Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. - (Philippians 2 v 8)
These are the golden rules for a writer. The qualities enumerated are hard to find in the picture of our times, but I have tried to discern them as I went along and to give them their place in this chronicle of events as seen by me.
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[Editor's Note: Although no chapter numbers were used in the original book, they have been adopted here for convenience]
In these latter years I did many things, and writing was of the things undone, for my writ, I felt, ran out. There was only the oft-told tale to re-tell and its constant iteration came too near the praising of myself, for every fool can play upon words. If "warnings" were needed, let others warn, and probably in vain, for by a divine instinct men's minds mistrust ensuing danger. So I sought other paths and spent many years in South Africa.
Man proposes: looking for pastures new, I found myself in the centre of another world conflict in the brewing. Africa was this time the scene of the preparatory steps, and Southern Africa the last rung of the war-ladder. The British Government's onslaught on Rhodesia, in 1965, returned the world to its plight of 1937, when war was two moves away and could yet have been averted by obvious countermoves.
Let me briefly recall those days to you, senior and junior classmates. From 1933 Hitler's patent intention to make war was fore-told by all competent observers in Berlin. Even the date (about five years ahead) was accurately estimated, in its despatches to London, by the Berlin office of The Times (where I was a correspondent).
The London government, however, to the end encouraged Hitler on his warpath by the method called "appeasement" (throwing children to pursuing wolves until only the parents remain, in the fleeing sleigh, for the wolves to devour). German rearmament was let pass, then the seizure of the Rhineland, then the recreation of the German air force (in 1935 Hitler personally told the British Foreign Minister of its massive strength, as I then reported).
That left two pieces on the board, and they provided the final test. If Hitler kept within his frontiers, "appeasement" would be vindicated. If he forayed out of them, it would collapse and war follow. Seeking to reach the public mind, I wrote in Insanity Fair "Austria means you" and "Czechoslovakia means you".
Austria was invaded as the book appeared. One last move remained. If he were allowed to invade Czechoslovakia, world war was certain. I repeated this in a second book, Disgrace Abounding, and also opined that the Second War would begin with a Hitler-Stalin alliance.
Six months after the Austrian invasion, the British Prime Minister, from a meeting with Hitler, sent a timed ultimatum to the Czechoslovak President to surrender his defensive zone. M. Benesh, saying "We bequeath our sorrows to the West", capitulated. Mr. Chamberlain, back in Downing Street, announced "Peace in our time". Hitler took the Czechoslovak defences, disclaimed any further "territorial demands", and six months later invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, punctually to the foreseeable moment, the Second War began.
As the German tanks entered Prague, I left (as I left Vienna a year earlier, after telephonic warning from my London office that the Gestapo disliked me, which I knew). Soon I quitted journalism, too, for Insanity Fair was not popular with the highpriests of appeasement, a sacred word at that time. My editor, a Mr. Dawson, was a foremost advocate of it and told me "Insanity Fair is an excellent book, but not one for The Times" (I had submitted it before publication as in duty bound) so I resigned. (The Times, in its later 0fficial History, confessed error about its policy of 1933-1939 and in the same breath unrepentantly sneered at "junior members of the staff" who resigned in protest. The History also admits that The Times had "abandoned the practice of basing a foreign policy of the paper's own upon the dispatches, published and private, of 'our own' Correspondents abroad". Had The Times, then a powerful force in the world, maintained that policy it could, in my judgment, have averted the Second War. Today, 1966, it still does not base policy on the information of trustworthy correspondents abroad: if it did, it could not support the policy pursued by British Governments in Africa since 1945, of destroying order in Africa and thus preparing new war. (Incidentally, the term "junior members", quoted above, should be read in the singular: in fact the resigner was a singular person called Douglas Reed).
Insanity Fair, in 1938, gave a true picture of the wrath to come at a time when it could have been averted. It was simply prognostic and not "prophetic".
These are my credentials, good reader, for returning, in 1966, to write one more book. I have briefly retold the events of 1933-1939 in Europe to draw the comparison between them and those of 1960-1966 in Africa, and to say: "Rhodesia means you".
Ten years ago a major war beginning in Africa was inconceivable. While wars, "hot" and "cold", went on elsewhere, Africa was a continent of order. It was steadily moving to an improving future for all its peoples under the colonial powers, as they pursued the established policy of gradually uplifting the tribespeople towards an increasing part in the management of affairs. With folk separated by millennia from every "Western" concept, gradualism was the only method. Violent interruption of this process meant (as is now being seen) reversion to a chaotic tribalism of slavery, warfare and disease, the things of which Africa was slowly being purged.
Only one power in the world admittedly desired this. Lenin, in 1920, decreed that the expulsion of the colonial powers from their territories was vital to the achievement of world communism. In the years 1960-1966 Western "liberalism" openly supported this Leninist aim. This partnership, indeed, between the governments of the "free world" and communism, their professed enemy, is the basic fact of the years 1960-1966 in Africa. Only when that is understood does the picture of what has happened become plain, as a photograph emerges from a film in developing liquid.
The "wind of change" speech began it all. I see Mr. Macmillan now, mellifluously addressing the Cape Town Parliament. Icy rejection underlay the courtesy of the Afrikaner Members who listened, and their unspoken comment was, "Here we have it again: perfidy". I recall my own feeling that day: "This is Mr. Chamberlain again". I thought of the days, thirty years before, when British policy towards Hitler was formed by knickerbockered figures at country-house parties, during weekends on grouse moors or beside trout streams, in too-substantial midday meals at the Carlton and Athenaeum Clubs, far from the madding truth of events in Europe. Had, any been there to watch, t'would have been pitiful to see me wring my hands and murmur, Oh dearie, dearie me, here we go again.
The "wind of change" speech began the era of Doubletalk, the use of words to disguise, not express intention. These particular words suggested a natural process, uncontrollable by man: the wind bloweth where it listeth. They meant a political decision to abandon Africa to turbulence and war.
From that day fiasco followed on perfidy in Africa as if some grisly Quixote, followed by his Sancho Panza, rode on skeleton mounts through a dark vale of bones. The sudden change of policy was as if a good ship, built to ply the seas until in high old age it should be honourably consigned to the wreckers' yard, were scuttled in mid-ocean.
Almost at once Belgium, under the mysterious outside "pressure" which governs governments in our time, jettisoned the Congo, and for three years killing and rapine followed. Under American pressure, "United Nations" troops, now of unhallowed memory, were sent, not to preserve life or restore order, but to prevent the secession from chaos of its one orderly and well-governed province, Katanga, and to drive out the only black statesman produced by Africa until that time, M. Moise Tshombe.
The London government, under similar occult pressure, offered 1,000 lb. "blockbuster" bombs to help subdue Katanga and M. Tshombe. Rhodesia's Sir Roy Welensky redeemed the name of England at that moment by refusing to allow "the transit of bombs which we know are destined to be used against almost defenceless people who are fighting for their homeland, but who have ranged against them at least one of the great powers of the world today". Mr. Macmillan, when Sir Roy refused to withhold this statement withheld the bombs. (This incident of blockbusters to be used "strictly for defensive purposes" against black people in the Congo is a classic example of Doubletalk).
After that the rot set in which, in the next five years, moved swiftly from the north of Africa southward, destroying the fabric of orderly development as white ants devour a good floor.
Ghana was then already independent and Nigeria followed at once. These were held up as the showpieces of Western-type, parliamentary government, successfully transplanted. In those two dark pools the Western "liberals" thought to see, Narcissus-like, their own fair reflection: blood had not yet surged across the surface, blotting out this illusion. They were given paper constitutions of the Western kind. Titles and orders of nobility were bestowed on their leaders. This was to be The New Commonwealth.
The destructive process quickened as one new "State" after another, lacking the resources or experience to qualify it for state-hood, was hurled into independence. The vote-for-all, after one-vote-once, became a free-for-all. Massacre was followed by tribal wars (simmering beneath the surface during the period of colonial control, these revived when it was removed). One-party rule, military governments and dictatorships appeared on all hands, "Strong men" popped up and were ousted by other strong men, soon to be ousted. Foreseeably, "the army" took over in many places. "Army" does not mean, in Africa, what Western folk understand, with their mental images of West Point parades, Changing the Guard, or stomping Red Army masses. It means, the few men who have guns. Where no law runs, he with the gun prevails, as at Tombstone, for instance, in Wild West days.
The tribesman accepts strength as the ultimate. Force, deliberately used, is to him unanswerable: unintentionally used, it amuses him. I have seen a Zulu struck in the forehead by a cricket ball travelling at something near the speed of sound: whether he lived I know not, but his friends around laughed themselves into the ground.
Mrs. Dugauquier (Congo Cauldron) gives two illustrative examples. A silent film of the trial and execution of Jesus was shown in a Catholic Church to Congolese tribesmen. At the whipping, "excited cries of 'Pika!' Strike! rang out ... quite naturally, as in a Western film we cheer on the goodies and boo the baddies, they were encouraging the strong against the weak". In another film, showing the white man's suppression of the Arab slave traders (their hereditary enemies), "each slash of the long whip on the wretched black man's back was cheered wholeheartedly" and when the rescuing white man was floored by the Arab slaver, "their shouts reached a crescendo of support for the Arab, not as representing a race, creed or idea, but simply because he symbolized power and force".
A Basuto chief, who impressed me by his authority, dignity, good English and knowledge of the great world, was later hanged for a ritual murder (a "strong medicine" killing: parts taken from the living victim, are used to reinforce a compound potent against spirits hostile to the chief or the tribe). This was nothing personal against the chosen victim. The chief had no sense of wrongdoing, and the tribespeople (save possibly for the child victim's parents, and they would not dare protest) respected his motive and act.
In short, people are not only funny but different, and the hundreds of tribes now more or less "represented" by the 35 or 36 new African "States" at the United Nations were truly not ready for the responsibilities thrust upon them.
However, these new apprentices, with the support of what is called "the Afro-Asian bloc" and of the Soviet group, acquired a majority at the United Nations. In December 1965 this combine voted out the rule about important issues requiring a two-thirds majority and changed it to simple majority. By that time the London and Washington governments were on the verge of using force to compel "one-man-one-vote", with the same foreseeable result, in the small remaining area of orderly government in Africa. They appeared constantly to retreat before 'the demands of the newly-created majority in the United Nations, where Togo (population 1,500,000) had about 175 times the voting power of the United States (population 180,000,000): yet these governments must have foreseen what would happen in New York when they brought into being this new voting-mass.
The new "States", inevitably, began to clamour for their powerful godparents, in London and Washington, to use "force", for, as I have shown, force is the thing they understand, and they could by this time count on a majority, artificially created, at the United Nations for any warmongering. By this means they did, in 1966, bring the world to the very verge of another world war, and the danger is not past.
There remained only, in 1966, as the last bulwark of order in Africa, the last dam against the waters of chaos, South Africa, Rhodesia and the two Portuguese territories, Mozambique and Angola. Punctually to the moment, a sound like that of jackals in the African night arose from the building on East 42nd Street, as the new "majority" imperiously demanded that war be made against Rhodesia, which stood between them and their supporting cohorts of "Western liberalism" and the real target, South Africa.
The war they wanted was to be waged, not by them, but by Britain and America. These two countries, by their actions between 1960 and 1965, gave enough cause to fear that they might do even this bidding.
At that moment in the debacle Rhodesia declared independence and opposed itself to the outer world gone mad. Two sentences from Mr. Ian Smith's independence day speech leaped at me when I heard them: "To us has been given the privilege of being the first Western nation in the last two decades to have the determination and fortitude to say, 'So far and no further' ... We may be a small country but we are a determined people who have been called upon to play a role of worldwide significance".
Was it possible, I thought, that at last a country, this little country in Africa, would oppose itself to the Gadarene process of these last three decades (I would say three, not two: because all this began in the Thirties)? Might one still hope that the rot would be stemmed, the destructive process held and turned back? To me, more perhaps than to any other hearer, Mr. Ian Smith's words fell into the context of world events stretching back to 1933 and into a historical perspective of my own experience.
For I saw Austria and Czechoslovakia fall. They would have resisted if they could, but the foe was too close and mighty, and all their friends false. Now Rhodesia was in their plight, and faced a world entire of foes bent on its destruction for a purpose further beyond.
If this wonder could happen, I knew, if Rhodesia could in fact stand fast and hold out and win, the prospect for all our tomorrows would vastly change and improve.
Thus, dear reader, that busy little bee your humble servant, having watched what brewed from South Africa for many years, went to Rhodesia to watch the outcome of this epic struggle, for on it depended the future: chaos in all Africa and general war; or stability restored in Africa and peace in Africa, at least for some time yet.
Rhodesia means you, good people, as Austria and Czechoslovakia meant you. This is a warning book about a coming Third World War. So was Insanity Fair, in 1938. Now, as then, it need not happen, and that is why I have written. Room and time remain to avoid war, in 1966 as in 1938. Had Hitler been stopped at the gates of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, no Second War would have occurred. If simple reason prevails, and Rhodesia survives, there will be no Third World War, beginning in Africa: those who desire one will have to look elsewhere for a pretext.
It is simple enough, a mathematical calculation. Rhodesia means you, from Whitehall to Washington, Wisconsin to Worcestershire, Wigan to Wilmington and Winnipeg, and you cannot escape it. Rhodesia is no distant, isolated African episode: it reaches into your very home, however far away you be.
And now, good companions, let us look at this "little country far away, that we know nothing about": Rhodesia.
In Africa the moving frontier went on moving. In both places the pattern was the same: the horsedrawn covered wagons and the oxen-drawn trek wagons formed laagers when the attack came: Custer's Last Stand of 1878 and Major Alan Wilson's last stand of 1893 alike left no white man alive. Destiny was "manifest" in each case and "pioneer" was a brave name.
It was an old name, too, for pioneering began four hundred years earlier, when Bartholomew Diaz reached and Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape. The seas were uncharted and their seamen feared to fall off the edge of the world. Da Gama's feat of seamanship in reaching and planting the Cross on Natal's shore on Christmas Day 1498 (hence "Natal", for the Nativity) in his wooden cockleshell was great, for these are treacherous waters where even in the 1960's big steel vessels such as the Aimèe Lykes, may strike the shoals. Then in 1652 Jan van Riebeeck was left at the Cape to store water and grow vegetables for Dutch ships eastward bound, and out of this market-garden sprang a new nation, Afrikanerdom, now a growing moral force in the world.
In 1776 the American colonists proclaimed their independence of government from three thousand miles away. The word "colonialism" then meant this mismanagement by remote control: today the word has been turned upside down and is used as a reproach against government-on-the-spot.
The Boers followed the American example when the Dutch ceded the Cape to England in 1806. They too, could not endure the distant hand and proclaimed UDI in their own way: they inspanned their wagons, trekked over the northward mountains and across the Orange and Vaal, and set up their own republics. Therewith the moving frontier moved far inland and with the Portuguese settlements on the western and eastern coasts, Southern Africa became the white man's settled domain.
Remained the unknown middle part of Africa, a dark enigma, and soon the moving frontier moved thither. Into that unknown land, in the 1840's and later, came first the missionaries, led by those great Scotsmen Robert Moffat, his son-in-law David Livingstone, John Moffat, James Stewart and others. The world hailed them, too, as Christian pioneers, and America shared the sense of pride when the Britisher, Henry Morton Stanley (late of the U.S. Navy), sent by Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald to search for Livingstone, found him in 1871.
Even today Central Africa is a formidable place and the dangers these men endured, though different, were not less than those braved by those later pioneers, the astronauts of today. Slave raids and inter-tribal wars, wild beasts and reptiles, malaria, dysentery, blackwater fever, yaws, Little Irons: all these made for nightmare journeys and the men who achieved them were held in the awe that is the due of Spacemen now.
The world they left behind was solidly with them, for their great purpose was to root out slavery, which the warrior tribes and the Arab slave-traders together practised. They were the banner-bearers of Christian civilization in Central Africa, and all Europe and America, in that Victorian heyday, shared this belief. So did the "settlers" who followed.
From the day when Livingstone, seeking the source of the Nile, discovered the Thundering Smoke (Victoria Falls) and went on to explore the Zambezi River, the frontier began to move northward again, into what is today Rhodesia. Its original peoples, the Bushmen and Hottentots, had been exterminated by warrior tribes and the area now was held by later comers, the newly-arrived Matabele in the west and the Mashona in the east. The Matabele, under King Moselikatze, some decades earlier split off and fled from the Zulus of Natal, under the terrible Chaka. They were warriors and scorned the Mashona "dogs". (After seventy years of the white man's peace this feud still simmers and would at once burst out if one-man-one-vote were imposed here, for the Mashona are far more numerous than the Matabele, who would not submit to this "majority rule": for this reason both groups want the white man's protection to continue).
Into this dangerous scene stepped a clergyman's son from England, Cecil Rhodes, who by 1878 gained control of the Kimberley diamond industry. His vision went beyond money and a diamond empire. His conviction was that the white man was best fitted to open up Central Africa, the dark enigma. Like Livingstone, he believed that white enterprise alone could save the continent from poverty, slavery and disease and that British rule would be a blessing for its peoples. Britain, he held, could not afford to stand aloof: without her overseas possessions the little kingdom would be but an overcrowded, insignificant island in northern European waters. Today his belief is receiving its ultimate test (and you, dear insular reader, will see the answer).
Rhodes looked northward, wondering if another gold and diamond empire might lie in the land that now bears his name. In 1888 John Moffat[1] obtained from King Lobengula, Moselikatze's successor, the concession of "all metals and minerals" in the Matabele Kingdom for Rhodes and his "British South Africa Company". In 1889 Queen Victoria signed the Charter empowering the Company, in effect, to govern the territory.
Next came the task of moving the frontier across the territory thus assigned, where were only a tiny handful of white men, isolated among Lobengula and his redoubtable impis and the Mashona. Rhodes formed the Pioneer Corps of some 200 picked men, accompanied by 500 British South Africa Company police.[2] This column succeeded in by-passing the hostile Matabele and on September 12, 1890 reached the spot which they called Fort Salisbury: the beleaguered Salisbury of today.
With that the moving frontier halted and the white man established himself in the land. The Pioneers ("duke's son, cook's son ...") dispersed and were given mining claims and farms. Among them was an American, William Harvey Brown. He called his farm Arlington (after Arlington, D.C.) and travellers landing at Salisbury Airport today alight on its site.
The white man was in Rhodesia but three wars had to be fought before he was secure. King Lobengula had agreed that he might mine for gold, but the Matabele warriors did not agree that they must cease from enslaving the Mashona, who in turn deduced that the white man was too weak to protect them and refused labour for his mines and farms. In 1893 Mashona were massacred near Fort Victoria and when the Matabele king refused to give up his claim to the Mashona raiding grounds, war began. Lobengula burned his capital and fled. Major Alan Wilson with a small force tried to capture Lobengula in his kraal and failed: all were wiped out. Lobengula escaped and died, possibly by suicide, Matabele resistance collapsed, and in later time a great city, Bulawayo, rose on the site of Lobengula's kraal.
After that the number of settlers quickly increased, but in 1895 the collapse of Dr. Jameson's raid into the Transvaal, which dimmed Rhodes's prestige, and the consequent absence of white troops from Matabeleland, again persuaded the Matabele that the white man could be crushed: he was weak! They rose in 1896 in the usual manner: 130 unsuspecting white men and their families were shot, stoned, bludgeoned or speared. A force of 2,000 white and 600 black troops was raised to put down this rising but (as in the later South African war) an elusive enemy, fighting on his home ground of precipitous kopjes, rocks, boulders and caves, proved hard to find and fight.
Then the Mashona, of whom the white folk had adopted the Matabele's opinion, surprised all by rising too. They also thought the white man was weak, that the Matabele would win, and that they, the Mashona, would pay the price if they did not help crush the white man. Their rising followed the Matabele pattern: servants thought faithful suddenly turned and did women and children to death, murdered prospectors in their camps, miners in their shafts, storekeepers behind their counters. (In the 1960's this pattern was often repeated, in Kenya, the Congo and other newly "independent" places: the old ways reappeared).
The Mashona were subdued in 1897. In the meantime Rhodes performed his legendary exploit of pacifying the fierce Matabele. With a small, unprotected party, including two women, he met the Matabele chiefs and induced them to lay down their arms. They gave him the name "Lamula 'mkunzi", "Separator of the Fighting Bulls", for this, his greatest triumph. This, the start of seventy years of peace, is today a memory as vivid and significant in the Matabele and Mashona mind as that of Magna Charta or Independence in the British and American one. For them, a new life began that day.
(Seventy years later, a Mr. Arthur Bottomley from Walthamstow met the Matabele and Mashona chiefs, to whom Rhodes and his achievement were a living memory, as they repeatedly told him. He could not at all grasp the significance of the episode: they found him unintelligible; and although the African chief is a model of courtesy in such debates, one of them in despair was moved to say, "If I had my own way we would walk out of this meeting and leave Mr. Bottomley here alone". Kipling was right: when two strong men stand face to face they can understand each other, no matter what their skin or language. Between such as Mr. Bottomley and these tribal leaders no communion of minds was possible. Across the great gulf fixed between them, the chiefs looked and saw the living emblem of the white man's weakness, to them the fault beyond forgiving).
The two rebellions cost the whites about one-tenth of their numbers in casualties, a percentage, I believe, never otherwise known in war. 'The white folk never faltered or thought of quitting. They stayed and (as Mr. L. H. Gann says[3]) "Their will to rule remained unbroken. They felt that history was on their side, that Europe stood behind them, and that they formed the vanguard of civilization in Darkest Africa ... The whites in Rhodesia never experienced that clammy sense of moral and political isolation, which weighed down their successors two generations later".
That means today. If "history" is that which is manufactured in our time by machines that reach the ear, eye and mind of millions, then it is against the whites. But they still believe what their grandparents believed. When a British Minister told Rhodesian representatives. "We have lost the will to govern", one of them told him "But we have not". In Rhodesia, and in South Africa, the white man's will still "remains unbroken" for a' that, no matter what may happen in Rhodes's overcrowded little island in the North Sea or elsewhere.
The moving frontier halted at last, in 1897, seven years after the American one stopped. Followed seventy years during which no black man needed fear the slave-raiders or the outcry of enemy tribes in the night, around his huts. There was peace in the land.
Today the attempt is to destroy all that thus was gained.
Southern Rhodesia (today's Rhodesia), the area of the original conquest, was a case by itself. Its white population was greater and its development quicker: the African bushveld began to blossom like the rose; and the settlers grew restive under the hand of a board of directors in London, as the American colonists, earlier, under that of King George. As the date for the renewal of the Company's charter from the Queen approached, their demand for self- government swelled. In 1922 the voters were offered, by referendum, self-government or (at Mr. Winston Churchill's suggestion) union with South Africa. Much talk of a republic was heard from South Africa and the Rhodesians, intensely loyal to The Crown, chose Responsible Government, which London granted in 1923.
Rhodes was dead, but his work flourished. From that day, 43 years ago, Rhodesia has governed itself, London retaining only some control over laws affecting the tribal population and safeguarding them against any discriminatory disabilities. The successive Constitutions have contained no racial discrimination. The qualification for the vote requires moderate amounts in cash, property or income.
In practice the black community votes little, for reasons which lengthy residence among them alone can make clear. Most of them find "voting" unintelligible: their immemorial tradition is against "choosing" and for decisions reached in pyramidal tribal conclave, of villagers, village elders, district headmen and chiefs. The notion that "the children", at the bottom level, should challenge tribal authority and unanimity is as Chinese to them. They believe that the tribe's spirits, or ancestors, consulted through the chief's medium, or oracle, ultimately decide the tribe's weal or woe.
For example: in one tribe a child was sacrificed, at the spirit's bidding, to the rain-god. The Chief was imprisoned for eighteen months and on the day of his release rain fell. The tribespeople drew the obvious conclusion (incidentally, their beliefs are respected by white folk who live among them).
Again, the educated and well-to-do African townsman, with a business, remains subject to his tribe's communal custom of sharing possessions. If a man has six wives and sixty-one children, (a cast known to me), he well may not wish to declare even the modest amount of property qualifying him for a vote.
Time and patient responsible statesmanship might in time produce a harmonious solution to the most difficult problem of the world. Only an irresponsible interruption, engineered from outside, can endanger that. The British Socialist Party, founded in 1900, never yet obtained a majority of votes, yet it seeks to force the dogma of "black majority rule" into Africa's resistant soil, which is like trying to grow cokernuts in Camberwell.
The only statesmanlike leader yet produced by that party, Mr. Clement Attlee, in 1952 told one of the now-now politicos from Northern Rhodesia, "You have a long way to go in this field. look how long it took our British Parliament to achieve fully responsible government". To Mr. Nkumbula's reply, "We have received guidance, we can reach political maturity in much less time", Mr. Attlee rejoined, "I don't think you are right on that point. Constitutional government can't be learned from textbooks. You're trying to rush things. My experience has taught me that it takes a long time to get a democratic idea working effectively".
Had Mr. Attlee's successors been men of such balance, the world would not find "Rhodesia" in the headlines every day. Statesmanship takes time. Given time, it works: denied time, all falls into a smouldering shambles that can only be kept down by the lid of force. This result has been seen everywhere in Africa where Britain and America have "tried to rush things".
I discussed these things with African leaders of the opposition in and out of Parliament, and also with Chiefs and tribesmen in the tribal districts and the towns. The political gentlemen were against gradualness and for immediacy (black majority rule now): what political gentleman would not be, with great outside powers threatening to bring the world in arms to enforce everything-now and all-at-once.
The Chiefs were strongly for orderly development which to them meant peace in their districts. The man-in-the-kraal took guidance from them. As to the African man-in-the-street, I quote a French journalist, with an interpreter, who once stopped the first black man he saw in a Salisbury street and asked whether he wanted the white folk to stay or go. To stay, the man answered. Why, asked the Frenchman. "If you had been here last year" (1964, the time of the killings and burnings by communist-trained terrorists from outside) "you would not ask", said the man, "we want them to protect us".
Gradualism produced results, in the form of increasing African[4] participation in Parliament and all walks of life. However, gradualism, though the best expedient now and for the near future, is not a solution. The solution, as I will later show, lies elsewhere.
In thirty years of self-government, 1923-1953, Rhodesia strode ahead as if on seven-league boots. The astonishing thing is how much was done in how short a time. That impressed me in South Africa, too, but South Africa has a white population of some millions and has had three centuries to build. Rhodesia has a white population of about a quarter-million and has had but seventy years.
At the start the land was scrub, constantly impoverished by the tribal method of farming and by erosion. The lifegiving waters drained away into the Indian Ocean. Disease, tribal raids and wild beasts ravaged the people and the land. It was still, as James Stewart found it in the 1860's, "a lonely land of barbarism, of wild beasts, of timid and harried but not unkindly men, harassed by never-ending slave raids and inter-tribal wars".
Today water conservation in Rhodesia is a model for the world. The lethal diseases, killing and slavery have been stamped down and almost out. The white farming areas show crops, the equal of those in the Mid West or anywhere in the world. The tribes occupy more than half the land, but the contribution of this to the economy is insignificant because the tribesman clings to his immemorial custom of growing just enough to eat, grazing the land bare, and when it is denuded, breaking up his huts and moving elsewhither, there to repeat the process.
The allegation is often heard that the tribes "only get the poorest land". The matter may be checked, by any who care, at the great Triangle sugarlands in the Rhodesian lowveld. This land was raw scrub in 1912 and little that looked less promising could have been found when another indomitable Scotsman, Tom MacDougall, saw it then. The First War delayed him but in 1919 he began with his hands to clear a patch or two. A secondhand mill, bought in Natal, needed two years to reach him, by lorry and ox-wagon, from the border at Beit Bridge. By 1935 he produced ten tons of sugar. Today, when big concerns have taken over, twenty thousand acres are under sugar and the endless crops gladden the eye of man.
The land problem may be studied at the Domboshawa Training Centre, near Salisbury, where men from the tribal districts receive instruction in local self-government. It was formerly an agricultural training centre and still has a farm, where fine crops grow. On the side of its fence is tribal land, bare and denuded, where, one might say, nothing would grow. The land on either side of the fence is the same: only the method is different.
The white man's achievement may be studied, for example, in little Umtali, which reminded me of a mountain village in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It has 9,000 white and 35,000 black people, and the white ones provide nine-tenths of its revenue. Over the years this small place has built some six thousand houses for the African community and (from beer-hall proceeds) a stadium for the black folk costing £75,000, a swimming pool, picture-theatre, infant schools and crèches and much more. I doubt whether an English or American town of comparable size could equal this achievement.
Rhodesia's growth was always fast but the great acceleration came after the Second War, in 1945. The next twenty years brought probably the most rapid development the world has ever seen. Still building on the tradition of sound administration and probity in public affairs which it thought to be its rocklike heritage from England, the country flourished exceedingly, managing its own affairs and spending nobody's money but its own.
Within Rhodesia the people, white and black, grew in beauty, as one might say, side by side. The emphasis is on side by side, as distinct from together, and here lies the difference between the temporary expedient, gradualism, and the ultimate solution, separateness.
Before Responsible Government was granted in 1923 the Rhodesian delegates in London raised the question of territorial segregation and Mr. Winston Churchill (then the Minister competent) agreed that the existing law might be changed if an impartial enquiry upheld this method. Seldom was so emphatic a judgment delivered as that of the Commission then appointed (under Sir Morris Carter):
"The evidence ... leaves no doubt as to the wishes of all classes of the inhabitants ... an overwhelming majority of those who understand the question are in favour of the establishment of separate areas in which each of the two races, black and white, should be permitted to acquire interests in land ... However desirable it may be that members of the two races should live together side by side with equal rights as regards the holding of land, we are convinced that in practice, probably for generations to come, such a policy is not practicable or in the best interests of the two races. Until the Native has advanced very much further on the paths of civilization it is better that the points of contact between the two races should be reduced and a lengthy period afforded for the study of the whole question of the future of the relations between the two races in an atmosphere which is freed as far as possible from the setbacks which would ensue from the irritations and conflicts arising from the constant close proximity of members of races of different habits, ideals and outlook upon life" (my italics).
This was then, and today is the immutable African truth, unpalatable to those who live snug, and perhaps smug, on Boston's Back Bay or Bournemouth's beachfront, and very anathema to those high initiates who seek through chaos in Africa to set up the World Dictatorship. Wisdom spoke then. Today, the pressure, and the menaces, from London and Washington are used to enforce the very opposite of this prudent ruling, to exacerbate "irritations and conflicts", to set the two races against each other, and to foment an atmosphere of war.
But if the future is to be one of improving relationship between white and black folk, and of mutual betterment in material things, separate life in separate lands is the only longterm solution. In Rhodesia policy followed this recommendation and the white and black areas are distinct, but dotted in enclaves over the map. What the chief and tribesman most would like would be a separate homeland, side by side with a white homeland, in Rhodesia, and for this reason he gazes approvingly across the frontier at the Transkei, South Africa's first "Bantustan".
The end of the Second War and the great boom which followed gave impetus to an idea, long discussed, for closer union between Rhodesia (then Southern Rhodesia) and its two neighbours, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Together, these would have provided a hard core of political stability, and a great source of common wealth, in the heart of Africa. Out of this came conferences in 1949 and 1951, when the British and the three territorial governments together drafted a scheme for a Federation "which would be a much-needed stabilizing factor in a continent which is in such a state of flux". The Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister of that time, Sir Godfrey Huggins, said, "It is up to us to save Central Africa by our exertions and Africa by our example".
Of all sad words ... In 1953 the great Federation of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland was set up, and a splendid future opened for Central Africa. The London government, as now transpires, at that time was already set on a course which could only worsen Africa's "state of flux" into a state of shambles. Within ten years the British Government destroyed the Federation created by it and all Africa was deprived of the gyrostabilizer in its central hold.
Let us now take a look at those years of Doubletalk which left Rhodesia alone in a world determined to incite its races against each other.
As to that, there is one simple test by which the white folk's supreme achievement in Rhodesia, in relation to the black ones, may be measured. If life be the greatest gift of all, then the white man gave the black one life. Seventy years ago some 400,000 tribespeople occupied this area, and but for the coming of the white man they would not be many more today: disease, the assegai and the slaver would have seen to that. Today they number over 4,000,000, half of them children. They have been rid of disease, infant mortality, death by the spear and burning, and abduction and sale to the bordellos and harems of Arabia.
This hope and confidence were in fact illusory, for the Federation rested on two buttresses, one in London and one in Rhodesia, of which the London one was a hollow sham. The compact between both parties there, to abandon the African possessions, already existed, and that inevitably meant wrecking the Federation and producing a war situation in Africa: the years have shown this. For a decade the Rhodesian leaders struggled against what they thought was delusion in London but in truth was resolve. At the end they found themselves on the ruins of Federation and facing a levelled gun.
Quickly, then, the sunburst paled as the years of doubletalk followed, when the Rhodesian leaders tried to sink anchors into the pledges and assurances of London and found no hold. Sir Roy Welensky's tale of these 4,000 Days shows the development to a high art of the use of words to confuse and confound all who sought to cash them at face value. Sir Roy and his men, struggling to pierce this mass of wordage, passed from trust through perplexity to dazed unbelief and at last gave up, defeated.
The process gave a new word to the Barotse people (who were among the black folk sacrificed to the dogma of "black majority rule"): "ku-makmirana". Its definition, according to their Litunga, is "to discuss at great length and get nowhere: from the English Makmirana, or Macmillan". This way of employing speech now seems to have become general British usage (new in the West, that is: it is ancient in the Orient).[5]
When the decade of decadence began, the phrases "Safe as the Bank of England", "A.1 at Lloyds" and "An Englishman's word is his bond" were as the law and the prophets to folk of British stock in Southern Africa. The Afrikaner's cold disbelief and the Frenchman's talk of Albion's perfidy brought smiles: they did not understand us. I saw the British in Rhodesia and Natal, where they were predominant and devotedly loyal, gradually veer during this decade to the Afrikaner's side in distrust of London government. Inwardly they remained true to the ancient Crown and the British heritage as they understood it, but when menaces against themselves were put in the mouth of the Crown's wearer they feared that the ultimate intent must be to degrade or even destroy the monarchy, for such things seemed to them to deprive the concept of "constitutional monarchy" of meaning.
The fiasco of the Federation was in truth ordained before it was born, for in 1948 Sir Roy Welensky, canvassing support in London for an amalgamation of the two Rhodesias, was told by both Socialist and Conservative spokesmen that no government, of whichever party, would ever consider placing the control of the black folk in the hands of the fewer whites. This was the existing situation, and no public statement of its abandonment was ever made. Therefore the future deed was already foreseen.
However, at that point Sir Roy was put off the scent by a hint that "some form of federation" might be acceptable: and conferences between 1949 and 1953 hammered out the framework of a federation of the two Rhodesias and of little Nyasaland. By that time the Mau Mau killings had shown the indifferent world the facts of life in Africa, and a foremost authority, Lord Salisbury, said, "If England abandons these Central African territories they will go straight back to the conditions in which we found them, until they are gobbled up by people far less enlightened than ourselves". The years have shown and will show the truth of this.
Obviously the Federation, if it were to be set up at all, had to be built to last, or have that appearance. Lord Swinton (Commonwealth Secretary) said he knew of no federal constitution anywhere that contained a secession clause (save, he added smiling, in the Soviet Union). The Federation would need loans, and could never raise a penny if its continuance were in doubt. Mr. Lyttelton (Colonial Secretary: during the decade the harassed Rhodesians had to struggle with two distinct departments of State in the distant government) concurred, adding that they must have "legal assurance that the Federation could not be dissolved without the consent of all governments engaged". (Lord Swinton agreed, but commented, prophetically, that "You cannot legislate against the United Kingdom Government going off its head").
On this basis the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland was born in September 1953. Within it Southern Rhodesia was fully self-governing, as for thirty years: the other territories remained protectorates of the Crown. A review conference was foreseen in about ten years, but not (said London) "to decide whether Federation has succeeded or failed, or should be abolished or continued": it would merely recommend "such alterations as experience of its work has shown to be necessary during the first decade of its life".
The decade was to see many strange things. As it began the Korean war ended. It was supposedly waged against Chinese Communist aggression, yet Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, through General Marshall, set up Communism in China. The American commander was not allowed to win that war, which ended (like the Second War in Europe) in partition, the most fertile source of new war. America's part in world affairs became another riddle inside a mystery within an enigma. The great Republic stood fast, in words, against Communism, but, by deeds, showed growing hostility to countries which repressed Communism in their territories. And during this fateful decade America's mystifying presence began to be felt in Africa.
After three years came the Suez debacle, and London began to peel off its African possessions as at a clearance sale. Westminster-type paper constitutions were bestowed on them and Socialist politicians agitated loudly for the Federation to receive one patterned on that of Ghana (the working results of which have now been seen). In 1960 Mr. MacMillan, in Africa, announced his "wind of change" and British newspapers immediately claimed that this meant the end of the Federation, in the sense that any of its members now were free to secede.
Like hounds unleashed by these encouragements, "African nationalist leaders" (as the press called them) thronged to London, vociferating for "independence now" and were courted and fêted there as the voice of Africa. The Conservative government gazed, not at Africa, but at the next by-election, where the Socialists beat the big tomtom of "independence now": and the Socialists, when they came to office, would gaze, not at Africa, but at their own left-wingers, clamouring for "independence now". Chaos in Africa was being made on the British hustings. "Black majority rule" was a vote-getting slogan from London's slums to Manchester's suburbs (as was "Chinese slavery in Africa" sixty years before). Lenin's plan for Africa was being realized in London.
In 1960 Belgium overnight abandoned the Congo, which fell into chaos. Troops from various distant lands, with "U.N." painted on their helmets, arrived to prevent the secession of Katanga (no "secession" there!). These men, and their countries, had no conceivable interest in the Congo and, as they were paid, might be considered mercenaries. Those who were called "mercenaries" were a handful of fighters, mostly from Southern Africa, to whom most of the white hostages rescued owed their lives.
By 1960 the London government's actions, after Suez, had released a tide from the north which menaced the Federation. Katanga bordered it and thousands of refugees crossed into Northern Rhodesia. The involvement of Britain and America in the Congolese fiasco brought not only danger to the Federation but peril of general war. American troopcarriers were used against Katanga and, the "defensive bombs" from Britain were withheld only at the last moment. The world, in 1960, was again very near a brink.
Thus the Federation was in a closing cage as the time for the "review" approached. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland the "African nationalists" began by terrorism to force London's hand: any move to put them down was checked and rebuked by London. The Nyasaland Governor, at one point, was forced to use police and troops, and an investigating Commission (appointed at the instance [ed: insistence?] of the clamorous African nationalists and their Socialist friends in London) found that he had so to act "or abdicate". The London Government's choice was the same, and its decision was already plain: abdication.
The Conservative government, ever in retreat before the sound and fury of the Opposition and the African nationalists", then appointed a Royal Commission, under Lord Monckton, to enquire into conditions in the Federation. This obviously supplanted the Review Conference originally foreseen, which was committed to "no secession": once more the ulterior intention showed through the verbiage. Sir Roy Welensky said that if all that was needed to produce a Royal Commission was to stage a riot, the future was dark. He was soothed with a syrup of words.. it would not be like that at all. Well then, asked the Rhodesians, suspicious but still loath to suspect, "what are to be the terms of reference?" Mr. Macmillan, in an exquisite exercise in phraseology, told the House of Commons:
"I regard the Commission as free in practice to hear all points of view from whatever quarter and on whatever subject ... it is never wise to be too specific or rigid in interpretation ... the terms of reference ... include a very wide possibility for Lord Monckton and his colleagues to conduct their affairs in such a way as to bring about the result we all wish ..." and so on and so on.
Sir Roy urgently asked what was this result so devoutly desired and Mr. Macmillan said he had "not yielded and would not yield an inch on the Commission's terms of reference." These, according to his statement quoted above, were elastic enough to stretch to infinity, so that an inch was of little moment, but Sir Roy still struggled to get down to brass tacks. Were the terms of reference to include secession? If so, he referred Mr. Macmillan to his pledge of April 27, 1957. Mr. Macmillan emphatically assured him that the British Government would not include secession in the terms of reference. Sir Roy so informed Rhodesia. Lord Shawcross, a member of the Royal Commission, then announced that he felt "completely free to entertain the views of any people on the whole future of the Federation". Mr. Macmillan, arrived in Salisbury, told indignant Rhodesian Ministers that he had been misunderstood by English newspapers which reported him as pledging "no forcible federation in Rhodesia". "I was not", he said, "referring at all to the possibility of secession from the Federation".
By this time it was clear that, in fact, the British Government would permit, and even prompt the two lesser members of the Federation to claim their Unilateral Declaration of Independence, but the game of words went on. Back in London, Mr. Macmillan ordered the release of Dr. Hastings Banda, then under detention on security grounds after the violent disturbances in Nyasaland. This was to the African nationalists the familiar "sign of weakness" and even louder uproar at once broke out.
To the very last the Rhodesian leaders thought that truth and the pledged word were somewhere to be found, if they could only discover where, and they burrowed on. They invited Lord Home (Commonwealth Secretary) to Salisbury and once more were engulfed by words:
"It is not inconceivable that, in the hypothetical event of an over-whelming volume of evidence being in favour of secession, the Commission may have to consider whether, in fact, it can report within its terms of reference or whether it may not have to say that it is unable to report."
The efforts of Sir Roy and his weary men to get to grips with their problem during all the years are wondrous to behold. Ever and again they thought they knew which thimble contained the pea and always they were wrong. The Monckton Commission next recommended that "the British Government should declare its intention of permitting secession" (UDI). However, the Commissioners "regarded with concern" the possibility of the Federation's break-up, now that they broke it up, and hoped that, given proper safeguards, a right of secession might prove a "valuable safety valve", and far from weakening the Federation might enable it to survive. This is Parkinson's theory of seacocks, that the more water is let in, the likelier the ship is to remain afloat.
After "this terrible piece of high explosive" was dropped from London into Salisbury, Sir Roy reminded Mr. Macmillan of all the pledges given between 1952 and 1959, and culminating in the Governor General's Speech from the Throne even in 1960, stating that secession was not to be considered by the Monckton Commission. Mr. Macmillan replied that the matter was indeed very delicate and difficult and Sir Roy again felt himself enveloped "by clouds of chilly cotton wool". He then hastened to London, to be confronted by Mr. Macmillan, Mr. Duncan Sandys (Commonwealth Secretary), Mr. Ian Macleod (Colonial Secretary) and "a huge array of African nationalists", and listened to "many hours of their oratory with all its prejudice, racial hatred, special pleading and demand for immediate and total political power". Then all were taken for the familiar "full treatment" of a weekend at Chequers, where Messrs. Kaunda and Banda demanded the immediate dissolution of the Federation, and Sir Roy asked bluntly if the British Government intended to destroy it. He could obtain no answer but was wished a happy Christmas and safe journey home.
All was over but a little more doubletalk. Two months later the "Commonwealth Prime Ministers" (by this time including many new, "emergent" personages) met in London and forced the withdrawal of South Africa by the methods which thenceforth provided a majority for any irresponsible warcry from the "United Nations". In February 1962 Mr. Sandys personally conveyed to Sir Roy Dr. Banda's demand for Nyasaland's secession, and being told that a firm exercise of authority would keep Nyasaland peacefully in the Federation, replied (says Sir Roy), "No, you see, we British have lost the will to govern."[6] Sir Roy says this incident left him with a severe migraine and the British High Commissioner in Salisbury went home and vomited.
In London, at last, the two departments, Commonwealth and Colonial, were combined under a single Minister, Mr. R. A. B. Butler, who for thirty years looked like the next Conservative Prime Minister but was not destined to reach that office. The wonder is that he now undertook the executioner's task, and the strong possibility is that he did not know the purpose for which he would be used. This is indicated by the fact that in July 1962, when the Federation had but nine months to live, Mr. Butler, speaking in London, in specific terms urged investors from Britain and the Commonwealth to put their money into the Federation and assured them of the British Government's determination to back them if they did. Mr. Butler would not have said this, had he not believed it, and the only inference to be drawn is that, once more, somebody knew more about the government's intention than even he.
A few months after his speech he informed the House of Commons, and through the High Commissioner in Salisbury Sir Roy Welensky, that the British Government agreed to Nyasaland's withdrawal from the Federation. Sir Roy replied, from Salisbury, "... there is little if any honour left in dealing with the British Government. I say that Britain ... is utterly reckless of the fate of the inhabitants of the present Federation".
In March 1963 the Federal Ministers were invited to London to see if at least the two Rhodesias could not be kept together in the Federation. The pattern of events repeated itself: Mr. Kaunda, already in virtual control in Northern Rhodesia, refused to attend the meeting unless his terms were accepted, and Mr. Butler told Sir Roy, "If we were free to decide, we would like to see the closest links between the Rhodesias ... but we haven't any forces in Central Africa to impose our will".
Three days later came the end, when the Federal Ministers saw Mr. Butler again. "He looked wan and grey and ill", says Sir Roy, "averting his gaze he spoke rapidly and tonelessly". His message now was that any territory might secede, (ergo, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland).
Sir Roy asked Mr. Butler to inform Mr. Macmillan that he and his Ministers would not be able to lunch with the Prime Minister: "I don't want to be discourteous but I cannot accept the hospitality of a man who has betrayed me and my country". Mr. Butler "sat in silence, looking stricken", while messengers scurried away.
Sir Roy raised a last matter, that of the Barotse people in Northern Rhodesia, who wished to secede from Mr. Kaunda.[7] Mr. Butler, says Sir Roy, remained silent. "He seemed so near to collapse that I changed the subject."[8]
Such, in March 1963, was the end of the Federation, begun with such brave hope in 1953. This reduced the area of stability in Africa to a last bastion, composed of Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and the two Portuguese territories. After that, the deluge.
All that remained was the formal liquidation of the Federation and the matter of Southern Rhodesia's independence. Independence had been thrust on the two lesser territories, both backward and unready for it. The logical next step was independence for Southern Rhodesia, far more advanced than the others, self-governing for forty years, raised by its own bootstraps to its status, without monetary or other help from others. More than thirty new "States" had been fabricated out of the tribal complex of Africa and were being propped up with British money while they clamoured for war in New York.[9] It was unimaginable, in 1963, that to Rhodesia alone, in all this continent, independence should be denied.
But this was the case, as the next eighteen months of doubletalk showed. Mr. Winston Field, Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister, now took up the burden. Looking back on Sir Roy Welensky's four thousand days, he resolved not to be washed away with waves of words. Firmly he informed Mr. Butler that his government would not attend the liquidation conference "unless we receive in writing from you an acceptable undertaking that Southern Rhodesia will receive its independence" concurrently with the secession of the two other territories.
Mr. Field felt that he had at last pinned the issue down. Mr. Butler's reply, smooth as silk, "accepted in principle" that Southern Rhodesia should "proceed through the normal processes to independence" and then stated "what we consider should be done" before independence could be granted. There should be many discussions on various matters before ... and so on and so on.
Nothing in writing. The game of words went on.
Mr. Winston Field repeated his demand for an undertaking "in writing" and submitted that the record and achievements of Southern Rhodesia already constituted much more than "the normal processes to independence"; moreover, the other territories had been given independence without going through any such processes. This argument is unanswerable, but the London Government was not interested in arguments: it already knew the facts, and just wanted to keep Mr. Field stringing along.
Mr. Butler's reply was affable and as elusive as a soaped eel. Yes, indeed, he well knew Southern Rhodesia's proud record of achievement, and his Government repeated its acceptance, "in principle", that Southern Rhodesia should proceed "through the normal processes" and so on and so on. Above all, he said, Southern Rhodesia was still a member of the de facto defunct Federation, which could be brought to an end only by the passage of United Kingdom legislation enacting that the Federation already destroyed in London should cease to exist and so on and so on.
(I imagine that the lawyers who draft these communications must writhe with mirth as they devise them. Sir Roy Welensky relates that he and his colleagues, after wrestling long with one such earlier message, tried to understand it by means of a diagram, and at last threw the diagram away in despair).
By now Mr. Winston Field, like Sir Roy before, was hopelessly befogged. His next letter no longer requested an undertaking "in writing" and asked only that Southern Rhodesia should receive independence "not later than the date when the dissolution of the Federation occurs". Apparently failing to perceive the trap, or still unwilling to believe in anything less than utter sincerity at the other end, he then invited Mr. Butler to discuss "the terms on which Southern Rhodesia would proceed to independence on the dissolution of the Federation".
Mr. Field was undone. Mr. Butler's legal advisers pounced on that phrase, "the terms", like eagles on a brood of chicks. But of course, of course, they replied (through Mr. Butler) more affably than ever, Southern Rhodesia should have its independence - "subject to the satisfactory conclusion of the discussions about the terms." (Mr. Kaunda's Northern Rhodesia and Dr. Banda's Nyasaland gained all they wanted without any palaver about "terms").
Thus the liquidation conference was held, in July 1963, and Mr. Winston Field and Mr. Ian Smith who accompanied him, came empty away. All that was determined was that the Federation, already dead, should formally expire in December 1963. Mr. Field and Mr. Smith were told privately that the matter of their independence would be finalized once the conference ended, but they had nothing "in writing", and when it was over found themselves in Southern Rhodesia, alone, and facing a sea of troubles, which, after two more years of doubletalk, Mr. Ian Smith and his government resolved to oppose and end.
Historically, the outstanding event of this ten year story was the decline of the Conservative party in England, once a powerful element of stability in the word. The eclipse of its leaders was not brought about by advancing years but was the penalty of recurrent fiasco. Its headlong retreat from responsibility showed it to have lost the sense of purpose and national interest. It repeatedly ran away from any loud clamour, whether from the Opposition benches or from the petty demagogues who hastened from Africa to London to exploit its weakness, and supported their demands by organized terrorism in the countries they left behind them. Its pretence that these represented "the people" was painful to watch, for it knew better. It offered the world the spectacle of a great government reacting like puppets on a string to the manipulation of any here-today-and-gone-tomorrow upstart who paraded himself in London as an "African nationalist". Above all, it set up a coterie of such in New York as a tribunal with authority to dictate the world's affairs.
If, as Mr. Sandys said, it has lost the will to govern, it has little claim to govern again, for it squandered the British heritage of faith-keeping and would command little confidence. If it cannot find in its ranks new men of another kind, who will stand for the British heritage (as Rhodesia stands today) its day may well be done.
The Socialist government which succeeded continued the method of doubletalk and out of that came at last what is colloquially known as Wilson's War. However, Mr. Wilson but continued in the Conservatives' ten-year footsteps. This was not a party matter, whatever else it might be. Some occult clutch seemed to drag both parties from fiasco to fiasco.
These fiascos led, in November 1965, to the Battle for Rhodesia.
Thousands of Italian workmen built it in three years and a whole township of houses, schools, hospitals and roads sprang up on Kariba hill, in a country wild, peopled by primitive tribes, remote and previously inaccessible. Now the Italians are gone and when I was there, in 1966, the settlement was almost a ghost town, for petrol rationing kept away the throngs of visitors and fishermen from far away who otherwise would have reanimated it.
The Italians, nevertheless, left behind something greater than the dam: a token of man's indestructible hope and of the Christian's faith. They worked six-hour shifts, six-on-six-off, to beat the timetable, and succeeded, against great odds of flood and mishap. Some of them, and some African workmen, died of the heat, down there far below the Zambezi's bed. Yet the Italians, during their six-hour respite, built on the very top of the hill the loveliest church a man may see in many a day's march. They were craftsmen as well as artisans and adorned it as only men from Italy, perhaps, know how to adorn a church. It is circular and open to the air, because the congregation, then, was more than it could contain, and many knelt outside.
They dedicated it to the patron saint of workmen and to those who died during the toil: the names, Italian and tribal, are engraved on a common plate. They knew they would soon be gone and for the simple love of God built this exquisite place where they might worship while the work went on. The task, once done, was meant to uplift men on both sides of the great river, fertilize their lands and improve their lives: what better signature to it than the sign of the cross? On the church's roof they set a great cross, which boatmen on the lake made by the dam, if they lose their bearings, may see from forty miles away.
The waters stored by the dam rose to form the biggest man-made lake in the world: an inland sea it seemed when I flew over it. The spreading lake, too, brought new problems. The people who lived on the river's banks from time unknown, the Batonka (they with quills through their noses and front teeth removed) violently objected to this, the white man's disturbance of their solitude, but in time they were persuaded, moved away, and contentedly settled in new lands. Then came the game, big and small. The larger animals were able, with encouragement, to swim to land as the water rose, but the smaller ones had to be tenderly caught and saved. This rescue operation by means of rafts, boats, nets, nylon ropes and tranquilliser drugs was something new in the world, an epic, done by devoted men of the Game Department. Only the rhinoceros, among the big creatures, sometimes refused to shift, and their transport to dry land was an undertaking, unimaginable before it was achieved.
What followed was as darkness to light. Today, on both sides of the river, soldiers keep watch against each other, and from either side aeroplanes patrol to see what goes on. The great turbines have to be guarded by day and night. From the northern side Radio Zambia incites the tribesmen on the southern one to murder and arson. The Moscow- and Nanking-trained terrorists slip across the 400-mile border in the darkness, and in Rhodesia a handful of police and helicopters watch to stop them before they get too far with their Chinese and Russian bombs and weapons. But for the Western governments and their patronage of these "African nationalists", save the mark, all would now be as it was before. Law and order would reign and men on both sides of the river, black and white, would live in amity, sleep secure at night, and work unafraid by day.
On the hilltop the cross stands between the new severed territories. The church is not quite deserted, though its congregation is gone. The Italian priest has stayed: I was told that he would not leave because he believed he had much work to do among the Africans. Three nuns are there, too, and early each morning he celebrates Mass, alone with them.
I went to the church and on the steps met a lady with (I thought) a Northumberland accent, who looked at me and said, hesitantly "I'm not a Catholic". "Shall we go in?" I said, and we went. The three white nuns prayed and told their rosaries and presently the priest came in, with an African acolyte, and celebrated mass as the sun rose over Kariba.
The Mass, whatever your belief or unbelief, is a majestic ritual, worthy of a king of kings. In this setting, beneath the great cross and the blue African sky, with dogs of war waiting to be unleashed around and the distant world howling Havoc, I felt in it a particular meaning and poignancy.
Imagine (but in your secure, watertight, all-electric, main-drained abode this will be hard), imagine a thatched, mud and wattle hut in the African bush, in the silent and unholy night. The desert itself is not much more lonely. The next kraal is a mile away, the nearest township twenty miles, help, in effect, a million miles. At the weekend thousands of young men have come from Salisbury, Bulawayo or another place, among them the town-tainted wastrels and neerdowells (all cities, white and black, produce quantities of these, as many British and American citizens well know today). Among these, again, are those few who have been trained in arson and murder cattle-maiming and crop-destruction, in faraway Asia, and around them are a larger number who have not been so far but have listened to those others and caught the taint.
You, in your thatched hut in the black, lightless night, cannot read or write. Your world is bounded by the tribe and its tradition, which is just what memory has handed down from the remote recesses of time. Because you have no "history", as the West knows it, your memory is long and keen and vivid, and although you have always slept in peace your flesh still chills at the elders' tales of those other, million and one African nights, stretching back to the unknown beginning: the nights which were rent asunder by the sudden clamour of "Kill, kill" around the huts, the shrieks of the old men and women (the young tribesman might not marry before his assegai was blooded and this blood was cheapest) and the roar of flames. A few minutes and all was done. The captives were gone, to the slaver, and the bodies lay among the embers, which cast a fading glow into that black, black, friendless night.
Now these nights, suddenly and violently, have come again. The young men have been and gone, and before they left spread the word among the kraals: wreck the dips, poison the fodder, hamstring the cattle, stone the white man's car, slash his crops: do all this, or we will burn you when we come again.
So you lie and fear to sleep, in your lonely, thatched hut. Or perhaps you take your babes and creep away into the bush, to try and sleep in a cave or beneath a tree. If you stay in your hut, then at last you do sleep, deeply, immovably, unwakeably, as tribespeople sleep. You do not smell the burning bark-strips, even when the flames rise to the thatch, for the smoke goes upward, until with a sudden roar the roof falls on you.
This is original Africa, now, after seventy years of peace, being rekindled as ancient embers might be stirred. This is the African reality which Western politicians call "African nationalism", which newspapers, radio and television conceal from the mass-audience.
Next morning, if you live, you talk endlessly with the others around, and try to understand. Why are "our children" doing this? The only world you know ends at the headman's boundary, but you gather, without comprehending, that "the children" are being told in the outer world to do these things, that mysterious outer world where your protectors have lived from the time of the great Queen who first made your nights secure. What is this new thing? Why cannot the Chief protect you, or your white "fathers".
What would you do, gentle reader, if you were the Chief of 70,000 tribespeople in this district of some 120 miles by 30: or if you were the District Commissioner, with his six white and twelve black police? What would you do if you were in their place and you were told that the distant Protector would no longer protect you, because you do not speak for "the people"?
I went over the story of one such affair on the spot. It occurred during the eighteen months following the destruction of the Federation and was meant to force the hand of London into capitulation in Southern Rhodesia, as it had been forced by the same means in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The word had gone round: the white man is weak: strike, strike!
This particular reign of terror (other districts suffered similarly) was brought under control in two days, by the arrival of a small force of black troops and the use of a few helicopters. The eyes watching from above unnerved the terrorists and reassured the tribesfolk, who slowly returned to their huts to sleep after spending cold nights, men, women and children, in the bush. Freed from the terror, they began to report the presence of any "intimidator" who showed himself. Today the district is a picture of peace, where the people work and sleep without fear, the cattle thrive, dipping goes on as authority insists. Any who go there may see a tribe happy in its fashion.
These are the facts of what happens. The other fact is that such deeds of criminal violence are presented to the Western world by its newspapers, radio and television as the gallant exploits of "freedom fighters", "guerillas" and "outlawed African nationalists". This constantly happens, and has happened again as I write; the burning and killing of black folk by black folk are presented as an understandable reaction against the white man's authority.
Let me show you, good reader, what truly occurs. These men are picked up somewhere in Rhodesia and smuggled over the border to Lusaka in Zambia, where are the terrorist headquarters. They seem to be studied there and after a few weeks are forwarded by road to Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika, which today seems to be a Communist outpost, or colony, on the north-eastern coast of Africa. From there they go by air to Moscow, Nanking or North Korea, are trained in the use of weapons, explosives and petrol for some months, and then return by the same route to Dar es Salaam, Lusaka and Rhodesia.
I have seen the statements made by many of these men, who were captured, and they all tell the same story, save for the few who refuse to say anything at all. The others describe their experiences similarly and in detail and by cross-checking one can see that they are true. They are all provided with a "cover story" for use if captured, and it is always, the same story: that they were induced to go to Moscow (or Peking, or North Korea) by the offer of "a scholarship" which would qualify them for a better post on their return to Rhodesia: they say they would not have gone if they had known the real purpose; but they all agree that, when they discovered it, they submitted without ado to the training in weapons, explosives and the rest. Some of them have been caught with caches of Russian- and Chinese-marked weapons and bombs.
The communist budget for this Operation Africa must be enormous. The permanent shuttle-service by air between Dar es Salaam and the terrorist training-centres in Moscow, Nanking and North Korea alone must be most costly. During their stay there, and in Dar es Salaam and Lusaka, they have to be housed, fed, clothed and given money. A large staff in the Russian and Chinese embassies at Dar es Salaam is needed to supervise their reception and transport, and this in addition to the cost of all the instructors and buildings at the other end.
When British politicians in London and American ones in Washington and at the United Nations in New York insist that a solution "acceptable to the African people" must be attained in Rhodesia, they mean these people, for they refuse to listen to their victims, the tribespeople, their headman and chiefs, who are the true "people". The arrogant and ignorant disdain shown by politicians from England, particularly, towards them during the last five years has been a spectacle, as humiliating to responsible white folk as was Mr. Chamberlain's performance at Munich and President Roosevelt's at Yalta. Every day now the question poses itself larger and ever larger: why is America, and Britain under America's wing, supporting communism in Africa? Why are they fulfilling Lenin's plan?
But for that, peace would return to Africa. The terrorist gangs were brought under firm control, without great difficulty, in the year preceding UDI, and but for the organization in the communist East and the support it receives from "the free world" in the West, they would never be heard of again. In fact, very much will be heard of them during the rest of 1966 and in 1967 if general war has by then not occurred, because this is considered to be the now-or-never time for the complete subjugation of Africa. The greatest possible amount of violence will for this reason be unloosed in order that The Voice of America (today, apparently a Mr. Goldberg) may declare that this is The Voice of Africa speaking.[10]
From the support of terrorism in Southern Africa to war is but a short step. Such a war, obviously, would not be one "against Communism", but, in truth, in support of it, because the impulse comes from that quarter, and the encouragement from the professedly opposite one.
This is the time set for that war, and if the world somehow skids past the peril in coming months it will be blessed indeed. As by careful planning, all the sources of war conjoin at this moment in time: the case against South Africa at the International Court, the published plan for war on South Africa (see a later chapter), the siege of Rhodesia, the communist terrorism in Rhodesia, the war-mongering majority of irresponsibles in the United Nations, and, above all, the now public incitement by the United States (if its representative there speaks for the President, as one must assume, and not against him).
A perilous brink, my masters, and I trust that you may think on these things when next you hear or read about "freedom fighters" or "guerillas" in Rhodesia. May your minds then conjure up the image of that constant shuttle-service between Lusaka, Dar es Salaam and the distant communist terrorist-camps; of the encouragement given to all that by your politicians in London, Washington and New York; and of that lonely mud-and-wattle hut blazing in the night with black folk trapped inside.
Let us go back for a moment to that place. Near the charred site of such a hut I talked with the Chief, in his good suit, white helmet, and chief's badge. A German film-cameraman, in search of the picturesque, once asked the District Commissioner here if he would ask the Chief to pose "in his ostrich feathers". This one, who has been half round the world twice, had none and if he ever saw an ostrich feather, then perhaps in Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. The only tribal costume ever known in this tribe was nothing, and today's tribesman there has long worn white man's clothing.
I sat beside him in his little court while he adjudged what I thought must he a small matter, for he tried it in a room and few came to listen, whereas for anything of tribal importance the people would have gathered in thousands around the big indaba tree outside. Thus I was surprised when he murmured to me the dread word, "Arson", for I knew the terrorists were gone.
Benign and judicial as any High Court judge in the West, he questioned the complainant (a woman) and I learned, as he translated for me, that the matter was but a domestic one. "I want to know," said she, "why my husband burned my hut". The Chief looked at the husband: "Well", he said, penitently, "I came home from a beerdrink and went to her hut" (she was his second wife) "but she called out 'I am tired'." Such words are not unknown in the West, I am told, but the husband did not put the proverbial Western counter-question. He was a tribesman and knew a woman's place. He demanded to know what she had been doing, that she was tired, whereon she admitted him. But his question, repeated, remained unanswered, so that he removed the children and whatever else the hut contained and burned it (an act, I believe, of symbolic meaning). The Chief quietly interrupted his eloquence (the tribesman, if allowed, will talk forever) and asked, "Do you love your wife?", and the husband said, Yes, but he was very, very drunk that night. Thus the Chief sorted the thing out, in a few moments, to its happy ending, and as we left the tribesfolk outside made respectful farewell, hands clapping in unison and a shrill, birdlike call.
These, fellow seekers after knowledge, are "the African people". Given the protection, against other tribes (today, against the outer world) which they have had for seventy years, they know how to manage their affairs and live in content. This Chief, and nearly all the people I met, black and white, spoke bitterly of the earlier terror by night, applauded what had been done to end it, and prayed only that it might never return. Word had reached them of what went on in neighbouring, now "independent" territories and their fear, outweighing every other thought, was that the old times of killing and burning should come again.
I asked the Chief if he had spoken for independence at the great Indaba of over six hundred chiefs before UDI Yes, he said, they had discussed and debated for five days, every man his say, and every one agreed that, as the protector no longer protected and was weak, they must "cut the strings" and look for protection to their own government.
Was all well now, I asked. Yes, he said, very well: the people no longer went in fear, they could sleep and tend their cattle and work their fields in peace. He had been to London, been turned away, and could not comprehend why the great men there listened to "our children" (the terrorists) and ignored the leaders of the people. I recalled a day, just before Independence, when a British Prime Minister (after one week in Rhodesia and meeting forty-six people) said in the Commons, "The Chiefs cannot, by the widest stretch of imagination, be said to be capable of representing the African population as a whole".
A lot of ignorance is a dangerous thing. Unless and until the tribal system can be destroyed (and it goes back beyond any time that we can record) they and only they are so capable, and a man who thus frivols with the basic fact of African life is as a child who plays around a gusher with a firecracker.
"What do you think of one-man-one-vote?" I said. To the ordinary tribesman even the question would be incomprehensible. The Chief was a travelled man and knew what was meant. These people, from chief to kraalsman, always choose words which will not offend, and, fearing to affront, he said deprecatingly, "I think that is not good here. This country must grow", he made a gesture towards a tall tree, "like that". "Is there anything you need here?" I asked. "Yes", he said, "more big schools" (he meant secondary schools: two days later, as it happened, the Government announced a new African education programme providing for three hundred new secondary schools in the next ten years).
As I came away I thought of smoking ruins, of wrecked dips, dead cattle, hamstrung beasts unable to rise, of a lonely white farmer or two gunned down through an open window. All that was done, and could not come again unless it came from outside. But the voices from across the border, from London, from something incomprehensible to "the African people" called the United Nations in New York continued their incitement: the shuttle-service between Dar es Salaam and communist Asia plied on ...
The terror by night still lurked in the alien shadows.
Picture the burning hut to yourself, gentle and listless reader, for with your tacit assent and that of your Members and Congressmen these things are done.
In June-July of 1964 Mr. Ian Smith arranged for twenty-nine senior chiefs to visit many countries of the strange, new world. They were received with ceremony by the Pope in Rome and by Ministers in India, but the British Prime Minister refused to see them and they achieved only two half-hours with Mr. Duncan Sandys, who told them that in London's opinion the "African nationalists" had the following of the people. The chiefs pointed out that whatever following these had came out of intimidation by murder and arson. Mr. Sandys intimated that methods did not concern him, he was satisfied that they had the following. Thereon the chiefs said they were law-abiding people but by calling out their impis they could soon show who were the true leaders.
Mr. Sandys at once retreated, with the familiar cry of "no violence": on all these occasions the chiefs were told that "a following" produced by violence had been "demonstrated" but that they must not demonstrate a following by replying to violence with counter-violence.
The chiefs returned to Rhodesia humiliated and angry and, after taking counsel with all the other chiefs and headmen, told Mr. lan Smith of their strong support for independence, the only way in which peace and law could return to the kraals. Mr. Smith went to London, for some more doubletalk, and was told that Southern Rhodesia could only receive independence if the British Government were given "evidence" and "views freely expressed by the population" that the majority supported him. (During seven weeks of this period 1,725 acts of terrorism, from murder down to cattle-maiming, were committed, the two "African nationalist" parties were banned, and the kraals became peaceful again).
Mr. Smith, still hoping to satisfy London, then set about to "ascertain opinion" in the only possible way, in Africa, by consulting the chiefs and headmen, some seven hundred of whom gathered at Domboshawa in October 1964 and for five days reasoned together in the traditional tribal way.
Each in turn rose at the end and called for "the strings" to be cut, that is, the bond with England severed, and independence be given. They were embittered by the indignity of their leaders' reception in London, by the refusal to see, listen to or learn the truth, and by the deference shown there to the organizers of terror. Some of their words deserve record:
"It is amazing that anyone who lives six thousand miles away should think they understand conditions here."
"We have asked the British Prime Minister to come here and confront us ... The thing that depresses us is that his representative is here next door in Northern Rhodesia and has not the courtesy to come ... You see for yourselves the manners of a person who lives six thousand miles away."
"There is no such thing as one man, one vote, casting your vote on a piece of paper. This is quite foreign to our way of life. By our customs, our method of voting is to discuss the matter openly, as we are doing today in this hall. After a matter has been fully discussed anyone who has any objection is invited to stand up and give his reasons for objecting. This is our traditional method of reaching unanimity ... We have seen that Britain does not wish to respect our customs, she is destroying them."
"I am one of those who visited Britain. Face to face they said to us, they no longer recognize the chiefs, they only recognize two people who are our children, Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole" (the leaders of the two banned parties which were identified with the reign of terror).
"Right from the beginning we were recognized as the leaders of the people, by the missionaries to whom the chiefs in council first gave land: by Rhodes and by Queen Victoria when he sent Chief Lotsha to her as his representative: in 1914 and again in 1939 it was we chiefs who called our people to the aid of Britain. The King, with his Queen and their two daughters, came especially to thank the chiefs for that. When the Queen Mother came here I, together with all the chiefs, presented her with our token of loyalty ... Now I wonder if the London we have always known still exists. This is perhaps another London which has emerged because they suddenly cannot remember all that the chiefs have done ... It makes us believe that it is the British Government that is saying to these young thugs, 'Go and kill your fathers'. In London they know about the deeds of these young thugs yet they have not bestirred themselves nor yet even raised a voice in protest. This convinces me that they are the ones who are behind it all ..."
"Where Rhodes met the chiefs in the Matopos there was an enormous boulder high up above them on the hill. Recently that boulder tumbled down to the bottom. This is a sign that we who are gathered here must come to a decision ... When that rock fell it indicated to us to cut the strings and have our independence so that we can live our own life in this our land."
You observe, companion of these pages, that these people, who do not write down their history, carry living history in them. Everything that has gone before is there, in its proper place and given its rightful meaning. And by their "traditional method of reaching unanimity" they reach truth. Consider those words, "This convinces me that they are the ones that are behind it all". They recall the child's cry at the court of the unclothed king: "The king is naked". What folk in the enlightened West fear to say, these people discern and utter.
Consider also that fallen boulder. A hundred years from now that event will be part of their living, though unwritten history, in its right place and given its apt significance: "The protector is gone: we must cut the strings".
1965 began and the doubletalk continued: "every time we moved nearer to them, they moved away", said Mr. Ian Smith later. In February, at last, a British Minister agreed to meet the chiefs in another great indaba at Domboshawa. The kopje at Domboshawa has an especial place in the beliefs and customs of the local tribes. They believe it to be the haunt of spirits, and not of benign ones, apparently, because when the Queen Mother was there tribesmen were posted round about with guns, which they fired to keep the spirits away. This did not happen when Mr. Arthur Bottomley, Commonwealth Secretary, arrived; possibly one may attribute the unhappy outcome to the hostile spirits.
I have contemplated political gentlemen for nearly forty years and cannot recall one who seemed less suitable for the post he filled. Hailing from Walthamstow, he seems to have risen in politics through the Labour Party machine, and knew nothing of Africa (he once confused Zambia with Gambia). He was a natural master of the mot injuste and aroused in others that unease which the sight of a hippopotamus walking on eggs would cause. His mind moved in a world of ballots, shows of hands, card votes, motions and amendments, points of order and rulings from the chair, and he tried hard to ascertain that the chiefs had consulted their people by such methods: when this baffled them, he thought they were evading his interrogation.
Some of the chiefs remembered Rhodes and Lobengula and even the four Household Cavalry officers sent by Queen Victoria[11] to impress that king. When they contemplated Mr. Bottomley they felt that the boulder's fall was significant indeed.
Mr. Bottomley, facing the red-robed figures, courteously instructed them that there were "some differences of opinion among the African peoples": however, he would listen to their views. His advisers were also maladroit, for someone put into his mouth two native proverbs, "A river is filled by its tributaries" and "The breast of man is a granary". The use of tribal idiom is perilous, unless you have some acquaintance with the allusive and indirect form of speech used by tribesmen, and Mr. Bottomley asked for one Chief's comment, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The Chiefs spoke in Sindebele or Shona yet their tongue was nearer to that which Shakespeare spake than the man from Whitehall's. Their theme was always the same: protest against the present Britain, and reminder of the British past:
"You know full well that many people have died, have been incinerated in their huts, that our huts are thatched with grass. It seems clear that the British Government has no concern for us. You said we have proverbs that say this and that: to my mind it would have become you better to come here humbly to learn from us Chiefs what the position is in this country. I stand here in fear because my home may be burning ... You do not realize that we do not sleep of nights because of this fear that by the morning we and our children may be dead ..."
"I am astounded to hear that the Chiefs and headmen are not the leaders of the people. What have you been doing for seventy years that you have not discovered this before?"
"We waited here for you a whole week in October and then heard you were gone back to England ... You, sir, if you had a thatched roof and your wife and children were incinerated in it, would you be content? Many of the Chiefs and Headmen here present have had their wives and children killed."
"A person from the British Government came through these parts and said there would be a wind of change and because of what the British Government then did the whole of Africa is now in turmoil and strife ... Everywhere the people are fighting like dogs over a bone because the power was let fall into wrong hands ... We live in fear because the Europeans overseas are giving our youngsters bombs and weapons ... When we went to London ... the British Ministers ran away and hid. One of them said, 'I can see you for thirty minutes' and then had the nerve to tell us, 'You are not the leaders of the people, Nkomo is the leader'."
"I stand so that you can see me, your servant who has had his houses burned and children and wives killed."
Then the repeated reminders of the past, with its pledges and protection given. Ever and again these men retold the story of peace that began with the meeting between Rhodes and Lobengula, the period that began with the Separator of the Fighting Bulls and now ended with the crashing boulder. That meeting in the Matopos was a monument, erected in their minds, which was more real to them than any marble statue to a white man:
"Rhodes set us our great example when he said that everybody must work together, put down their weapons and work as one community, and we did this and have lived very happily together. Had we known that this would be changed, we certainly would not have laid aside our weapons."
"From the time when I was a child, brought up by my fathers, the old people, they always made me understand that the British word and the British sense of justice was something that one had to look up to and therefore I have grown up to be what I am today ... Now we have doubts whether England is still England, or whether she is standing on one side with some ulterior motive, and we are left with the impression that those who hold the reins in England are no longer British, probably some other nationality. And I say this because I am certain that the British in the past would never have allowed this state of affairs to continue."
The reader will see that these men, though they spoke their own tongue, spoke with what was once the voice of England. Today one may borrow the words of a song and ask, Where are all the flowers gone? These eloquent words appeared to fall from Mr. Bottomley as water from feathers, and the next encounter (a week later he met the Council of Chiefs, twenty-six senior Chiefs elected by the rest) was still unhappier.
Mr. Bottomley began by informing the Council that he had seen the "African nationalist leaders", and my readers may care to put themselves inside the skin of the men who heard that, with their minds full of pictures of burning huts and death. He then asked the Chiefs to "demonstrate that they represent the bulk of African opinion", and informed them that they used "the ballot" in the election of traditional chiefs within the tribes. Even for Mr. Bottomley, this was an astounding assertion: chiefs are chiefs by tradition of birth.
One Chief, stung beyond endurance, said, "It is obvious to us, Sir, that however much truth we speak it is not the intention of our honoured guest to be satisfied with what we know to be the truth. If we take him to the grave of people killed, to the graves of children murdered, to wrecked churches and schools and diptanks, he still would not be satisfied that this was done by the African nationalists. If I had my way, I would say, 'Let us get out of this meeting. Let Mr. Bottomley hand over government to these people and see what would happen ..."'
Any meeting of minds between Mr. Bottomley and these men was impossible. To them, Mr. Bottomley was a hostile and incomprehensible figure: to him, they were slippery customers who would not stand up to questions about "ballots" and "votes". From first to last Mr. Bottomley ignored every reference to what was the very root of the matter: the terror in the kraals. At the end, when one chief personally asked him, "What do you want? If you want us to demonstrate our following, let us call out our impis and restore law and order", Mr. Bottomley patted his shoulder and said something which sounded like, "Oh, Oi pray yew, no violence".
The meeting had to be wound up, when its hopelessness became clear, by a man of different kind, young, able, active, airman, farmer, now Minister: Mr. William Harper, of Internal Affairs. He spoke language which both parties could understand, saying (for the benefit of Mr. Bottomley) that they were on "completely different wavelengths", and (for that of the Chiefs) that "the hippo and the lion do not talk the same language". Possibly in a last, faint hope of reaching Mr. Bottomley's mind, he explained that the tribal system and the Western electoral system were as worlds apart, and that the best evidence of the hold of the tribal system on "the people" was that those who sought political power in the land had to resort to force to try and upset it.
With that Mr. Bottomley went his way, having learned and forgotten nothing, 1965 wore on, and the course of human events neared the point where Rhodesia would be driven to declare independence, if only to be able to put down the terror and settle the land again. At the last instant (in October) Mr. Harold Wilson consented to meet the Council of Chiefs (for ninety minutes). He refused to have the proceedings recorded so that no verbatim exists (a fortnight later Mr. Wilson tape-recorded and published a telephone conversation with Mr. Ian Smith, without informing Mr. Smith).
From notes made by the Chiefs (who protested against the refusal to have the meeting recorded) it is clear that they spoke as they had spoken to Mr. Bottomley: that is, they recalled the British past, pointed to the terror in the kraals and to the "African nationalists" as its organizers, and said they wanted independence so that they could handle it, as the British Government encouraged it.
Like Mr. Bottomley, Mr. Wilson, when he reported to the Commons, ignored the great issue, the terror. He disparaged the Chiefs as being "paid by the Rhodesian Government". They do receive up to a maximum of about £550 in salary and allowances. British M.P.'s get £1,750 and have been heard to ask for more.
Finally, Mr. Wilson fired his memorable dictum, based on a non-recorded meeting of ninety minutes, that the Chiefs were not capable, "by the widest stretch of imagination", of representing the African population as a whole. This stupendous misjudgment cleared the way for another period of "African nationalist" courtship in London, and produced an impasse in the Rhodesian negotiations which could only be broken by "cutting the strings" and declaring Independence.
The descents on Africa during these twelve years of British Ministers, Conservative and Socialist, and their performances there, made people who live in Africa writhe with embarrassment: they were as some quite new form of human life. The same sensation was experienced earlier by those who lived in Europe, for instance, at the time when Mr. Chamberlain spoke of "plucking this flower safety from this nettle danger" by abandoning "a little country far away" to Hitler's invasion.
Six months later, when "sanctions" were in top gear and "talks" between London and Salisbury were arranged, in hope of a settlement, President Kaunda of Zambia renewed his clamour for Britain to attack Rhodesia. The London government, the newspapers then announced, assured him that "the rights of Rhodesia's four million Africans will be fully protected".
And the rights of Zambia's Africans? Zambia's independence was ushered in by the massacre of the Lumpa sect. They were Africans. Nobody in England cared or remonstrated. The "rights of four million Africans in Rhodesia", if London had its way, would obviously be "protected" in the same measure.
Their only true hope of protection lay in independence, and it was given them.[12]
For great wars may from small beginnings grow, and as Captain Jenkins's car caused one between England and Spain (which enlarged into the greater war of the Austrian Succession) what might not Miss Phombeya's toe have effected, efficiently handled by the machines of mass-information? True, Captain Jenkins, de-eared by a Spanish coastguard, was left earless for eight years before the Commons heard his tale (did he say, "Those who have cars to hear ...?) and rose in fury against Spain. Possibly a bellicose reason was desired in 1739 which was not sought in 1731: "history" does not say.
Then again, the goods and chattels of Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, nearly caused a war, for he was by chance of birth in Gibraltar a British subject, so that Lord Palmerston sent the British fleet to Greece to obtain redress for that act of pillage in Athens.
Therefore the world may have been fortunate in being spared grave consequences arising from Miss Phombeya's toe.
Miss Phombeya, a Malawi girl of twenty was one of a "Number of Ladies Present at the Scene" (Mr. Justice Southworth uses the public-convenience labels throughout his report and one hears a chuckle coming from the chambers where he prepared it) when Mr. Macmillan arrived at Blantyre in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in January 1960. He had just announced "the wind of change" at Lagos; this, being reported everywhere as an intimation that Nyasaland would be allowed to break up the Federation, encouraged the Malawi Congress Party to arrange a nice little demonstration for him at Blantyre, to reinforce his faith in the desire of "the African people" for independence now, now, now. The representatives of The Times, the News-Chronicle, the Standard and the whole of the daily press also were there.
The reports which reached London that evening, and from there the world, variously estimated "the Number of Ladies and Gentlemen Present at the Scene" at two hundred up to two thousand. They spoke of "shaming scenes" and "a sickening spectacle" provoked by "the stupidity of the Nyasaland white police officers" and "an ugly situation" provoked by "a few young undisciplined policemen" who "stamped with heavy boots on bare feet" and went "berserk" and were "frenzied", of "baton-swinging", of "hysterical white settlers" of "Africans being seized indiscriminately" and "bundled roughly with punches and whip slashes into caged lorries", of other Africans being "grabbed and hurled, yelling and struggling" into a jeep, of Black Marias, and much more.
Through all this Mr. Macmillan, in Ryall's Hotel, quietly ate his pheasant especially flown from Scotland (one report changed this to "grouse", as being more suitable fare for a Scotsman: another added local colour to the tumultuous scene by putting in some non-existent "eucalyptus trees").
By that evening the "build-up" of the story had begun and one of the white police inspectors engaged remarked to his wife, as he listened to the B.B.C.'s depictment of what had occurred, "They must have gone to another incident than the one I went to". An African merchant who also heard it also was "surprised when I heard there was a rioting and beating, and so on ... because there was no such thing at all". An American missionary of twenty-three years residence in Malawi, Mr. Barr, said when he heard the incident described as "a riot", "Riot. What riot?"
No matter: the build-up went on in the manner familiar to those who know the news-rooms of British and American newspapers. By the time it reached the Swedish Stockholms Tidningen, it took this shape, in shrieking headlines: "THE AGGRESSION OF THE WHITE POLICE FRIGHTENS THE BRITISH", and the report of the "violent riot" continued:
"The black masses acted calmly and with restraint until white police started to tear their banners away and attacked them with their truncheons. With uncontrolled brutality they whipped the black women and men and received willing assistance from local white civilians. The incident was also immediately echoed in the English Parliament where the Minister for Colonial Affairs promised the indignant home front to undertake at once an official investigation ... the incident has opened the eyes of the English public to the Police State conditions which prevail in Rhodesia and Nyasaland ... aggressions by the whites ... something has to be done to curb the white extremists ..."
In ever-growing form these reports spread over the world, until, two days later the Daily Herald in big headlines demanded, NAME THESE GUILTY MEN! STOP THESE BULLIES ONCE AND FOR ALL! It went on to speak of "a shameful, brutal, UNNECESSARY clash between police and African demonstrators, provoked by senior British police officers". What happened could not be denied, it said, because it took place "under the eyes of experienced reporters". NAME (it cried) the plain clothes officer who, in a state of frenzy ... started the whole thing. NAME the senior officer who started lashing out with his baton. NAME the officer in charge of the whole operation. This brutal, barbarous, bullying attitude of mind must be kicked out of the colonial administration. No wonder that "hatred boils up in the hearts of friendly coloured folk when boneheads are let loose to knock them around with batons. NAME the men ... PROSECUTE them."
By this time the affair was an international headline one. Questions In The House had been asked, and the thought of such gives Ministers nightmares.[13] The Minister yielded, fortunately as it transpired. Mr. Justice Southworth of the Nyasaland High Court was appointed to investigate the matter. He is evidently a man of subtle humour, as well as judicial impartiality, and his report greatly adds to the gaiety of nations, if any of that commodity remains. I recommend any who enjoy a good laugh to read it, even if they have to go to the British Museum for it.
At enormous expense the enquiry was held. It lasted four weeks and two days. Eighty-one witnesses were heard, including ten news paper correspondents who were invited to substantiate what they reported (although the day was cool when he was examined, one of them perspired so much that he appeared to be wearing drop earrings, a friend tells me). Six counsel were engaged, including the Nyasaland Solicitor General. The report covers 125 pages and its author's grave portraiture of The Ladies and Gentlemen in the witness-box deserves publication in paperback form throughout the English-speaking world.
It deflates the newsroom-inflated balloon to the size of a shrivelled pea. The brutal white police were thirteen in number, and one plainclothes one who took photographs (fortunately, because many of these showed what in truth occurred). They wore light walking shoes (not "heavy boots") and seven of them carried swagger-sticks weighing four and a quarter ounces (not "batons" or "truncheons" or "whips"). Some of them were former "London Bobbies" or from other British police forces (some of the reports said there would have been no trouble if only "London Bobbies" had handled the affair). They rapped and prodded unruly demonstrators with these swagger sticks to get them back on the sidelines.
The crowd, Mr. Justice Southworth estimates on the strength of all the evidence, was between eight hundred and a thousand people (not 2,000), nearly all of them onlookers, come only to look. The actual demonstrators numbered between fifty and eighty, but he thinks fifty nearer. The police had a landrover and a Bedford truck, the truck covered with wiremesh against stone-throwing, (not "Black Marias" or "caged lorries"). Thirty-five demonstrators were removed, but not "hurled" or "bundled" into these vehicles: they fought to get in, to the perplexity of the reporters present, who do not know that "Get arrested" is an instruction given on these occasions.
The actual demonstrators were a small group who broke out of the cordon into the road. These were headed by five Young Ladies, of whom Miss Phombeya was the most active, the prima ballerina, as it were. The behaviour of these Young Ladies, again, appeared to the newspapermen, unfamiliar with the African scene, to indicate irrepressible emotion and enthusiasm for some cause, for they shouted and danced themselves into a frenzy (one of the young men around them threw himself into a mud-puddle, tore off his coat and threw it at the police). Those who live in Africa know that dancing is the native form of self-expression among the tribal peoples, and often ends in an eye-rolling condition where the dancer throws himself or herself or falls to the ground. Miss Phombeya and her friends were in fact dancing (and between you and me, friend reader, if ever you are in my part of the world I can show you something of this kind any Sunday you choose).
They continued to self-express themselves in this manner in the truck which took them away. Mr. Barr, the American missionary, says "The girls and several of the boys were carrying on their dancing rhythm similar to a normal village dance, inside the van". Mrs. Warr, a white lady, also describes one of the Young Ladies in the truck "giving us all a little dance, clapping her hands and seeming quite happy".
In the course of the little melée someone trod on Miss Phombeya's toe. Perhaps then, or perhaps at the climactic moment of her dance, she fell to the ground, and was courteously helped to her feet by a police inspector. A photograph of this episode was published in London and over the world as "Police slap down girl demonstrator".
Says Mr. Justice Southworth, "In the course of the disturbance, two or three of the demonstrators kicked or struck European police officers, and three European police officers kicked or struck demonstrators. One young lady had her foot trodden on by a police officer, and sustained a slight injury. The two officers who kicked demonstrators say they did this to make the demonstrators let go of them when they were dragged into the crowd: and the officer who trod on the lady's foot has explained how this was done by accident, an explanation which on the evidence one would not be entitled to reject. One other young lady may or may not have had her foot trodden on on this occasion, but if this occurred, it appears to have been done accidentally by someone in the crowd. The distance between the two furthest points between which the demonstrators moved throughout the course of the demonstration is about eighty yards. The entire incident took place on a straight stretch of road covering an area less than one-sixth the size of a football field ... and appears to have occupied not more than forty minutes".
Mr. Justice Southworth's concluding sentences may have given him as much pleasure as they give today's reader. They place his report high among the literature of humour. More than that, if this standard of reporting were kept by newspapers, radio and television, peace in Africa, and in the world, would be secure:
"As far as can be ascertained the amount of skin lost by both police and demonstrators as a result of injuries received on this occasion would hardly cover an area of one square inch, probably no more than the area of a penny postage stamp: and it does not appear that the amount of blood that was shed would be sufficient to test the capacity of an ordinary mustard spoon. Contemplating the measure of the injuries sustained by the demonstrators, one cannot avoid the reflection that when the face of Helen launched a thousand ships, and brought Agamemnon and the great Achilles to the shores of Phrygia, it hardly achieved as much as Miss Phombeya's toe when it brought the paladins of Fleet Street in the aerial argosies of our day across two continents to appear before your Commissioner in the remote highlands of middle Africa."
May you bear those words in mind, reader of mine, when next you read or hear such tales of mystery and imagination as those which I have quoted earlier in this chapter.
And may I, in the role of old Polonius, lay one more precept in your memory. The tale of Miss Phombeya's toe, which reached you in such inflammatory form, might be said at least to have been founded in fact. Miss Phombeya had a toe, probably ten, and one was trodden. Even such a grain of truth, the size of a mustard seed, is not to be found in many reports published or depicted about Southern Africa today. I have a collection of a score or more of such reports, completely invented, and will enumerate some of them later.
I think you never heard one word about the massacre of 480 people, black, white and brown, men, women and babes, in Angola in March 1961. You heard a great deal, as you have now seen, about Miss Phombeya's toe in January 1960.
I foresaw this five years earlier and then made plans to go to Rhodesia and follow events, but was hindered. I had long stopped writing: now the phrases, "The first western nation in two decades to say 'So far and no further' ... and "A role of worldwide significance" jolted me into the resolve to fare once more unto the breach.
Particularly the words, "a role of worldwide significance". This pricked my interest like a spur. Nowadays, among governments, truth hid its head: there was only cant about "world peace" and "the United Nations" while the body so-called obviously was devised as the instrument of new war. These words of Mr. Ian Smith and the men around him seemed to mean that they saw the whole shape of the great Plan to obliterate nations in a world state and, like the Chiefs at Domboshawa, were not afraid to say "The king is naked". They wanted independence, in truth, from this scheme and only from Britain because of Britain's part in it. They realized that Rhodesia was the linchpin in the remaining area of peace and stability in Africa, and if it were knocked out, the way would be clear for the final move in the great game. I wondered that men so far from the hub of international machinations should see so clearly what all others, at the naked king's court, professed not to perceive. When I came to know these men, later, I was equally surprised by their clear understanding of what was in truth at stake and by their determination to hold the pass.
November The Eleventh! As I heard the words, somewhere in South Africa, I saw myself lean against the wall of a Flanders farmhouse in the drizzling dusk and watch the horse-gunners riding to their lines, with guns behind them that at last were quiet. I remembered many other Eleventh of November's: in London, where the multitudes stopped and stood with bowed heads as the eleventh hour struck; in villages where the scene repeated itself in miniature around the green; in small colonies abroad, when a few expatriates gathered for this annual homage in the English Church. I remembered, as the years passed, how true meaning gradually faded from this celebration, while the shadow of new war grew, and it became little more than an empty form. The course of human events led to no better future but doubled back towards the old shallows and miseries.
Now, after nearly fifty years, another Eleventh of November dawned and brought with it what sounded to me like a new note of truth. Might this be the turn in the disruptive tide? I thought of the other acts of Independence, all of them achieved only by blood, and wondered if this time reason would prevail, or England again go from folly to fiasco.
I remembered my children playing in the British trenches and on the British cannon at Yorktown. How bitter a war was that, and how long and vain a wrangle followed it. As late as 1796 Talleyrand wrote to his English friend Lord Shelburne (a friend of the Colonists):
"The only obstacle that I foresee to the rapid improvement of relations between the two countries is the incredible folly of the British Government, in doing everything that could possibly offend the susceptibilities and alienate the affections of the Americans. Their diplomatic representatives are treated with contempt in London and England is represented in America by men who are known for the fervour of their opposition to the cause of independence or else by minor officials of no importance."
Were we to go through all that again, with a Mr. Wilson playing the part of King George? We were, as the reader now knows, whose cars have heard all the uproar about "rebellion" and "an illegal act" and "restoring the rule of law" (where else in the world, these twenty years, has the rule of any law been invoked, upheld or restored? The rule has been that of war, not of law).
Here let me interpose a thumbnail sketch of a Rhodesian "rebel", for the reader's album. About seventy years ago a Rhodesian trooper, quick to go to England's side, rode behind a convoy of wagons carrying Boer women and children to safety. A woman in one wagon called that the children were hungry and the troopers must find food for them, so they rode off right and left, and found apples in an orchard, which they stuffed into their shirts and gave to the children when they rejoined the convoy. This trooper jogged along behind a wagon, over the tailboard of which leaned a little girl of some ten years, munching one of his apples. Nine years later he returned and married her. Some sixty years later their son, an Air Marshal serving as Minister of State in the British Embassy at Washington was