The perils of hatred in Rhodesia

Press, 19 October 1978, Page 12

The perils of hatred in Rhodesia

DIANA MITCHELL,

the author of this article,

was born in Rhodesia, is married to a civil servant there, and has three children. She has been a political opponent of the ruling Rhodesian Front and has unsuccessfully fought two election cam paigns. Here she describes the growing white anger since the shooting down of a Rhodesian airliner last month, and the consequences of a white backlash.

When the news hit Salisbury whites after the crash of the Air Rhodesia Viscount last month there w’as a wave of bitterness, a backwash of gall, and rising tide of sheer unembellished hatred expressed all over the city, and its surroundings. It was bad enough to have your friends shot down (an instant assumption), but to have women and children, already broken and bleeding, dragged to their feet and shot by terrorists at point blank range was the end. Rhodesia Broadcasting and Television kept repeating it, over and over again; the survivors were interviewed at great length and urged not only to say how dreadful was their experience, but also how dreadful were the prepetrators of such an act of brutalitp. The “lie industry” had not been prepared for the incident. Mostly, we Salisbury citizens have been given highly sanitised renderings of the killings, the abductions, the atrocity and counter-atrocity, according to the wishes of the Government propaganda organs and the good sense of the local newspaper proprietors who know by now how easy it is to get your publication banned if you step out of line. Manj’ of us knew people on that plane — one was my neighbour, the father of three young children. Often we hear of the death of the son of a friend, a brother, or husband serving in the forces, or killed in an ambush. Wives and daughters too; there is no discrimination on grounds of sex, colour, or religious conviction in the deathly battle going on in Rhodesia today.

For all that, the consciousness of colour persists very strongly in the relatively peaceful life of the city. The peace was shattered the other day in First Street when a white man picked up his newspaper and read of the deaths of the survivors of the air crash at the hands of the terrorists, and opened up with his FN at the first black man who passed his car on the pavement nearby. It was all covered over, of course, and given out as an accident, the “lie industry”

was protecting us again. But it may be too late. We should have been better protected from the news of the crash, if there had not been so many witnesses, and the very real danger of a white backlash might have been reduced. As it. is, the tales of “what we are going to do to . 'them’ when we get back into uniform on our next call-up,” or how we are going out to prove our superior civilisation by going out in a posse into an African township and shooting everything black that moves, get increasingly wilder. A couple of years ago, long before the war was half as bad as it has become, whites who had no personal axe to grind, who were simply bigoted, racialistic, and showing off for their less intelligent friends, were already threatening that rather than hand over their possessions to the “Afs” they would burn the lott, and shoot their way out of the country.

This did not extend only to the bar-room and bedroom — it got as high as the boardroom, and even the exalted regions of the Cabinet, where rumours had it, mor than one Minister was proposing it as his ultimate solution to the country’s problems.

How much worse, when we have been touched, every one of us, by now, by tragedy-

Somehow, I have never been able to lose sight of the “other side.” Ten thousand people have died since 1972, with the black-white ratio running at more than ten to one.

Tjis is a macabre reversal of two well-known statistics — 10 to one times more spent on each white child’s education than on blacks; 10 times higher income for whites.

The average white, however, does not believe this, even if he has heard about it. He is totally unable to comprehend why it is that the blacks get so angry that there is such a “disproportionate” outcry, both here and in the rest of the world, whenever whites are written off in alarming numbers, while the news that

anything up to 60 deaths of blacks (reported in the local press only last month) in one day, passes almost without notice.

Some are listed as "terrorists.” Otherse as “civilians running with, or assisting terrorists.” Or they may be described as having been killed in “crossfire.” Those of us who have kept an eye on the law know that when the Roman Catholic Cdmmission for Justice and Peace tried to bring to court some known atrocities perpetrated by Government security forces, there was a new law passed, indemnifying members of the security forces against such charges. No wonder the war has gone so bad that it is difficult to know whether any law is of use any more. Lawlessness is becoming the order of the day. The shock of the “M“Msana Private Army” of “General” Comrade Max frightened enough people into realising, at least, that such lawlessness exists, and is being encouraged, where the bandits are friendly to Government agents.

With very little warning, white Rhodesians were shown a television film of the little Christian Bishop

Muzorewa brandishing an AK rifle of “communist origin” and metaphorically embracing a hairy-looking fellow dubbed as “Comrade Max” as a new-found friend and supporter of the Smith regime.

There were denials of the authenticity of the programme. and African people coming from the area report that they were totally in the dark about any such new army, and that, in any case, there are bands of youths, armed with sticks, going around their tribal reserve, just 20 miles from Salisbury, demanding heavy payments towards Muzorewa’s and Sithole’s parties. Occasionally the lawlessness and the lie industry fade for a few moments when the clear voice of an honest organisation is heard. When a speaker for the Justice and Peace Commission was asked at a meeting at a Salisbury hotel why “they don’t make enough fuss about atrocities perpetrated by the terrorists” he explained that the local media hammer very hard on the ills suffered by whites, and that they merely seek to redress the balance a little.

You begin to understand what they mean when whites say, in one breath

“our security forces (whiteled) could never do such bestial, inhuman, savage ■things” and, in the next “I can’t wait to get back into uniform so that I can teach those black bastards a lesson.”

When they talk about their “posses,” I suppose they forget that we are outnumbered here by 22 to one and that any black posses, before or after the war’s end, could do some d dreadful damage in the white suburbs. This could be a sure way to set off the dreaded stampede for the border, which miraculously has not happened in spite of all the bad news we have had to absorb this year. A local economist, referring to the effect of sanctions, once referred to “the boiling frog syndrome” where the animal fails to notice the gradually increasing temperature of the water until it is too late, and he is killed by the heat.

You could say the same about death and destruction now. You notice it only if you are in the bush, in the army, or, occasionally, in the way of a terrorist bomb. Otherwise, it is always somebody else who has been hit. « s .. t

My own thermometer has been functioning very well, due to a variety of circumstances — the chief of which is that I have been a consistent opponent of lan Smith’s political leadership. I, and those like me, always knew that those policies were disastrous, but we never believed it could get quite so bad. The thought of this latter day white backlash is the worst of all. If some fool carries out his boast, and tries to make an example of blacks in this kind of environment then I shudder to think of the awful reprisals. The country is bristling with arms. Almost everyone has a weapon, and there' are known to be cashes building up in every township teeming with blacks, and in anthills, granite kopjes and caves in the bush.

Those idiots who expect to achieve a blow for white supremacy by turning up the volume of their racial bigotry at this late stage of the war, could well succeed in uniting blacks in anger, in a common cause. I hope and pray it will not happen that way. I wonder if my white friends and I will live to see some miracle prevent it. 0.F.N.5., Copyright. |