Notebook
Salisbury, Zimbabwe From the air Salisbury appears as a patchwork of blue and green swimming pools all set about with jacaranda trees. The citizens — the white ones anyway — are very proud of the jacaranda, which is certainly exotic with its startling mauve blossom. But its very gaudiness contributes to the English suburban atmosphere of the town. It is Rhodesia showing off to Surrey: 'You could never grow anything so colourful in your climate.' Salisbury is a dulllooking town, but quite unlike the capital of an emergent third world country. Its centre is a neat arrangement of wide streets and office blocks; its suburbs are full of comfortable villas set well apart in large, lovingly tended gardens. The roads are clean and better maintained than those of many English cities. The traffic flows freely. Everything seems to work. This is the capital of black Zimbabwe, but here the black man looks like the immigrant trying to fit into an alien white culture. There is indeed little on the surface to indicate that the Whites are a vanquished minority. They move confidently about the city, and one cannot blame them for feeling it is still theirs. They founded it and built it to suit no one but themselves. And they are still there, running everything except the government.
Nevertheless, there is said to have been a collapse of white morale. This exasperates and perplexes the blacks. Richard West, in his book The White Tribes of Africa, recalls his amazement, during his first visit to Rhodesia, to find whites constantly asking him: 'Tell me, what are the Africans thinking?' — as if he, a newcomer, could be expected to know. I was equally taken aback on this my first visit to Salisbury when a prominent and knowledgeable black businessman, who works with white people all the time, sprang the same sort of question: 'Tell me, what are the whites thinking? Do you think many more are going to leave?' And he asked it With such a pleading look in his eyes that I longed to be able to answer it. Many thousands of whites have already left since Independence, so that there may now be about 180,000 of them still in the country compared to about 220,000 18 months ago. Those that have left seem to be mainly of the lower sort, the 'skilled' workers who may realistically doubt their own ability to thrive in a free labour market. As one historian of Rhodesia, A. J. Hanna, wrote some 20 Years ago: 'The Southern Rhodesian counterpart of trade union restrictive practices in Britain has been the industrial colour bar.' The emigrants have included young men whose only work so far has involved trying to shoot black men in the bush and who still believe that, had it not been for the treacherous Lord Carrington, they might have won the war. There are still some extremely unpleasant-looking white thugs in Salisbury whom I assume to belong to this category. On my first evening here, while I was drinking in a slightly seedy hotel, some white youths on the terrace outside set upon a group of young blacks with broken bottles. Some policemen, neatly split between black and white, arrived promptly and dispersed them. Several hotels have reported trouble of this sort, but it does not amount to a serious problem and it can in large part be attributed to drink.
while many whites have left and are leaving — mostly for South Africa — there are many more who would like to stay. It is among these that morale is said to have collapsed. Why this should be so is not immediately apparent. Given that Comrade Robert Mugabe, before his election to the premiership, was assumed by most whites to be a bloodthirsty Communist savage, his conduct in office so far should have come as an agreeable surprise. As the Financial Times summed it up recently: 'There have been no war trials, no anti-white campaigns, no purge of "Rhodesians" in senior positions and no nationalisation of firms or industry.' Mugabe's desire to work closely with whites of whatever political background is most strikingly illustrated by the fact, of which I am assured, that he even offered the Finance Ministry to Mr David Smith who had the same job in Mr Ian Smith's government. It is like Mr Benn offering the Treasury to Sir Geoffrey Howe. Few whites have suffered any economic deprivation so far under the new regime. Indeed, since the lifting of sanctions, business has boomed, and the white farmers, having produced a record maize crop, have never made such profits. So what is the matter? One gets a hotch-potch of answers. Some whites are lonely because their friends have left. Others talk of shor tages. There is, for example, no Marmite in the country. Several people complained to me of this, which proves that one should never underestimate the addictive qualities of this nutritious stuff. Sir James Goldsmith was unwise to sell it. There are also shortages of cheese and butter, because the blacks, who are now enjoying higher wages than before, are drinking all the milk. South African wine is also hard to come by, and the slightly soapy tasting Zimbabwean wines are widely considered to be bad for the liver. But even to discuss such deprivations is to show how extremely well supplied the Rhodesians have been in the past with practically anything a white man could want. By the standards of most third world countries, the abundance of European goodies remains remarkable.
The whites, it would seem, having feared that their throats would be cut if Mr Mugabe came to power, were initially so astounded by his policy of reconciliation that they succumbed to wild hopes that everything might in fact stay the same. But, of course, nothing can remain remotely the same. The whites may continue richer than the rest. But there are seven million blacks anticipating the prosperity they have seen the whites enyoy, and a government committed to promote their welfare. To house, educate and find jobs for these blacks, of whom 54.5 per cent are now under 15 years of age, is going to be a more or less impossible task. The government has already raised what money it can by taxation. All it can now do is borrow. The whites — with the exception of such rare liberals such as Mr Garfield Todd, the former Prime Minister, who has now formally declared himself a socialist and has given away a large chunk of his ranch to 400 maimed black veterans of the guerrilla war — are not at all interested in Mr Mugabe's plans for black advancement. They tend to interpret modest measures in this direction as racialist attacks on themselves. At the same time, their concerns are those of the English middle class. They are worried about their children's education, as we all are. They want them to study for English 0 Levels, not for some newfangled African qualification. There are rumours that history books are being rewritten and that Children, instead of studying Shakespeare, will be forced to spend some of their lesson periods learning to dig in the fields. The whites do not like queueing up with blacks for hospital treatment, and their plans to build fee-paying private clinics have been heavily sat upon by the government. Such schemes, said President Banana the other day, aimed 'to divide sufferers on the basis of wealth' and were in conflict with government policy. There are no escapes from these dilemmas. Even if they have money, the whites are not allowed to export it, so they cannot send their children to English schools or to hospitals in Switzerland. I put it to the Zimbabwean Director of Information that if the government truly wants the whites to stay and be happy — as I am con vinced, in fact, that it does — it must treat them as a very special tribe. It must furnish them with supplies of Marmite and grated Parmesan cheese; it must allow them skiing holidays and trips to the South African coast; it must permit them to have their private hospitals and schools in which their children study Chaucer and have their bottoms beaten; it must even let them keep their tribal British passports. But I don't think he took me seriously.
But it is something that Mr P. K. van der 1.2Byl, the hardest of hardliners in Ian Smith's government and a man who is nothing if not consistent, is perhaps the only white in Zimbabwe who may still believe that his throat will be cut. It is also something that the whites feel so completely free to air their grievances and to criticise the black government with reckless abandon. One of my first calls in Salisbury was at the Ministry of Information, where I was obliged to register myself as a visiting journalist. A weary-looking, white civil servant, no doubt on the point of retirement, gave me a form to fill in and took my photograph with a Polaroid camera. He revealed in conversation that he was English, despite the Zimbabwean flag on his desk and the portrait of Comrade Mugabe behind him. 'Are you planning to stay?' I asked him. 'I don't know,' he replied. 'Things seem to be going quite well,' I said hopefully. 'Don't you believe it,' he said, 'things are going from bad to worse. You haven't been here long enough to know. Read the little bits in the newspapers that ought to be the headlines but aren't. Then you'll begin to understand.' This was the first contact of a foreign journalist with the Ministry of Information, the government's propaganda machine. I was impressed. Nor is there any shortage of white racialist talk, which I have to confess that I quite enjoy because it takes such unpredictable forms. I was sitting by a swimming pool on a beautiful farm near Salisbury, cheerfully discussing the shortcomings of the new regime with the farmer's charming South African wife. Her little girls, she said, now had to wear underarm deodorant spray at school. The reason, she explained, was that black children smelt and that in deference to the new egalitarianism white children had to take the same precautions, however unneccessary in their case those precautions might be. It makes no difference that Mr Mugabe's cabinet is more richly endowed with academic qualifications than any other in the whole history of Rhodesia; a white member of parliament still solemnly explains that the natives cannot in fact be educated in any rounded way, that they can only be taught tricks. I wonder how long the government will go on tolerating Mr Ian Smith's Party, the Republican Front (formerly the Rhodesian Front), which still represents the majority of whites in parliament. Its objective, though clearly a hopeless one, is to overthrow the government, at best replacing it with an Nkomo-led regime in which the whites would play an influential role. Its parliamentary tactics are to mock black ministers and make them look as foolish as possible. Sometime it does this with some wit, as when one RF MP asked a minister whether an Ethiopian training programme for new Air Zimbabwe pilots might not fairly be described as 'a crash course'. Nothing wrong in that sort of thing, of course. It is in the best Westminster tradition. But whether such tactics are also in the best interests of the white minority is another question.
While the blacks, whether for reasons of self-interest or not, seem to me to display an astounding degree of amiability and tolerance towards the whites, it is not an easy relationship and could break down at any time with fearful consequences. There is already a disturbing lack of communication between the government and white businessmen. The government says it will leave private industry alone, but it expects that private industry in exchange should support its objectives, which really means the advancement of the black man. Some businesses, if only in order to secure their future, are engaged in active efforts to `Africanise' their staff and to bring employment to deprived areas of the country. `Africanisation' is not easy, for how do you sack a white man when you know that he will not be allowed to take any money out of the country? But the government tends to attribute lack of progress on this front to a reluctance by white businessmen to cooperate, even to deliberate obstruction. On their side, businessmen face rigid price controls and long bureaucratic delays in obtaining permission to raise prices — permission that may sometimes only be granted in exchange for quite irrelevant information about the number of Africans employed in the firm. DistruSt is growing on both sides. It is worse still in state industries like the railways in which a very high proportion of the white employees are in fact South Africans. The country's transport system is in crisis, with grave economic consequences, because Zimbabwe has not the facilities or the manpower to move its exports. Whites have been moving to private industry, where they can get higher wages, and they are hard to replace. But when things go wrong on the railways or, to give another example, in the electricity supply industry, the government now talks menacingly of 'sabotage'. Meanwhile, the government does not improve its own chances of economic success with its relentless stream of propaganda against South Africa. On radio and television, which are mere propaganda tools, South Africa is never mentioned without the adjective 'racist' — even, until recently, in the weather forecast. Not only does this depress the Zimbabwean whites, but the government knows and candidly admits its crucial dependence on South Africa for trade and transport. So far, South Africa has inflicted mere pinpricks on Zimbabwe in revenge. But if it decided to close the frontier, that would be the end. And the implacable Mr Mugabe would let Zimbabwe collapse rather than abase himself by one degree to his enemy beyond the Limpopo.
After five days I was fed up with Salisbury. I had read that many, many miles away in the mysterious valley of the Zambesi River there lurked a nomadic tribe called the Doma who lived by hunting and eating honey and who had yet to be informed that their country was now called Zimbabwe and had a black government. I thought I should go and tell them the exciting news, but I never had the chance. When I arrived in the bush — flying low up the Zambesi in a private plane, frightening herds of elephants and buffaloes, sending crocodiles slithering into the water — found no nomadic tribesmen but the elegant figure of the Spectator's proprietor, Algy Cluff, sitting in front of a tent on the river bank and gazing at yawning hippopotami over the top of a leatherbound volume of Livingstone's Letters. Here there were none of the shortages complained of in Salisbury. There was plenty of excellent cheese and chilled South African wine (though still no Marmite). Delicious meals were served under a huge acacia tree, cooked by Africans who could not have been Doma for they were clearly trained in Paris. We went out walking behind a white hunter and found some elephants. I slept in a luxurious tent to the night sounds of the jungle. For hundreds of miles around there were no human beings — only the invisible Doma eating their honey. This is probably the nicest sort of holiday in the world, and I am told it can be yours for only £.10,000 a fortnight.
Alexander Chancellor
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