Rhodesia To Seek 1m. White Migrants

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30724, 13 April 1965, Page 17

Rhodesia To Seek 1m. White Migrants

(N.Z.PA- Reuter —Copyright? SALISBURY (Rhodesia), April 11. Rhodesia will soon launch a campaign aimed at attracting at least 1,000,000 white Europeans to this self-governing British colony. Mr Harry Reedman, the Minister of Immigration, will encourage the campaign in a tour of 26 cities in Britain and on the Continent in April and May.

Mr Reedman says that he wants the immigrants to help develop Rhodesia and to provide “a healthy balance of black to white” people.

He told the Salisbury branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society recently: “1 am dealing with immigration as a science, but first as a necessity in order to develop to the ultimate the natural riches of this country and to hold Rhodesia as a place of civilisation in Africa.”

Mr Reedman’s plan is to settle the immigrants on small farms round the country’s as yet undeveloped perimeter, creating new towns instead of extending the present cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo. “Rhodesia,” he says, “is an area of almost 100,000.000 acres of 150,000 square miles —three times the size of Britain —and we calculate that whereas Britain is overcrowded with its populations of 54,000,000 people, we can sustain a population of 70,000,000.” Rhodesia at preesnt has about 4,000,000 Africans and about 210,000 white people. He is assuming, he says, that in each generation and in each annual crop of young people, “there are those with

that spirit of adventure which not all the welfare schemes in the world can dampen or wipe out. These are the people 1 shall be addressing next April and May in my tour of 10 countries and 26 major cities.” “We shall offer small farms under irrigation where a man and his family can extract a good living by the application of his best energies and fortitude.

“He will never be a millionaire or have the problems of a millionaire, but he will be an asset as a hardworking, successful Rhodesian.”

Rhodesia, he added, can offer them a healthy, openair life, and the opportunity to exploit the country’s untapped mineral wealth, as well as the benefit of land settlement. Africans Opposed African reaction is bitterly opposed to Mr Reedman's plan. First, Africans argue, it is a device to flood the country with white people to perpetuate white domination. Second, they say, if irrigation farms be made available to white immigrants, why not to the indigenous people. Opinion among the white population, while generally favouring the scheme, is that it can never succeed. They base this on two arguments.

| 1. There is not the capital 'available to develop the potential reception areas, nor does there seem much likelihood of it being sponsored Iby European governments. 2. The experience of other i immigrant-receiving countries, notably Australia, has shown that sophisticated Europeans tend to congregate in the cities, with their advantages of education and modern civilisation, rather than endure the discomfort of trying to develop virgin land.