Rhodesia
Sir: Two gross misstatements appear in Your editorial of 21 February: numbers of Whites arriving after 1965 and still resident do not exceed those previously living here; and, secondly, even when I came out in 1948 title to all land bar a few marginal farms had been taken up.
On your general argument of 'hand-over' it is best to be practical. On what grounds do you suppose our Africans can run a sophisticated economy any more than they can in Angola and Mozambique, where all land and buildings have been nationalised and children over six forcibly indoctrinated With communism ? Even here, occupying about half the country selected by themselves at Rhodes's time, they don't grow enough to feed themselves. So why upset the whole structure of government for the Shibboleth of 'black nationalism' which hasn't worked anywhere else? What new morality is this and where the vision that inspired the Crusades? To empty churches of your own volition, as you do, is one thing: to be told to do so by a foreign Power is alien.
No, the rallying cry should be 'What we have we hold' and let natural development, Which here anyway is altruistic, take its Course. Incorporate, yes: hand over, no.
It should be noted that white penetration last century superseded that of black by only about a hundred years, and the Present preponderance of the latter is due to their prolific birthrate induced by a beneficent (white) administration that curtailed Yearly plagues, famines, and Matabele massacres.
R. Y. Armstrong
4 Livingstone Road, Urntali, Rhodesia
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