Why hate the Rhodesians?

Richard West

Salisbury Salisbury The hunter and explorer Frederick Sel°us, who scouted for the pioneers of Rhodesia in 1890, was, even by modern standards, a liberal who named two mountains after the parliamentarian Hampden and Darwin the scientist; yet liberal or left-wing Englishmen of the Present day would find old-fashioned and even distasteful Selous's remarks on Rhodesia in Travel and Adventure in Africa.

'Such undertakings as the expedition to and occupation of Mashunaland cannot but foster the love of adventure and enterprise, and tend to keep our national Spirit young and vigorous. Like an individual, a nation must in time grow old and decay; and when once the love of adventure is so far dead within the breasts of young Englishmen that tales of dangers and difficulties successfully overcome no longer fire their blood, and induce a large percentage of them to give up ease and comfort at home and seek their fortunes in wild and distant lands, then will the decadence of England have set in. As a nation we are probably already past our time '• Eighty years after those words were written, refuse the people of England not only help to their countrymen in this distant land but constitute one of their gravest dangers and difficulties. Britain not only refuses help to the white K. black ho y pp esians in handing the country over o ma'orit rule but a ears bent n imPosing rule by people who are in effect, if not in theory, terrorists.

British policy towards Rhodesia seems calculated to cause damage and bloodshed not only in this our colony but throughout southern Africa. By arming and encouraging the guerrilla troops of Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, Britain has fostered a reign of terror not only against the whites but against the Africans, particularly in the tribal trust lands. Inevitably this has revived the ancient enmity between Mugabe's largely Shona supporters and Nkomo's almost entirely Matabele supporters. It has provoked not only a counter-terror from the Rhodesian army but the formation of private armies of banditti who loot, murder and rape the very people they are supposed to protect.

Britain refused to support Ian Smith's 'internal settlement' on the grounds that, on one of five points, he did not accept the terms laid down by the 'front-line Presidents' and the United Nations, although it was not explained why these groups have any right to interfere in one of Britain's remaining colonies. In fact Britain refused Smith's terms at the insistence of Mugabe and Nkomo who wanted to form a government of the 'Patriotic Front' before the holding of elections. From their point of view this was wise, as was shown by the result of this month's election in South West Africa /Namibia. This election was held against the wishes of the United Nations and of the guerrilla movement SWAPO, who ordered a boycott of the polls and threatened reprisals against those who voted, especially in the SWAPO stronghold Ovamboland. As it turned out, there was an 80 per cent poll in what one reporter described to me as 'the fairest election I've seen in fifteen years in Africa — not that that's saying much'. If Britain had backed the 'internal settlement', a comparable poll might have been held in Rhodesia, showing results equally unpleasing to men of violence. Now most of the country is overrun by different guerrilla groups; martial law prevails outside the cities, and terror will surely disrupt any attempt by the internal government to conduct an election.

Britain's encouragement of the guerrillas has been equally disastrous for the countries surrounding Rhodesia. South Africa has for fifteen years tried to persuade Smith to give way to black majority rule by a 'responsible', right-wing leader, who now seems very unlikely to materialise. The wretched Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, has not only had his economy hurt by the quarrel with Rhodesia, but plays unwilling host to an army of well-armed, undisciplined and mutually warring guerrillas nominally controlled by Joshua Nkomo.

Indeed `K.K's' position has been compared to that of King Hussein of Jordan, who had to make war against the Palestinian refugees when they became too riotous. It is widely believed that Kaunda connived at or even called in the recent Rhodesian air attack on Nkomo's guerrilla base. Other Matabele guerrillas virtually run the Francistown region of Botswana, whose 'front-line' President Seretse Khama also wants an internal settlement in Rhodesia. Even the 'Marxist' Machel of Mozambique is said to resent the ZANLA, or largely Shona, guerrillas based in his country. One of Machel's ministers said recently to a journalist, Conor Cruise O'Brien, that ZANLA were not true, ideological 'freedom fighters'.

This is a fact well-understood in Africa, where 'Marxist' means somebody getting money out of the Russians. Even the 'Marxist' Sekou Toure of Guinea has at last expelled his eastern European advisors and joined the pay-roll of the French. As for Rhodesia, I might as well quote the words of a veteran left-winger, who now describes himself as a 'pseudo-Marxist'. He told me: 'In Marxist terms what is happening here is an attempt by the black bourgeoisie to take over from the white bourgeoisie, using the young peasants to fight for them — young peasants, they're not even a lum penproletariat. I've not met an African Marxist, not in this country, at any rate. The young intellectuals at the university don't even pay lip-service to Marxism. They just want cars and suits and houses. I don't think any of the politicians would nationalise — certainly not Nkomo'.

Why then does the British government seem determined, on ideological grounds, to force Rhodesia into civil war rather than let her enjoy some form of peaceful government, even if this means a corrupt dictatorship? Why does Britain not try to install the kind of government that exists in France's former colonies, rather than a regime of war and terror as in Angola or Ethiopia? Whatever one might think of some Labour statesmen, nobody has suggested that David Owen works for the Russians. Nor can British big business be blamed for our Rhodesian policy, although certain companies, such as Lonrho, finance Joshua Nkomo. I think some of the reason must be found in that particular English, guilty liberalism that wants to be seen to be on the side of the 'under-privileged' and oppressed. The French, the Portuguese among the former colonial peoples, suffer no such complex in Africa; nor, I suspect do the Russians. It is an English psychological quirk; indeed, to understand English policy to Rhodesia, it is necessary to take a look at what is going on in the home land.

Rhodesia, it has been pointed out, is rather like Britain of twenty-five years ago, before it fell a victim of industrial inertia, bureaucracy, trade union gangsterism and modish permissive quackery, imported from the United States. In Rhodesia, schools are for education, fields and factories for production, the churches for prayer. What little news about Britain that one can find in the Rhodesian Herald sounds like the plot of some futuristic novel: The Times and the Sunday Times are closed by an industrial 'dispute; Jeremy Thorpe is charged with conspiracy to murder a former male model. Viewed from Rhodesia, all such snippets of news seem to have something in common that helps to explain Britain's strange attitude to Rhodesia: that is a flawed understanding of human character.

It was Michael Foot, that arch English liberal, who justified union closed shops on the grounds that the union bosses would not abuse their power. Only the liberal fails to grasp that everybody abuses power, which is why everyone wants power. Again, if you encourage children to give free rein to their sexual instincts, they may show a preference for such things as rape. If you go out of your way to apologise for members of a 'deprived' racial group, they not only will not feel grateful but may exploit what they regard as your weakness.

Not only does Dr Owen talk to the guerrilla leaders: he goes out of his way to be seen on friendly terms with 'Joshua', 'Bob' and such 'front-line Pres idents' as 'Kenneth' and 'Julius'. Never mind that his chumminess is often requited by snubs; 'David' is .a Christian Socialist and well understands the resentment felt by Africans to their historic oppressor.

Such liberal, guilty feelings are pardonable, if idiotic. But why are they so often accompanied by furious hostility towards the Rhodesian whites? One cannot imagine Dr Owen referring to Smith as 'Ian', or even allowing himself to be photographed, smiling in Ian Smith's company. Lesser dignitaries of the Labour Party are quite intemperate, witness the plump lady assistant to a visiting Labour MP who said in her first morning in Salisbury how much she loathed white Rhodesians.

It is true that many white Rhodesians used to have unattractive characteristics; they used to live comfortably at the expense of the blacks, whom they often treated with rudeness and ignorance.

Now that most whites spend half the year in the bush and may be deprived of all their savings and property, they no longer qualify for the role of exploiters and their faults are those of any people fighting a terrorist wai. They are quick on the trigger, `gung ho' as Americans say, often cruel to the guerrillas and, still worse, innocent peasants whom they suspect of guerrilla sympathies. They are brave, tough, committed and are fighting for their land; in short they have just those qualities which British liberals so admire in the IRA, the Vietcong and the Cubans. The modern English admire these qualities in any people except themselves. The modern English seem positively to detest the values admired by their ancestors, such as the Frederick Selous whom I quoted earlier.

This attitude, which I call 'liberalism', although it is mixed up with Trotskyism, ecumenical Christianity and vague feelings of guilt and good will towards people of other races, may turn out to have been the most dangerous and irrelevant of all the ideas foisted on Africa — worse than evangelical Christianity, parliamentarY democracy or even Marxism. It may be worse because the terrorism that it encourages can only brutalise those involved, both blacks and whites, both perpetrators and victims. Like most politicians, Dr Owen thinks in half-understood analogies, in this case with the 'freedom struggles' in Mozart,' bique, Angola and above all in Vietnain. The left wing 'scenario' sees the troops of the Patriotic Front, having swept the white men out of Rhodesia's countryside. finally storming Salisbury and Bulavvayo. Now although the war in Rhodesia has almost nothing in common with that fought by the Vietcong, there is to be found one telling analogy betweel Rhodesia and Vietnam.

In the early 1950s, when France vas, fighting a losing war against the rebels 01 Ho Chi Minh, the Americans refused to support either the hated Communists 01 the much disliked French colonialists; preferring to set up a 'third force inspired with the ideals of American democracy. This effort to impose an alien ideology on a people of utterly different culture, was to result in Kennedy's send' ing in army advisors, then Johnson sending in an army, and finally in the debacle of 1975. The course of events in Vietnarn . had been predicted with his prophetic genius by Graham Greene in The Quiet American, published in 1955. It may be remembered that Pyle, the Quiet American of the title, was a secret, agent who wanted to set up a 'third force led by a chosen war lord who could dis' place from power both the Communists and the French by what would now be called 'an urban guerrilla campaign'. Tba, climax of the novel, based on an actua', incident, comes when one of Pyle s bombs explodes in front of the Con' tinental Hotel, killing and wounding dozens of men, women and children. The central character in the novel, the English journalist Fowler, understands 35 Pyle cannot understand that one cannot create a better political system by crinle. His own political sympathies, as exP1e. ssed to Pyle in a famous episode in a watch-tower, are both with the Vietmitil] and the French: he thinks that the lam' must belong to the Vietnamese but, admires the French for their tenacity anu courage: 'Anyway the French are dying eyed. day — that's not a mental concept. TheY aren't leading these people on with half lies like your politicians and ours — I've been in India, Pyle, and I know the heal liberals do. We haven't a liberal parr" any more — liberalism's infected all tile other parties. We are all either liberal, conservatives or liberal socialists; we Si have a good conscience. I'd rather be exploiter who fights for what he believes and dies with it ... '