Taking the gap
Richard West
Salisbury — Fort Victoria Beitbridge — Pretoria This weekend I joined the two or three thousand, perhaps even four thousand Rhodesians who this month are 'taking the gap', the slang expression for leaving the e°,itintrY, not to come back. Some of those Who remain call it 'taking the yellow trail'. Of course, not all the Rhodesians now leaving the country mean to 'take the gap'. Most are merely taking their Christmas holiday; but those who intend to 'take the i gap' have also been telling their friends n Salisbury that they will come back early in the New Year. In that way, face is saved. Those who are more honest say they will go to Johannesburg or Durban or even Britain and 'look around for a bit into the job situation' and then maybe come to Rhodesia 'if things are looking better'. The present huge exodus was provoked by the 'internal settlement' reached on 3 March between Ian Smith and three black Politicians, according to which there would be a general election before the granting of Independence at midnight on New Year's Eve. By April this year, there had been such an advance booking on air seats out of Rhodesia for this month that there is not even a waiting list on most flights. People With urgent business in South Africa have had to fly north-west to Victoria Falls and go back with one of the tour planes. Net "migration for last month reached the record official figure of 1,800, which may be higher still in fact. Late in November, Smith announced that elections would be put back till 30 April, therefore removing the urgency of the New Y_ ear deadline, which he himself, in a TV broadcast asking the whites not to leave the ',Country, has called an 'emotional date'. ?lowever, the putting off of the date of independence has only disheartened the Whites who feel that the three black politicians now have nave still less chance of acceptance by black Rhodesians, let alone by the rest of the world. The disgruntlement of the Whites and their increasing readiness to trkethe gap' is explained by many causes; e burden, on men of military age, of having to spend half or more of the year on active service; a feeling that the rest of the 1•Yorld, and in particular Britian, is bent on imPosing a Marxist government; a fear that any black government will result in lower standards of work and education; and a widespread suspicion that the existinggovern.Ment, although it prevents ordinary whites from taking out money or valuable Boods, has covered up for currency swindles everal top civil servants. Fear of terattacks is seldom, of course, advanced as a reason for 'taking the gap' but, strange as it may seem to outsiders, I think most white Rhodesians have learned to live with danger; some even find it a stimulus.
'If you want to see how many are taking the gap,' a woman in Salisbury told me, 'just go down to the Municipality building where 'you fill in the forms for electricity. There are red switch-off forms and black switch-on forms. I don't know the figures but I think there are many more red forms than black.' Certainly, at any meal or party these days, the conversation normally comes round to 'taking the gap'. There are usually one or two stalwarts who boast that 'they'll have to take me out of the country feet first'; one or two who plan to leave; and a third group who want to go but loathe and despise England, dread Australia and do not much care for South Africa, because of its puritanism and grim apartheid system. A South African TV series on life in a ,Transvaal mining village is running now on Rhodesian TV, and has been described as a plot to halt emigration by showing the hell of life down south. In fact this series, The Villagers, is acted almost entirely by actors arid actresses of impeccable Old Vic accent so that the Transvaal mining village seems much more like one of those pre-war stage countryhouses in which the butler picks up the phone in the first act and says 'Lord Bellingham's residence'.
Nevertheless, it is to South Africa that most Rhodesians are now travelling first, some not to return. I went down by car with friends, stopping the night at Fort Victoria, to pick up the convoy early the following day for the second and less safe stretch of the journey to Beitbridge, spanning the Limpopo River. The first day of the journey was carefree enough, with stops at a couple of pubs en route. One of these has been busy in recent days serving army reservists engaged in a blocking operation. 'They were called out at four in the afternoon,' the barmaid said, 'and stayed in here till two in the morning, by which time they were motherless. You know that camouflage uniform they wear? If you pull at the seams it all falls apart. They were pulling each other's clothes off. One man was left with just a flap of cloth in front of each leg, and underneath a pair of blue and white knickers. The next evening I said to him "you must have looked wonderful out in the bush dressed like that"!
The regular guests were not in the bar. Not the third generation man who thinks that in a free election the blacks would all vote for the whites. (`There's a lot of inbreeding here,' one of the other cus tomers said by way of an explanation). Nor did I see the plump girl who recently beat the record in one of the pub's peculiar games, by gripping seventy-one cent coins between the cheeks of her buttocks. Another favourite game at this pub – pin ning a customer's tongue to the wooden bar – was unfairly won by a man who had three darts inserted without having revealed that his lower head was anaesthetised by plastic surgery. At Fort Victoria it occurred to me that those now 'taking the gap' are taking the very same route, in reverse, of the pioneers of the colony who rode up to Salisbury in 1890. It was just to the south of here that Frederick Selous, the big game hunter and tracker who acted as guide to the pioneers, discovered the 'Providential Pass' that led them out of the thick woodland and out of danger from Matabele ambush. Another Rhodesian pioneer, Frank Johnson, published a book in 1945, in extreme old age, implying that anyone could have found this trail and Selous was a fussy old woman. This was unfair on Selous, whose name is honoured today by a main street in Salisbury, the Selous Scouts or crack irregular troops, and several coloured or mixed-blood progency of his energetic sex life.
Near Fort Victoria, the oldest Rhodesian township, stand the Zimbabwe ruins, whose name is to be given to whatever state emerges next year. Their origins are less certain. The Africans say they were built by the Karangas, whose kingdom flourished here up to the nineteenth century, when it sank into degeneracy. The white Rhodesians tend to attribute the building to Portuguese architects, apparently on the grounds that the blacks were not capable of such work. As for Selous, one of the first whites to see this monument, he believed it the work of Arab gold-miners many hundreds of years before, a thesis based on the fact that 'another Semitic people' were now prominent miners at Kimberly and Johannesburg. We had planned to stay at the Ruins Hotel but at Fort Victoria the policeman said it was too late in the day to risk the drive there.
The convoy assembled at 6.15 next morning to hear a briefing from the policeman in charge: 'Morning everyone. Welcome to Llew Convoy. . . We have air cover all the way down today. In the event of an ambush, top priority is to get through. If we have to stop, get in the ditch. Don't get in the bush. We have convoy vehicles and if they see activity in the bush they'll assume it's terrorists. Although there has been terrorist activity, it's unlikely that we'll be hit. This convoy never has been hit and it's unlikely that we'll be hit today'.
The convoy took off at 6.30 and came to a halt at 6.45. Messages crackled over the wireless. 'Hello blue leader . . . Two trenches dug in the road 68 ks away . . Telephone wires ripped down • . . They've hit a stray vehicle behind the Lundi convoy'. We hurried ahead to Lundi with such zeal that we drove over the first of the trenches dug by the 'ters' in the night and then hung around for an hour or so while the sappers went over the trench with a mine detector. Clearly the trenches were dug for nuisance value or there had been no time to put in the mines and recover the surface. Nevertheless it was not pleasant to wait around in this wild place overlooked by huge, bald, kopjes the outcrop hills of southern Africa. 'This is the worst TTL [tribal trust land] in the country' said one of the troops. An elderly machine-gunner, standing in his armoured cage, talked of the by-gone days in Sidcup and burst into song: `This is a splendid way to earn a dollar 56 a day'. It's incredible to think that this road is our lifeline', said one of the soldiers. A furniture removal truck of the Trek company went by; more people `taking the gap'. The policeman in charge of the convoy said 'it's depressing when you see all those Treks and Clans on the other side of Beitbridge.'
The convoy reformed and went on to Beitbridge without incident. Indeed, it speaks well for the effectiveness of this major convoy that even a few holes dug in the road can constitute an unusual incident. To the Rhodesians in the convoy it did not even qualify as that. Even shots fired into a convoy do not qualify as an incident unless someone is hurt.
At Beitbridge, I left my companions and got a lift in a coach taking a party of children swimmers down to a match in Pretoria. Next to me was a man of thirty-five who had come to Rhodesia in 1964 after the factory where he worked in Teeside had come out on strike when two workers were sacked for theft. 'England seems to deteriorate every time I go there. There's no discipline in the schools. What's come over the British? What have they got against us? There was a BBC crew who came out to where I was stationed, after one of the terrorist atrocities. They burned a lot of their own people alive in their huts. I talked to one of the crewmen — I was the officer responsible for their protection —and he said "this won't be used it's not even worth filming. We only want stories against you, the whites." After that I withdrew all protection from them'.
He was bitter against the Smith government: 'Do you remember when he said there'd be no majority rule in his lifetime or in a thousand years? No way am I going to spend half the year fighting for a black government. As soon as they start to monkey around with the schools. I'm leaving. I've got three children. I was in Zambia and saw how they had classes with European_ children of twelve sitting next to blacks of fifteen or sixteen. In fact one of the reasons I'm down here is looking around for a place, in Johannesburg.' So he too was thinking oi taking the gap. Few Rhodesians like the prospect of moo. mg to South Africa. This was borne in 00 the swimmers when we arrived at Pretoria, at 9.30 pm on a Sunday night. The bar was closed, being a Sunday. The restaurant was closed. It would not be possible to sercie sandwiches. Perhaps the children IOW like tea or coffee? 'This is bloody ridiculous,' came the reply, 'these children are swimmers. They've got a match tomorrow against West Transvaal, and they can't go to bed without a meal'. I could have told WM it was no use. PS: On getting back to London's Heathrow airport, we were informed that o'-"wing to „a./1 industrial dispute among the handlers, luggage would be delayed `up to two hours Compared to the sabotage on the Fort Victoria to Beitbridge road, one can pro ducethe following score: Zimbab„dw; African National Liberation Arn1Y-4,,' Transport and General Workers Union-4However, the T & GWU sabotage is m°re.t effective since in Rhodesia one can (a) 5 out the stoppage in the sun, (b) buy s°111et beer at the local African shop, (c) legallY.se about the saboteurs with a sub-maching gun.
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