White Terrorists

I visited refugee camps, for Angolans and Moambiquans, driven out by war, and I saw children whose parents had been killed by massive Portuguese carpet-bombing of rural areas—bombing that is indiscriminate and aimed at terrorising the rural African population. I saw too, many who had been imprisoned in Rhodesia, South Africa or in the Portuguese territories, simply because they had refused to yield to pressures to betray friends who had belonged to 'illegal' political parties. I remember vividly talking to Jane, a woman of my own age, who had been confined to solitary isolation in a cell six foot long, with no bed, for over six years. At night she was given a blanket, and then buckets of water were thrown on the floor so that she could not lie down. She now permanently suffers from swollen feet and ankles, and she had to flee quickly from her homeland after her release, leaving two of her children behind, to avoid being re-arrested. There were many others, but I do not think that stories of inhumanity are really the answer to the problem.

The struggle for liberty in Southern Africa is one for the whole world, and it is a struggle between vested interests and cheap labour supplies for the white races on the one hand, and the dignity, liberty and human rights of Africans who desire self-determination, on the other. New Zealand can assist the Africans in so many ways, but above all by making it absolutely clear, without any reservations whatever, that we stand for human dignity, for the African right to self-determination, and that until such time as that is achieved, we will have nothing to do, neither in sport, trade nor in diplomacy with the racist regimes who are the cause of suffering to so many black Africans.