Subversive communities and the “Rhodesian Sixties”

The movement of ideas and behaviors from one context to another has been a rich area of study in the scholarship of the “Global Sixties.” ¹ The emergence and passage throughout the West of new types of youth-led protest movements, utopian socialist ideas, and alternative lifestyles that celebrated sexual liberation, drug use, and pop music has been conceived by some scholars as a new “international counter-culture.” ² Yet these “culturalist” explanations obscure much of the complexity of how Sixties experiences were shared, or adopted, or rejected, or ignored. Building on a new wave of studies that unearth the exact processes of ideational and behavioral exchange, this chapter explores the significance of the Global Sixties to student politics and life in Rhodesia. ³