new dimensions for nationalist historiography as well as the emerging discourse of intra-settler relations in Southern Rhodesia.