Andrew Young
Andrew Young; drawing by David Levine

I

Formally, something called “majority rule” remains an accepted objective for Rhodesia and eventually South Africa. The right, including almost all African whites, are bitterly contemptuous about this. They point out quite correctly that African elections have been one-shot affairs, followed by phases of rule by civilian ideological elites, terminable only by means of military coups. They also point out that “majority rule” was not a condition existing in southern Africa before white colonization. As far as Rhodesia and the neighboring regions of South Africa were concerned, what preceded white rule were the militaristic frenzies and tyrannies of the Mfecane period. The white man may have taken over by violence and fraud (he did), but he did so in territories where these were already the governing forces.

Majority rule is a concept alien to Africa. It is a late growth of Anglo-American civilization. It is taken up in Africa, not with any intention of making it a reality, but as a weapon against a particular type of minority rule—white minority rule. The appeal to democratic values, officially dominant in the Western white nations, serves to delegitimize white rule in Africa.1 Once that is accomplished, what replaces white minority rule will be essentially what preceded it: black minority rule. The dominated will have the consolation of sharing the pigmentation of their overlords, as did the luckless subjects of the Zulu and the Ndebele.

The indignation of African whites at certain uses of the slogan of majority rule is understandable but inconsistent. Their own rule has rested not on fairness but on effectiveness. When an effective rhetorical weapon is used against them it does not help to point out its unfairness—what was so fair about the firearms with which they held power? And the democratic (or pseudo-democratic) weapon is remarkably effective, considering the very limited extent to which democracy is practiced in the world, and its nonexistence in Africa.

It is worth considering why the slogan of majority rule should be so effective and what the limitations of its effectiveness may be. It is effective, I believe, primarily because there is a desire for the severance that it implies. There has long been in the West a sense of guilt about the relation of its own wealth to the exploitation and poverty of the rest of the world. At the same time there is no question of our wanting to relinquish individually or collectively any of the advantages acquired by our guilty practices. The US and UK will want to maintain such access to the resources of southern Africa as they can and such influence over the regimes there as they can muster. We can, however, rid ourselves of some of our guilt by excommunicating personifications of it, in the anachronistic persons of the whites of Africa: the unacceptable faces of ourselves. The moral distinction between us and them is—we like to think—clear: we accept majority rule and they do not.

We are not, however, left alone to enjoy the comfort of that distinction. African nationalists, like Irish nationalists in the nineteenth century, know how to exploit guilt dramatically. Parnell used the House of Commons for his theater of guilt. Africans today can make use of an even more extraordinary theater: the United Nations. It is a theater whose conventions and traditions are exceedingly well suited to the drama of guilt: to accusations, exculpations, and rituals of propitiation. In the Forties and Fifties the United States provided the scripts and choreography for such performances and stage-managed them. Thus the United Nations—and in particular the General Assembly—was used for ritual legitimation of the United States’ decision to go to war in Korea, and also for ritual legitimation of the United States’ decision not to go to war over Hungary.2

In both cases, the rituals of legitimation were provided with parallel rituals of condemnation directed at the Soviet Union. But by 1956 Western powers—France, Britain, and Israel—were already themselves on trial. By 1958—at the time of the Anglo-American landings in Lebanon—it became evident that the United States was no longer in full control of the theater: for the first time one of the scenarios of the US delegation was rejected, through Arab influence. After the influx of new African states in 1960, the United Nations theater became more and more one of ritual condemnation of the white African regimes, and ritual pressure on the Western powers to apply material pressure to those regimes. This pressure was—and is—psychologically powerful, because of the following factors:

First, because of the reality of Western guilt feelings toward the non-white world;

Second, because of African and Asian—particularly African—awareness of such feelings and capacity to work on them;

Third, because of communist efforts to exploit the African reactions, and of African ingenuity in exploiting the fears inspired by the communists;

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Fourth, because in the theater of the United Nations (as in the world) there are many more non-whites than whites, so that white rituals and rhetoric are at a heavy disadvantage;

Fifth, because of the institutional tone of the United Nations. This tone is one of lofty morality. It was so from the beginning, in the eloquent preamble to the Charter—drafted by a South African, Jan Smuts. Over the years, when it seemed politic for the United States to build up the United Nations as embodying “the moral conscience of mankind,” this institutional tone was strengthened still further. Today it is the non-white members who insist on representing the “moral conscience.” Every player on the United Nations stage feels constrained to act out a virtuous role. But the Westerners have to act out parts written for them by history in language of imputed and partly accepted guilt, and to act them in a manner reasonably satisfactory to non-white expectations.

There is also a sixth factor, more specific in character. The United Nations is situated in New York and the high moments of its drama reach American audiences live on television. Its dramatized race relations thus interact with the race relations of the American cities and with the politics of those relations. And those same relations then react, in their turn, on the politics of Africa—as happened in February 1961 when the Security Council gallery riots, after Lumumba’s death, helped to change the Kennedy administration’s approach to the Congo and set the stage for the fall of Katanga.

This sixth factor is tied in with all the others. Because, however, of the worldwide power and influence of the host country, the United States, it is worth looking at this factor in rather more detail.

It is worth noting first of all that this factor, unlike the others listed, does not necessarily, in all circumstances, work to the disadvantage of the white African regimes. An administration, like Nixon’s, which has virtually written off the black vote may also feel able to ignore the accusing rituals of the East River.3 It may even be tempted to try a little ritual defiance, appealing to a section of white voters; hence the presence on the US delegation, successively, of Mr. William F. Buckley, Jr. and Mr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But ritual white defiance does not work well in that theater. If not perceptible to its immediate audience, it can give scant satisfaction to its domestic audience, and if perceptible to its immediate audience, it will be intensely unpopular with them (fourth factor above).

Such defiant behavior will then be correspondingly unpopular with the American professionals, both at the UN, in Washington, and in the African capitals. It will thus be seen as playing into the hands of the communists—a particularly destructive charge once the events of 1974-1975 in Portugal and Portuguese Africa made Henry Kissinger feel some of the same pressures, in relation to Rhodesia, as the Kennedy administration had felt in relation to the Congo.

The Carter administration has to feel these pressures too. But it also feels, as its predecessors did not, the tug of black feeling in the United Nations.

II

Over this junction of Africa and America Mr. Andrew Young has established an extraordinary authority. I think it is safe to say that he is respected in Africa, by African leaders, as hardly any American, and no black American, has ever been respected before. As Richard Wright learned in bitterness, Africans, and especially influential Africans, have tended to look down on black Americans—because they were slaves, because one’s ancestors might have sold theirs, because they were of mixed race, because they were often poor and ignorant, and because, when they had escaped these conditions, it was often in order to serve as a mouthpiece for white men, sometimes in relation to African matters, about which they had no real right to speak.

Andrew Young has a way of dispelling such dismal associations. He radiates confidence and intelligence, with just a touch of arrogance, of which he is comfortably aware. He is an easy, witty speaker; he knows how to be indiscreet and makes his indiscretions work in his favor. He has enormous charm, when he bothers to exert it. He has charmed President Nyerere—no mean charmer himself—and considering the wide, formal ideological gap between what he has to say and what President Nyerere has to say, the exertion of this charm has a certain political significance. In black America he necessarily has enemies; his qualities and attainments must arouse an envy which his style and manner can do nothing to disarm. But his admirers, even his worshipers, have to be more numerous than his detractors. He is a potent, living symbol of how far black people—some black people—have come in the America of today; there must be an awful lot of Moms who would like to see their boy grow up to be like Andrew Young.

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I watched Andrew Young, in Washington, on last November 7, working a part of that constituency of his. He was talking to employees of Health, Education, and Welfare; more than half of them were black and all who put questions to him were black. He spoke effortlessly without notes; I found myself taking notes, more than I ever remember taking at a public meeting.

The first note was on the speaker’s entrance. It read: “Standing ovation. Slight yawn.”

The yawn was Mr Young’s; the effect was not offensive, but somehow pleasing. A woman stood on the platform beside the speaker. She was moving her hands: simultaneous interpretation into deaf-and-dumb language. This too seemed to make a point in the speaker’s favor.

Mr. Young began by taking on his critics—he had been charged with running out on the black community in the United States. That was wrong. The solution of domestic problems depended on international progress. The effects of the Middle East war on the American economy showed that blacks—last hired and first fired—felt the worst effects of such international crises. The new administration had established “a new climate” in international relations.

Previously foreign policy had been “East-West oriented,” obsessed with communism. Under the new approach Americans should learn to have more confidence in the inherent attractiveness of free enterprise, of this “system of ours.” Africans were spontaneously drawn to it. “At the junction of Jomo Kenyatta Avenue and Uhuru Avenue in Nairobi I saw a sign. It read: ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken.”‘ In Angola, the government’s ideology was Marxist, but it was Gulf who was getting the oil out for them. The Tanzam railroad built by the Chinese was hauling mainly Western goods. The right policy in Africa was to allow these forces to speak and work for themselves, not to worry too much about communism, and to show that America was sympathetic to African nationalist aims. Because the Carter administration had adopted that policy it had “won the respect of the front-line presidents” (i.e., of Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, and Samora Machel). It now represented “what they thought America always ought to stand for.”

Moving back to domestic policy, he sounded on the defensive for the first time when he claimed that President Carter’s balanced budget policy was not “cutting back on the poor.”4 “These are cuts you have agreed with…they don’t affect the poorest of the poor.” Free food stamps had been saved. He sounded more comfortable as he moved away from that point to praise Governor Carter’s record on race relations in Georgia. The governor hadn’t talked much, but he had acted quietly and unobtrusively, and the formerly lily-white State Capitol was suddenly full of blacks. The effect of this on some people was such that quite possibly Jimmy Carter would not have been re-elected governor.

“But we solved that problem by…ah….”

As the sentence trailed away, the hall rocked with laughter.

He ended his speech with the words: “We were protest—and now we are it.”

After a second standing ovation, questions. A warming up question about adverse press comment on Mr. Young’s indiscretions. He was magnanimous, deadpan. The press had its faults, but you had to admit that in the long run it was “very educational—it forces the American people to think for themselves.” More laughter.

The next question concerned South Africa—this was just after the Security Council had decreed a mandatory arms embargo: “How will limited sanctions have the desired impact?”

Mr. Young said that no sanctions could have the desired impact: South Africa was “amazingly independent.” It could survive a decade of total sanctions. The arms embargo was “uncomfortable” for them; it “about answered” the provocation of their recent clamp-down. Limited sanctions were useful as warning signals, and more likely to be effective than total sanctions; they could help moderate leadership to emerge. South Africa he thought was more like Dixie than they want to admit.

The implication appeared to be that the racial progress which had happened in Dixie—and which was symbolized by the speaker—could be produced in South Africa by a combination of economic forces and prudent international pressure, sanction signals.

A woman questioner was troubled by the thought that the collapse of Smith’s Rhodesia—a collapse which she assumed to be imminent—might bring white racist immigrants to the United States.

Mr. Young was not worried. “A few fascists,” he thought, “might keep you from taking democracy for granted.” In any case, the whites would not have to leave Rhodesia or my other place in Africa. African governments wanted white people to stay. Mozambique was the latest proof of that. “We have two blacks in our cabinet. Mozambique has three whites.”

The last question was about Uganda, and the damage that Idi Amin might be doing to the African image. Mr. Young did not think that Amin’s leadership was an indigenous African phenomenon at all. The British had used him to get rid of Milton Obote. “Obote, you see, was this arrogant black intellectual”—Mr. Young’s features flashed in self-parody—“so they looked around for another guy. They were going to raise them up a good nigger that they could control…Idi Amin.”

More laughter and a final standing ovation.

Meeting Mr. Young in his office later that afternoon I found him friendly and courteous, but quite lacking in the animation he had shown throughout his public appearance. I was asking him questions about southern Africa—possible impacts of sanctions, prospects for the future of the Anglo-American proposals. His answers were vague, conventional, abstracted. I slowly realized that our conversation was beside the point. Southern Africa was not the point. America was the point, the position of black people in America, the meeting of that morning. In relation to that great point, it was important that America should be seen—seen domestically and seen internationally—to pay respect to the views of black states and to oppose racism. It was also important that it should do so in the symbolic person of Andrew Young. These things were important in and for themselves, and for America. These things had to be done for their own sakes, because they were right. Since they had to be done, what their impact might be “out there”—in southern Africa—was rather beside the point, something about which one could only hope for the best. The emergence of a rational black element in American power was, on the other hand, something clearly on the way, and something which a man could be proud to symbolize.

Consolidar a Revolucao—a Revolucao Georgiana

Under their sharply contrasting ideological flags, Andrew Young and Mozambique Foreign Minister Joaquim Chissano have some important things in common. Understandably, Mr. Young is something of a hate-figure to the whites of southern Africa. Yet it could be argued that the forces he represents work in some ways toward easing rather than increasing the pressures on the white regimes. Consensus among the United States, Britain, and the “frontline” states—Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, and Botswana—has a stabilizing rather than a destabilizing effect on the region. The confidence inspired by Mr. Young’s personality and style is a key factor in that consensus. But his tendency to play down the communist menace rather than play it up has also had a stabilizing effect. The dynamics of anticommunism are destructive and unpredictable. In the Congo they destroyed both Patrice Lumumba and those who killed Patrice Lumumba. They were eventually decisive in bringing about an event unique in history: the forcible liquidation by the United Nations of a political entity, Katanga.

It may be that the future has something like that in store for Rhodesia and/or South Africa. But it is certain that the mood and character of the Anglo-American/Front-Line consensus works not to hurry on such confrontation but to arrest or at least postpone it. All the leaders concerned are prudent people with something to lose. Mozambique, on the “left” of the consensus, has no less valid economic reasons than Britain on the “right” to want to postpone for as long as possible any confrontation with South Africa. The pressures that have built up on Rhodesia and on South Africa itself over Namibia represent an effort to rescue South Africa, even against its will, from positions of illegality—sanction-busting in Rhodesia and illegal occupation in Namibia—that might make it impossible to veto sanctions, even possibly military sanctions, against South Africa itself.

For situations of illegality attract the theater of the United Nations, cast those who appear to condone illegality in undesirable roles, and in general have a tendency to unpredictable escalation. On the other hand new independent black states—Zimbabwe and Namibia—would have as good reasons as Mozambique to seek to put the brakes on progress toward confrontation with South Africa.

At the same time, the international pressures on Rhodesia are applied with remarkable caution. It would for example be possible for the “front-line” states to say to Britain, in effect: “If you are not prepared to discharge your responsibilities as sovereign over this territory, by suppressing the Smith rebellion, then we ask you to hand over those responsibilities to the United Nations, requesting the international organization to create the conditions for majority rule in Zimbabwe.” Such a request—which would no doubt be highly embarrassing—is not being made, and is not likely to be made.

On the contrary there is a definite desire, in the “front-line” states, for a continued British involvement, even in the rather ghostly form which that involvement has taken since 1965. I heard in the “front-line” states, and from ZANU and ZAPU people, a fair amount of anti-British grumbling, but it was a comfortable kind of grumbling. As a connoisseur of anti-British sentiments I found this stuff decidedly lacking in zing. They’re very devious, was the most frequent complaint: not necessarily an entirely hostile comment, from one set of politicians about another. I sensed a certain sober satisfaction that this familiar British deviousness was still around, to be complained about, and also possibly drawn on in some way for one’s own purposes. The idea of a United Nations force on the other hand represented the unknown: the precedents of the Congo were ambiguous but frightening. The idea of sharing in responsibility for the unpredictable transactions of such a force was also frightening. Safer to leave the responsibility to the British, and lay the shortcomings at their door.

It was generally assumed—not for the first time—that the collapse of the Smith regime was imminent. The guerrillas might not be able to win direct military victory but the strain which they were able to impose on the white economy and white society, and the net white emigration reflecting that strain, must inevitably destroy the regime. Most people seemed to be thinking about which faction of the Patriotic Front—Nkomo’s or Mugabe’s—would then prevail, and which transitional arrangements would benefit which faction. The idea of a possible internal settlement, producing a black-and-white regime, was rather heavily discounted at this time. I asked one able and experienced African correspondent whether she thought Smith really proposed to go for elections which would provide a black majority. She said no, he would “dangle the possibility”; no more.

I thought the pressures and evasions which were seen as making Smith’s collapse imminent might well be real enough to make him do more than just dangle possibilities. He would after all be taking quite a lot of wind out of a great many sails if a general election were to show a majority for Bishop Muzorewa and Mr. Sithole—men who were being denounced by the Patriotic Front as stooges and traitors. There could be no UN observers for such elections—the “front-line” states would see to that—but the world press would provide the observers. Six years before, Smith’s regime had suffered a major setback when the Pearse Commission had reported rejection by the African population of the terms negotiated between Smith and Sir Alec Douglas Home—terms which would have legalized independence, but under minority rule. The most prominent figure in organizing the rejection of the Home-Smith terms had been Bishop Muzorewa as chairman of the African National Council (ANC). The Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, as leader of the proscribed ZANU, had also stood for rejection—and much more clearly than Joshua Nkomo had done. Moderates and extremists in African politics are liable to switch votes in unpredictable ways.

The Pearse Commission’s findings had stripped the Smith regime of its claim to international legitimacy. But if those whose views had impressed the Pearse Commission as representatives of the African people were endorsed as its representatives in free elections, then a government formed by them would have a serious claim to legitimacy—as a “new Pearse Commission” might well report to a British Conservative Government. The whites of Rhodesia would by no means be out of the wood either domestically or internationally but they would have allies again inside as well as outside Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

III

I had been warned to keep out of Rhodesia. The warning had been conveyed to me in London on November 10, at a gathering in Chatham House, held to confer the Christopher Ewart Biggs Memorial Literary Awards. The man who conveyed the warning was an official at the Republic of Ireland desk at the Foreign Office. He said: “I have a message for you from Jack Gaylard. He said to tell you you will not be welcome in Rhodesia, and to remember that there are Belgians there”—the reference to Belgians was presumably intended to suggest that former residents of Katanga now domiciled in Rhodesia might be vengefully disposed toward the former United Nations representative in Elisabethville.

Filling in the immigration form at Salisbury airport, I laid a good deal of stress on my academic connections and was otherwise vague. Indeed I fear I was guilty of that offense which would have deprived me of any political future in Mozambique: absence of clarity in my autobiography. Once inside Rhodesia, however, I thought it better to be more explicit. I rang the director of information to ask for an interview with Mr. Smith. I gave my academic credentials, but added: “I was formerly a United Nations official, in the Congo.” “Yes,” said Mr. Ferris. “We know all about that, Dr. O’Brien.”

Mr. Ferris was courteous, even punctilious, but I never did get to see Mr. Smith. Nor did I meet with any Belgians, or any personal unpleasantness.

I did, however, meet Bishop Muzorewa, at his political headquarters in Charter Road, Salisbury. The headquarters are across from the Zimbabwe Furniture Stores in a populous African district. A small house, very plainly furnished, and very crowded, entirely with Africans: a lot of tea was being made and served. The atmosphere was rather like that of a local headquarters of a working-class party in a working-class district in a pre-election period. One difference, however: security was very tight. Not as tight as at the mission of Israel to the United Nations in New York—which is the tightest I ever experienced—but much tighter than with the “front-line” presidents, the leaders of the Patriotic Front, or the foreign minister of Mozambique. My briefcase and I were very carefully searched. The searchers—large, grave, tense men—seemed surprised that I should carry no weapon at all. “Not even a knife?”

The bishop is a small man, rather stiff in manner and carriage, and reserved in speech. He does not have either the weighty authority of Mr. Nkomo or the melancholy dignity of Mr. Mugabe. Meeting him, one could understand Zambian President Kaunda’s fears about him. President Kaunda does not dislike or despise the bishop, although the president’s political protégé, Joshua Nkomo, has used strong language about him. The president fears that the bishop might get the votes in “recognized” elections under the Anglo-American proposals—and then not be able to control the situation. Meeting Mr. Nkomo and the bishop, one can understand how a politician might decide that Nkomo was the better bet, votes or no votes.

Yet the politician might possibly be wrong. Small, colorless men have often made an impact in history, surprising people by their courage and their ruthlessness. There is a certain stubbornness, an undertone of bitterness, about the bishop, which reminded me of Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, who became president of the Irish Free State when De Valera resigned in 1922. You could see the bishop dig his heels in. He said he stood where he always stood on the principle of majority rule. One of the bishop’s leading supporters, George Nyandoro, whom I met in Lusaka, had defined the Patriotic Front’s position as NEBMAR. (No elections before majority rule.) But the bishop himself is not given to jokes. Neither outsiders nor minorities, said the bishop, had any right to determine the future of the people of Zimbabwe. “I am not looking for elections because I think I will win them. I am looking for them because the people have a right to decide their own future.”5

He did not know whether Mr. Smith was genuinely prepared to agree to majority rule or not, but the only way to find out was to negotiate with him. If Mr. Smith was prevaricating about majority rule, then the negotiations would not succeed. They would be difficult negotiations; neither success nor failure should be predicted at this point. But his right to negotiate should not be disputed. The claim that only the gun gave the right to negotiate had to be rejected. He hoped that the Patriotic Front would run in the elections. They were entitled to whatever support the people freely gave them. Neither they nor Mr. Smith had a right to dictate to the people. Mr. Sithole and he were working on the same lines, aiming, as always, at majority rule.

I had the impression that Bishop Muzorewa meant what he said, and also that he would be a difficult man to negotiate with: principled, pig-headed, and a little pedantic.

I had gone to Charter Road by taxi, but no taxis were in sight to take me back, in that section of the city, so I walked back. For about twenty minutes I was the only white pedestrian in streets crowded with blacks of all ages. No more than in Maputo did I at any moment experience any sign of racial hostility.

I have tried in these articles to chronicle such nonhappenings, without awareness of which the happenings covered as news may perhaps have a distorting impact. Both Maputo, after its revolution, and Salisbury, presumed to be on the verge of its revolution, showed much less visible evidence of ferment than I found in New York in the late Sixties, not to mention Belfast in the early Seventies. No doubt this was partly deceptive as recent violence in Salisbury suggests. Certainly the cities should not be taken as fully representative, and even in the cities one met lives closely touched by war.

I met in Salisbury a young woman whose fiancé, a pilot in the Rhodesian Air Force, had been engaged in the Chimoio raid on the ZANU guerrillas; I met in Maputo a young man, a ZANU official, whose wife had been on the receiving end of that raid (hurt but not killed). Both the white young woman and the black young man showed a similar reaction, in a tense emotional contempt for the abstract “political” talk going on around them and for the civilian routine. Nonetheless it was routine—peaceable routine—which dominated the visible lives of the cities. There were posters about antiterrorist violence, but on the whole Salisbury was getting ready for Christmas, not for the Apocalypse.

The routine was, of course, in part a new and still unfamiliar routine. In Meikles Hotel at lunch time a long table filled up with a racially mixed party. White men, white women, and black men, no black women. Not an unmixed success: the white women talked mostly with the other white women, sometimes with the white men, never with the black men. The white men were a little too loud and too jovial. The black men smiled and said very little. Nonetheless it was happening, inspired by the hope of the internal settlement.

If—it’s still a big “if”—the internal settlement were to come to fruition, with large African electoral participation, that by itself would not end the violence or lift the sanctions. The Patriotic Front—if it did not itself join in such a settlement—would be likely to keep up, and try to step up, its guerrilla activities.

But it would be doing so in a changed political and moral context. Its actions would be less likely to seem legitimate to the people. In such conditions, the “front-line” presidents—all able, prudent men, who both want and need peace—would sooner or later have to cast a thoughtful eye on elected African leaders in Salisbury. If I read Mr. Chissano aright, he might be the first to put out a feeler.

Those are among the possibilities for the future, if the Salisbury talks—and the preliminary agreement announced on February 15—should come to fruition. But it would be very much better if the contemplation of such possibilities for the future were now to lead people in the direction of widening the basis of the internal talks. It would be well if the leaders of the Patriotic Front were to cease their public attacks on the African parties to the Salisbury talks, and were to open private contacts with those parties. It would also be well if Mr. Smith could be brought to see that it is not in the interests of those whom he represents—or any Rhodesians—to lay down conditions which have the effect of preventing the participation of any representatives of the Patriotic Front in the Salisbury talks.

The progress of the internal talks, and the prospects for widening them, deserve to be seriously considered by the British and the Americans. If the talks can be widened and their momentum maintained, peace in Rhodesia, and the lifiting of sanctions, could be near at hand. If the external and internal negotiations continue to go separate and uncommunicating ways, then sanctions and fighting, hurtful to all the people of Rhodesia, and to their neighbors, remain in prospect for some time to come.

At the airport as I left, the security officials, rather wistfully, asked me to acknowledge that I had been courteously treated in Rhodesia. White Rhodesians set a high value on courtesy. I acknowledged their courtesy, and reciprocated it by making no mention of Mr. Gaylard’s message, or alleged message.

—February 15

(This is the second article in a series.)

This Issue

March 23, 1978