Rhodesian Situation Recalls J. S. Mill’s Perplexities On N.Z.

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31277, 25 January 1967, Page 7

Rhodesian Situation Recalls J. S. Mill’s Perplexities On N.Z.

Press" by R. M. CAMPBELL/ LONDON John Stuart Mill’s admirers claim that nothing he wrote about has since been put into better words. They might cite in support an 1866 letter to a friend in New Zealand, Judge Chapman (father of a later and better-known judge), posing a problem that then faced Britain in relation to New Zealand and now faces her in Rhodesia.

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Mill had just become a member of Parliament, and, so he wrote, was under a special public obligation to make up his mind on troublesome colonial questions. Chapman, his friend before leaving England, had been AttorneyGeneral of Victoria and later ‘The Times” correspondent in Melbourne before becoming a Supreme Court judge in New Zealand. Britain’s Problem “Is it possible,” asked Mill, “for England to maintain an authority (in a colony) for the purpose of preventing unjust treatment of the (coloured) people and at the same time allow self-govern-ment to the British colonists in every other respect? How is that one subject to be kept separate, and how is the Governor to be in other things a mere

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government of the colony by a colonial cabinet and legislature? ... I do not see my way through these difficulties.” Chapman’s letters, unlike Mill’s, have not been published. They are, however, stored in the Turnbull Library and some researcher might disinter his reply. If Mill were living today, he could be puzzled by a question that New Zealanders overseas find not too easy to dispose of: how to explain the much stronger support for the Rho-

desian U.D.I. regime in New Zealand than in Britain—particularly in contrast with the almost fierce pride of New Zealanders in their own racial equality? The question perhaps goes too far in assuming that guesses of “seven out of ten” in New Zealand supporting lan Smith are substantially correct. The estimate may have been revised downwards when the H.M.S. Tiger compromise was rejected in Salisbury. But I have no doubt, as a casual reader of the press of both countries, and from comments by travellers from New Zealand and comparable people here (even fellowtravellers in a London “stockbroker zone”) that the contrast is valid. Why so? We in New Zealand, whether brought up on the land or not, think in terms of our early settlers. New

Zealand is seen as a country developed from scratch by the pioneers, virtually made by the white settlers. This diagnosis of New Zealanders’ kindly views on Rhodesia has been given by one person faced with the paradox that different standards prevail in judging racial inequality within their own country and elsewhere. The inference is that some generous emotion from “pioneer-worship” overflows to the advantage of the racialist-minority regime in Rhodesia. It may be, too, that New Zealanders, in their pride in a smoothly-running “multiracial society,” are at pains to avoid boasting that their success is exportable to a more difficult setting. Would we be so racially tolerant if our non-whites were 95 per cent of the population? We would like to think so, but dare not be dogmatic. Much in Common

Rhodesia and New Zealand, of course, have much in common. A correspondent in Auckland, a cautious observer (yet confirming that, 70 per cent estimate of pro-Smith sentiment) writes: “I find interesting that fellows here from Rhodesia like New Zealand, saying it has the same way of life, the same attitude, the same general pace as Rhodesia.” (Rhodesian whites, of course). In both countries racial composition is divided into

something like 95 per cent and 5 per cent proportions (though the other way round). Who, taking other than a very short-term view, would suppose that the political supremacy of 5 per cent could last?

One must not push too far the point about contrasting United Kingdom and New Zealand judgments on Rhodesia. In both, such practical affairs as trade and investment as well as education and experience will have due weight Nowhere is it responsibly argued that “one man one vote” is immediately practicable. Yet I think that the practical consequences of the “wind of change” in the African setting have been more realistically accepted in Britain than in New Zealand.

This may be, in part, a question of timing, of the time-lag in facts getting known in the face of competing distractions. Damaging TV Interviews So the rejection of the H.M.S. Tiger formula, with later analyses of what this involved, clearly reduced the support in the United Kingdom for the U.D.I. regime. Sir Edgar Whitehead (“Spectator,” December 16, 1966) revealed that the “working document would, if implemented, have the effect of greatly postponing the possible date of African majority rule, almost certainly beyond the end of the century.” He

himself in the General Election campaign of 1962 had given a probable date of 1977.

In its vastly wider setting, television has decisive effects, very noticeably so when one or other of the British channels, 8.8. C. or 1.T.V., has featured live interviews with new-prosperous, not modest, emigres in Salisbury. It would be hard indeed to pinpoint any single item more damaging, in United Kingdom minds, to the cause of the U.D.L regime. Again, see John Stuart Mill: his 1866 letter to New Zealand’s Judge Chapman. Could the legislators at home, he anxiously asked, give up the coloured people to the mercy of the new settlers? “Knowing what the English are when they are left alone with what they think an inferior race, I cannot reconcile myself to this.”