Rhodesia: guns or politics?
Richard West
Salisbury Sir Richard Burton, who did not like the place, said that 'out of Africa only madness comes'. But this week's ZimbabweRhodesia election proves that the traffic in madness is not one way. Here one can see the baleful effect of trying to graft onto Africa three alien European enthusiasms: first evangelical Christianity, then liberal democracy and now, in the last decade, revolutionary socialism.
These three enthusiasms stem largely from Britain and the United States. France has not tried to wish them on Africa. The old evangelicals might not have approved of Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the politician who now seems likely to be Zimbabwe's first prime minister. He entertained the press to a cocktail party on Good Friday, and celebrated Easter day with a rally at Umtali, where he denounced the Anglo-Americans, led a triumphal run through the stadium, and distributed ten dollar bills to some of the party workers. (The bishop's new-found affluence suggests that Lonrho and other big companies in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia have switched their support to him from Joshua Nkomo, the exiled guerrilla leader.) The bishop's main rival and fellow evangelical, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, may be lucky to get a job as Zimbabwe ambassador to Paraguay. 'There are no second prizes in African politics', I was told by a fierce lady supporter of Muzorewa.
These elections should mark the end of 25 years of constitutional wrangling over the former British colonies in East and Central Africa. What a bore they were, those talks at Lancaster House and Victoria Falls on the Central African Federation, the built-in guarantees for a multi-party system, the comings and goings of Whitehead and Maudling, of Higgins and Ian Macleod, now no longer with us. All those colonies, except Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), have long since won independence, and all their rulers have quite sensibly torn up the constitutions as soon as they got power. Countries like Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania are now run as one-party states, or even dictatorships, tempered by a respect for traditional tribal feelings and interests. It is a system better suited to Africa than is liberal democracy. In a recent article in the Spectator Mr David Steel, the Liberal Party leader, quoted Rhodesia's foreign minister Mr P. K. Van Der Byl, as saying: 'you people wanted a bloody election, and now you're going to get one'. Although Mr Steel clearly intended this as a joke on the flamboyant Van Der Byl, I fear that the joke was on himself.
After the missionaries and the liberals, the revolutionary socialists came to Africa. In character, they are much the same type of guilty, middle-class intellectual, appalled in turn by the slave trade, the British Empire and now 'racialism'. The revolutionaries, like the first eyangelicals, were eager for converts, especially among impressionable youth. Radical schoolboys from Soweto are taken to England to study under Vanessa Redgrave. Delegates from Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe Africa National Liberation Army are sent as delegates to the IRA in Derry. African children who, a hundred years ago, would be carolling 'what a friend I have in Jesus', are taught to chant that 'power comes out of the barrel of the gun'.
Even some of the liberal democrats and the evangelicals have made common cause with the revolutionary socialists. Once liberal journals like the Observer which, 20 years ago, were promoting African parliamentary democracy, now lend support to the Russian and Cuban-backed terrorists of the Patriotic Front. The Protestant World Council of Churches, including the Church of England, finances Marxist guerrilla movements throughout Southern Africa. The great powers and the capitalists play on these idealists just as they did a hundred years ago. Then King Leopold of the Belgians used the cause of the missionaries and the anti-slavers as cover for his plot to gain the wealth of the Congo. Today the Soviet Union is using the black revolutionaries to obtain the gold, chrome and diamonds of the South.
But, 'You people wanted a bloody election, and now you're going to get one' — and it must be said that the government has done everything possible to ensure a big vote. Almost the whole police and army reserve is in uniform to meet the threat of terror attacks on the polling stations. As I was writing this article, a squadron of helicopters flew over the house to a nearby battle in which, we were later told, 88 ZANLA men died. The auxiliaries, or private armies, have grown to impressive size. The enemies of the internal settlement, such as the British and American governments, have said that the state of war in the country makes an election impossible, and therefore refused to send observers. This had the advantage, from their point of view, that if the election gets a good turn-out they can say it was a fraud.
Auberon Waugh is on holiday, and 'Another voice' will return next week. His review of Suffer the Children, by the Sunday Times 'Insight' team, appears on page twenty•two of this week's issue. One hour after polling began on Tuesday morning I saw a queue of 400 people In Highfield, a black suburb of Salisbury, outside a polling station. From other parts of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia there come reports of queues as long as 800 people. Even at this early stage it looks like an overwhelming vote of confidence in the internal settlement.
Nearly 200 journalists and television people have come into town, including the enigmatic Japanese and a furious Oxford don called Dave something. Newspapers and television companies which have for years ignored Rhodesia, now scramble for coverage of every detail of political life. One American camera crew was dispatched last week to record the address by Chief Chirau, one of the dimmer political candidates, to the Circolo Italian° di Rhodesia (the Italian Club of Rhodesia). Since Chief Chirau is a slow-paced speaker and everything had to be turned from Shona into English and then into Italian, this film can hardly have got high ratings in the United States.
The Government of Zimbabwe Rhodesia welcomes observers, including the foreign press, but few of these transient visitors (certainly not myself) are as qualified for the role as the resident journalists who have worked for years in this country and elsewhere in Africa. Thus it was foolish of the police last week to threaten charges against Mr Paul Ellman, the correspondent of the Observer, for an article he had written four months ago and which, the police maintain, was calculated to cause 'alarm and despondency'. (With all respect to Mr Ellman's eloquence, his article caused less alarm and despondency among Observer readers than did the snow and strikes. The Observer, which detests the internal settlement, was up in arms over this threat to its own correspondent and asked for help on his behalf from the Foreign Office and Dr David Owen. But, final ironY, Mr Ellman, who knows this country very well, does not support those who are trying to turn his case into propaganda for Dr Owen. 'The last thing in the world I want to do,' he told me 'is help Dr Owen in his loony policies on Rhodesia.'
The guerrilla leader, Robert Mugabe, has promised to wreck the election by what he calls a 'reign of terror' — hence the correct description of him and his men as terrorists. And this is less an election than a referendum to test whether the blacks of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia want to be ruled by politicians, however imperfect, or by the men of the gun. The same choice, in a milder fashion, faces the voters of Britain, where IRA terrorists have already murdered Airey Neave in an attempt to wreck the British electoral system. Perhaps when the polling booths here have been closed, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia ought to dispatch observers to Plymouth, where Dr Owen is fighting to hold his seat. Chief Chirau and Mr Van Der Byl would make a good observing team.
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