The silence of the bishop
Ferdinand Mount
The gorgeous vestments are a little startling. Surely the Methodist Church was founded to do away with flummery. From the walls of Wesley's Chapel, austere divines with muttonchop whiskers and stout bosoms seem to stare down in marmoreal disapproval. But Bishop, Muzorewa was ordained in the American tradition of Methodism, episcopal and fond of show, First impression: that he is swamped, by cope and chasuble, by Ian Smith, by the unfamiliar awfulness of politics. He is physically a small man, not chunky and braced like the tiny megalomaniacs who ruin nations, just small; his stature is modest. His face is humorous, twitchy, so far lacking the rigid set of power. He preaches awkwardly, snatching at the wrong word, then drifting off into unexpected Afro crooning: 'Yes, yes, yes', he chants, but yes to what? Then he tells a parable: 'Suppose a butcher and a schoolteacher go out to the farms round London and they see a boy herding,cattle . In Chislehurst? He does not seem quite anchored to time or place, like those old ex-colonial padres who would start their Christmas sermons to Cotswold farmers: 'As we sit here under the jacaranda tree. . . '
Yet gradually a certain strength makes itself felt. You may not like missionaries, he says, yet everything in Africa, the good and the bad, comes from missionaries the boys in the bush, the secretaries in Salisbury, Nkomo, Muzorewa, all of us. With all their faults, only the, missionaries treated the Africans as human beings who could be redeemed and freed, not aschickensscrabbling around for scraps in the white man's hen-runs but as eagles whose vocation was to fly. Shorn of its scriptural context, this is a liberation sermon, preached directly at the likes of Mr Smith, the Bishop's own Minister without Portfolio. Black-and-white corespondent's shoes, in patent croc-skin, peep out from under Abel Muzorewa's cassock, like the sort Dr Hastings Banda wears. He is an African leader all right and a good man still, but how much longer can he keep his innocence — and with it his moral authority?
It isn't the splits in the Nkomo-Mugabe partnership but the splits in the Bishop's delegation which the conference has so cruelly brought to light. The team from Salisbury lacks not only an underlying unity of purpose but also any outer casing of loyalty to permit relaxed internal debate. Their spokesmen seem despondent and tongue-tied — frightened, their opponents plausibly claim, to speak inside the conference for fear of deepening the divisions that are so painfully obvious outside. Sithole was the first to break ranks. If there was a futures market in grandmothers, the Revd N. Sithole would be the leading seller. He is a splendiferous twister, a kind of betrayoholic who can scarcely wait to sell out one alliance in order to fix up the next. He seems scarcely to notice how his following dwindles each time.
But the Muzorewa delegation suffers from a more serious disadvantage, which is that its black members place so little value on what are meant to be their chief bargaining counters. While Mr Smith was repeating the need for safeguards for the white minority, the Bishop was sending a message home in the name of his delegation pointing out that the whites in Kenya had soon discovered that 'what they considered as safeguards were not really that important after all.' What else could he say but that 'given the correct black leadership they have nothing whatsoever to fear'? Inevitably, he begins to sound unnervingly like Mr Nkomo.
All that matters to the Bishop and his supporters is continued control of the armed forces and the police. The rest is all too obviously negotiable. The validity of the April elections has to be defended in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Muzorewa regime, but everybody knows that the regime would accept fresh elections and dare not risk the conference breaking down on this point.
Outside, the Bishop talks airily of going home and of having a country to run, but inside the conference, he is often embarrassingly silent. All Monday the entire delegation sat mum, while the Patriotic Front made hay. This silence was defended as a dignified tactic designed to speed up progress by pushing the conference into a series of two-sided bargaining sessions with the British. But it is hard to make a virtue of total silence at a parley which is to decide your country's future. There was a ghastly irony about the fact that at Lancaster House the next morning, the Muzorewa delegation found nobody to greet them, because Lord Carrington had gone to meet them at the Foreign Office.
By contrast, Mr Eddison Zvobgo, the Patriotic Front's main spokesman, is a forceful and voluble character, pudgy and cheerfully devious, a sort of African Roy Hattersley, only floored once when asked why he always refers to Rhodesia and not Zimbabwe; he mumbles something about a colonial situation and Zimbabwe being our country and not the country of Ian Smith and so on.
As for the Daily Express headline 'Purge of the Whites', why, nothing could be more patently absurd. Mr Nkomo is driven to issue a statement that he treats white men as he treats himself. At over 20 stone, sprawled sideways across the back seat of his limousine, Mr Nkomo is well qualified to compete for the Ungenial Fat Man world championship. Lord Goodman, Cyril Smith, Robert Muldoon, Franz-Josef Strauss, Leonid Brezhnev spring to mind as other qualifiers.
But then it is curious how hard revolutionary terrorists find it to screen out the sinister aspectsof their personae. Even when they try to appear polite and constructive, some menacing reflex always gives them away. Even Robert Mugabe, normally so circumspect, could not refrain from remarking that the proposed Declaration of Rights 'must be subject to the usual limitations and to the necessary qualifications.'
Mr Nkomo and Mr Mugabe are said to be jubilant at the concessions they have secured from the British, notably, that the conference is not just to draw up a constitution but to undertake a comprehensive settlement and that there must be agreement on all points, including the control of armed forces during the transition to independence; they conclude that it is therefore now impossible for the British to provoke a walk-out by the Patriotic Front and then impose a constitution unilaterally, declaring the Bishop the winner by a walk-over.
After the commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference at Lusaka, this was indeed noised abroad as Mrs Thatcher's cunning fall-back plan. Indeed, the possibility was put forward by some Tories in defence of the claim that she had not really been led by the nose by President Nyerere et al, but rather the other way about; in conjunction with Lord Carrington, she had worked out a deep-laid scheme which, far from dishing the whites, would leave them securely in control with the strength of the commonwealth around them. This view of Mrs Thatcher as the Great White Queen Who Sees Further Than Foolish Old Men seemed a little romantic at the time. The more likely prospect was that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were flying by the seat of their pants, negotiating each patch of turbulence as it came. The difficulty always was that they would begin to run out of airspace as the sanctions vote in November approached. It is true, as apparently Lord Carrington is now reminding Mr Smith, that many of the embargoes on Rhodesia do not need to be renewed by parliamentary vote, but the renewal is symbolic of Britain's intentions. The Tory Party conference looms too. Monday Club mutterings will be heard that all this would never have happened if Mrs Thatcher had disregarded Lord Carrington and kept faith with the Manifesto commitment to lift sanctions and recognise the Bishop. As it happens, the Manifesto fell a long way short of promising to recognise and be damned. But if that was ever a politic or honourable course (which it was not, so long as the whites controlled the armed forcesand retained a blocking power in Parliament), it certainly isn't now, with a publicly united Patriotic Front in full cry trampling all over the divided and dispirited Salisbury team. The gunmen are on top, and the fault is not Britain's or the Bishop's.
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