Rhodesia

SOME 180 miles south of Salisbury, in the sparsely populated Midlands countryside of Rhodesia, seventy-five African men live in a 1000-acre prison without walls. Most of them sleep in eight-by-ten-foot galvanized iron huts, six men to a hut. Their food is meted out in ounces. There are no guards in the compound area, but every morning at eight fifteen there is a roll call, and if an inhabitant has decided to walk out to freedom through the snake-infested bush and high grass, chances are better than even that within hours he will be recaptured.

These men are political prisoners. Members of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), a political party banned by the white minority government, they have been arrested without specific charges and confined without trial, some of them for five-year terms. Their leader, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, is “in restriction” with them, living in a small grass hut near the edge of the compound. He was brought there May 19, after serving an eleven-month term in jail for circulating a “subversive statement.”

In the southeast section of Rhodesia, some 220 miles from this compound, there is another, larger one, holding Joshua Nkomo and about 800 members of his People’s Caretaker Council (PCC), also banned. Thus Rhodesia’s two leading African nationalists and their parties are immobilized.

Hardening racial policies

The likelihood that a racial confrontation would eventually occur in Rhodesia has existed since the rise of African nationalism some dozen years ago. But the crisis that is coming to a head there now was spurred in 1962, when the white electorate cast out the wavering middle-of-theroad government of Sir Edgar Whitehead and brought the right-wing Rhodesian Front Party to power. Since then, the government has detained or restricted more than 3000 persons (Africans, Asians, and Coloreds of mixed blood) without trials or specific charges; banned one daily newspaper and expelled several editors from the country; expelled at least four missionaries, including the Reverend Ralph E. Dodge, a bishop of the Methodist Church; set up a propaganda machine under the direction of P. K. van der Byl and Ivor Benson, both of them ultra-right-wing white supremacists from South Africa; dismissed the chief of staff of the army and the director of the state broadcasting system; and threatened repeatedly to declare independence unilaterally from Britain.

Rhodesia has been a self-governing colony since 1923. Thirty years later it joined Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland to form the Central African Federation, but that fell apart at the end of 1963 when these two states stepped out to become the independent nations of Zambia and Malawi, under African leadership.

Rhodesia lies south of the Zambesi River, along with South Africa and the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and the Zambesi has become Africa’s Mason and Dixon line, the ideological boundary below which white supremacy clings to power. Prime Minister Ian Smith, a forty-seven-year-old tobacco farmer, has vowed that there will be no African government in Rhodesia in his lifetime.

Rhodesia under Smith continues steadily to harden its racial policies. Multiracial opposition has grown weaker as it has become more liberal, and the organizational home for this opposition — the Rhodesia Party — could not capture a single seat from the Rhodesian Front opponents in the May 7 parliamentary elections. As a result, liberals are hard to find, and the few who remain are being forced underground by social and economic ostracism.

For whites, the only liberal pockets left are in some segments of the press, the church, and the schools, including the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and all three of these areas are feeling increasing pressure from the Front. The middle ground they represent is rapidly eroding, and a polarization at the extremes is taking place.

There are three principal protagonists in the Rhodesian drama, each capable of precipitating a tragedy of major proportions: the Rhodesian Front, the African nationalists, and the British government.

The Front has made perfectly clear what it wants: independence from Britain under the present constitution and white supremacy forever. Nobody knows for sure how many of the country’s 217,000 whites are in full sympathy with this position, but it is generally conceded that most of them are. They argue simply that the white settlers made Rhodesia; there would have been little reason for the black Africans to come there in numbers were it not for what the whites had built.

In two elections during the past nine months, white voters have given overwhelming support to the Front. One close observer of the political scene, a liberal journalist, estimates that perhaps 200 whites would accept with equanimity a black government fairly soon, and as many more would not object to such a government within the next twenty years. “The vast majority will never accept it quietly,” he said.

B-roll and A-roll

To control the more than 4 million nonwhites in the country, the Rhodesian Front has a small but powerful military and police force, well equipped and well trained, which is backed up by a ready reserve of some 25,000 young men. On top of that, every white man between the ages of eighteen and fifty can be called into service in an emergency. There is also the CID, Rhodesia’s version of the FBI, which is coldly efficient and genuinely feared. Documented cases of brutality by these forces are numerous, causing more than one Rhodesian to say publicly that the Front is reminiscent of Germany under Adolph Hitler.

Life for the African in such an atmosphere is difficult at best. In addition to the detentions, the ban on political activity, and the police brutality, Africans must face a grossly inadequate school system, a comparatively higher cost of living, an average income one tenth that of whites, and a high unemployment rate. As required by law, they must live either in the ghettolike townships or in reserves far out in the bush, and they must carry identification to go outside those areas.

Voting in elections is based on a complicated formula involving income, property, and education, with the effect that only a relative handful are eligible. Furthermore, all but a few hundred of the qualified African voters are on the so-called B-roll, which means they can vote only for the fifteen B-roll Parliament seats, and not for the fifty A-roll seats held by whites. Even the B-roll members, who are Africans, cannot escape discrimination because the Parliament itself observes numerous petty forms of segregation. Most hotels, theaters, and restaurants in the country are closed to nonwhites, and job advancement, even for the highly qualified, is a rare thing to accomplish.

In fairness to Smith and the Rhodesian Front, it must be said that they alone are not responsible for white supremacy in the country. Not since Garfield Todd lost the prime ministership to Sir Edgar Whitehead in 1958 has a man sympathetic to African rights been in office, and even Todd looks liberal to a great extent by comparison. Whitehead and his colleague Sir Roy Welensky, the former prizefighter and railway worker who became Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, were only mildly interested in giving the African a political voice. Though Whitehead toward the end of his reign seemed to be mellowing a bit, he could hardly be called liberal or even moderate, except perhaps in comparison with Smith, and if he was more genteel than the present Prime Minister, he was also more hypocritical. No one need wonder what Smith’s feelings are; he states them bluntly.

It was Whitehead who first introduced detention without trial, the ban on African political parties, and a host of oppressive laws aimed at intimidation, imprisonment, and even death for black protesters. And it was Whitehead who negotiated the present constitution in 1961 (a constitution which, incidentally, was opposed so strongly by Ian Smith, then a Member of Parliament in Whitehead’s United Federal Party, that he walked out in protest).

The constitution has never been recognized by the African nationalists. It theoretically could bring about African majority rule in ten to fifteen years, but Smith, who now seems willing even to leave the British Commonwealth in order to save it, has said repeatedly that Africans will never control the government. The constitution has no guarantees against search without warrant, arrest without charge, or detention without trial, and it is generally conceded that Smith wants independence under it only to amend into oblivion the few remaining freedoms it preserves.

In spite of the fact that they are outnumbered almost twenty to one, the whites in Rhodesia, as represented by the Front, are in firm control, and they want independence from Britain in order to make their position permanently secure.

Nationalism versus tribalism

The second major character in the Rhodesian drama is the African, represented by Joshua Nkomo’s PCC group and Ndabaningi Sithole’s ZANU. With both of the leaders in restriction and all political activities by their followers banned, the African is without a voice.

Furthermore, the once unified nationalists split in 1963 when Sithole and a small group of dissidents grew tired of Nkomo’s indecisiveness and formed their own group. Though the two disagree on little of real substance, they have drifted farther apart, and all efforts at reunion have failed. Sithole, an American-educated intellectual, is generally considered the best organizer and policy maker, but Nkomo, who also is a university graduate (South Africa), has a much broader appeal with the people, thanks to his spellbinding oratory.

Further hurting the nationalist cause is the fact that the African tribal chiefs of Rhodesia have given support to the white government, and Smith had advertised this as being representative of the feelings of the African people. Even some of the Rhodesian Front supporters laugh up their sleeves at this, though, since the government has boldly bought the support of the chiefs with handsome salaries and periodic junkets overseas. Tribalism is less a factor in Rhodesia than in most African countries, and most people think there is little significance in the chiefs’ sellout to the Front. The chiefs are poorly educated and lacking in influence, and cannot be said to represent the people truly. “If the Front is convinced that rankand-file Africans will echo their chiefs, why don’t they let the people vote?” asks Sithole.

Nationalism is the antithesis of tribalism, and it is not difficult to see why the chiefs might be motivated to support the antinationalist white government. It is ironic, though, that whites who continually urge Africans to throw off their past and accept the modern world’s advantages in medicine and agriculture would at the same time urge them to cling to the “wisdom” of their political witch doctors, the chiefs.

The fifteen B-roll seats in Parliament, held by Africans, are both ineffective and unrepresentative. The vast majority of Africans have refused to register to vote and have boycotted every election since the one in 1961 at which the constitution was approved. Their position has been that acceptance of the fifteen seats and participation in the government would have the appearance of complicity with a government and a constitution that they totally reject.

Few alternatives are open to the nationalists except violence. Their buying power is not sufficient to make an economic boycott successful and they are already too crippled by unemployment to gain anything from a general strike. In their frustration, Africans have turned to clumsy and uncoordinated acts of sabotage. There are some wellinformed persons who fear Communist support of these efforts from outside the country; now those fears have been heightened by government seizure of several caches of Russian-made arms.

Sithole, with a five-year sentence to serve in restriction, gives the impression of being a patient and confident man. “Only the whites can provide a constitutional solution to this stalemate,” he said. “If they won’t, the only alternative is bloodshed. This oppression can’t be maintained forever. Sooner or later, it will break down.” Nkomo has said essentially the same thing. Both of them are waiting for the white man to make his choice.

White patience

The choice must be made in part by Britain, the third major character in the Rhodesian struggle. Under both Conservative and Labor governments the British have expressed unequivocal opposition to Rhodesian independence “so long as the government of that country remains under the control of a white minority.” The Rhodesian Front, by threatening unilateral independence, has kept the issue hot, but so far Smith has been unwilling to drop the other shoe.

Negotiations between the two governments are continuing, and one informed source in Salisbury believes a British “sellout” is imminent. “Britain wants badly to be rid of Rhodesia,” said the source, “and it seems likely that some sort of compromise that will allow the white minority to perpetuate its control is in the making.”

In such an event, the Rhodesian Front could probably hold out indefinitely, perhaps for twenty years or more. While the country is not as prepared as South Africa to thumb its nose at the world, it has plenty of advantages nonetheless. Rhodesia is a beautiful country with an ideal climate and probably the highest state of development of any former colony in Africa.

The government controls an educational system in which white parents are given stiff fines for failure to send their children to school while only 15,000 nonwhites in the entire country are enrolled in classes above the primary-school level. It controls employment and the economy so tightly that Africans literally owe their souls to the company store. It has at its command all the weapons of press control, detention, deportation, political ban, and suspension of civil rights, and it shows an increasing willingness to use these powers. It is, in sum, close to being a solid white nationalist regime that can thrive with or without independence.

Buoyed by the sweep of Parliament scats in the election and sure of its ability to maintain rigid control, the Rhodesian Front is showing signs of confident patience. Smith apparently believes he can get what he wants without independence, and time is on his side. The economic slump of the past two years appears to have halted, as does the heavy out-migration of whites.

The pressure now is on Britain, for it must either intervene and force majority rule or stand by and let apartheid become complete and permanent. The British Labor government, walking a tightrope with its crumpet-thin majority, seems unlikely to precipitate a showdown now; thus the “sellout” rumors grow ever more persistent.

On May 29 the Front restricted a white man for the first time when it ordered Leo Baron, Nkomo’s attorney, not to venture beyond a fifteen-mile radius of the Bulawayo post office. The next day, the Rhodesia Party — a remnant of Whitehead’s opposition party — disbanded after its annihilation in the May parliamentary elections. And the day before Baron’s restriction, the government declared a “state of emergency” in the area surrounding Nkomo’s restriction camp in an obvious effort to prevent the courts (the only section of government Smith does not completely control) from freeing the restrictees in response to an appeal now pending.

So the stalemate continues, and the Rhodesian Front grows bolder in its disregard for legal processes. Phones are tapped, mail is opened, plainclothes detectives tail “suspicious” persons, and police at roadblocks search cars for hidden weapons. Nkomo and Sithole try to maintain control of the Africans while they themselves are divided and without latitude for maneuver. Britain marks time, attrition nibbles away at the already depleted ranks of white liberals in Rhodesia, and the independent African states mutter dark threats of intervention.

Brooding stalemate

There was a time when the nationalists in Rhodesia spoke of their desire for a nonracial government. They still use the term, but as Ian Smith pulls the white minority further to the right, the conflict polarizes into black versus white, and sooner or later it seems sure to explode. Viewing the decline in the liberal ranks with despair, Sithole now speaks of white liberals as “sugar-coated white supremacists,” and the number who still maintain the confidence of either Sithole or Nkomo is minute.

Many Rhodesians had expected some sort of dramatic new developments cither at the opening of the Rhodesian Parliament June 9 or at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London later that month. Neither event produced such a climax. Instead, the tense uneasiness created an intrusion of British royalty into the political sphere. In a speech to a group of college students, Prince Philip suggested off the cuff that the ultimate end of white rule in Rhodesia is inevitable. He then added: “But I think a few years here or there do not matter if we can achieve this result peacefully and quietly.”

The remark drew a startled response from the press; one angry Labor MP said that the same restrictions which prohibit the Queen from speaking out on political matters surely apply as well to her husband. African nationalists both in and out of Rhodesia were equally critical. But it has not altered the brooding stalemate.

The African nationalists, who refer contemptuously to Smith’s Rhodesian Front regime as “the white settler government,” find themselves in somewhat the same position as embattled Indians in a cowboy movie. But there is a difference. This time the white man is outnumbered, and the “Indians” are determined to direct the last reel. It is getting late to pass the peace pipe in Rhodesia.