Baffled
Sir: I have read Xan Smiley's piece on the Rhodesian atrocities (9 July) more than once, and still don't know what he is meaning to convey. He says 'the African concept of corporate family responsibility' makes the entire family of a black in government service liable to killing or mutilation. The blood feud, which is what he means, is as old as recorded history; the only novelty is the euphemism in which he clothes it. He goes on, as if offering a course in anthropology, 'There is no view that women or children should be exempted from violence. As one African sage put it, "If you are exterminating rats, do you spare any on account of their sex or size?" 'Some tribes, he adds, reckon that outsiders are technically 'nonpersons', and thus do not merit compassion because they are 'not really human beings'.
Some tribes do, indeed. When did I hear an Aryan sage saying precisely this? He was speaking German and got rather excited, but there was no mistaking the sentiments. Mr Smiley, however, goes on to call them 'typically African'. Perhaps some of these atrocities may be specific to Africa, as Nazism may have been specific to Germany. But `typical' is a very different thing. Does Mr Saaey reallyinean this shattering piece of racism, which no responsible South African newspaper, left or right, would print? And if he actually believes it, why should he seem more surprised at the white Rhodesians' stand than at that of Britain in World War II? Mary Renault Delos, Glen Beach, Camps Bay, Cape 8001 South Africa.
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