Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 4. March 26 1968

K R Chihambakwe writes

K R Chihambakwe writes

Sir.—Last week when I opened the Evening Post at my flat in Kelburn alter tea the first thing I saw was a picture of Mrs. Mlambo—with a caption that told me her son, my friend, Victor Mlambo, had been hanged by Ian Smiths, de facto government.

I first knew Victor in 1956, when we were going to the same boarding school in the Eastern Highlands of Southern Rhodesia. Me was our school's star soccer player. When last I heard of him he was teaching in a rural primary school in Chipinga District.

What happened to him after this, until he decided he had no alternative but to fight the Smith regime by the only means posible—I do not know—but I find it very easy to imagine.

Victor Mlambo was hanged in a country, your correspondent, Mrs. Valintine, calls the most peaceful in the world—why? If it is so peaceful, did they need to hang page 5 Victor? Why does Rhodesia ask for military aid from South Africa if it is not afraid of its African population? why are they executing more than 100 African activists besides Victor; And why is it probably the only country in the world which makes a death sentence mandatory for such offences as throwing a stone at a bus or a goods train.

Two of the African chiefs whom Mrs. Valintine claims express the will of African majority in their forced support of Ian Smith were killed by three of the men hanged in this peaceful country.

"Some of us will be shot", Rhodesia's national leader, Joshua Nkomo once said, "others will be hanged—but all these things we have to go through before our country can be free".

The news from Rhodesia all this week has been news of hangings—news sufficient by itself to give the lie to Mrs. Valintine's picture of a peaceful, united country. There are 4¼ million Africans in Rhodesia. The African population is growing at the rate of 3y% each year. Thereare about 200,000 white people in Rhodesia—slightly less than the population of Christchurch. The number is hardly growing for many of them are leaving the country. In another 10 years Africans will outnumber whites by 1 to 40 instead of the present ratio of 1 to 22. The Smith regime is nothing more nor less than an attempt by 20,000 people to deny 4¼ million Africans their human rights. This is why there is fighting; this is why Smith's only way of dealing with this protest is—the rope.

Mrs. Valintine says Africans have a say in Rhodesia—that they have a vote. It is true there is a second-class electoral roll for Africans and people on this roll can elect only 15 out of 65 members of the Rhodesian parliament, It is also true that Africans have boycotted such elections—for they are a mockery of democracy. Mrs. Valintine says that the chiefs support Smith and the Africans are behind their chiefs. But the chiefs are paid government servants, dismissed by the Goverment if (like Chief Mangwende of Mrewa District in 1960) they choose to disagree with the government policy. In fact they (the chiefs) have authority over less than 50 per cent of the African population who live in officially designated tribal areas.

Mrs. Valintine says there is economic opportunity for Africans. But the European average wage in Rhodesia is more than ten times the average wage for the African—on official figures. I know a school where a white man who supervised the cleaning of school grounds on Saturdays and supervised school boys' manual work when they were not doing lessons during the week (he had no qualifications officially) earned £95 a month—while an African accountant earned only £39 a month. It was not the job, but the skin pigmentation that counted.

Would anyone blame the accountant for taking to the hills to fight the Smith regime? I would not.

As for Mrs. Valintine's assertion that Todd was rejected by the white electorate because he was 'undemocratic' the answer is very simple-undemocratic to whom? Todd wanted Africans to have a greater share of the franchise: Mrs. Valintine does not—yet, somehow, it is Todd, not Mrs. Valintine, who is undemocratic.

Mrs. Valintine's democratic principles will not allow her to support Garfield Todd, yet support censorship, to prevent the untutored Africans from being contaminated by propaganda they cannot evaluate. It becomes very clear that democracy and racialism mean very similar things to her. If her racialist assumption is true, though, that Africans cannot 'evaluate' propaganda, why is it that according to her, they have resolutely spurned "propaganda", from the B.B.C. and the Zambian radio?

Mrs. Valintine tells us she really loves the African people. She will not protest the hangings. She will not protest against concentration camps where nationalist leaders are interned. She will not protest against Garfield Todd's restriction to his farm and debarment from political activity. She will not protest against a state depending heavily on its security service that its C.I.D. executes a search warrant when two African graduates have tea together with their wives—to ensure they are not plotting subversion. She will not protest against inferior wage levels or educational standards for Africans. But she will join a charitable society to help Africans in need. Mrs. Valintine, you cannot appease your conscience this easily. We do not Want charity on such terms.

The Africans in Rhodesia and the African states are looking closely at divisions over race relations both in the Commonwealth and at the U,N. They want to find out who are their enemies and who are their friends. The line should prove easy to draw. New Zealand might not care what happens in a country as distant as Rhodesia—but at least this apathy should not lead her to support Smith. New Zealand—we know—can do very little diplomatically and otherwise, but there is no reason why it should not take a moral stand on this issue.

Rhodesia is a beautiful sub-tropical country—its immediate future is troubled. Either there must be majority rule in Rhodesia or the settlers will have to maintain minority rule by physical extermination of the African population. These are two alternatives—and the first is the most probable and desirable. Would it not be better to recognise this fact now?

— Kerenius R. Chihambakwe