Showdown in Zimbabwe war of T-shirt slogans

Press, 10 February 1981, Page 9

Showdown in Zimbabwe war of T-shirt slogans

NZPA Salisbury Zimbabwe’s Government is soon to outlaw T-shirts that glorify the whites’ role in the guerrilla war that brought it to powier or lament the passing of the old white Rhodesian regime. “White youths are often wearing these shirts,” a Government spokesman said in announcing the move in an interview with the “Sunday Mail.” “The slogans are provocative, inflammatory, and racist in character.” The spokesman said printers would be banned, under proposed Government Gazette notices, from producing T-shirts that said such things as “Rhodesians never die” or “Rhodesian might is white and right.” White youths, many of them veterans of the seven-year war against the guerrillas, would : face prosecution in court under censorship laws if they wore outlawed T-shirts, the spokesman said. Robert Mugabe’s Government came to power in British-supervised elections last February after the war and called for re-

conciliation between the seven million blacks and the 200,000 whites who had ruled the former British colony. “These T-shirts are not in the spirit of reconciliation,” Festus Mhiangu, an employee in a shirt shop, recently complained to the offices of Mr Mugabe’s ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front.) “The Rhodesians are coming,” reads one such T-shirt against a background of a raid against a guerrilla camp. Thousands of people, including refugees, were, killed during the war in such air and ground raids, ostensibly against guerrilla bases in neighbouring Mozambique and Zambia. “I slay gooks,” says another shirt, using the common derogatory term for guerrillas that the Rhodesians learned from Americans who fought in Vietnam. “Join the Army. Visit exotic places. Meet interesting people — and kill them,” proclaims a third. Whites wonder whether the crackdown on T-shirts might be a prelude to a

purge of other memorabilia. White store owners still display the green and white flag of Rhodesia, as the country was called before independence last April 18, beside the new multi-coloured Zimbabwe standard. Books such as Danny Carney’s “Whispering Death” — about a lone white man’s hunt for an albino terrorist after the barbaric murder of his fiancee — still sell in the shops. Beer mugs, chess sets, and pens made from shell casings are popular buys among tourists as souvenirs of the war. And at a city hotel a white employee said she would rather be sacked than take down a portrait of Mr lan Smith, the former white Prime Minister, following protests to the management by black Z.A.N.U. (P.F.) officials. “Will they start on these next?” a young,, white former soldier who would not be identified said, pointing to the blood-stained knife tattooed on his right arm beside the words “Goodbye gooks.”