THE SLEGE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

by

Douglas Reed

LORELEI and LORELLE

CONTENTS

although no chapter numbers were used in the original, they have been used here for convenience

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

The Siege

The Ravening Wolves

Angolan Ordeal

“Wilson’s War”

The Martyrdom Of Mozambique South West

South Africa; The Great Change

Foreword

Author’s Note

Appendix

Acknowledgements

08 In Blanketland Again

09 L’Etat C’est Moi In Swaziland 10 The “Non-Racial” Republic

11 The Chinese Invasion

12 Interim Balance Sheet

13. The Unabated Storm

Foreword

In the first book which I wrote after my arrival in South Africa in 1947"! I said, “I expect Africa to become of major importance during the next fifty years ... for third parties, international aspirants to world power who sought to raise the dark man against the white one, and to divide the white men among themselves, South Africa was a land of opportunity.”

In 1948-9, when this was written, it was a very long shot even for a man of my experience.”! In 1948-9 Africa was a minuscule dot on the outer periphery of the radar screen of international affairs and events. It was not present in the mind of the public masses at all. Africa was for them a large place far away which they knew nothing about (as Mr. Neville Chamberlain might have said).

That was to be radically changed in the 1960's when, by obvious preconcerting at the super-national or behind the scenes level, a propaganda campaign equivalent in its noise and intensity to a barrage on the Somme in 1916 or a thousand-bomber raid on Hamburg in 1944 was suddenly opened against the remnant of White-ruled Africa because it did not lie down and let the tidal wave of massacre, one-man-dictatorship and terrorist police sweep over it from the north, where one newly “emergent” state after another demonstrated the abiding validity of old Tippu Tib's dictum that “the man with the gun will always rule Africa”.

I also discovered in those far-off days of the Forties, when the word “Africa” was not present at all in the mind of the masses at large (today it preponderates in the screaming daily headlines and violent opinions about it are loud on the lips of every initiated conspirator or imbecilic infatuate in the world), very large plans for Africa were already shaped in those secret places “behind the scenes whence the world is truly governed” (Disraeli).

Thus a Mr. Truman from Missouri, having ascended the Democratic elevator from the Vice- Presidential to the Presidential floor at the close of Mr. Roosevelt's catastrophic fourteen years, was soon prompted to announce a programme for “saving the world from Communism” which contained a “Fourth Point”, “a defence master plan to open up Africa South of the Sahara”. This envisaged a “huge project” for building roads and railways between the African possessions of Britain and those of other countries, and establishing “new airways and modernizing scores of new ports”. (Long before any of these blessings could accrue, Britain had been bereft of all “possessions

in Africa’.)

Intrigued by the discovery of this stupendous scheme for developing Africa, I pursued my researches and found that a similarly stupendous scheme had already been outlined in a book by the then American Communist leader, Mr. Earl Browder. Mr. Browder's vision (or his masters’; Communist leaders in countries outside the Soviet area do not have such ideas of their own) was that America should underwrite “a gigantic programme for the industrialization of Africa ... large- scale plans for railroad and highway building ... all-round modernization ... in undeveloped areas”.

Fine and fair words, but all that came of them in the next twenty years was bloodshed, of Black men by Black men, on a scale probably greater than that of the Second World War. They revealed, however, the continued collusion of American and Communist strategy “behind the scenes”, the earliest public sign of which was given by the words of the first of the puppet Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, to Congress in 1917 on the occasion of the Bolshevist Revolution: “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have happened in the last ten weeks in Russia ... here is a fit partner for a league of honour”.

A straight line runs from this early revelation through the fourteen Roosevelt years. President Roosevelt told a penitent Communist defector to “go jump in the lake” when informed with proof that his right hand “adviser” was a Soviet agent: the same who was the dying President's right hand adviser at Yalta when the decision was taken to transfer half of Europe from the Hitlerist to the Stalinist curse, and to drive out the Allies' Chinese allies from China and establish the Communists in their place. These are all matters of authentic and verifiable record. Some day a competent dramatist might take the Yalta Conference for his theme. The scene showing Stalin gazing sardonically at the dying President opposite him, surrounded by men whom Stalin well knew to be his (Stalin's) own men has all the stuff of high drama.

This shadow policy of parallelism with Communism in deeds while publicly professing inflexible antagonism to Communism continued through the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower. Under President Nixon there was a recoil from it.

As far as Africa is concerned, at any rate, President Nixon took off the heat. He did not send “Special Emissaries for Africa”, like the egregious Mr. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, to go round Africa calling for the South African Government to be “brought to its knees”. Neither did he send members of his family to harangue students of South African universities about the evils of South Africa.

President Nixon, indeed, showed a sense of responsibility in world affairs: and because of that the termites in his administration, and those in other countries who also work “behind the scenes” under the cover-name of “liberalism”, will break him if they can. The reader will be able to judge of that for himself by 1976. If this president can survive the international onslaught against him and can halt his country in doing the Communist revolution's work for it, which is what his predecessors did, the outlook for Africa, and for much else, would greatly improve. If the next President is of the Wilson-Roosevelt school, the world can, in my opinion, say goodbye to the United States it has known, and should watch out for its own survival.

And now, to Southern Africa and its beleaguerment.

Douglas Reed

South Africa, South West Africa, Angola, Rhodesia, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, 1973-4.

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Author's Note

For the purpose of this book the term “Southern Africa” denotes the following States and territories: South Africa (with its several Black Homelands), South West Africa, Angola, Lesotho, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Botswana and Swaziland.

I spent nearly a year between 1973 and 1974 travelling the immense area which contains these territories, and covered some 30,000 miles by jeep, landrover, military or civilian aircraft, army convoy, military or private car, and rail. My thanks are particularly due to the South African, Portuguese and Rhodesian authorities, who enabled me to go anywhere and to see whatever I wished in the terrorist-infested and other areas.

“Southern Africa’, in the meaning of this book, is of course the part of Africa which so far has been spared the régime of massacre and gun-rule bequeathed to the remaining northern part by “the wind of change”, and the words “The Siege” allude to the intense campaign waged from the outside world, and supported by arms, money and the most poisonous propaganda this writer has ever known, with the purpose of spreading the area of massacre and gun-rule to those parts which as yet have resisted the infection.

May 1974

D.R.

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Chapter One

THE SIEGE

Siege: Operations of encamped attacking force to take or compel surrender of fortified place (Concise Oxford Dictionary); The investiture of a town or fortress by hostile troops in order to induce it to surrender either by starvation or by attack at a suitable juncture (Chambers Encyclopaedia); The “sitting down” of an army or military force before a fortified place for the purpose of taking it, either by direct military operations or by starving it into submission (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The reader will see that none of these definitions describes the siege which is the subject of this book, though the direct military attack has for twelve years now been clamoured for by the warmongering majority at the United Nations, and a detailed military, naval and air blue print for such an operation was published years ago by one of the various American Government- subventioned “foundations” in New York. The open frontal attack has not happened, or not yet, and the siege of Southern Africa which has been conducted during the last decade is of an entirely new nature. It is one of bombardment by falsehood, threat and menace from the body ludicrously called the “United Nations” in New York; of murder, arson and rapine by hired assassins on the borders of the four countries chiefly besieged; and of incitement by words and money gifts from innumerable “democratic” Governments and Communist “cover organizations” all over the world.

This, in short, is a siege of a kind never before known in recorded history: but then, this century is like none in recorded history. To those inside the area of beleaguerment the noise from without is like that of the incessant howling of a pack of hyenas. The countries under this siege have offended none and threaten none. The siege began within a few years of the Second World War, which ended with the abandonment of half Europe to the Communist tyranny of which Hitler's was but a carbon copy.

These achievements bequeathed to the remaining “free world” a sense of moral rectitude which expressed itself in a sudden outburst of fury and menace against South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique on account of the treatment of the Black peoples in those territories. This, was the general clamour, was not to be borne.

Some of the contributions to this cacophony of hatred and contempt may provide the future historian with scope for humorous comment. A leading part in the threats and money gifts to the murder gangs was played by a body of mysterious origin, but obvious political bent, which called itself “the World Council of Churches”. I deem the part played by this body to be worse than that of Judas: I have seen the results at the other end, and would like to take the members of this organization severally by the nose and lead them through the wards where Black babies lie, their feet blown off by Chinese and Russian mines.

Then there was a Mr. Harold Wilson, who used the oldest trick in the busker's book (raising the eyes to the gallery as the punchline is spoken) to gain the maximum applause for his undertaking to lend “British Labour's” support to “the freedom fighters”. In announcing his party's “unconditional” gift of money to the “liberation movements” (at Blackpool in October 1973), Mr. Wilson upcast his eyes to the gallery, where sat the representatives of these “liberation movements”, and reaped the expected storm of applause from there. At almost the same time Queen Elizabeth, in the speech from the Throne prepared by her Ministers, was saying, “The British Government remains committed to encouraging peaceful change in Southern Africa, but condemns the use of violence”’.

Mr. Wilson, when he addressed his words to the gallery at Blackpool, was hoping to become British Prime Minister again.

Politicians the world over outdid each other in the venom of their attacks and feared not to make themselves ridiculous. The chief of these was a Mr. Gough Whitlam, who in resigning as Australian Foreign Minister described himself as “the greatest we've had”, and aligned himself with forgotten Mr. “Soapy” Williams from Washington in calling for the South African Government to be brought to its knees. He also said that Mr. Ian Smith of Rhodesia was “as bad as Hitler”.

This irresistibly put me in mind of another Prime Minister, one whose vanity and ignorance led my native country into a disastrous war, and in my private album I classified Mr. Gough Whitlam, from remote Australia, as “worse than Chamberlain”. I never thought to be able to say that of any politician, but the twentieth century knows only the change from bad to worse.

Thus politicians throughout the world fell over each other in the rush to get on the band-wagon of “aid to liberation movements”. West Germany's Socialists, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Canada, even far New Zealand and, of course, Russia and China joined in the chorus, so violent was their urge to aid the victims of oppression anywhere except in Poland, the Baltic lands, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Arab Palestine.

Another body of Churchmen (ah, these men of peace and love!) joined with the World Council of Churches, and at Dublin in 1973 reaffirmed its support for the other body in the matter of giving financial aid to “liberation movements” against the counsel of two bishops from Southern Africa, one of whom, Bishop Burrough of Mashonaland, introduced an element of truth into the imbecilic debate by saying that the Council was in effect supporting “naked terrorism”. He added, again with utter truth, “You are sending them to their certain deaths in a contest which they cannot win for a liberty which they cannot produce”.

This is the whole truth of the matter, which everybody in Africa knows. In any chaos of the kind which these people outside Africa strive to produce inside Africa for their own ulterior purpose, the Black people would be the greatest sufferers and they would be less free than ever before: they would, in fact, return to the days of “darkest Africa”. What has happened north of the Zambezi has already shown that, and Black leaders who as yet have been spared well know it.

One of the most notable Black Leaders to emerge from the contemporary South African scene, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of Zululand, knows this and said so publicly to a hostile audience in America: “You must stop encouraging people to create a bloodbath for other people to bathe in.” I have long wondered whence came this nauseating phrase, “bloodbath”, to which, in Africa, politicking clerics seem particularly addicted. It has the sound of Teutonic fury and might have been the product of Hitler's or Goebbels's diseased minds, or for that matter of the greatest bloodshedder of all, Stalin. It could only have gained popular currency in this degraded century of the liberal death-wish.

A prominent Black leader in, South Africa, Chief Kaizer Matanzima of the Transkei, also warned African States supporting terrorism to “mind their own business”, and all responsible Black men in Southern Africa, knowing well that they are the potential victims of “liberation”, feel like this, and often say so. Chief Gatsha Buthelezi even made himself highly unpopular in Communist quarters by his remark and was the object of organized hostile student demonstrations when he visited Dar es Salaam, the Chinese headquarters in Africa and the base of Chinese arms supply.

In August 1974, a third Black political leader from one of the self-governing Black Homelands set up by the South African Government, Venda (the one nearest to the menace of “liberation” from

the north) spelt out the same warning. This was Mr. Baldwin Mudau, who on returning from America said conversations with Black African delegates at a law conference in Texas had led him to change his mind about African “freedom fighters”. They did not want to help their brothers. They meant to take control and they would hit the Black man and White man alike; and Vendaland would be the first battleground in the fight against armed insurgents.

It has been a remarkable experience living and moving inside the walls among men, Black and White, who get on alongside each other well enough, and to hear the tumult of menace and moral indignation from outside, with the voices of high clerics and vote-thirsty politicians leading the din, and to think, “Woe unto you, hypocrites, for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful without but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness”.

Hypocrisy! The word is not big enough for this lying cacophony. Was it only yesterday that the Socialists of Britain preached that wars were made by bloated capitalists, or armament manufacturers? Was it but yesterday that they claimed the monopoly of peaceable intent?

And today they proudly announce, to the plaudits of the slave-raiders and murderers in the rogues' gallery, that they will give “unconditional aid” to these liberators. Shades of Uncle George Lansbury and Arthur Henderson, those patron saints of “disarmament”. I see Uncle Arthur now, the very Father of Disarmament, being escorted by reverent French officials to his stateroom on the Geneva express. Those Socialist leaders of yesteryear achieved nothing but were at least honest men, who would have shamed themselves to send “aid” to the murderers in the Zambezi valley, in Angola, and in the Tete district.

In 1973 a “fact-finding delegation” of trade union officials from England came to South Africa. I would have liked to show them some facts in the hospital at Tete, but that would not have interested them, although they would there have seen the results of giving “unconditional aid” to assassins, and pretending that they are “liberators”. They would have been able to see the amputated Black arms and legs. Instead, they collected “facts” of a nature more agreeable to a trade union congress, and, wearing almost visible haloes of moral superiority, returned to an England made desolate by strikes, short time and unemployment.

Yes, a rare experience indeed to live through this siege. History has seen so many sieges, from Troy to Paris and Stalingrad, but none like this. The only one that might be compared is the siege of Jericho, when the walls collapsed beneath the blare of rams' horns. Is that literally true, or are the rams' horns symbolic? Was the noise that of propaganda perhaps? Listening from within the Southern African perimeter to the shrieking din from outside, one could believe it.

What is it truly all about? The mob believes everything and ever did, since it clamoured for Barabbas to be released, but even the mob surely cannot believe the frenzied outburst of moral indignation against the White-governed countries to be genuine. What is really the game?

The game is world revolution and the world slave state. It is the next step of the world-state conspiracy to that end. The conspiracy is old and all whose lot has led them to the study of world history in our time are fully aware of it.

The “conspiratorial theory of history” has always been derided by those who serve it, but the Second World War brought it into the open and it cannot any longer be denied. The facts and the evidence are there. The governments of the great Western Powers were infested by agents of the revolution and in one country after another, as that war ended, these were exposed and convicted: in America, in Canada, in England. The stables were never cleansed, and all whose business it is to study these matters know that the foul infection is worse than ever now. Let those who care to

consider whither that may lead in the future look back on the Second World War and the shape that “victory” was given at the Yalta Conference by agents secretly enlisted in the service of the world revolution.

The history of the world-revolution conspiracy is of absorbing interest to students. It is so old that its original root is hard to find, but the continuing development of the idea can be picked up at almost any period. In this century it has made great gains and the present ambition is evidently to complete the process during the remainder of the century: to this end the ruination of all law and order in Africa is obviously held to be a paramount necessity.

I quoted earlier the words of President Woodrow Wilson, who in 1917 became the praise-maker of the revolution and began the American involvement in it which bred the disasters of 1945 and after. He was a man picked for the job, and this process of selecting and “getting something on” a man who is to run for high office was described in an extraordinary novel published before the 1914 war by President Wilson's own mentor, “Colonel” House.

The novel was called Philip Dru, Administrator, and, strangely, was published in 1912 after Wilson's first election. It tells, in thinly veiled fictional form, the story of Woodrow Wilson's choice, and if that President read it, as he certainly must have, he can have had little doubt about his own humiliating place and function in the conspirators' scheme of things.

“Colonel” House (he had no military rank) described a “conspiracy” (his word) which succeeded in electing an American president by means of “deception regarding his real opinions and intentions”. The conspiracy was to insinuate itself into the electoral process in such a way that “no candidate might be nominated whose views were not in accord with theirs”.

The breakdown of President Wilson (also a dying man) threw the conspiracy temporarily out of gear, but in 1932 it made its greatest advance when Mr. Roosevelt, having been nominated Democratic candidate for the Presidency, hastened forthwith to discuss the future with “Colonel” House (alias Philip Dru) at his Massachusetts home. In 1938 House boasted to his biographer, “During the last fifteen years I have been close to the centre of things, though few people suspect it. No important foreigner has come to America without talking with me. I was close to the movement that nominated Roosevelt ... All the Ambassadors have reported to me frequently.”

Here, then, the reader may perceive how the sorrows of our generation were made “behind the scenes”. Here may be seen why Woodrow Wilson posed as praise-maker of the world revolution, and why Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta agreed to hand over half of Europe to it.

House's original notion, as propounded in Philip Dru, was for a world government founded on “Anglo-Saxon solidarity”, but the results of his conspiratorial activity, as revealed by the deeds of the two marionette-presidents in supporting the world revolution, show that this phrase was but another example of his technique of “deception regarding his real opinions and intentions”.

At the turn of the century another man, on the other side of the world, was pursuing this ambition of world government. Cecil Rhodes, in South Africa, thought to bring all the habitable portions of the globe under the control of “the English-speaking peoples”, and being immensely rich was able to take practical steps (as he thought) towards the aim, stated in his first will, of “extending British rule throughout the world ... (and) the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the interests of humanity”.

The method was to be conspiratorial and the model for the secret society he envisaged, and began to set up, was to be the Society of Jesus. Rhodes' last will established the Rhodes Scholarships,

which provide for the bringing of “Rhodes Scholars” from the British Empire, Germany and America for schooling in internationalism at Oxford, with the aim, according to his co-conspirator William Stead, “that after thirty years there should be between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each one of whom would have impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder, each one of whom, moreover, would have been specially, mathematically, selected towards the Founder's purposes.”

The British Empire dissolved, and the great body of English-speaking peoples disintegrated and deteriorated long before Rhodes' dream could be realized, but his method of planting trained conspirators in all the high places of the world was taken over intact by Communism and used to great effect as the results of the Second War, and the exposures which followed it in Washington, Ottawa and London showed: indeed, the method was used to such effect that the old morbid ambition of world government at last came within perceptible prospect of success in the remainder of this century.

Still pursuing “Colonel” House's technique of “deceiving” the public masses about “real intentions and opinions” and planting agents of the world revolution in all governments of the world, the conspiracy at that point (during and after the Second World War) adopted the benevolent-sounding name, Liberalism, as a cover for its fell designs.

Under the bloodstained banners of “liberalism” and “the United Nations” the conspiracy prepared for the third act in the Twentieth Century drama: the attempt to set up the World State through carnage and chaos in Africa.

The remaining area of law and order, Southern Africa, was a major obstacle to the completion of this grand design: hence The Siege of Southern Africa. This brings the story to the present epoch of “liberalism”, which I call that of the ravening wolves, for as Jesus said (Matthew 7, XV), “beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”.

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Chapter Two

THE RAVENING WOLVES

Liberalism will be seen historically as the great destructive force of our time: much more so than communism, fascism, nazism, or any other of the lunatic creeds which make such immediate havoc. Compared with the long-term consequences of a Gilbert Murray, a Bertrand Russell, a Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Hitler was an ineffective dreamer, Stalin a Father Christmas, and Mussolini an Arcadian shepherd."!

Of the birthplace of this all-destructive force in its present shape, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge says, “I took a great dislike to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and even more, to its imbecilic foreign admirers.” The verdict is the more damning in that Mr. Muggeridge himself, as he says, “went to Russia in a silly enough mood”. Indeed, he disposed of his home and effects, packed, and took his family with the intention of settling there for good. Six months (the winter of 1932-3) were enough for him to discover the truth of the abomination of desolation there, and the classic he produced in 1934 (Winter in Moscow, Eyre and Spottiswode) will remain for all time the true and ghastly picture of that birth and birthplace.

His phrase, “the imbecilic foreign admirers”, brings back to me vivid pictures of some of those weird travellers, whom we foreign correspondents in Berlin saw on their way through to Moscow, and others whom I encountered when I went to Moscow in 1935. How comic and ineffably stupid they seemed then: how little we could foresee the havoc they would wreak in the world, the Lady Astors, the Mrs. Roosevelts, the Webbs, the Bernard Shaws and many more.

We who knew the truth of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat watched these characters pass and return with ill-placed mirth, little realizing the power for evil that resided in them: they seemed figures of ridicule. Most of them, in fact, were infatuates rather than initiates of the great conspiracy, but as the years went by and the Second World War approached they bred around them a great band of true initiates, men in governments and administrations who were able to warp and distort actions of State, particularly in America, to the service of the World Revolution.

Some of these were the creatures exposed in Washington, Ottawa, and London when the War ended, but their exposure led to no general clearance: today, as all students of power politics know, they are more strongly and more numerously esconced in places where they can do the most damage than they were in 1945. The Siege of Southern Africa is the proof of what they have been able to achieve in the name of “liberalism”.

“What a ghastly charade that was! In those days Moscow was the Mecca for every liberal mind, whatever its particular complexion. They flocked there in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and the Webbs down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, and drivelling dons, all utterly convinced that under the aegis of the great Stalin a new dawn was breaking in which the human race would at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity for evermore....

“Stalin himself, to do him justice, never troubled to hide his contempt for them and everything they stood for and mercilessly suppressed any like tendencies among his own people. This, however, in no wise deterred them. They were prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing,

ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.

“Tt is true that many of them subsequently retracted; that incidents like the Stalinist purges, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the debunking of Stalin, the Hungarian and Czech risings, each caused a certain leakage among liberal well-wishers. Yet when the dust settles the same old bias is clearly discernible.

“Tt is an addiction, like alcoholism, to which the liberal mind is intrinsically susceptible - to grovel before any Beelzebub who claims, however implausibly, to be a prince of liberals. Why? After all, the individuals concerned are ostensibly the shining lights of the Western world; scholars, philosophers, artists, scientists and the like ... held in respect as being sages who know all the answers; sought after by governments and international agencies; holding forth in the press and on the air. The glory of faculties and campuses; beating a path between Harvard and Princeton and Washington, D.C.; swarming like migrant birds from the London School of Economics, Oxford and Cambridge into Whitehall. Yet I have seen their prototypes - and I can never forget it - in the role of credulous buffoons capable of being taken in by grotesquely obvious deceptions. Swallowing unquestioningly statistics and other purported data whose falsity was immediately evident to the meanest intelligence. Full of idiot delight when Stalin or one of his henchmen yet again denounced the corrupt, cowardly intelligentsia of the capitalist West - viz., themselves. I detect in their like today the same impulse. They pass on from one to another, like a torch held upside down, the same death wish ...”

I have reproduced these paragraphs, again with grateful acknowledgment to that unique authority on the subject, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, who included them in an unforgettable denunciation, The Decade of the Great Liberal Death Wish, published in December 1970 by Esquire, New York. This magnificent diatribe was of particular fascination for me because I knew from my own experience the Moscow-bound pilgrims he describes, was involved in the events of that period, and watched the emergence after the Second War of a great throng of their proselytes in the governments of the world, and particularly in the central headquarters of death-wish liberalism, the place of the ravening wolves, on the East River, called “The United Nations”. The building which houses it is tombstone-like, and the masons might very well prepare to incise on its walls, “Here lie the remains of Western civilization, of the once-United States, and of once-Great Britain.”

Founded on a deed of arrant racism, the expulsion of the Semitic Arabs from their ancient Palestinian homeland to make way for non-Semitic Jews from Russia and Poland, it devotes all its energies (and would like to start a war) to attacking “racism” in Southern Africa. Again, Mr. Muggeridge comments, “In a world full of oppressive régimes and terrorist practices, in England the venom and fury of the liberal mind picks on the White South Africans with particular spleen.”

Seldom does an honest word come out of this place, where all men are helots, enserfed to the liberal policies of their governments “which do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand” (Disraeli). In 1973, for instance, the helots were marching towards the General Assembly to give the inevitable rubber-stamp vote of approval to a typically hidden-hand resolution “welcoming the accession to independence of the people of Guinea-Bissau”, (a Portuguese West African territory), “condemning Portugal for its illegal occupation of certain sectors of the Republic” and inviting other states to give “the new republic” all assistance.

The facts of the matter were that they themselves had invented “this new republic” and “welcomed it” for the purpose of swelling the clamour for war against Portugal which was in legal possession

of this region. No “new republic” had been established there; the local terrorists had merely sent agents to report that they had conquered the territory, knowing that such a claim would be accepted by the General Assembly without question.

Before the General Assembly could impress its rubber stamp on this resolution, the helots, in their delegation-dens, found on their desks the following alternative resolution:

The General Assembly

confused by the situation reportedly prevailing in Guinea-Bissau

deeply concerned at its inability to find the newly independent state

puzzled by the conflicting and confusing geographical references given by the parties concerned; having lost a fact-finding mission sent to the area; disregarding such facts as are available

1. Welcomes the accession to independence of the people of Guinea-Bissau (a) Whomever they maybe

2. Hopes to be able to find the newly independent state

3. Decides to despatch a second fact-finding mission to be composed of 135 members of the General Assembly to be selected by themselves to

(a) Find the first mission

(b) Implement paragraph 2 above

4. Invites all member states, the specialized agencies and other organizations within the U.N. system to join in the search

5. Condemns the Government of Portugal for whatever it may be doing 6. Calls on the Government of Portugal to desist forthwith 7. Decides to keep the situation under continuous review.

Even helots may be allowed a little fun, and a few of them had gathered together to produce this alternative resolution. The helots well know what frauds they are and I happened to learn that there was loud laughter in the rooms of the delegations which were about to vote for the original resolution when this “alternative” one was circulated around. It at once became a collector's piece among the helots and was tenderly stored in hundreds of albums which, in later years of retirement, would help ageing helots to pass the long winter evenings in happy reminiscence of the good old days at Helots Hall on East 42nd Street.

While this extraordinary pantomime was being enacted, I was already engaged in my long journey around the beleaguered areas of Southern Africa.

I began with Angola.

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Chapter Three

ANGOLAN ORDEAL

Luanda is one of the least known capital cities and its hinterland, Angola, one of the least known countries in the world. Luanda, with its ancient fort brooding over the southern tip of its magnificent bay, would be the big-game hunter's and fisherman's paradise, were it better known and more accessible: in the respective seasons you may see the landrovers returning to town with buck and buffalo strapped across the bonnets, or the boats coming in laden with barracuda and marlin.

When I first saw Luanda, it was abustle with building activity, like all the other cities I have seen in this decade, and the streets were thronged with people of every shade of complexion between black and white, all getting on alongside each other very well. Yet twelve years before this hardly a being in the place would have given Portugal more than two years in Angola. That was after the terrible initial shock of the attack of drugged and drunken assassins from across the Congolese border.

Angola has been a Portuguese possession for five hundred years. One of the great Portuguese navigators, Diege Cam, first landed there in 1482 and left his mark in the traditional Portuguese shape of the Cross. That was centuries before the emergence of the British Empire which in its brief day occupied a quarter of the globe and ruled over a quarter of the earth's inhabitants, before dissolving to leave as its only memorial a gibbering wraith called the British Commonwealth, wherein the erstwhile “lion cubs” turned into yelping jackals snarling at the other members.

All that time Portuguese Angola was there. For a few years the Dutch appeared on the scene and the Portuguese Governor withdrew upriver, but in seven years he was back again in the ancient fort. During this time the Portuguese in Angola even hived off a colony in South America which today has become the greatest state in that half-continent, wealthy, with a population of fifty million and a glowing future: Brazil.

Among the great “ifs” of history is why the Portuguese Government did not make of Angola a second Brazil. All the conditions were present: enormous space, and boundless mineral wealth. Diego Cam's discovery was neither exploited nor developed, although he planted his cross on the coast of Angola years before Columbus discovered America. These Portuguese navigators, who set out in cockleshells and knew not if they would end by falling off the edge of the earth, were the spacemen of five hundred years ago.

While all the great events of the next five hundred years racked the world around it, Angola continued its placid way of life, undisturbed by the demon “progress”. Differences of race were not felt or known as such. The difference between relatively schooled and skilled White people from overseas and undeveloped Black ones set the pattern of life; colour as such played no part in it.

In this enormous territory (it is almost as large as Europe and it has a thousand miles of coastline stretching from north to south along the Atlantic) the Portuguese until the beginning of this century effectively occupied only the coastal strip, and that in small numbers.

The huge Black population of the interior, had they wished, could have just nudged the Portuguese into the sea: hardly any troops were garrisoned there. But they never did this. The Portuguese, alone among the colonizing powers, seem to have understood and come to grips with Africa. While others came, stayed a hundred years or so, and then scuttled away, Portuguese Angola, unknown or

forgotten, stayed on. It saw all the others come and it saw them go, and now that its five hundredth anniversary approaches it is still there.

This colonial slumber was shattered in the early morning of 15 March 1961, by the shrieks and screams that arose from twelve villages in the coffee belt of north-western Angola. The day that followed was one of rape, torture, arson and obscenities practised on living and dead bodies that have no parallel in the history of any period on record. Creeping silently through the elephant grass the fiends burst upon the sleeping or unsuspecting farmers, peasants and small shopkeepers, hacking off heads, legs and arms of men and women, girls and children and babes, Black and White and Brown, hanging them on trees. At one place they put living victims through a sawmill.

Who were these creatures? Mr. Robert Ruark, an expert on terrorism and torture from his experience of the Mau Mau in Kenya, identifies them: “... hired strangers, strangers drunk on the local pombe, strangers fired by hashish, strangers recruited and semi-trained across the northern Angolese border in the Congo, strangers with no real axe to grind except against an innocent neck, strangers armed by the terrorists of Algeria, strangers motivated by Russia and China and other Communist affiliates.’”™!

Mr. Ruark did not add what I will append here: these hideous miscreants were the protegés of those ravening wolves, the Liberals of New York, as well as the hirelings of Communism. Their leader, an abominable creature of many aliases, is best known as Holden Roberto. Just eighteen months before the massacre he went to the United States where he was made warmly welcome by the American Committee on Africa, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

These influential acquaintanceships bore fruit. Holden Roberto received both financial and political support from United States sources. Then about a year later came the massacre, of which Holden Roberto boasted to a correspondent of the Paris journal, Le Monde. He was asked, “There is proof of tortures perpetrated upon Portuguese men, women and children. Do you deny these horrors?” He answered, “No, all that is true ... they massacred everything.” “Women and children included?” he was asked, and he replied, “Yes, why deny it?”

Mr. James Burnham (see above and footnote [5]), speaking of the propagandist successes in the world press and at the United Nations of such revolting gangs of murderers as that of Holden Roberto, said, “Not the least of these propaganda victories has been the concealment of the events of 15 March 1961. And even today some readers of this book will wonder: can these horrors that Bernardo Teixeira recounts really be true? Can they possibly be true? Is it conceivable that human beings actually ran other humans through rotary saws?!

“Alas for mankind, not only are these things true, but these things are not the worst, of what Holden Roberto's squads did and have done: of some things it is simply not possible to write.”

I studied the story of 15 March 1961 for years before I was able to go to the scene of the massacre and recreate what happened for myself. In probing the background, especially the background of foreign support for these sub-human massacrists, my eye was immediately caught by the name of Mrs. Roosevelt as their patroness. This woman, who posed as the mother of all good works and good causes, first attracted my student's attention in 1949, when I was in America. At that time the Soviet agent in the American Government, Alger Hiss, the man who at Yalta, at the dying President Roosevelt's side turned the Allied victory into a Communist victory and an Allied defeat, had been exposed and the Liberal Establishment was waging a tremendous campaign to snatch its favourite son from the jaws of justice.

I observed with a shock of surprise that Mrs. Roosevelt identified herself with it, and went to the length of publicly attacking the man who had denounced Hiss. From that time on I was prepared for anything that Mrs. Roosevelt might do in her role as patroness of liberalism, and I was no longer surprised when she entertained such as Holden Roberto to tea.'*!

I came to think of Mrs. Roosevelt as the reincarnation of Madame Defarge. She knitted by the guillotine as heads fell into the basket. Mrs. Roosevelt entertained murderers to tea and wrote her unreadable “My Day” column, while women and children, Black, Brown and White, were being hacked to pieces by her visitors' gangs in Angola.

Thus, by way of the Yalta Conference, the “hidden hand behind the scenes”, and the rise of all- destroying “Liberalism”, we come to the massacre of 15 March 1961 in Northern Angola: the continuing thread from Mrs. Roosevelt's patronage of Alger Hiss to her tea-party with Holden Roberto twenty years later and his welcome by the Communist-infested departments of the American administration is clear to see.

The initial shock in Angola was almost lethal. In the whole vast territory there were but a few platoons of soldiers, Black and White, and police. Few then believed that Angola could survive. But the unexpected, the almost incredible happened.

The civilian population of the massacre-area resisted fiercely and drove the murder squads back into the Congo. The Black population never gave the invaders that support without which (according to Che Guevare) no guerilla attack can succeed. Within a few days troop reinforcements began to arrive from Portugal and soon the situation came under control. The mass of Black peasants and farmers who had fled into the bush, either from fear of the murderers or of being mistaken for them, began to trickle back, and in less than a year 140,000 of them had officially presented themselves to the Portuguese authorities who fed, clothed, and housed them and provided medical assistance.

No questions were asked, although terrorists may have been among this returning throng. The Portuguese from the start, both in Angola and Mozambique, always practised this policy of receiving-back and reincorporating into the Portuguese community. They are wise people in their dealings with the Black population and have thus succeeded in Africa where others failed.

The atrocious event of 15 March 1961 went unnoticed by the outside world. As Mr. Burnham said, its concealment was one of the greatest successes of the terrorist leaders and of “Liberalism”, and it was achieved by the complicity of that vast network of “liberals” which in our generations has come to control all means of public information: press, radio, television.

One American publisher produced the authentic story, with all the pictorial and other evidence, but in Britain and other “enlightened” lands no one would touch it. The international campaign of propaganda against Portugal continued unabated and was taken up by persons who had come to political office in such places as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The resistance of the Angolan population, Black, White and Mulatto, and the arrival of military reinforcements, put an end to the immediate threat to Angola, and from that point the epic of Angola began. The atrocious event led to the rebirth of Angola, which began to look like becoming “a second Brazil”. Its development in the decade after 15 March 1961 was so great, and in such contrast to its former lethargic condition, that when I arrived there in 1973 the current jest was that a statue ought to be erected to Holden Roberto because he had shocked and shaken the country out of its colonial slumber.

A sudden revival of confidence followed the defeat and flight of the Bakongo murderers, the return of the great plantation owners and the continuance on their land of the small ones, the repossession and resumption of work in hundreds of plantations which had been attacked or destroyed. The discovery of offshore oil in 1966 and the participation of several great foreign concerns in its exploitation and in further prospecting helped. In places where thought had never been given to Angola as a place for investment, the awareness began to spread that it probably has the greatest unexploited mineral wealth in Central Africa.

During this period a great iron deposit was opened up at Cassinga and much progress was made with a gigantic hydroelectric scheme to harness the water of the Cunene by means of a series of barrages, irrigating up to 100,000 hectares of land in Angola and Ovamboland, and developing electric power for South West Africa.

The effect of the 1961 atrocity was to cause the Lisbon government to put Angola at the top of its agenda paper. The support of the primitive Black population, which had been crucial in turning the tide of invasion, must be maintained and established. One immediate result was the abolition of the old colonial system of the indigenas, who were not recognized as full Portuguese citizens and were subject to compulsory labour. For thirteen years now all Blacks have had the right, by simple application, to become Portuguese citizens, and about a million have taken advantage of this.

A second effect was the emphasis laid on education, which for a backward population represents the great road to improvement: in 1960 only 100,000 Black children were at school: in 1971 there were 511,000 children and students in the schools and universities, and at least 400,000 of these were Blacks (all places of education, like the hospitals, are integrated and Black and White scholars or patients occupy adjoining desks or beds).

The other great effect of the 1961 attack was the vast growth of the system of roads in Angola, partly due to military necessity (with an army of 100,000 men, Black and White, suddenly appearing in the country), and partly to the great economic expansion which occurred in the following decade. Formerly, during the rainy season, roads in the interior became unusable; the plantations in the Coffee Belt and the diamond mines in the Lunda [ed: Luanda?] district, as well as the pleasant small towns which have grown up in the interior during this century, were almost cut off from their needs. By 1971 there were over five thousand kilometres of tarmac roads serving north-south traffic and branching eastward.

On the morning of 16 March 1961 (that is, the morning after the massacre), it seemed impossible that Angola's Coffee Belt, its main source of income, could ever live again. But in the next ten years the coffee output was doubled. Much of the coffee-forest land is worked by Black growers who get a guaranteed minimum price through the Coffee Institute at Carmona.” This marketing system has achieved the result (near-miraculous in Africa) of weaning the Black smallholder away from his immemorial method of hand-to-mouth, daily-bread farming, and making him a man of substance with a rising standard of living.

For twelve years after the massacre of 1961 the picture of that day never left my mind. Not Stalin or Hitler had ever invented such horrors as these. Now that I was in Angola I made it my first purpose to go to the scene where those things happened which (as Mr. James Burnham said) were “simply impossible to describe’, to talk to survivors and generally clear my mind about something which it still found difficult to believe.

So I set out for the Coffee Belt one day with a most helpful guide in a military convoy (the road was by this time pretty well clear of the Chinese land-mines planted by night, although a wrecked

truck or two still lay about, but was not secure from the odd shots fired from safe ambush in the shade forests, where some of Roberto Holden's miserable hirelings still lurked).

This was a journey of the greatest interest. The Portuguese developed their anti-terrorist technique as they went along and produced new ideas out of this necessity.

One was the regrouping of the tribespeople in protected villages, and I saw many of them along this road and later in the east and southeast, where other Chinese-motivated and Soviet-motivated groups of terrorists still made desultory forays across the border. The aldeamentos, or protected villages, were a good answer to the menace in one way: they did guard the people from the arsonists and abductors who plagued them when they lived in isolated groups. A disadvantage is that the Black tribesman clings tenaciously to the soil he knows, however perilous, and dislikes to be separated by distance from his land.

However, safety comes first and the Ovambos and others accepted this enforced regrouping, albeit with inward reservations on which the terrorists will undoubtedly play. As we went along we passed groups of coffee-picking women going to and from the shade forests, escorted by an armed militiaman (he is usually a returned fugitive living in the protected village). Another idea born of this emergency was the mobile gendarmerie, Black soldiers or policemen grouped in a cantonment, equipped with transport and arms, and in contact by radio with all isolated plantations or aldeamentos of the district.

The Portuguese have built heavily on their policy of reincorporation and regeneration, and some of their most efficient and effective Black troops are the Flechas, returned fugitives (or returned terrorists: as I said, no questions are asked). These are highly-trained and very tough warriors who go out on their own to pick up a terrorist or two or detect arms-caches. The array of Russian, Chinese, Algerian, Cuban, Iron Curtain and other automatic weapons, grenades, landmines, mortars and the rest collected by them, which I saw at one place, was proof of their devotion to their job.

The most fascinating of all the new ideas born of these problems was, for me, the regiment of Black Dragoons whose officers welcomed me with great good cheer when I visited them. Their discipline was exemplary, the condition of their lines, horses and barracks would have gladdened the nostalgic eye of any ex-cavalryman from overseas. Ninety per cent of the troopers are Blacks and their commander told me that none of them had ever seen a horse before they began their gruelling training as Portuguese Dragoons in Angola. This rebirth of cavalry is one of the strangest and yet most logical results of the need to seek out and stampede and rout creatures who never fight, whose weapons and methods are the darkness of night, the buried landmine, the ambush and the arsonist's torch. The Black Dragoons go out for weeks at a time, under their own officers, and usually come back with a prisoner or two and more Chinese or Russian weapons to add to the collection in the armoury.

Everywhere I went, in the north-west, the north, the east and the southeast, the Portuguese way of handling their problem seemed to be producing results. In several places I saw tribespeople who had been driven out from their homes by fear or levelled weapon, presenting themselves to the Portuguese authorities for readmission. They told their tale of capture and abduction and were taken in and given one of the adobe houses which Portuguese soldiers, Black and White, were building all around.

On this first journey we came to Quitexe, a place I particularly wanted to see because at Quitexe there were two survivors who were able to tell an exact story of what happened on that day of horror. There were a few survivors in other places, but they were usually too demented from the

things they had seen to give a lucid account. At Quitexe was a butcher whose name has become famous.

Angola is hunter's country and he and his daughter were keen hunters, and had guns and ammunition. On that morning of 15 March 1961, some presentiment caused the butcher to delay a few moments before opening his shop at the usual time. This brief delay saved his and his family's lives, because during it the bloodcurdling screaming began as the murderers from the Congo (as in eleven other villages, at the same preconcerted time) rushed into every shop and house and slaughtered every soul in the place, hacking off heads, legs and arms as they did everywhere else. The butcher and his daughter, from an upper window, killed the group waiting at their own door and then any other murderer who came within range. They held out until the screaming stopped because “the dead cannot scream” and thus survived that day.

From Quitexe our convoy went on to Carmona, the capital town of the coffee region, where another fantastic fight for survival was fought and won. At the beginning of the day the people of Carmona, like those in the twelve villages, were completely unaware that the day was to be different from any other. When the doctor, having gone the twenty odd miles to Quitexe on his professional round and turned back when he saw what was happening there, drove into Carmona with the alarm, the towns- people, sitting at the pavement cafés, at first could not understand what he meant, so unprepared were they for anything of the kind. Yet by the evening the townspeople (there were only five soldiers in Carmona) under the doctor's leadership and that of his son (killed during the battle) had improvised some sort of defence against the Congolese attack which obviously was to follow.

It came in the dusk, when the drums began in the elephant grass and in Carmona the church bells all began to toll. The noise of the drums came nearer and nearer, and louder, and then thousands of voices, shouting kill, kill!, joined in the demoniac pandemonium. At last the murderers burst from the elephant grass and the townspeople with their few weapons fought back, killed the frontal few, and then drove in Landrovers and old motor cars, headlights full on, into the mass.

At last the murderers fell back into the high grass and departed: the staccato chorus of kill, kill continued, but it grew fainter and then died away. And that was the end of the Congolese incursion for the time being. The basic idea was to take Carmona and then claim that “the liberation movement” was in control of northern Angola; at that point their accomplices at the United Nations would without doubt have “recognized the new republic”. The Angolan population, Black, White and Brown, had shown that they wanted no truck with the “liberators” and of their own strength had beaten them back.

After that, troops began to arrive from Portugal and the immediate danger was over. Today as I write, thirteen years later, the troops are still there, 100,000 of them, mainly Black but also many Portuguese from Portugal itself, mostly peasants' sons whose devoutly Catholic mothers at home cross themselves as they hear that “the World Council of Churches” is giving aid to the murderers. What, they ask themselves, are their sons fighting for so far away, if even the churches want them butchered.

I have in my mind's album many vivid pictures of that journey around Angola, by convoy and by air. At one place in the eastern sector, where soldiers were building a protected village for the returning fugitives and other soldiers were planting vegetables for them, I looked toward a distant hill and saw a building which had the shape of a typical South African trading store. This surprised me, because the trading store, so familiar a sight in South Africa and Lesotho, for some reason is not found in Angola, so I asked what the odd-looking, lonely place could be. The Portuguese colonel said it was “a shop” and added that it belonged to an eighty-year-old man who had been

there for fifty years and had survived three attempts by murderers (this time from Zambia) to kill him.

I asked to be taken to him and found a very ancient man sitting quite alone in his trading store, the stock of which seemed to consist only of a few blankets. He lived there, and had for fifty years lived there and now was quite alone - his wife died long ago and his children did not care for the place and had moved to the nearest town, Luso, begging him to come with them, but he obstinately refused.

Even the “freedom fighters”, stupid hirelings as most of them are, might be expected not to foray across a frontier in order to kill one old man. But they came one night and fired through the door of his room next to the store, where he was wont (as they evidently knew) to sit at his table. The bullets went through the door and into the wall behind the table and would have perforated him but by chance he was, for once, not there. They came again later with a machine gun and from a safe distance sprayed the house with machine gun fire, the bullet holes leaving a dotted line across the front of it. Once more they came and he went out with a shotgun and blazed away at the sound of their firing. After that they left him alone, and he told me that if I came again ten years later he would be there.

Another memory is that of a commanding general in one sector, on whose desk I saw a heavily scored and annotated book. It was Sir Robert Taylor's Defeating Communist Insurgency in Malaya and Vietnam. This general told me that he had read the book in the aeroplane on his way from Lisbon to take up his command. When he arrived he gave his troops the order, “Don't press the trigger unless you see something pointed at you.” The order was at first unpopular with the younger officers, but they accepted it and behaved accordingly. This order, of course, was in line with the Portuguese policy of retaining and encouraging the allegiance and support of the Black Portuguese and it has produced results. Neither in Angola nor Mozambique have the murderers had much success with the Black Portuguese population, who know all too well the sort of thing their “liberators” do.

Another memory, a surprising one, is that of two Irish ladies whom I found in a remote place in the eastern sector where for twenty years they had selflessly tended the sick and the poor. They paid the highest tribute to the Portuguese as a nation and particularly to the Portuguese army, which, they told me, was always ready to fly an urgent case to distant Luanda and to provide them with transport to fetch a patient or stores. A German nursing sister at a mission not very far from the two Irish ladies spoke of the Portuguese troops, and their ready helpfulness, in the same way.

This is an apt place to say that all the foreigners I met in Angola have admiration and respect for the Portuguese and their troops, feelings which I soon came to share. People who had lived in other parts of Africa and in many parts of the world all shared this regard.

A British Ambassador's lady once wrote of Portugal that she could not quite put her finger on what makes the Portuguese such lovable people. In my case I can put my finger on exactly what qualities gained my high respect for the Portuguese as I saw them in Angola. They are brave, steadfast in adversity, tenacious, and proud. In this decadent couldn't-care-less generation they remain proud of their nationality and of their unique historical achievement in opening up the world.

In Angola they are engaged, as they well know, in a war which they cannot militarily win because it is not a war at all, in any sense in which the word was ever used in history. It is an international conspiracy in which half the governments of the world join, wearing the mocking mask of moral indignation: Russian and Chinese Communists, American Quakers, British Socialists, Norwegian, Swedish and German Socialists. It can go on as long as hireling murderers can be enlisted by the

promise of loot, women, private vengeance and political appointments. It can go on as long as America, Russia, China, “the satellite States”, Cuba and Algeria flood Africa with arms for these hirelings, and as long as the Socialist party in England and the Roosevelt school in America lavish money on them.

A bitter ordeal this, that has been put on Angola and Portugal. The Portuguese, Black and White, have shown that they want none of the “liberators” who have already liberated millions of Africans from life, but that will not save them if the liberal conspiracy has its way. The end of that would be a return to darkest Africa (this has already happened in the northern “liberated” areas) and a continent depopulated, not this time by the slave trader, but by the carnage which the liberals started in the 1960's and now seek to complete in Southern Africa.

The best military brains realize that the Portuguese wars in Africa cannot be won by military means because, as I have said, they are not wars. They are forays out of bush, jungle and forest land, into which the murderers vanish, again at will, of gangs paid and armed from abroad. At any other time in history they would have been chased back routed and destroyed, and peace would return. Today, the noxious liberal cohorts all over the world would clamour “Portuguese aggression” and call for “a bloodbath” (their favourite prescription for others).

What, then, can be done? A Portuguese general, Antonio de Spinola, deputy Chief-of-Staff of the armed forces, in early 1974 suggested a solution in a book called Portugal and the Future. Starting from the generally accepted theorem that the African “wars” cannot be won by military means alone, he proposed the creation of a Federal Republic of Portugal in which each of the Portuguese overseas territories would become independent states with a federal assembly in Lisbon and a common head of state.

This plan would undoubtedly commend itself to the overseas Portuguese. territories, which have often felt that government from metropolitan Portugal was too remote from their especial interests and needs, and would strengthen their attachment to the Portuguese language, culture and heritage. I do not myself see how it would prevent the international liberal conspiracy from continuing to pay and arm the murderous marauders in the Congo (now Zaire), Zambia and Tanzania, or discourage the Chinese and Soviet Russians from their obvious design of taking over Africa.

However, General de Spinola may see more clearly into the future than this wandering scribe. He was dismissed immediately after the appearance of his book.

I left Angola one day with a sense of high respect for the Portuguese, whom I seldom encountered in my earlier travels, and a conviction that, whatever the future, they had certainly brought the revolt begun by the Roberto incursion of 15 March 1961 under control in Angola. At the start it seemed that so small a country as Portugal could not long sustain the cost and strain of maintaining a great army in Angola, but for thirteen years it had done just that and Angola itself, by its own exertions and also by a few strokes of good fortune, such as the discovery of oil, was more prosperous than ever before.

I said goodbye with regret and as I looked down on this enormous country, with its hundreds of thousands of miles of empty ranchland and hundreds of miles of unused beaches, hoped one day I

might return and find that the grass had grown over the frightful memory of 15 March 1961.

Then I turned my face to the next stage on my long journey: Rhodesia.

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Chapter Four

“WILSON'S WAR”

Rhodesia, seen again after seven years, was bright, busy, vigorous and prosperous. Everywhere building activity, new housing schemes, new industries, new schools in the tribal districts, clinics, weirs, dams and roads, brick homes instead of pole-and-dagga huts, trained community advisers who with the support of the District Commissioners organized the tribespeople in local government councils with the power to levy rates, school them in building their own clinics, and in maintaining dams, bore-holes and roads. This pattern of self-help, under expert guidance, is spreading throughout the chiefdoms and the tribespeople are raising substantial sums among themselves for the development of education, health, roads and water throughout the land.

The improvement of the general lot is in the hands of men (and women) who, from the Government outwards through the chiefs and headmen to the tribespeople themselves, really know the country, its people and their needs, and thus are different from the howling mob outside the walls which claims to know just what should happen in Rhodesia. The picture is one of growing improvement, despite the outer howling and the boycotts, and this will continue. In contrast to the carnage and chaos to the north, a better future awaits the Rhodesian people if they are left alone, and their present is already much better than their past. The traveller may convince himself of that: contented people laugh and chatter in the village markets.

Prosperity! How is it done, with all the foreign exchange inlets blocked, barred and bolted? Money seems to be abundantly available for new enterprises. Sanctions have proved to be a farce as far as the strangulation intent is concerned. “We are trading with all civilized people,” said a Rhodesian Minister on the air. He laid emphasis on the word “civilized” and who shall gainsay him.

Outside Rhodesia the ravening wolves of liberalism keep up their howling, their clamour for the “bloodbath” which they have already brought upon the Black people in the northern area of carnage and chaos. The Rhodesian, White man or Black tribesman, who gazes northward may see close at hand what liberalism would like to make of Southern Africa: millions of dead in Nigeria and the Congo, five hundred thousand in the Sudan, an estimated two hundred thousand (so far) in Burundi and Ruwanda, other hundreds of thousands spread over Zanzibar, Uganda, Zambia. All Black people killed by Black men: everywhere one-man dictatorships built on trigger-happy troops and police, modelled on the O.G.P.U. and S.S.

Over this stricken field, this shambles, beat the pinions of a rare African fowl, of vulturine type, known locally as the Mocking Bird Wilsoniensis. Its characteristics are an almost human-sounding call and its ability to pick up and imitate sounds rising to it from below, so that its doleful, spine- chilling cry, as it circles over the mass graves and unburied dead of Africa north of the Zambesi sounds like “One man, one vote, one man...”

Amid this scene of Pharisaic beleaguerment stands Mr. Ian Smith, his head unbowed after a nine- year ordeal of threats, calumny and lies; nine years of what Rhodesians call “Wilson's War”. The traces of Battle of Britain surgery still show on his face but do not mar its determination. He fights a good fight and keeps his cool, despite all. Thirty-five years ago, when he helped defend Britain, he was held in honour, but in this generation of liberalism honour is a dirty word. Today his two sons and his daughter's husband, as was to be expected, help defend their country in the deadly Zambesi valley and share only in the epithets of hatred which the liberal establishments everywhere in the world hurl at such men of loyal principle and Christian belief.

I was able to travel through and to fly over the area called Centenary (I never learned which centenary: Rhodesia is not a hundred years old) on the north-western border where the hired killers with their landmines and weapons were galvanized into sudden activity by their Chinese masters in far-off, safe Lusaka and Dar-es-Salaam in late 1973 and early 1974. To this deadly place men from all over Rhodesia, stockbrokers and tradespeople, bank clerks and butchers, bankers and bricklayers come to do their tour of duty, then return to their homes and work until, quite soon, the time for their next stint comes round.

The farmers here live with sudden death from the assassin's gun or grenade. I attended a meeting of them and heard hardly a word about that: the talk was all of crops and marketing.

I met others in their homes and found myself among men I could understand, men of unshaken belief in the values which, until the era of all-destructive liberalism, were the common heritage of good men and true. “Good men and true”: as I write the words I realize that they have lost their meaning, save in places such as this. Where else in the world today are good men and true, in this world of Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, of Fred Rose, Burgess, Maclean and Nunn May, Fuchs, and Philby? Treason and treachery no longer cause even a lifted eyebrow. But here in this little corner of Africa men still fight for the right and for their rights. I dined with a farmer whose dining-room window was heavily sandbagged. The neighbouring farmer's wife had recently been killed by a grenade thrown from the outer darkness into the room where she sat. After a delightful evening my host led me to my room and put a loaded revolver on the bedside table. Thus they live in the Valley, but they stay there and fight.

I flew also to Saint Albert's Mission, the Catholic mission at Mount Darwin overlooking the Zambesi Valley, where a raiding band of terrorists kidnapped by night 270 Black children and students and took them off towards Zambia. Rhodesian Air Force planes went up to search for the party (a hopeless task over such country in darkness) and by good chance dropped flares over them which caused the kidnappers to panic, and in the confusion nearly all the children escaped and made their way, hungry, exhausted and terrified, back to the Mission.

The affair at Saint Albert's Mission provides proof of the extent to which the revolutionary conspiracy has gained control of all news-distribution, by press, radio and all other means, throughout the world. The kidnapping of the Black children is an incontestable fact, like the sinking of the Titanic, an eclipse of the moon, or the murder of the two Canadian girls at the Victoria Falls. I visited the Mission myself, talked with the priests and with some of the returned youths. Hundreds of other investigators did likewise. Yet, months later, the BBC was still broadcasting references to “the alleged abduction”. Truly, when the next war comes, the masses will never know what hit them, or why, for the truth has never reached them.

THE BLACK DRAGOONS, MOZAMBIQUE, 1973

When I was there seven girls were still missing and I asked the priests their ages. Between sixteen and seventeen, I was told. This meant that the old slave-raiding days had returned. I never learned if these seven girls escaped or were rescued, but at the next vacation fifteen Black girls arrived at the Mission and begged for refuge: they were terrified of being abducted and made into “bed companions” for the murder gangs. They were taken in, and Father Maurice Rea said, “The terrorists’ talk about recruiting girls for nursing training in Zambia and other places is sheer nonsense. They want bed partners.”

PORTUGUESE TROOPS IN ACTION, ANGOLA-MOZAMBIQUE, 1973-4

About this time Mr. Wilson fluttered his eyelashes upward to the gallery at Blackpool and said that if his party were returned it would give “unconditional aid” to the “liberation movements”. I listened to the news report of this with the same feelings of shock and shame which I first felt, thirty-five years before, as I listened in the British Legation at Budapest to the story of Mr. Chamberlain's ultimatum to Czechoslovakia. “Surrender your defensive region to Hitler or take the consequences: we have betrayed and deserted you.” Those were not Mr. Chamberlain's words but that was what they meant, and they also meant that within a year Hitler, thus encouraged from Westminster, would start the Second World War. (See nsanity Fair.)

In South Africa, from the start of the wind-of-change period, I had again lived with this feeling of shame for my country. Were the British people about to dance for joy in the streets in Mr. Wilson's honour, as they did for Mr. Chamberlain? Would no end ever come to this story of abasement and betrayal?

When I came to write this chapter of my book the disastrous election of 28 February 1974 opened the way for Mr. Wilson to become Prime Minister again and re-enact the Chamberlain deed, this time with “a little country far away” (but in Africa, not Europe) as the victim. Of ignominy there is no end.

For the future of England, I judge, the fact that Mr. Wilson replaced Mr. Heath as Prime Minister was not of great importance. What was of great importance was the sudden emergence of six million people who voted Liberal: as the Conservative and Labour Parties were only separated by a few seats, this meant that liberalism would in fact hold the strings of power and if any still doubt what that will mean, they need not have bothered to read this book. The ravening wolves were loose among the sheep. England was committing suicide on television. The curse had come upon us. The Liberal death-wish had gained the day. I surmise that, historically, this election of 1974 will prove to have been a nail in England's coffin.

I have in another book given some picture of the beings who in the outer world are dignified by the name of “freedom fighters” or “liberation movements”. If they are such, then Stalin and Hitler

might equally claim the name. I will give here the portrait of just one such “freedom fighter”: his story is typical of them all.

The Black man believes that his great handicap, in competition with the White man, is lack of education and he thirsts for it. The older or completely illiterate victims of the terrorists’ press gangs are lured by the promise of loot, women, motor-cars, houses and political appointments. The Younger, partly-schooled ones, are dazzled by the promise of “a scholarship”. They have no clear idea of what a scholarship is, but the word is a magic one to them.

The dupe, whose story I now relate, was a Black lad of 17 or 18 from Bulawayo, Rhodesia. He had some schooling but left at the end of form four and walked across the border into Botswana believing that he would be helped to a scholarship “by the World Council of Churches”! Here the reader may study the shape that news about the World Council of Churches takes on when it reaches a Black boy's ears.

In Botswana he was arrested. Sir Seretse's Botswana, though it dislikes South Africa's views on racial separation, has been impeccably correct in refusing to allow the terrorists to use it as a throughway or base for their activities and this lad was arrested. When released he sought out a representative of the World Council of Churches in Francistown and was about to sign a form, supposedly applying for some “scholarship”, when “a man” from Zanu (the Zambian-based terrorist organization) appeared and told him not to bother: the formalities were already completed and a good position would be secured for him. He was then put aboard a plane for Zambia, where he was taken by troop carrier into the hills and there told to forget about education: there was a war on. Then he was taken to Tanzania for training and in time given a gun and ammunition and pushed into Rhodesia with a band of killers.

Quite useless as a killer, he was soon picked up by Rhodesian security forces and told his story, one long since familiar to his captors. This lad quickly had enough of the life of a “freedom fighter’’, which is one of the most miserable to be imagined: hungry, often thirsty, frozen at night and half dead from heat by day, hated and feared by his own people, ever on the run from the Rhodesian troops and police or the Rhodesian African Rifles, he is a poor creature indeed, exhausted, starved, equally terrified of his Zambian masters, of his Rhodesian captors, and of his fellow-tribesmen in Rhodesia.

Such “terrorists” as this lad present no problem. They are pressed into the gangs, having never intended to join them, and usually desert or give themselves up as soon as they can. The older criminals, who have been fully trained in China or Algeria or Tanzania, are different. These are the ones who take delight in planting a Chinese landmine in a tribesman's mealie patch, so that his wife or babes are blown up when they go to plant or pick; these are the ones who seek to intimidate men into joining them by kidnapping wives and daughters.

These are the ones to whom Mr. Wilson, raising his eyes to the rogues gallery at Blackpool, promised “unconditional aid”. The word “unconditional” does not mean much, if anything, at the other end. No conditions made would be kept in any case. The use of the word “unconditional”, however, implies approval of and therefore co-responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated in the name of “Liberation”.

Mr. Wilson at Blackpool was reported to have said that he would welcome the agents of “guerilla movements” to London, and wanted to greet them in his drawing room at 10 Downing Street. Thus Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's cosy tea-party with Holden Roberto, which preceded the massacre of 1961 in Northern Angola, seems to have set a pattern for liberal politicos all over the world.

And now, with Mr. Wilson again Prime Minister, we shall be back to the days of ten years ago when, like a sneaking schoolboy, he crawled to the House of Helots in New York and reported Rhodesia to them. That was the time when British officers were canvassed to know what they would do if ordered to attack Rhodesia. I have heard the story from their own lips.

Thus, after nine years, Rhodesians told each other that they were back in “Wilson's War”, with the difference that the formal dissociation (of his earlier period) from “violence” has given way to

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“recognition”, “unconditional aid”, and possibly a tea-party in Downing Street.

To live twice through such periods of national decline and degradation, once under Mr. Chamberlain and now under Mr. Wilson, is a hard lot for an Englishman. Somewhere there must be a turn for the better, but for the present there is only a darkling prospect and the howling of ravening wolves.

I travelled, a second time, all over Rhodesia by road and air and once more breathed deeply the high, clean air there and also the air of what Mr. Churchill called “simple and honourable purpose”

in a generation of vipers and liars.

Then the time came to press on again, to the next sector of the siege: Mozambique.

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Chapter Five

THE MARTYRDOM OF MOZAMBIQUE

Only a few years after Diego Cam left his mark, the Cross, at a rivermouth in Angola, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape, sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, and landed on Mozambique Island. Thus the Portuguese have been in Mozambique, as in Angola, for newly five hundred years. They were there long before the British Empire and the United States were thought of and they are still there. Like the Angolans, they are fighting a corrupted world, in which the Cross has been dishonoured, and wanton and unprovoked aggression is called “freedom fighting”.

In the context of today that is where the resemblance between Mozambique and Angola ends. Mozambique is in a worse plight than Angola because it is much more vulnerable to attack, called “liberation”, in this century of the lie dominant, or “liberalism”. Up and down its 1,700 miles of coast pass and re-pass the ships of the powerful Soviet navy in the Indian Ocean. That is not of major importance ... yet; it might become so. What is deadly for Mozambique is that, only some 150 miles from its northernmost boundary, lies the Chinese and Russian invasion port of Dar-es- Salaam. I believe the name means “Haven of Peace”, but in today's context the name bears as little resemblance to truth as that of the World Council of Churches to Godliness.

Into Dar-es-Salaam steam continuously shiploads of the most modern weapons, tested by the Viet Cong and elsewhere: rifles, rocket launchers, the AK47 assault rifles, anti-aircraft machine guns, mortars and more and deadlier things to come. They are loaded into trucks and sent bumping through the bush to equip the “freedom fighters” on the Mozambique and Rhodesian borders.

These “freedom fighters” in Mozambique are, for the most part, the murderous kin of those who committed the Angolan massacre on 15 March, 1961: “... hired strangers, strangers drunk on the local pombe, strangers fired by hashish, strangers recruited and semi-trained across the northern border ... strangers with no axe to grind against an innocent neck ... strangers motivated by Russia and China and other Communist affiliates” (Mr. Robert Ruark's description in Mr. Bernardo Teixeira's Fabric of Terror, Devin Adair, New York, 1965).

This description equally fits the “freedom fighters” of Mozambique: The killers of 1961 in Angola were Bakongo, a tribe which straddles the Zaire-Angola border and is hated and feared by the other Black peoples of Angola for its evil reputation for butchery in earlier, slave-raiding and slave- trading days. For these people killing was a calling, and butchery an essential part of killing which they performed with laughter and shouting.

Similarly in Mozambique the mass of the Frelimo murderers come from two tribes which also straddle the border, their main body being in Tanzania and their evil reputation being the same as that of the Bakongo on the other side of Africa: the Maconde and the Nianja. It was customary in earlier days to dignify such with the name of “warrior tribes”: their warfare was always against their own people. Today these creatures have been promoted to the status of “freedom fighters”.

However, they are but the merest pawns in the great game of liberalist world revolution. Their weapons come, in the vast majority, from Russia and China. Their propagandist support comes from the press of almost the entire, corrupted world: as on a famous occasion two thousand years ago, “The chiefs and elders persuade the people ...” and the mob today reacts exactly as the mob reacted then: “Release unto us Barabbas.”

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“Warrior”! Was ever a word so defiled! The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a distinguished or veteran soldier ... fighting man”. These creatures do not fight. They no longer use the assegai or meet others in combat. Their weapons now are the Russian or Chinese landmine, planted by night in some villager's little mealie plot, or the Chinese mortar, by means of which they can lob shells from a safe distance of many miles into a native village or township.

When I was in Tete I saw a number of the victims of the landmines, and can never forget the sights. In Tete itself, with the occasional mortar shell being lobbed into the town, I was reminded of a place which few others now will remember: Poperinghe, a behind-the-line town in the Ypres Salient in the First War. There was the same behind-the-front atmosphere, the same instinctive listening for the next explosion, the same dust blowing around from the earlier explosions.

But the hospital was entirely different. Here the great majority of the patients were Black Portuguese from the surrounding villages, and many of these were children or infants, legless or armless. More were brought in while I was there (the few doctors and nurses accomplished miracles of salvation and succour). Up to that time nearly seven hundred villagers had been killed by these mines and two thousand more maimed for life. Very many of these were children and I wondered if the tribeswomen realized that their babies had been killed, or had their legs blown off, by bombs from China (not that “China” means anything more to them than somewhere far away). I wondered too whether any Chinese ever asked themselves why their country was killing people, unknown to them, thousands of miles away. If any do so, they presumably find the answer in the Thoughts of Chairman Mao. Around this hospital, on the bare ground, lay the families of these amputees. They dared not return to their villages, if anything remained of them, so they came to Tete and lay down on the ground around the hospital, hoping, I supposed, that food and shelter might some day, somehow, reach them.

Thus the weapons, the worldwide clamour of chiefs and elders and the slavish mob, the troops (not the wretched Bakongo and Maconde killers but the thirty thousand Chinese so far assembled as railway workers, technical advisers and the like) in Zambia and Tanzania, the whole machine of the liberalist world revolution has been set up for the purposes of destroying Mozambique and extending the territory of the world revolution in Africa. But what of the other essential: money!

Never was so much contributed by so many for the purpose of murder and rapine.

The Organization for African Unity at Addis Ababa, where the aged Emperor Haile Selassie (restored to his throne by South African troops after the Second World War) presides over the periodical meetings of such representatives from its forty-one Member-States as have escaped assassination or deposition during the preceding year as they fulminate against, and demand war upon, South Africa, this “O.A.U.” administers a “freedom fighter” fund composed of contributions which are said to amount to at least one million pounds sterling a year.

Outsiders hasten to get in. Colonel Gaddafi of Libya sent the O.A.U.'s “Liberation Committee” at Dar-es-Salaam £100,000 and then added another £100,000. The United Arab Emirates gave £175,000 for use against Southern Africa. Norway gives the gangs operating against Portuguese territories £250,000 annually and is considering an increase to £750,000. Jamaica chipped in with a modest £12,500. From England, Mr. Wilson, in his 1974 election campaign, promised “unconditional aid”.

At the bidding of the General Assembly of the United Nations the “specialized U.N. agencies” joined in the stampede to promote the physical and moral welfare of mankind by subsidizing murder and massacre in Mozambique. UNESCO for instance set up a two-year programme to train Frelimo cadres to run areas occupied by the gorillas (no misprint, this); the World Health

Organization agreed to set up a new programme for the above-named which will train medical personnel, provide surgical equipment and establish mobile health services. (Victims of the freedom fighters, being dead, will not share in these health-giving undertakings.) Then the Food and Agricultural Organization (ah, the inner man and the hungry multitudes) is analysing defoliants used by the Portuguese to discover murder gangs lurking in the bush and has issued leaflets of instruction in methods of counteracting these defoliants.

Thus, the reader will see that freedom is on the march and a new holocaust is in advanced preparation. (Africa has already had one holocaust. The number of Black people killed by Black people in Africa since the Wind of Change reared its ugly head and “freedom” became the order of the day must already exceed the casualty list of the Second World War. There are no statistics about Africa to prove this, even if statistics in this century would ever be allowed to prove anything, but all who live in Africa know that it is so.)

North of the central and southern area of Africa, Russia has been pouring tanks, armoured personnel carriers and Mig jet fighters into Somalia, so that readers may expect to hear news from that part of Africa soon, if none has developed before this book appears. Such consignments are not tokens of respect. They are meant to be, and will be, used.

The stage is set for another move in the liberalist world revolution and, as the reader has seen, East and West (who said they would never meet!) as well as North and South are all equally involved in it. Everywhere the high priests and elders, in U.N. lobbies, parliaments and editorial offices, combine in persuading the multitude that captivity is liberation, bloody despotism “democracy”, massacre a gallant blow for freedom, and self-defence racist oppression.

Mozambique, like Rhodesia and Angola, is not fighting against “freedom fighters” and “liberation movements”. These frontal few, the scum and scourge of Africa in its “Darkest” days, have merely reverted, under “Freedom”, to their immemorial practice of raiding, killing and butchering: night is their ally, butchering with shouts and laughter their method, disembowelling (especially of pregnant women) their speciality, and heads, arms, legs and breasts their trophies, to be hung on trees.

These creatures, in a sane world, would be dispersed like chaff by the wind. Mozambique, Rhodesia and Angola, as the facts and figures show, are in truth fighting Russia, China, the captive “satellite” countries, Cuba, Algeria, and politicians all over the world, and, above all, American money.

Mozambique, more than the other beleaguered territories, has been the particular victim of the upside-down news technique. The massacre of 15 March 1961 in Angola was probably the most atrocious one in any discoverable record of the subject. Another success (and this one, more than any other, reveals the complete worldwide domination of all means of public information by the liberalist conspiracy) was the Mozambique massacre that never occurred at a place that never existed. This was the opposite method from concealment of truth: the worldwide dissemination of untruth.

In the summer of 1973, when I was myself in Mozambique, the Times of London published a sensational story of a massacre of Black villagers in Mozambique by Portuguese troops. The story was attributed to some priest or priests who had it from some other priest or priests. Thus it was hearsay and to a Times journalist of my generation it was something that should never have been published without complete and authentic corroboration. Answering questions, a spokesman for the Times was reported to have said that he had realized the story was “uncheckable” and had taken it “on trust”.

To anyone living in or knowing Africa the absurdity of the story lay on the surface: for that matter its absurdity should have been obvious to anyone at all, inside or outside Africa, who had the power of thought. An incontestable fact about the Portuguese handling of affairs in both Mozambique and Angola is that the far more numerous Black population in both territories held aloof from the murder gangs from outside. For what possible reason, then, would the Portuguese massacre their own tribespeople? In order to drive them into the hated Bakongo or Maconde camp? Again, the majority of the Portuguese troops in both territories are themselves Black Portuguese. For what possible reason would they massacre their own folk?

However, the Portuguese, as they always do, threw open their gates to the fullest possible investigation. Hordes of journalists went wherever they wished in search of the place of the massacre, but it was not to be found. The thing was a propagandist invention, but it received headline treatment all over the world. Eventually some other zealous propagandist produced “a fifteen-year-old boy” who had seen the massacre. People who live near to these matters know how fifteen-year-old Black lads can be persuaded to tell what they “saw” on such occasions.

Whoever was the original fabricator of this story qualifies for a place at the United Nations, where they even invent new republics. Whoever he or she was, the species, if not the individual, was indicated by a reference to “Marxist priests” in a comment made at the time by the Archbishop of Lourengo Marques. The matter of the Marxist priests is an unhappy chapter in the whole unhappy story. At that time a former Foreign Secretary, Lord George Brown, said in a B.B.C. broadcast that he was suspicious of the motives of those who were publicizing the alleged Portuguese massacres in Mozambique, and added that in Southern Africa the previous year he had met a number of young Roman Catholic priests who were more interested in revolution than anything else.

People living in these parts understood this allusion. “Marxist priests” have certainly been among the Friends of Terrorism, in fact, though in words they always say piously that they are agin violence (as President Coolidge's preacher was agin sin).

That there is a deep fission, reaching to the top, in the Roman Catholic Church seems to be indicated by the Pope's decision to retire the hero of Roman Catholic resistance to anti-religious Communism in Communist-dominated countries, on 8 February 1974. This was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the very day on which, in 1949, he, Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, was sentenced to life imprisonment on trumped-up charges by a Hungarian Communist court!

Before his dismissal (which at the moment of writing the Cardinal has refused to accept) he had informed the Vatican of five points at which the working bargain between the Vatican and the Hungarian Communist régime had been broken. Two of these were: “The decision to appoint Church functionaries rests with the Communist régime,” and “The appointment of a great number of pro-Communist ‘peace priests' in key Church offices has shattered the trust of loyal believers in the leadership of the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy.”

“Marxist priests”, “peace priests”: these are dark, hooded figures displaying a crucifix as they move among the shambles of anti-Christ. The Roman Catholic Church has no monopoly of them. The Church of England has produced enough of them, bishops, deans, canons and the rest, and I came on traces of their ill-omened visitations as I travelled through the beleaguered countries of Southern Africa. The reputation they left behind them did their church no credit, nor their sincerity in their calling. Happily there were others who still believed in and preached and practised Christianity.

I came to Mozambique with great respect for the Portuguese, Black and White, which I had acquired in Angola. As I have said, the lot of Mozambique was quite different from that of Angola. For ten years it had had no rest from Chinese and Russian landmines and mortar bombs, yet it

maintained an orderly life among its forty-three different tribes and (strange paradox) its population increase during the deadly decade 1960-70 was the greatest in its 470-years' story. The pride of the Portuguese, their especial quality, forbids them either to complain about their desertion by the outer world or to invite sympathy from others in their isolation. Whatever they may inwardly feel about it, they evince no bitterness. The emergency in Mozambique, as in Angola, has given an impetus to the long-neglected and long overdue development of the territory and, again as if they had no other preoccupations, they are pushing ahead with great road and rail schemes.

Above all, they have calmly gone ahead with the Cabora Bassa project, one of the greatest hydro- electric undertakings in the world. This place, when I was there, was already one of the wonders of the world, with machines like prehistoric monsters crawling along miles of lit streets burrowed through the mountain. Work was ahead of schedule and is due to be completed in 1975, when Mozambique hopes to supply services to its African neighbours.

Cabora Bassa is only a few miles from Tete, the most dangerous area of Mozambique, but work went on there as if all the world were at peace. Cabora Bassa is said to be strongly guarded, though no open signs of this meet the traveller's eyes. It has never yet been attacked by the murder gangs: whether from fear or by order of their Chinese masters, who might hope to take it over intact when world revolution day strikes, is anybody's guess. The lake, when full, will stretch 155 miles to the Zambian border. Some with whom I spoke thought that this great stretch of water would prove to be a great hindrance to the murder gangs in their activities. Others, nearer to the menace, were less optimistic.

A thing that particularly impressed and, I confess, surprised me about the Portuguese in both territories, was a characteristic once thought to be peculiarly English, or British: their sangfroid."! They show no resentment at their treacherous abandonment by “the free world” - how it all brings back to me the treacherous abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938, of which I wrote at the time, addressing myself to English readers, “Czechoslovakia means you!”

Exactly so, in its effects, would the treacherous abandonment of Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia and the rest of Southern Africa mean you, little though you dream it now.

After this long journey, which left the hospitals at Tete and Nampula forever imprinted on my mind, I returned to Lourenco Marques, where the life of the big hotels and the pavement cafés continued tranquilly around the splendid bay where Vasco da Gama landed 470 years ago, and from there I recrossed the sub-continent to another place where the leftist-liberal conspiracy has been busy trying to stir up trouble: South West Africa.

While I was there the news came of General Spinola's fantastic coup, and looking back over my shoulder at Mozambique I saw a picture suddenly turned upside down. Diplomatic relations opened with Soviet Russia, whence came the landmines and mortar shells that filled the Tete and Nampula hospitals with victims: it was ominously like the first days of President Roosevelt's calamitous fourteen years in America.

Socialist and Communist leaders returned in triumph to Lisbon. A Socialist-appointed Foreign Minister had undertaken to cooperate with “our British allies” in the Wilsonian enterprise against Rhodesia. The same Minister had himself photographed embracing the leader of the killers who had filled those hospitals with Black amputees.

General Spinola's aim, he said, was pacification, but the immediate result was an uproarious clamour for war. Earlier in this chapter I mentioned that Moscow was supplying large quantities of arms to Somalia. This small republic is far from the madding Southern African scene so that the

immediate intent was not clear to see, but I said that the arms were not sent as tokens of esteem: they would be used. Sure enough, the news of General Spinola's coup produced in far Somalia an urgent call from President Mohammed Siad Barre there for the establishment of a permanent continent-wide army to fight the Whites of the South.

Then the tidings of the General's coup at once released a new stream of atrocity stories, of the kind begun by the Times in July 1973, and ever since printed by the world press without scrutiny or demur. These originated, as always, in the lie-factories of Dar-es-Salaam, Lusaka, Moscow and Peking; and followed the old Communist pattern, unchanged since 1917, of churning out horrifying stories of “police brutality” (it used to be “Cossack brutality”). The Portuguese security police, the DGS, were used for the purpose on this occasion.

I mentioned before that the first act of governments in every one of the newly-independent Black States in Africa (save for Botswana) has been to establish these “para-military” police units, with unchecked powers of arrest and imprisonment. The process has been watched without a glimmer of interest by the outer world. Now that Mozambique was found to have had its own para-military police the Communist propaganda mills produced reams of readymade “Cossack” stories, on a note of moral infuriation that such things could be. These stories went the round of the world press. The mob was let loose to work off any old private grudges it wished by beating up the policemen.

In particular, terrible stories were told of torture and the like in the “infamous” (or “notorious”’) Machava prison. By chance I had learned a lot about Machava prison, near Lourengo Marques, when I was in Mozambique. It was then, I estimate, unlike any other prison in the world. The Portuguese military and civil authorities, I found in both Mozambique and Angola, were guided during their long years of ordeal by the idea of “rehabilitating”, rather than killing, the terrorists. I have given instances of this and have seen numbers of people coming out of the terrorist areas and presenting themselves to the Portuguese for readmission.

The “infamous” Machava prison was in fact part of this pattern of rehabilitation. Its inmates were indeed detained without trial, on suspicion of being sympathizers of the terrorists. However, the manner of their detention was unique. For many of them the prison was but a place to sleep. In the morning they set out from it to do their usual jobs, returning in the evening to sleep. No attempt at escape was ever made and the prison authorities claimed excellent results in “cleaning” former Frelimo sympathizers by this method. I learned of one young man who passed his university entrance examination at Machava and was able to attend lectures in Lourengco Marques during the day.

The future will show the result of General Spinola's coup, and those who have seen the staunch Portuguese resistance to Communist attack during all these years must hope that the result will not be disastrous for Portugal. The Frelimo killers are already acting as the future rulers of Mozambique, saying that they will break off economic ties with South Africa and Rhodesia at no matter what cost to Mozambique, and will nationalize the Cabora Bassa dam without compensation (I suggested earlier that this might be the reason why the Chinese had not tried to blow up the dam).

General Spinola had been in power just one month when he gave warning, at Oporto, against “anarchy” (“any form of anarchy will fatally open the door to new dictators, to régimes like the one overthrown on April 25”).

Any violent interruption of an orderly system of government which has been going on for five hundred years is obviously likely to lead to anarchy and one may wonder why the General did not see that danger before he leaped into the centre of the political stage.

In the meantime the unhappy Black man in Mozambique and Angola, as elsewhere in Africa, will continue to be the small Black pawn in the White man's game of world revolution.”!

Only the course of events can now vindicate or condemn General Spinola; and show whether his coup will prove to be a shot in the arm for Portugal or the coup de grace, destroying the Portuguese commonwealth and with it the historic achievement of five hundred years. When he acted, the Portuguese troops in Angola had the situation well in hand; as soon as he acted the Chinese, who until then were active only in Tanzania and Zambia, began to send instructors across the continent to the Congo to train Congolese troops for an attack on Angola. On 15 March 1961, the reader will recall, the Angolan population, unarmed, unprepared, almost defenceless, of its own strength threw back into the Congo the murderers who came from there, and in the subsequent thirteen years Angola went steadily ahead. Now the coup in Lisbon seemed to set back the clock thirteen years and the survivors of that terrible ordeal of March 1961 were faced with the likelihood of another such. In Mozambique, when the general acted, the Portuguese troops, two-thirds of them Black, were staunch and steady, as I can testify.

While the world waited to see the outcome of the coup in Portugal, I made another long journey of political discovery: to South West Africa.

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Chapter Six

SOUTH WEST

Much had changed since I saw South West Africa in 1948, but the changes were superficial. Essentially it was still the same: like Angola and Botswana, a huge, underpopulated piece of Africa, with much wealth already extracted from the earth and much more still awaiting the great mining companies’ exploitation or the lone prospector's geiger counter and pick. Information about the diamond industry is almost as closely guarded as the Prohibited Area along the coast where diamonds are found, but those who should know say that around £100,000 worth are daily lifted from the ground.

The main changes were in the increasing prosperity of South West Africa since the Second World War, which derives chiefly from mining in all its forms, and the growth of Windhoek, the capital, which is now, much more than it was, a recognizably German city, with German shop names, German-style hotels, and a German newspaper.

The high-rise buildings and glistening shops are new and are not different in their functional architecture from those which abound in all modern cities, but their character is distinctively German. The old Beau-Geste-like fort still stands and a cannon with the Hohenzollern eagle on it guards the gateway. Three castle-on-the-Rhine-like mansions look down on the town. Two of them (as Mr. Jon Manchip White relates) were once owned by a German baron who installed his lady friend in one while he inhabited the other. The story is that he was a stickler for Korrektheit and always sent his butler over with his visiting card before calling on the lady.

Swakopmund, a rather forlorn little Governor's Residenz town at the mouth of the Swakop River when I saw it in 1949, has grown into a popular, and in the season populous, seaside resort still as distinctively German in its Kaffee und Kuchen atmosphere as it was in the days when Dr. Goering, the Reichmarshal's father, sat there in the Governor's place.

The greatest change was in South West's relationship with the outer world. In 1949 few knew anything about it and many had never heard of it. Those who for any reason took interest in it knew that, after centuries of savage tribal wars, it was annexed by the Kaiser's Germany in 1894 and was a German colony for thirty years until the German troops there surrendered to General Botha's South African forces in 1915.

Thus the question of South West's future arose. “International law” (according to the encyclopaedias) applies to “the subjugation of one independent State by another: which may be followed by the acquisition by the conqueror of territory which admittedly belonged to the conquered.” In the light of what transpired, the world might have been spared much tribulation, had the South African Government simply invoked the law of conquest and incorporated South West in its own territory.

Instead, the League of Nations was set up in Geneva and South Africa was, by dubious right, burdened with something called “a Mandate” to administer South West under South African laws as an integral part of its territory (my italics are intended to draw attention to the essential point).

The old League, though a farce, did at least bring together in its assemblies persons with recognizable names and identities, with some qualification to be accredited as national representatives, and to be regarded by the public masses as men who upheld the cause of their

particular nation among this “league” of nations, spokesmen and guardians of national interests within the framework of international debate.

Later, to the woe of generations to come, South West, quiet, improving, orderly, harming none, came under the purview of the congeries of faceless, nameless beings at the House of Helots in New York, as they cast about for places to incite men against each other and destroy peoples and nations. None knew their names. They were as anonymous as a gang of cattle rustlers on a dark night: the only “unity” they knew was in their united devotion to the destructive cause. Like automatons they stood up to vote for any incitement to rebellion or war. Not a man among them dared vote on his conscience or belief; they were the helots of world revolution. They sent arms, money and a rabble of mercenaries with “U.N.” painted on their helmets to destroy one of the very few viable, stable and well-run territories in Africa, the Katanga of Mr. Moise Tshombe, and in their wake left the Congo open to massacre on the grand scale. Then they turned their predator's gaze on South West Africa, enjoying a period of order and progress after centuries of the most savage tribal warfare.

One of the Unacceptable Truths about South West (that is to say, a truth which is not allowed to reach the masses outside) is that during the fifty years of South Africa's administration the general birth rate increased more rapidly than in any other African country (in the last ten years; of course, the general death rate in those other African countries has increased much more rapidly). This applied equally to the Hereros, one of the nine separate ethnic groups inhabiting the territory. Alone among all these tribal groups, the Hereros are known, at least by name, to some extent in the outer world. This seems to be the result of various excursions into the country by “Marxist priests” seeking “a cause and an audience”. The general, vague idea about the Hereros among such people in the outer world is that they are, among the oppressed, the most oppressed.

Again, this is the opposite of the truth of what has happened to the Hereros during the period of South African administration; this has been the re-birth of a small tribe which seemed to be doomed and dying out.

The Hereros spent the first eighty years of the nineteenth century in unremitting warfare with the Hottentots, who twice defeated them. Then in 1894 came the Germans, and the Hereros became the favourite sons of the new Protector (as such the Hereros regarded them, and the Germans tried hard to uplift them). In 1904 the Hereros suddenly turned against the Protector and massacred German garrisons and mission stations. The German General von Trotha mercilessly repressed the inexplicable rising and in the final encounter at the Waterberg the Hereros were wiped out save for the few survivors who escaped to Angola and Botswana (where they still are).

After that the Hereros seemed to be dying out again. There were stories that their women refused to have children, that the men had become sterile: the spirit of the tribe was broken. Then, when South Africa took over the territory, the reverse process began, and in the next fifty years (that is, until today) their numbers more than doubled. They are still one of the smaller tribes, outnumbered seven to one for instance, by the Ovambo in the north. They stand out from the other tribes by their great self-conceit (they think of themselves as the destined leaders of the mass and upstage the others by their talent for attracting the notice of the outer world to themselves).

Their women, who are tall, graceful in movement and sturdy, stand out from all others, anywhere in Africa where I have been, by the brilliance and elegance of their dress. None can understand today how they have contrived to fashion raiment of such beauty from the original mode, the flounce- and-bustle dresses of the wives of the Rhenish missionaries who appeared in South West in the mid-eighteen hundreds. It is as if Mr. Cecil Beaton, in My Fair Lady mood, had designed a dazzling series of costumes for a Black musical, My Dark Lady, perhaps. Their use of vivid colours

produces startling effects, and any who encounter an Herero woman in full regalia for the first time must stop and stare at something so unique and unexpected.

The male Herero, for no apparent reason, feels himself to be a member of a Herrenvolk, and bears himself swaggeringly. He is, understandably, disliked by his fellow Black men. The Hereros and Hottentots defeated and enslaved the more numerous Bergdama people, whom they despised as “baboons”, and to this day look down on them as destined serfs of the stronger tribes.

So much for the Hereros, who receive more publicity in the outer world than they inherently deserve, but that is part of the leftist-liberal plan of reducing all of Africa to a mass and mess of weak, depopulated territories, incapable of resistance when World Government moves in.

After the rape of Katanga the attention of the House of Helots at once turned towards South West, a place where tribal feuds could be encouraged and risings against the Whites fomented, and a base established for the main attack on South Africa itself. This phase of the destructive process began with the appeal of Ethiopia and Liberia to the World Court to hold that South Africa had violated the obligation to “promote to the utmost the moral and social wellbeing and the social progress” of the inhabitants of South West. (In another book I recalled that the old League of Nations, which occasionally did good things, found through its Slavery Commission that slavery still existed in Ethiopia and Liberia, and I mentioned that this continued to be the case.) For the moment nothing came of that, and the desired invasion of South Africa by sea, air and land (already planned in full published detail, in the Carnegie Plan of 1965) did not occur.

The name, South West Africa, is as correct as “South Africa”. The territory lies in the south-west of Africa, and no good reason offers to call it anything else. For bad reasons, the Helots in New York invented yet another new republic there, as they had already done in the Portuguese West African territory of Guinea-Bissau. They called this new, equally non-existent country “Namibia”, after the great Namib desert. If it should serve the purpose of the conspiracy no doubt they will one day announce that the whole of North Africa is the new Republic of Saharia.

Then the leftist-liberals all over the world began to talk about “Namibia” and, of course, to “recognize” the new republic. In no time at all about seventy of the faceless Helots on East 42nd Street had “recognized” the new Republic, and from far-flung Australia the energetic headline- collector, Mr. Gough Whitlam, hastened to join the throng.

A NGANGA (HERBALIST AND BONE-THROWER) AT AN ANTI-TERRORIST GATHERING, SALISBURY, 1973

In due course the Helots announced the appointment of a “U.N. Commissioner for Namibia’. This was a Mr. Sean MacBride and Mr. MacBride set about to make another Katanga of “Namibia”. Speaking, as might be expected, at Lusaka, in Zambia, which is the headquarters of several terrorist

organizations, he gratified his audience by saying that he would, “consider using force to get South Africa out of South West”, if the Security Council approved. He intended, he said, “to draw up a long-term programme for independence in Namibia which would include the training of Africans to take over the running of the country”. At this point the shadow of what had happened in Katanga began to creep towards prosperous and orderly South West, and if ever they find themselves living in “Namibia” the Ovambo will rue the day. But then, they are meant to rue the day, and to revert to the days of slavery from which they have been freed. = —— > . TT

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“INTIMIDATION”: TWO CHIEF'S MESSENGERS AMBUSHED AND MURDERED, 1973

The kind of people who, if this Commissioner should have his way, would be “trained to take over the running of the country”, might be foreseen by considering the case of a Mr. Sam Nujoma, the leader of an organization called the South West Africa's People's Organization, or SWAPO, which is dedicated to the aim of creating revolution in South West. His public exhortations to violence and revolutionary methods caused him to remove himself to Dar-es-Salaam, the Chinese-Russian invasion port in East Africa, where he found himself in congenial company with those whom one writer calls “the cream of Africa's revolutionaries”, and whom I would call the scum of Africa. On the wall of his office hangs a published programme-of-action of the Organization for African Unity (OAU), which says:

We cannot compromise with any White Government, extreme or liberal, or agree to multi-racial nonsense. We are determined to destroy all vestiges of White civilization. The rivers of the South are to turn red with the blood of the White tyrants and their children.

In view of this typical example of Mr. Nujoma's incitements to violence and revolution, none need be surprised that the tribal chiefs and headmen in South West, whose task and duty is to keep their tribal areas and their fellow-tribespeople happy and in order, do not greatly admire Mr. Nujoma and his organization, particularly its “Youth League”. (In all such countries and situations, for instance in Lesotho and Zambia, these “Young Pioneers” or whatever they call themselves soon gain an especially evil reputation for brutality and violence.)

This applies particularly to the Ovambos, who with around 400,000 people are by far the greatest tribe in South West. More than that, as part of the Homeland process, they obtained self- government status in 1973 (as did their much smaller Kavango neighbours in that year). Since then they have had their own Ovambo Legislative Council which functions on a federal basis, each of the seven Ovambo tribal communities contributing six representatives. Ovamboland is in practice run in the traditional way by its Chiefs and Headmen. When I was there late in 1973 the Chief Councillor (in effect, the future Prime Minister) was Chief Filemon Elifas, whom I found, when I called on him at his kraal, wearing a sweat shirt and pants and busy doing something to his car.

Under this arrangement Ovamboland, where the Ovambo came down from the north and settled long ago, has lived a peaceful and settled pastoral and agricultural life, almost free from the lethal inter-tribal wars of the southerly tribes during the nineteenth century. They were left alone and were happy in their fashion. Even the Germans, during their stay in South West from 1894 to 1915,

never established effective jurisdiction over the Ovambo, and were never represented there by either civilian or military officials.

Thus a fair and promising future of independence developing into sovereign nationhood would await the Ovambo, but for one thing. They are no longer to be left in peace to go their own way. Their territory borders on Angola, and through the forests and bush there creep the emissaries of Mr. Nujoma in far away Dar-es-Salaam. These emissaries infiltrate into the Ovambo villages by night and disturb and incite the tribespeople, particularly the young men, with tales of coming invasions patronized by the House of Helots in New York and limitlessly supplied with Chinese and Russian arms. The leftist-liberal world conspiracy has reached into this remote and peaceful pastoral community.

Chief Elifas and his colleagues of the Legislative Council responded to the threat of violent outbreaks and the overthrow of orderly government by measures similar to those taken by other Black leaders in the “liberated” regions to the north. He requested the South African Police to suppress illegal meetings in the homeland, because they were the product of “undesirable foreign influences” and were intended to break down law and order in the territory. At that time an election pended and political meetings were allowed only with the prior permission of the tribal authorities. This step was directed mainly against Mr. Nujoma's SWAPO agents, who were in fact stirring up grave trouble in the territory.

As a sequel to this a Mr. Nangutuuala, leader of an opposition “Democratic Co-operative Development Party” was arrested and publicly flogged with the traditional palm-leaf rib.

Mr. Nangutuuala, a Christian soul who believed in turning the other cheek, was probably the least outraged by the flogging, saying he felt happy about it because “I benefited politically as a result”. In the outer world, however, all the cover-organizations of the leftist-liberal conspiracy, such as the World Council of Churches, “International Amnesty”, the “Friends of Namibia”, and the “International Commission of Jurists” (sic) filled the air at the House of Helots with their cries of “unprecedented brutality” and their demands for an attack on South Africa.

In the real world, as distinct from the false one of helotry, flogging is an immemorial form of African tribal punishment. It is the least of the tribal ways of dealing with political or other enemies, to which the Black states of the north reverted immediately after “liberation”. Queen Victoria, when she reluctantly agreed to the Chiefs' plea to grant Protection to Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, instructed her High Commissioner for the three Protectorates to “respect any African laws and customs” except where these were “repugnant to humanity”, but in this even the great Queen failed. When I was in Basutoland in 1948, the British administrators were vainly trying to stamp out “medicine killings”. They never did: in the tribesman's beliefs, these were part and parcel of “African laws and customs”.

Other countries, other ways. When Queen Elizabeth II, as Princess Elizabeth, visited Basutoland in 1947, she was received with great state and reverence by five senior Basotho chiefs. After her departure the British community agreed to ask her acceptance of a painting by an eminent South African artist to commemorate her visit. The general feeling was that the painting should be of some typically South African scene, “Moonlight on the Drakensberg” or something of that kind, but the Princess asked if she might instead have a painting of the five Chiefs whose picturesque ceremonial of loyalty and veneration she well remembered. Sadly, this could not be arranged: two of them had in the meanwhile been hanged for strong medicine murders.

When that gentle zephyr-like “Wind of Change” blew into Africa north of the Zambesi, all such restraints vanished as the night dies with the dawn, and “tribal laws and customs” returned to

unchecked power. In the Uganda of General Amin, a “Foreign Minister” who was dismissed for “laziness and inefficiency” was found, carved with panga slashes, floating in the Nile (March 1973). Again in Uganda, at a time when the Helots were fiercely attacking South Africa for student bannings, the entire executive of the Student Guild at Makerere University disappeared and at the time of writing its whereabouts is unknown. In Zambia a woman member of parliament suggested in a television programme that criminals should have an arm or hand cut off if convicted of theft (this is a “tribal law and custom” widely practised in the days of “Darkest Africa” and now recurring).

In Liberia, while the uproar about the South West flogging continued, the Police Chief ordered his men to flog all suspected thieves arrested and put them behind bars before they could be tried. The reader will recall that Liberia was one of the two countries (Ethiopia was the other) which arraigned South Africa before the “United Nations”, alleging tyrannical oppression of the South West African peoples.

In Guinea, President Sekou Toure's judiciary ordered that a smuggler have both his arms amputated from the shoulder before commencing a sentence of fifteen years. In the Central African Republic an edict of 1972 laid down that convicted thieves should lose an ear, the other ear to be sliced off after a second offence. The Head of this State once was present while some thirty men suspected of various crimes were beaten, killed, maimed or injured by troops who beat them with clubs in the central square of Bangui, where the bodies of those dead were left in the tropical sun for an hour as a warning to others. Among the pictures of this era in Africa which the outer world is not allowed to see, lest it injure its belief in the “liberation of Africa”, is one of the President of this newly- liberated African State, wearing on his jacket more stars than there are planets. He watches something, with the smile of a good, kind uncle on his ebon face, and applauds what he sees with his hands. Another picture shows what he sees. His para-military police are beating to death with heavy bludgeons some dozens of their fellow men - suspected of what? - who have been manacled and thrown in a heap on the floor to be killed. The faces of their killers show a ferocious satisfaction in their task. In Nigeria, northern tribesmen cut off the right hands of thieves. Some Ghanaian tribes, in the practice of “tribal law and custom”, drive nails into the heads of their victims. In Nigeria, again, public shootings, with hawkers peddling soft drinks and sweets among the throng of thousands, are regarded as public entertainments.

The joke, if it can be called such (possibly paradox is an applicable if inadequate word), is that the representatives of all the places where these things happen, now that the colonial police officers have gone, occupy seats (indeed, the majority of the seats) in the House of Helots and, to the applause of the World Council of Churches, International Amnesty, the International Jurists, the Friends of Namibia, the American Committee on Africa, the Council on Foreign Relations ef al, join in thunderous denunciation of “South African brutality”. These Helots, were they to return to their African homelands, would practise and be subject to the same “tribal punishments” which they denounce in New York.

In the particular case of the flogging of Mr. Namgutuuala, under “tribal law and custom”, which was seized on by the Helots for a rabid attack on South Africa, the matter came to court when the Supreme Court at Windhoek granted applications by the Black Bishop Auala of the Lutheran Church, the Anglican Bishop of Damaraland, and a Mr. Thomas Komati to stop floggings of “members of political parties” save under specific conditions. The traditional rulers of Ovamboland claimed that tribal law placed no limitations on the public floggings of their political opponents. Nobody was flogged (said a senior Headman) merely for support of a political party. The punishment was for contravention of tribal law and practice. Tribal tradition was that such punishments were given with an epokolo, or palm branch, and had always been given in public on

the naked body. According to tradition women were equally liable to this punishment, which was not limited (as the applicants maintained) to ten lashes.

At this point in time the story of South West had best be left for the reader to take up as the plot unfolds. The tribespeople there live in peace, tend their fields and graze their cattle, but the ravening wolves are at the door and the future is overcast with menace. The mighty gun-power of China and Russia is trained against them, and so is the vast moneypower of America (which paid for Russian and Chinese armaments in the first place and seems itself to be drifting toward a Communist takeover). In the operations room at the House of Helots the attack on South West is next on the drawing board.

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Chapter Seven

SOUTH AFRICA; THE GREAT CHANGE

Now we come to that which Mr. Churchill would have called the root of the matter: South Africa, a country which I have learned to know well in twenty-seven years. About South Africa I have here to relate some of the Unacceptable Truths.'"®!

One unacceptable truth, for which I can vouch because I have seen it happen, is that during these twenty-seven years the lot of all sections and classes of the population has vastly improved (with the exception of the Coloured folk, those orphans of the political game who have neither international finance nor voting power behind them; but as I write signs offer that their plight too is to be relieved).

This improvement is that rare thing, an incontestable fact. The Black people have come up a long way, in material and spiritual things, and from being a faceless mass have become a presence felt on the South African scene, able to bring heavy influence to bear upon their ambitions and needs.

The Indian community, which is mainly located in Natal, has made great strides, chiefly through their native skill in business and trade, and while their brethren in the “liberated” Black States of northern Africa are being expelled and despoiled, the Indians in South Africa are developing into a highly educated and on the whole well-to-do community.

The contrast with their condition of twenty-seven years ago, when I first saw them, and today is most remarkable. They were then mostly ragged shack-and-shanty-town dwellers, often tuberculous, miserably poor. Their housing has much improved, they have their own university and have lifted themselves by their bootstraps, having little voting power. Another remarkable thing about this group of the South African population is that of their own will and accord they maintain their racial identity and harmoniously pursue among themselves that path of “separate development” which, as governmental policy called “apartheid” is the target of such frenzied moralist attacks from the liberalist outer world. They keep themselves apart, and none accuses them of bigotry or racism. It is their way and they thrive on it, even in adversity. Indians in the countries of northern Africa, now “liberated”, yearn to be in “racist” South Africa.

When I first reached South Africa, General Smuts had still a few months to run as Prime Minister. His policies in matters of race relations were not much different from those of the Nationalists (who took over from him six months later) but he was held in high esteem by the outer world and no chorus of obloquy ever fell on him. This, I think, was because he was held to be potentially “one of us” by those who direct these great affairs; he liked the vision of “World Government”. His problems in governing South Africa, however, were the same as those which confronted his Afrikaner successors. As he once said:

There isn't a human problem under the sun we haven't in this one Union of ours: Black, Brown, Yellow, White, we have them all. Can it be said that we are a peaceful amiable nation? of course it can't. But it cannot be said that we are not an interesting nation. How exciting life is here. How there is a passion here that creates a sort of genius! I wouldn't be anything but a South African for the world.

The South African situation is in fact unique in the world. Nowhere else do so many distinct racial and linguistic groups, each with its own identity and cultural or tribal tradition, have to find a way, if they can, of living alongside each other in peace and harmony. Judged by that, the only true

standard, South Africa has done extremely well, and the overall picture is one of improvement and progress towards general betterment.

Racial hatreds do not on the whole exist, despite the constant incitement from the leftist-liberal conspiracy in the outer world. The only racial outbreak I remember during twenty-seven years was the sudden inexplicable attack on the Indians by the Blacks in and around Durban in 1949 (I was in the middle of that strange, isolated affair). The ghastly case of cannibalism at the port of East London in 1952, when a White nun was killed and eaten on the street by a crazed and drunken mob, was not in its origins racial: it was the direct and demonstrable result of the infiltration and capture of a peaceable and law-abiding Black organization by Communists. It led to the effective suppression of Communism in South Africa and remained, to the disappointment of its foreign organizers, an isolated incident. After that order prevailed in the land.

Tribal feuds, as distinct from racial hatreds, are endemic in South Africa and in all other African countries. These have nothing to do with government or misgovernment: they are always there, beneath the surface as far as South Africa is concerned, and erupt in violence and massacre once the lid is taken off. This has been shown in one “liberated” country after another in the northern part. Once “Independence” was gained, the ancient vendettas immediately flared up and millions of Blacks were killed by other Blacks in the Congo, Nigeria, Zambia, Uganda, Ruanda, Burundi, Zanzibar and elsewhere. The origins of these inextinguishable feuds are never to be discovered. They go back to the days of Darkest Africa, to which Africa to the north is now reverting. They, together with the slave-traders, disease, and starvation, produced a depopulated Africa, and that condition would also return if Southern Africa, as yet immune, were to be “liberated” by the liberal-leftist conspiracy.

The image of South Africa which is projected by the authors of this business into the mass-mind overseas is that of a great mass of Black people brutally oppressed by a White minority. I have used the word “Black” throughout as the one nearest to the facts. “Africans” and “Natives”, the favourite designations of the propagandists, are inapposite because the millions of White folk born in South Africa are “Africans” and “Natives”. The word “Bantu”, now commonly used, means simply “the people’, and in the mouth of a Black man would mean merely those of his own colour.

Colour, however, by no means carries with it unity of belief, purpose or ambition. As we have seen, the most virulent and ineradicable of hatreds in Africa are between people of the same colour. The Black population of South Africa is divided into at least seven distinct ethnic groups, each with its own written language and home area, and each resolved to retain its identity, that is, to “develop separately”, or to stay apart. This is the sector of the South African situation which the present Government has set out to regulate by the establishment of separate, self-governing “homelands” for each group, each to move gradually towards (and I quote) “sovereign nationhood”. It is a tremendous undertaking, but if anyone can suggest a more just or more logical method of meeting the situation, without committing the White population to suicide, I have yet to meet him.

This Black sector is only one, though by far the biggest, of the mass of “human problems” to which General Smuts referred. Its size is due to the enormous increase in the Black population under White Government, which put an end to slave-raiding, jungle diseases, malnutrition and starvation. These improved conditions, together with multiple marriage, caused the Black population to increase, as the saying is, by leaps and bounds. In the “liberated” African States to the north, the reverse process has already gone far: there the killing of the darkest days is already reducing the population to its earlier, pre-’Colonial” size. If South Africa were overrun, to the joyful cheers of the leftist-liberal cohorts abroad, the same thing would happen there.

To any rational mind, South Africa must seem to be obviously on the right line in this matter. Somewhere along the line new difficulties will arise (for instance, when the Black population reaches a size too great for the land, under any government, to carry and feed) and that will need to be met in due course. In the meantime the best that can be done is, in my opinion, being done, and all sectors of the population do in fact live in fair relationship with each other.

The sub-divisions of this total population are endless. The main Black tribal masses contain many smaller tribes. The Indians are divided between the descendants of the Hindu “coolies” (now increasingly prosperous), imported as indentured labourers a century ago, and the Muslim merchants, and speak several different oriental tongues, including Gujerati and Urdu, Tamil, Hinsi and Telegu.

The Coloured people (in South Africa “Coloured” means mixed breed) include, statistically at least, a distinct group of Cape Malays, descendants of slaves sent to the Cape from Java in the 1600's and 1700's, who are of the Muslim faith and, again, despite poverty and adversity, have retained their separate identity,through their devotion to Islam. (The journey to Mecca is their overwhelming ambition and having made great sacrifices to achieve it, they return uplifted in spirit by this, the supreme experience of their lifetime.)

This, then, is the situation which any South African Government has to handle, and it is unique in the world. That the country, with such a conglomerate of diverse racial groups, has succeeded in enabling them to live alongside each other in fair harmony, progressively improving their separate lots, acknowledging and respecting their differentiation, and forging economically ahead until it has become economically the strongest and most stable state in Africa, is a considerable achievement by any standards. This is the Unacceptable Truth about South Africa today. It is the opposite of that which the propaganda-fed multitude in the outer world receives from the hyena-like howling of “racist” which the leftist-liberal media of communication keep up against South Africa. Separate development, or “Apartheid” as the Nationalist Governments call it, is in fact what all parties concerned desire: the preservation of national, racial, tribal and linguistic identities.

All South African Governments, which includes pre-Nationalist ones, have pursued this aim of enabling the Black population to develop separately in its own various tribal areas, since 1913 when Black tribal land was declared inalienable. In 1936 an act was passed providing for the expansion and consolidation of these Black tribal areas and increasing the recognized Black tribal areas from six million to fifteen million hectares. Since then, step by constitutional step, the measure of Black self-government in these areas has been increased until, as I write in 1973-4, eight separate Black ethnic “homelands” have been brought to the threshold of complete independence within the framework of South Africa.!"!!

Within the decade 1975-85 all these are due to become independent states, so that the reader of this book will be able to see what transpires. What form, then, will their “independence” take?

The Nationalist Government has spelt that out and committed itself. The Prime Minister, Mr. Vorster, has said more than once that by “independence” he means just that, and nothing less. On the very eve of the 1974 election in April a Nationalist Minister, Mr. M.C. Botha, in answer to a questioner who asked if “independence” meant that the Black homeland states “would be able to accept gifts of Russian arms like Uganda’, said that this would be so. He hinted at a qualification by adding that although South Africa would give the independent Homeland States financial aid after independence it was under no obligation to continue doing so in all circumstances. The South African Government, he said, had already offered to sign non-aggression pacts with any state in Africa and this offer held good for the independent Homelands. If they wished to join the United Nations they would be free to do so.

This was within a few days of the election, and caused hardly a ripple on the surface of public discussion. No storm of Nationalist protest ensued, and indeed an almost uncanny calm prevailed during this election, a most unusual thing in South Africa. I had the feeling that great changes of heart must be occurring among the Afrikaner Nationalists, once accounted to be the most irreconcilable opponents of change. These governmental statements represented the most extreme change from the Nationalist attitude at the time of the 1948 election which brought them into power, and during successive elections. Yet there was no reaction. As to the Opposition, Sir de Villiers Graaffs United Party also seemed to accept the great change as something not worth using to make political capital. There seemed to be quiet acceptance of the once unacceptable.

The most instructive comment on the great change came from a leading Nationalist politician who had been a Minister in the Nationalist Government for twenty-six years, Mr. Ben Schoeman. In a statement which would have been inconceivable a few years ago, he said:

Of course we have adapted our policy. Today we have tens of thousands of educated Black men that we didn't have in 1948. They are progressing economically. They know what's happening. We have to adapt ourselves, our policies. That's why we have mixed sport today. You have to have it for the future. We are making more and more adaptations. We have got to do it as long as we maintain two principles. We have to maintain our identity. We have to survive as a White race. But we have to hasten slowly, the way we have been doing. People have accepted the changes ... You have to educate your people, and do it gradually.

So there it is. Under the Nationalist government, and within the present decade, South Africa is scheduled to become a country containing eight independent Black States, of sovereign nationhood, and one White State. The reader will see that General Smuts' claim that South Africa, despite its multifarious “problems”, was an exceptionally “exciting” and “interesting” country has been fully justified.

The world has nothing like it, and has never seen anything like the political amalgam now in project here. If it succeeds the world will have to realize that the men on the spot after all knew best. They have in fact pursued the old British concept, which has bequeathed so many fiascoes in northern Africa, of leading the indigenous people to self-government.

It represents a reversal of the “White supremacy” theory of government in this country, and the acceptance of “White survival” as the right and proper policy for the future, an “adaptation” compelled by changing circumstances. The Nationalist concept is that of “political independence” lubricated against friction between the eight Black States and the White one by their “economic interdependence”, and indeed the experiment could only succeed on that basis, for the leftist-liberal machine in the outer world would obviously be put into top gear to create dissension between the eight and the one. Political independence is an empty thing without economic viability. You can't have one without the other, as the song says of love and marriage, and economic viability for the eight new Black states can only rest on a good neighbourly relationship with South Africa. That is the best hope for the outcome of the radical change of the South African shape of things now envisaged.

It is an astounding undertaking, and only the Nationalist leaders can know whether it is a well- calculated risk or a desperate gamble. At the outset it is hard to see how the two vital Nationalist principles, “to maintain our identity and to survive as a White race”, could be ensured in a greatly reduced White area completely surrounded by sovereign Black nation-states incessantly prodded and prompted from outside to submerge the Whites in “a bloodbath”. Similarly it is hard to envisage how Russian and Chinese arms from the East and liberal-leftist finance and incitement

from America could be kept from poisoning the relationships between the Blacks and the Whites in this new rearrangement of population and territory in what until now has been known as “South Africa’.

One thing is obvious: if the project is carried through to the ultimate shape depicted by the Nationalist Government, and succeeds in producing a sort of Southern African Commonwealth in which all races are able to live in close proximity in harmony, it will be a triumph for all concerned, something without parallel or precedent in the relationships between peoples of utterly different breeds.

The difficulties are many and obvious. Already, long before “Independence” in this form becomes a reality, several of the potential new states are claiming more territory than that laid down as the home-area of their tribes in the 1936 Act mentioned earlier. This applies particularly to the Transkei, which is scheduled to be the first of the Black tribal areas to achieve full independence (in the sense of “sovereign nationhood”), probably within the next few years. This priority (like the vast increase of the Black population in all the earlier Colonial areas) is a legacy of British rule. In 1894 the British Government at the Cape instituted what Mr. Basil Holt (in Where Rainbirds Call, Howard Timmins, Cape Town, 1972) calls “a wise and far-seeing native policy, which alone has made possible the self-government of the Transkei today: this policy was not to take the land from the Africans by throwing it open to White colonization indiscriminately, but to hold it in trust for the Africans themselves. Furthermore, while, in the then primitive state of the inhabitants, it was necessary to place them under restraint and to prohibit fighting, murders, and the more extreme manifestations of ‘witchcraft’, in all such matters as were not in direct conflict with justice and humanity they were to be governed in accordance with their own laws and largely under their own chiefs.”

This accounted for the difference I noticed when I first went through the Transkei in 1948, although I did not at the time realize it. I found that the White men were few and White men's cars hardly to be seen on this long stretch of the great highway which the White man had driven from the Transvaal to the Cape. I said then that the green and rolling country, with neat little villages scattered on the hillsides, bore “on the surface at least” the look of a pastoral idyll, and so it does today.

But in its one city Umtata (one at that time, and even today towns are few) was a Parliament-like building (Speaker's Chair, Sergeant-at-Arms and all) called the Bunga, (Council of Chiefs) whence the Transkei was self-governed within the limits described above. Only a few White traders, missionaries and officials lived in the Transkei, and they on the probationary basis set by the British enactment of 1894. The rest was a large piece of Africa inhabited by its own tribespeople, the Xhosas, and they were happy there in their fashion. They felt themselves free and in my earlier book of 1950 I told the tale of a lively debate in the Bunga when a chief, in true Runnymede fashion, attacked a motion to regulate the large-scale brewing of Kaffir beer as an intolerable attack on the liberty of the people: to show how great a principle of human freedom was at stake he added, “the Transkei is our England, our only home where we can go up and down.”

Alas, the comparison would not be valid today; England has ceased to be the land towards which men look when they dream of freedom!

In this way, when self-government began to move towards “independence” and “sovereign nationhood”, the Transkei became first on the list and before this book is five years old the reader should be able to judge how the great experiment works out in practice. It is a huge piece of Africa, twice the size of Wales, with a long stretch of Indian Ocean coastline. It is a ready-made homeland, the only one of its kind, having no “White problem” of any size to solve, and being inhabited by its

original people, the Xhosas, with their factions of Pondos, Tembus and Fingos. It has its ready- made Parliament building (unless as a sovereign nation it should follow other northern African examples and spend large sums of money on building a new one, like the one which stands deserted near the Royal Kraal of King Sobhuza in Swaziland).

It has long governed itself in all internal matters of any importance (that is, except for foreign affairs and defence), and according to governmental information all South African police are to be withdrawn by 1976 and their duties taken over by a Transkeian Black force. The danger that this might develop traits similar to those of the “para-military” units notorious in Zambia, Lesotho, Uganda, and elsewhere is obvious, but the present Head of Government, and presumptive future Head of State, Chief Kaiser Matanzima, has had enough experience of Communism in the territory to be well aware of which way to look in this matter. His life was twice preserved from assassination attempts by the South African police.

The old hurdle, of “economic viability” will then remain. The only clear point in that matter is that the South African Government is prepared “after Independence” to continue financial aid, which has carried most of the Transkei's budget in the past. There seems little prospect at present of attracting large scale industry to the Transkei.

The country's only potential source of real wealth lies in its soil, which is some of the best in the Republic. This is the snag on which so many efforts to uplift the living standard of Black people have come to grief, in the Transkei and elsewhere. The tribesman is so tenaciously attached to his traditional methods of grazing the land bare and planting only for the day that attempts to convert him to better farming methods have everywhere failed.

In the Transkei the tribespeople reap for themselves and their families eight to ten bags of maize (mealies) per season. The Transkeian Department of Agriculture once persuaded a man to let them cultivate and fertilize his land and they produced forty-five bags. This made no impression on his neighbours, who said that their eight to ten bags were sufficient: why should they go to so much trouble and also incur the expense of fertilizer? The man himself was asked if, having made so much money, he would himself buy fertilizer next season, and he said, “Why should I? I have enough mealies now to last for ten years.” Possibly a new Transkeian Minister of Agriculture will succeed where so many others failed.

The coming of the new “sovereign nations” within the framework of South Africa will bring new figures to prominence, names hitherto unknown or little known to the outer world, and the first of these, given the Transkei's pride of place in the transition to “sovereign independence”, will be Chief Kaizer Matanzima - when he was born the Black tribespeople heard the White folk talking loudly of one “Kaizer”, whom they assumed must be a great man, hence “Kaizer”: it has no other significance. In like vein one has heard of a Kitchener Leballo and a leading Black footballer is known as “Computer”.

Chief Matanzima has inherited from the British enactment of 1894 not only a Western-type parliament, but also (a very rare thing in tribal Africa) an Opposition, led by the very able Mr. Knowledge Guzama. His ability is not likely to gain for his party, the Democratic Party, a majority in parliament. Elections are held, but in these parts (as in White South Africa itself, for that matter) the majority usually remains with the ruling party. If an Opposition survives at all when the Transkei becomes sovereignly independent, it will be an exception to the tribal African rule, as is shown by other examples mentioned in this book. Indeed, in March 1974, with Independence supposed to come “in a few years” (Mr. Vorster) or “within five years” (Chief Matanzima), Chief Matanzima attacked “the rebel Tembu faction” of the Opposition party, and advised Mr. Guzama to

throw these “revolutionary fellow-travellers of Peking and Moscow” out of his party, otherwise “the rebels might find themselves locked up after independence”.

Chief Matanzima, like political gentlemen everywhere, sometimes says contradictory things. In August 1973, for instance, at East London, he advised the South African Government to give satisfaction to the Blacks “otherwise there would be a bloodbath” (Daily Despatch, 7 August 1973). This sounds as if one of the pestilent “Marxist priests” who gloatingly peddle this nauseating phrase around Black Africa had passed through Umtata at some time. Another Black leader who has become well known on the international scene, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of Zululand (KwaZulu), when addressing an American audience said what ought to have been the last word on this subject when he advised his hearers “to stop agitating for a bloodbath for other people to bathe in”, but unhappily for mankind, Black, White, or any colour, the liberal-leftist-socialist gang far away continues to befoul the air with this word.

Chief Matanzima has better cause than most to abhor the use of such words. Apart from two attempts on his own life, his Transkei was in the early 1950's and 1960's made the scene of a highly organized Communist attempt to take over South Africa by bloody revolution, and in the course of it there was enough bloodshed of the most horrific kind, with decapitations, burnings-alive, disembowelment and the rest.

This phase began on 26 June 1952 when Dr. Mary Quinlan, a White Sister who for many years had worked among the poorest Blacks in the port of East London, emerged from a hovel where she had been tending a mother just confined in childbirth, and ran into a raving mob of several hundreds who tore her to pieces and ate her in the street. The mother heard the uproar and came out and later said, “It was horrible the way they ate her. When I got to the scene they were dishing out parts of her body. Hundreds of them ate. I could not stand it for long and ran home. I was sick.”

The police eventually arrived and fired into the drunken, crazed mob. Some were killed and blood was found on the mouths of these. “We could not find much of Sister Quinlan” said the police report.

In the Communist calendar for South Africa, this day, 26 June, is celebrated as “Freedom Day”; in Communist parlance, freedom is a euphemism for “cannibalism”.

This was the start of Communist revolutionary terrorism and resulted from the takeover of the oldest Black political organization in South Africa, the African National Congress. Founded in 1912, this ANC was a peaceable organization, which by reasonable methods of resolutions couched in moderate terms and communicated by memoranda or deputation to the government of the day worked for reform in various aspects of the Government's laws and regulations affecting the Black population.

In 1917 came the Bolshevist revolution; in 1921 the South African Communist Party was formed; in 1930 the ANC joined with the Communists in launching a country-wide pass-burning campaign; in 1936 a Communist became its Secretary-General, and after that the ANC was in fact part of the Communist organization. It shared in the outbreak of lawlessness which expressed itself in the African miners strike of 1946, with attendant rioting and damage to property. Of the forty-six people convicted for their part in this outbreak thirty-three were Communists and they included the man who was, or became the leader of Communism in South Africa, Abram Fischer, who was not only an Afrikaner but the grandson of a famous Afrikaner, Abraham Fischer, who from 1902 to 1910 was Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony (later the Orange Free State). More than that, Abram Fischer had been a Rhodes Scholar, and in his time overseas became an habitué of the

London School of Economics and a visitor to Moscow. Cecil Rhodes' dream was converted into its opposite by Abram Fischer and his like.

Thus Communism spread and as a result of the investigation into that event of 1946 the Nationalist Government in 1950 promulgated its Suppression of Communism Act and banned the Communist party, which went underground. The ANC, still a separate entity, then abandoned its original, longstanding policy of advancement through peaceful means and organized a country-wide stay-at- home strike of Black workers on 26 June 1950, two years to the day before Dr. Mary Quinlan was eaten alive.

The red thread is plain to trace, and the next ten years were filled with acts of murder, arson and sabotage, arrests of ANC members, and police efforts to trace the leaders of the campaign of violence and terror. In 1963 the police raided a house near Johannesburg and took under their wing the entire high command of the South African Communist Party, including Abram Fischer, the Rhodes Scholar earmarked to become Prime Minister of Soviet South Africa. He later escaped but was recaptured and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

This was the end of long and infinitely painstaking years of investigative work under the guidance of Fischer's great adversary, also an Afrikaner, a brilliant security and intelligence expert, Major General Hendrik van den Berg. It was also the end, for the time being, of the epidemic of Communist murder and sabotage. However, hundreds of ANC men had fled abroad and were receiving guerilla-warfare training in Russia, China, the Soviet “satellite” states, Cuba and Algeria. The ANC, somewhere along the line, had been taken over by the “Pan-Africanist Congress” of Robert Sobukwe, a defector from the original ANC.

Sobukwe's PAC openly proclaimed a policy of violence, and hived off an army of murderers and arsonists of the kind who make war on Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique.

Thus terrorism came to South Africa, and in particular to the Transkei. In February 1963 came the first exploit when a White family of parents and two little daughters with a family friend were attacked as they slept with open doors and windows in two caravans near the Bashee River, hacked to death and burned. This branch of Sobukwe's PAC became known as Pogo (a name taken from Xhosa, the language of the Transkei). The murders continued, many headmen and Xhosa tribesmen being among the victims, and, as previously told, two attempts were made on Chief Kaizer Matanzima himself. Having seen so much bloodshed in his tribal territory, it seems to me surprising that this Chief, in 1973, should talk of “a bloodbath” if the Transkei's demands were not satisfied.

Indeed, Chief Matanzima has more to fear from the policy of bloodshed than most. The Transkei is marked down for Communist penetration and insurrection, and its capture is seen as the essential first move towards the complete Sovietization of South Africa. The reason for this especial concentration on the Transkei is plain to see. It is the only one of the future “Independent nation states” with a long Indian Ocean coastline, which would thus be thrown open to murder gangs coming down from Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

Sobukwe himself was captured and leadership of the organization was taken over by his second-in- command, Potiako Kitchener Leballo, who moved his headquarters across the border to Maseru in Basutoland (now Lesotho), where he set to work to prepare “the Great Revolution” in April 1963. Pogo branches in the Transkei received their orders from him, as he received his from the South African Communist headquarters in Johannesburg. Leballo's directives for the Great Revolution (which he openly avowed in statements to the press) listed the enemies of Pogo as the entire South African edifice of law and order, from the armed forces to the police, and even the poor old,

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originally law-abiding ANC, which had to be “wiped out”, “and the entire White population, including the women and children”. The Prime Minister, Dr. Verwoerd, Minister of Justice, Mr. John Vorster, and Minister of Finance, the late Dr. Eben Donges, were to be killed (an organized group was sent to accomplish these deeds but was intercepted by the police).

Leballo adopted a new slogan in place of the interned Sobukwe's “We have chosen starvation in freedom to opulence in bondage” (a typical Communist utterance). While awaiting the great festival of murder and rapine Leballo continued to live comfortably in Maseru, like all the other leaders of similar murder organizations. To my knowledge, none of them has ever been killed or wounded in combat, or even taken part in combat.

Leballo's Great Revolution came to nothing. On 29 March 1963 he sent his woman secretary to Bloemfontein with 150 letters to be posted to Pogo cell leaders throughout South Africa containing instructions for the Great Revolution to begin on 7 or 8 April. She was barely across the border when police intercepted her and confiscated the briefcase with the “battle orders”. These were in a childish code, the meaning of which sprang to the eye : “A wild living session has been arranged for the night of 8 April. On this night everyone must live.” Hundreds of arrests of Pogo leaders followed, and only local disorders occurred. Three days later the Basutoland police raided Leballo's office in Maseru. A detailed list of more than 15,000 members of the murder organization was found. Kitchener Leballo went into hiding.

For the moment at least, the Transkei and Chief Matanzima were rid of a deadly menace and neighbour. If the meaning of the word “bloodbath” was not clear before, it surely had by now been made clear to all, including Chief Kaizer Matanzima. Two hundred Poqo men were charged with murder, and the intended victims in other cases were witnesses against the accused.

Leballo, as was to be expected, turned up in the Chinese-Russian invasion port of Dar-es-Salaam, then moved to Kenya and later to Zambia, where he found himself among other “freedom fighter” leaders who spent carefree lives there, far from the madding sound of landmines and ambushes. In South Africa, however, the leaderless Poqo murder gangs, gingered up by the Communist headquarters in Johannesburg, began to reorganize, and again their chief objective was the great Transkei with its open coastline. Of the hundreds of ANC men who had fled the country, some returned with orders to set up guerilla training camps, particularly in the Transkei, and to survey the Transkei and Natal coast for possible Red submarine landing sites, where men and arms were to have been put ashore to support an uprising.

Thus the Transkei, if it be spared the “bloodbath” which Chief Kaizer Matanzima predicted unless its “demands” were satisfied, is likely to be in the news for some considerable time and Chief Matanzima's name is equally likely to become more and more familiar to the world audience of newspaper readers. He himself, speaking in April 1974 as presumptive Head of State of the future sovereignty independent Transkei, spoke very differently about matters of bloodshed.

He said that any person aiding terrorist organizations either morally or materially was “committing a crime against the people of South Africa, both White and Black”. His Government was unshakably opposed to all terrorism: “All we stand to gain by their actions is the eventual loss of our freedom, territory and identity ... the world should know that we as a Black Government in South Africa have no need for terrorist activities, that we feel that a terrorist revolution will only break down everything we have achieved and put us back decades in our development. The world should know that the Transkei would be quite satisfied to attain its freedom through legal constitutional means. We are determined to preserve the good relations existing between the South African Government and ourselves and we condemn in the strongest terms any action directed at

revolutionary upheavals. It should be clear therefore that so-called freedom fighters have no part to play in the Transkei.”

This is obviously sober and simple truth, uttered in statesmanlike tone, and it might make Chief Matanzima as unpopular in leftist-liberal circles abroad, as the advice of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of Kwazulu to “stop agitating for a bloodbath for others to bathe in” made him.

Chief Buthelezi is the other Black Homeland leader who has become a recognizable figure on the international scene. This is mainly due to his own personality, and partly to the image of the Zulu nation projected on to the mass-mind by Mr. Welcome Msomi's play Umabatha, which in its productions overseas was seen by multitudes of people, who gained from it for the first time some idea of the Zulu identity.!"7!

It could not have come about but for the encouragement given to Mr. Msomi, an ardent Shakespearian scholar, by Professor Sneddon and Mr. Pieter Schultze of Natal University. His mentors succeeded in engaging the interest of Mr. Peter Daubeny for his International Theatre season, and, as all now know, it was a sensation in London. Not long before this a successful and colourful film was made about the Battle of Rorke's Drift. Through these disconnected incidents large numbers of people in the outer world began to form some picture of a nation, submerged and forgotten since their defeat by the British a hundred years ago.

I was present at the first performance of that remarkable production, and an unforgettable experience it was, beneath the Southern Cross. High up behind me, the tower of Natal University was great Dunsinane. Halfway down the slope towards the harbour were groves of trees, Birnam Wood. Midway between the two was the University's open air theatre, and into-this cleared space the Zulu impis came out of the trees and shadows, did battle in the arena, and merged again silently into the trees and shadows. The Zulus, trained from earliest youth in the old, traditional, tribal war dances, can make a mock battle look more like a real one than any other people, as overseas audiences now know.

This event helped to provide a less uneducated audience for Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, Chief Councillor (in practice, Prime Minister) to the Paramount Chief, the King of the Zulus, when he went abroad. The re-emergence during the present decade of the Zulus as a distinct ethnic and linguistic entity, in fact a nation, is the result of many years of unremitting, patient effort by this Chief, himself a grandson of King Dinizulu. The present King, Prince Goodwill Zwelentini, who recently married a Swazi Princess, has kept much in the background, in the manner of Royalty everywhere, during these long years of struggle for Zulu advancement, which has been the life's work and mission of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi.

He is a man of high intelligence and therefore a conciliator, whose vision is that of a South Africa where all men should live harmoniously side by side. He has repeatedly dissociated himself from “bloodbath” talk and for this reason has become the object of scurrilous attack from the leftist- liberal-Marxist-priest pack in the outer world. “White Government stooge,” is the kind of insult they hurl, or howl, at this man who by undeviating but patient effort has brought Zululand to the threshold of “sovereign nationhood”.

Thus in March 1973 some weird American character speaking for some self-appointed “Pan- African Congress” (naturally, he spoke at the Chinese-Russian invasion port of Dar-es-Salaam) said Chief Buthelezi would not be invited to its Sixth Annual Congress, which was intended to bring together people of African origin from all parts of the world including “liberation movements”, but not other African leaders “like Chief Buthelezi”. The “liberation movements”, said this non-combatant type, were “the people engaged in struggle”. Asked whether Chief

Buthelezi was not “engaged in struggle”, this stooge said his organization had decided to recognize only the “liberation movements” as the representatives of the African people in Southern Africa. Just before he said this the Frelimo murder gangs in the Tete district of Mozambique had shot or hacked to death seventeen Africans, men, women, children and infants, in a night-time raid. The facts were verified by a large party of foreign journalists and by the local Red Cross representative.

These attacks and insults are bound to be painful to such a veteran fighter for his cause as Chief Buthelezi, but he has experience enough to realize that, no matter what the “cover name” used, the instigators are not “African”: the minds behind them are those of White men, of the kind rounded up by the South African police when they cast their net round the entire leadership of the underground Communist Party.

Chief Buthelezi is a man of rational thought who seeks reasonable solutions. Industrial magnates and men of high finance now seek him out when they are in Africa and he has always opposed “sanctions” and “boycotts” against South Africa on the ground that, apart from all else, those who would be the most hurt by them are those whom they are supposed to benefit: the Blacks. He wants to see much more industry in the Black areas, and I was present when he formally opened a jointly- initiated and operated Afro-Indian factory near Durban, a small but entirely novel beginning in this direction.

His political philosophy rests on the basic tenet of what would once have been recognized as statesmanship in such a situation: that the Whites have “the gun” but the Blacks have the numbers, so that any collision between the two, whatever the outcome, could produce only a Pyrrhic victory. Hence he concludes the right way is to work together to create a better, greater South Africa. This is in effect what the South African Government is coming to realize and do, as its “sovereign independence” policy shows, though its spokesmen are careful, especially in election time, not to go too far in the use of such phrases as “working together”. Their policy still is to develop separately, but in effect their theory of “economic interdependence” must mean “working together”.

Thus Chief Buthelezi, as he looks into the future of independent Zululand under its King and elder statesman, himself, sees many problems ahead. First KwaZulu is completely unlike the Transkei, which is a great, compact piece of territory containing few Whites, long since self-governing, having its own extensive coastline.

KwaZulu, as it has developed during the century, consists of numerous scattered Zulu reserves, interspersed with areas of White-settled farmland, all converging on a great port, Durban, with a vast new port already under construction at Richards Bay. How this could be administered in its present form as an independent state is hard to imagine. Chief Buthelezi's vision is of Natal sinking its separate identity in a non-racial KwaZulu. This idea would have been inconceivable a few years ago but Chief Buthelezi has said, “I offer this proposal to Natal Whites in earnest: I mean it.” He envisages the protection of the minority groups in this non-racial state (Whites, Coloureds and Indians) by means of a bill of rights. He thinks the outer world would be greatly impressed by “the emergence of such a thing in this place that is so sickened by racism’. He sees such a state as “the golden key which would open African markets”. His meaning in this respect is not fully clear. South Africa is not short of markets.

Chief Buthelezi has twice put forward this proposal in magazine articles, and may well have mentioned it to Mr. Vorster and some of the Ministers but it has not, of course, received either official cognizance or discussion up to the present. What the general reaction to it might be in traditionally “British” Natal cannot today even be guessed. In the minds of people here in Southern

Africa the old order may be and indeed is changing, but to what extent they could support a conception so drastically at odds with their established way of thinking cannot be estimated.

Chief Buthelezi considers that this great project, if realized, would commend itself to “African countries”. Here, it seems to me, even Chief Buthelezi for once succumbs to an illusion. Which “African countries”? If he means the countries of the chaotic, bloodstained northern area (and what other “African countries” are there now?) I think he is completely wrong.

Those countries are in truth being used to promote the aims of world revolution, which demands the violent reduction of Southern Africa to their own condition. Their role in the revolutionary design is to spread the area of bloodshed, one-man dictatorships propped up by terrorist police, and “apartheid” in reverse, that is, anti-White racialism everywhere.

“Conciliation” is an abhorrent word to their Communist masters and they have shown this most clearly in their vilification and ostracism of Chief Buthelezi himself because he denounces “bloodbath talk”, advocates harmonious relationships between all racial groups within South Africa, and has, himself, the stature of a man of peace. The success of conciliation in Southern Africa would be seen by them, under the masters they serve, as an intolerable affront and a major defeat. If Chief Buthelezi were to succeed with his vision of a conciliatory solution he would be the most unpopular man of all in those “African countries” and their attacks on him would know no bounds. He has already been vilified as the “stooge” of the South African Government, while in fact he has publicly charged it with fathering and supporting an Opposition party, calling itself “Chaka's Spear”, in his own KwaZulu, and in time he will no doubt be denounced as a “Fascist”.

After the Transkei and KwaZulu, six more “homelands” are scheduled to move towards full independence and Sovereign Nationhood. I gave their various names in a footnote earlier in this chapter. None of them has as yet made great impact on “the news”, but as the process continues they will appear more and more as separate entities and readers will be able to attach areas to the various leaders involved, and to form for themselves a general picture of the development.

One thing is clear: South Africa is on the threshold of great changes. As General Smuts said three decades ago, one other thing is indisputable: that South Africa is “an exciting country”, “an interesting country”.

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Chapter Eight

IN BLANKETLAND AGAIN

Lesotho revisited after twenty-six years (it was Basutoland then) is a place of great changes. In 1948, if you blinked, you might enter Basutoland from the Orange Free State almost without noticing what you were leaving behind and coming to. In a sentry box a Basotho trooper casually and smilingly waved you through and then a short stretch of curving dusty road led you to a little settlement, not much more than a typically Southern African one-storey inn and a Fraser store, the “capital”, Maseru.

Beyond Maseru another long, dusty track led to the north of this small country and dotted along it were a few inhabited places, at that time still locally known as “camps” from the days when the British troops pitched their tents and began their duty of protecting the Basutoland Protectorate. On your right, as you rode northward, was the narrow green belt of lowland and beyond that rose the mighty peaks of the Drakensberg Range, on the other side of which lay South Africa.

If you needed to visit a trader or a mission in those inaccessible mountains, and Frasers were good enough (as they were in my case) to lend you a pack pony, you rode a day and a half to reach a place, perhaps ten miles away crow-wise, and what a ride that was, up and along the one barely visible track, called, if I remember rightly, the Government Path.

Along the way you passed Basotho, back from the goldmines on the Reef, toiling homeward up this agonizing track with heavy loads on their heads: or, more often, the loads were borne on the heads of young girls. At the end you found yourself in another world, a remote, barren, rocky one, eerily lonely, immemorially old, where nothing grew and eagles soared. But people lived there, and they were happy people: that I well remember. The women singing at their labour, the young girls chatting and giggling around their favourite meeting-place, the trader's store, and the Basotho men tripling along on their surefooted ponies to the nearest beer drink: these were happy folk.

Today the sentry box has gone and one goes through the whole routine of passports, departure-and- entry form-filling, first at the South African border post and next at the Lesotho one. After that the little curving road brings you to modern Maseru, with shopping centres and supermarkets (happily, the name Fraser still predominates), and little Basotho girls from those remote mountain villages chirruping round the shop windows and emerging from the shops with the latest thing in mini skirts. Their inaccessible mountains are no longer so remote, the arduous trek down the rock and boulder-strewn track is no longer always unavoidable, because the pioneer work done in British days by a South African airman, Richard Southworth, has developed into a network of landing strips, in places hitherto unreachable save on foot or horseback, which are served by a fleet of six- seater aircraft from Maseru.

Thus a Basotho young lady today may flip down to the shops in Maseru when she wants to see what is in the windows there, instead of dickering for a piece of printed cotton fabric at the trader's. Nevertheless, the traders are still there and they have become so integral a part of Basotho life that it is hard to picture the country without this hardy, stalwart breed, who understand the Basotho mind and needs and are ever ready with credit.

And then, of course, modern Maseru has its brand new American-type hotel with casino, swimming pool, and theatre. The new hotel is only the first, I was told, of others to be built for the tourist trade (to which all the new African states attach great importance). I heard criticism of the casino on the ground that, although it undoubtedly brought much monies from the inverterate gamblers of

Johannesburg into Lesotho, it was too great an attraction for the young Basotho clerk or employee, who quickly ran into debt by this means.

Another effect of the appearance of the great tourist-type hotel in Lesotho (and in other places which I later visited) was one which I mention here without expressing any opinion: the clustering round them of numbers of young Basotho girls who accost visitors whose cars show them to have come from across the border and, if successful in their importunities, climb into these cars and are driven away into the night. This was a change, unimaginable twenty-six years ago.

When I was there in 1948 the Basotho were described as the only unconquered African tribe in Southern Africa. If they are still so today this is the result of the century of protection, and of old Moshesh's wise act of statesmanship when he sent a message from his unsubdued mountain stronghold, Thaba Bosiu, begging for the great Queen Victoria's protection; the request being granted, he rejoiced that “my people have been allowed to rest and live in the large folds of the blanket of England. My country is your blanket, O Queen, and my people are the lice in it.”

The three Southern African territories which received such Protection were Lesotho (Basutoland), Botswana (Bechuanaland) and Swaziland, and of these Lesotho was the second to achieve independence, in 1966. This event concluded ten years of disputatious wrangling among the Basotho themselves (very many of them wanted none of it), and with successive governments in London. The British Government, as events have shown, was willing, and only too anxious, to be rid of this commitment and of all other commitments in Africa. Meanwhile the hardworking British Resident Commissioner in Maseru, and all his District Commissioners and other officials throughout the land, toiled away at the task of improving the lot of the Basotho and their, by nature, very poor land.

While these ten years of negotiation went by, the picture of Africa to the north of Lesotho changed vastly for the worse under the aegis of bloodthirsty liberalism, and responsible Basotho leaders, gazing northward at the shambles and chaos which stretched from the Zambesi to the Sudan, became greatly worried about the true shape which “independence” might take in Lesotho. The dangers were as clear and the warnings as well based as those of Mr. Winston Churchill in the ‘thirties about the looming Second War. These are a few of the warnings which were addressed by leading men of Lesotho to the Prime Minister, during this protracted period of pre-independence discussion, about the future of independence when it was achieved:

We have the honour to submit our views about the independence of Basutoland ... these views are a matter of common sense experience, based upon hard facts in the newly independent States of Africa. We must learn from the mistakes of others and avoid them, instead of following the painful method of trial and error which may lead to irreparable damage. A coup d'etat which has been a characteristic feature of the newly independent African States, e.g., Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Dahomey, the Cameroons ... must at all costs be avoided in this country. In view of the present tendencies in Basutoland, this epidemic which has invaded the States up north is a real possibility in the not far distant future. Experience has shown that dissatisfaction is always inevitable in any newly independent State where a large proportion of the national income and of the financial assistance which may accrue from outside is used in prestige projects, such as building expensive palaces, erecting sumptuous assembly halls, buying cars for Ministers of Government ... Figures from the Unesco show that about 60 to 65 per cent of the Public Revenue of Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, the Republic of Central Africa, etc., has been expended on these prestige projects ... A wisely led political party of whatever complexion would choose to concentrate all its energies on awakening a sense of acceptance of duty

and an enthusiasm for hard work on the part of the masses instead of dashing in “where angels fear to tread”, controlling the army, the Police Force, the Civil Service, which, if realized, leads to dictatorship ...

I have broken off these quotations at this point because the last sentence touches on the real root of the matter: “control of the army, the police force ...” This was to prove the issue which dominated the long debate, and events have already shown how accurate these warnings were.

From the start the matter of who should control “the Police and the armed forces” when the British went and “independence” arrived proved to be the main question at issue and in dispute; the warnings quoted above, and the continuing carnage to the north of Lesotho, cast an ominous shadow over the proceedings.

All who know them intimately agree that the Basotho are a friendly, hospitable people who, until liberalism reared its ugly head in their mountainous little land, quietly tended the plots allocated to them by their Chief (and refrained from producing crops of such quality that the Chief or headman might re-allocate the plot to a friend), living by tribal laws and customs handed down by word of mouth from time immemorial, utterly loyal to and revering the hereditary Paramount Chief of Moshesh blood, knowing nothing of the thing called “politics”, harbouring among themselves very few (at that period) politicians or agitators, proud of their traditions and nationhood, treasuring the impartial justice which the Protecting Power introduced, and haunted by only one terror: witchcraft. Every misfortune was attributed to witchcraft and was capable of remedy only by the ngaka, the witchdoctor. Every undertaking, every warlike or legal dispute, needed the help of the witchdoctor if it were to succeed.

Their customs were their own and in a continent without written history cannot be traced to their remote, ancient beginnings. One of these tribal customs, particularly gruesome among these kindly people whose hospitality is boundless, is that of the strong-medicine or witchcraft murder. This is a desperate remedy, used against desperate ills, or what the Chief considers such. An epidemic of these occurred in 1947 and was still in progress when I arrived in Basutoland early in 1948. I was new to Africa then and was one of those who are often reproached with writing about a country after a short visit. However, what I then wrote twenty-five years ago seems to stand up to the events that have followed.

I said, “The chiefs and headmen were warned not long ago that if the killings did not cease the system of indirect government through the chiefs will after ninety years be ended. Neither the warning nor the hangings have been effective.”""*!

I added, “I felt that the chiefs must be in the grip of a greater fear than that of death or deposition. The only greater fear I could imagine was that of the end of Basotho freedom. Perhaps they read the signs of the times more clearly than many White men and cannot understand why the White man allows these accumulating perils to approach. In consternation and confusion, perhaps, they have returned to the witchdoctor and his strong medicine, his stern remedies. By doing so, however, they relinquish to the witchdoctor the power they wish to keep. He becomes the chief power in the land, and who prompts the witchdoctor?”

I answered this question by quoting the words of a Basotho, who, I said, should be an authority. “Chief David Theka Makkaola was for some time acting Paramount Chief of the Basotho and he served with Basotho troops in North Africa, Asia Minor and Italy. He said the murders were instigated 'by certain political bodies which are using the witchdoctors as instruments to further their aims'. The immediate object, he added, was 'to break the power of the chiefs and leave the

people leaderless ... this, in some measure, has been achieved, since many of the principal chiefs now stand accused of participation.”"'"*!

So there it is. As the British prepared to hand over full independence to the Basotho the shadow of all-destructive liberalism was creeping over the mountains, into the villages. “Certain political parties”: the Basotho, in the great majority up to that time, had no interest in or understanding of “politics”, or in the cry for self-government raised by these newcomers. They had been presented with their own parliament, at that time called the Basotho National Council, and took so little interest in it that a poll of 15% to 25% at any election was considered excellent. Itinerant political speakers, touring the villages, were sometimes refused permission to hold a meeting and occasionally were even stoned.

Such was Basutoland, one of the smallest and poorest countries in Africa, living contentedly under the White Protector and its own chiefs, as the ten-year negotiations about independence began.!"*!

It is entirely surrounded by South Africa, and in a rational time good relationships with that country would be the cardinal tenet of its policy.

Lesotho is not self-sufficient in foodstuffs and never can be until the tribesman can be persuaded of the virtues of contour-ploughing and donga-filling: the erosion is horrible to see, but the tribal peasant, here and in other African countries, strenuously resists efforts to get him to plough back stalks into the land instead of feeding them to the cattle, and to do the same with manure rather than use it for fuel. Over-grazing is another source of poverty. To gaze over a landscape of denuded rock to the green lands of the Orange Free State, a mile or two away, is a sorry sight.

Lesotho is dependent on South Africa for its essential maize imports, and a major amount of its national income comes from the customs agreement with South Africa and from the earnings of those Basotho (the greater part of the male population) who go to Johannesburg to work on the mines. Lesotho has no mineral resources to exploit, save for some diamonds, which have not yet developed into a major revenue-producing asset. During the period of Protection the little country depended on British subventions, and as Independence loomed no prospect of economic viability offered.

In the decade 1960-70 “parties” appeared on the once-placid Basotho scene and on this tiny stage a Homeric struggle for power ensued, “power” in the sense of the dictum of Tippu Tib, the great Arab slave-trader, who said a hundred years ago, “The man with the gun is the king in Africa.” As far back as 1964, when the Basutoland Legislative Council was debating the report of a Constitutional Commission set up by the Paramount Chief (later King Mosheshoe II) on a proposed constitution for a future Independent Lesotho, one speaker strongly advocated that control over the Police and the Armed Forces should be delegated by the outgoing Protecting Power to the future king, and spoke in the spirit of Tippu Tib's maxim when he said: “This conviction of ours is supported by what has happened in Ghana and other independent African States. We have watched with dismay the governing parties in these States make use of the Police and the Army to destroy all forms of legitimate, democratic opposition and entrench themselves in power for all time. Opposition elements, finding themselves unable to change the government by democratic means, reverted to assassination and coups d'état. These manifestations in many African States have been an object lesson to us and we have no desire to see such political upheavals occurring in Lesotho. The solution, as we see it, is that no political leader (including our own) should be tempted to do these things by being given control of the gun ...”

In the struggle for power to which I referred above, the chief protagonists were Chief Leabua Jonathan and Ntsu Mokhehle, a man of rabid racial hatreds who led the Basotho Congress Party.

When the first elections were held in Basutoland in January 1960, Chief Jonathan and his party, the Basotho National Party, were heavily defeated by the other party and Chief Jonathan himself failed to win a seat. Later in the year his political exile ended when the Paramount Chief (later King) nominated him to fill a vacancy in the Legislative Council, an act which brought him no gratitude.

Chief Jonathan varied between radical outbursts and words of sweet reasonableness. As a potential future Prime Minister of an independent Lesotho, a small country enclosed by and dependent on South Africa, instincts of wise statesmanship can hardly have prompted his appeal to the United Nations:

The White supremacist policy of our neighbours needs no qualification from us. It is a known fact throughout the world, and especially in the United Nations, that their economy is based on the philosophy of oppression and exploitation of the non- white races. Their past actions have proved beyond doubt that in the upkeep of this policy nothing is sacred. How much more so of Basutoland which would go a long way towards disproving their philosophy, being an island inside its territory.

At other moments he seemed to show a disposition towards rational relationships, as when he visited and was cordially received by Dr. Verwoerd and, later, Mr. Vorster. At the pre- Independence election of 1965 it was stated in the Press that he had received from the Republic of South Africa financial assistance in his campaign amounting to R15,000.!"°!

In the pre-Independence election of 1965 Chief Jonathan again lost his seat, and his party, the Basotho National Party, emerged narrowly victorious with 31 of the sixty seats, the opposition Basotho Congress Party of Mr. Mokhehle gaining 25 and the small Marematlou Freedom Party 4 seats, so that Chief Jonathan's overall majority was two. His party, however, polled a minority of votes.

An extraordinary game of musical chairs followed, which boded little good for the future of one- man-one-vote liberalist “democracy” in this, its latest province in Africa. A safe seat was found for Chief Jonathan, who was then sworn in as Prime Minister. Mr. Mokhehle's Congress Party then appealed against two of the results and both appeals were upheld by the High Court, so that Chief Jonathan's party had 29 seats and the Congress and Freedom parties together also 29.

Chief Jonathan thereon adjourned the sitting of the Assembly sine die. Mr. Mokhehle wrote to the Paramount Chief urging him to declare that Basutoland (not yet Lesotho) had no government, the National Party Government having no majority and having in fact collapsed. Chief Jonathan was rescued from his predicament at this point by two of the four Freedom Party members, who crossed the floor to his side and thus restored Chief Jonathan's overall majority to 2! The Assembly remained dissolved. Chief Jonathan remained, and as I write nine years later remains Prime Minister.

The years between the “first-ever” Basotho election of 1960 and the “pre-Independence” election of 1965 were filled with bickering about the form of the new Constitution, whereunder independent Lesotho would be governed. In 1964 the British Government, after a meeting in London with political leaders from Basutoland, agreed that Independence should be granted provided that the Basotho people, through resolutions of both their Houses of Parliament or in case of disagreement at that level by majority at a referendum, should ask for independence: and that conditions in Basutoland should be such as to enable power to be transferred in peace and order (my italics).

In this last phrase the main point of contention came to the surface. Chief Jonathan had previously stated in the Legislative Council, “I certainly cannot agree that the Head of the Armed Forces

should be the Prime Minister. In the memorandum of our Party we have specifically stated that the power should be invested in the Head of State.” Mr. Mokhehle and his followers strenuously insisted that the Armed Forces should be under the direct control of the Prime Minister, he being “an elected representative of the people whereas the King is an hereditary monarch who is not answerable to anybody for his actions ...”

This issue bedevilled the debate right up to the decisive moment of what Mr. Khaketla calls “the great betrayal”, when the British Government in June 1966 agreed to grant Independence in October 1966 and accepted as the Constitution of independent Lesotho a draft constitution agreed in London in 1964. This draft Constitution was “with minimum changes” to become the Constitution of independent Lesotho. The intervening years had been filled in Basutoland with furious debate, inside and outside the Legislative Council, about the status of the King, which to the ordinary Basotho was the only truly important matter.

The term “constitutional monarchy” is absolutely meaningless to the ordinary Basotho, who wants what he always had, a ruler with effective power. The present king's ancestor, King Mosheshoe I, certainly consulted his people when he decided to request British protection. His method was, in any matter of national importance, to submit it to a pitso (public meeting of the whole nation) or to his Council of Advisers. All feelings were aired and a report of the proceedings was sent to the King, whose advisers then tendered counsel which he was free to accept or reject. No case is recorded where he acted against counsel thus tendered. It was in the light of this tradition that his descendant, King Mosheshoe I, saw his place and duty as King of Lesotho with effective power.

The politicians, however, in both contending camps knew well what they meant by a “constitutional monarch”: one who would have no status, other than a titular one, as head of the Armed Forces. All the warnings from the chaotic North were disregarded, and when the British Labour Government, represented by Mr. Fred Lee, in June 1966 met the Basotho leaders in London to finalize the matter Chief Jonathan, with his majority of two, had streamrollered all amendments concerning the powers of the King out of the constitution. Mr. Lee said that after all the years of preparatory work, after all the successive “constitutional steps” had been taken, there was really little to do but sign and close the books. Chief Jonathan, however, in order to make assurance doubly sure, reiterated that the matter of the Paramount Chief's discretionary powers must not be reopened, “both in the interest of stable government in Basutoland and in the interest, let me emphasise, of the Paramountcy itself”.

Famous last words! Their sequel is of much interest, as the reader will see. When they were spoken the representatives of the two Basotho Opposition parties had already withdrawn from the Constitutional Conference in protest against the granting of Independence to “an unpopular minority government”, and King Mosheshoe II had declined, “as the traditional Head of the Basotho nation”, to attend the final meeting and to sign “the proposed agreement conferring independence on my country”. He said, “on what should have been the happiest day in the history of my people’, that for seventy years the Basotho had put their faith in the honourable intention of Britain, that when the time came to relinquish their protecting role, this responsibility would be discharged “in a way fitting to them and to ourselves ... our faith has been gravely misplaced. As the traditional head of my people I have only one overriding concern and that is that my people should be broadly united. The political expression of this unity demands a Constitution that enables them freely to acknowledge their democratically elected leaders and to respect the integrity of their Head of State ... a nation divided against itself can never be at peace: for a nation to be deeply divided at the beginning of its period of independence is a calamity that everybody should wish to avoid ... My own part in these difficult weeks has been to insist on the safeguards necessary to ensure the preservation of democratic institutions after independence. This has been my only purpose. And I feel duty-bound in the days ahead to continue to strive for these objectives. Only in

this way do I feel that I can discharge the responsibilities which my people have always reposed in their traditional ruler.”

This was the end of the hundred years of British protection and of ten years of “Constitutional advancement towards Independence”. The King's words, and similar ones spoken by many others during the long pre-Independence disputes, may be tested by the events which soon followed. For the moment Chief Jonathan had won the day, and therewith “control of the Armed Forces and the Police”. I know little about Lesotho's Armed Forces, but saw a good deal of the Police, who are what is known in today's jargon as “a para-military force”. In Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia I grew to detest the sight of such. It was sad to see (in Lesotho and elsewhere) how quickly Black men, recruited or press-ganged into these bodies, and equipped with “the gun’, consider themselves above the law and able by their mere presence and bearing to cow, bully, intimidate and strike fear into the hearts of even those who simply go about their business. The mere feeling of “the gun” changes these men for the worse.

King Mosheshoe II returned to an independent Lesotho where he was to be at best a rubber stamp. The feeling of the people, deriving from their long tribal tradition, was that he should have the last word in any matter referred to him by the Prime Minister: in case of disagreement, particularly on any subject of great moment, he should have power to order the Prime Minister to submit the question to the people at a referendum, the outcome of which would be final. The King, before the final conference in London, had already listed the matters in which, he submitted, the pre- Independence Constitution was unsatisfactory. For instance, the prescribed machinery of consultation between himself and the Prime Minister was in fact derisory “because at the present time matters pertaining to the administration of Lesotho are discussed, finalized and put into effect without any knowledge whatsoever on my part”.

Further (and this is particularly important in view of what transpired), decisions “dealing with the declaration of a State of Emergency should not be made by the Prime Minister, but should be made by Motlotlehi [the King] after a report to him by the Prime Minister, and after satisfying himself that such a declaration is necessary because there is nothing else that can be done”.

On his return from London King Mosheshoe II resumed the series of pitso-like meetings with his people which he had been holding before he left. In one of these, at Ramabanta's Village on 11 December 1966, he repeatedly assailed the new Independence Constitution (and also complained that “foreigners” exerted too much influence in Lesotho, and particularly that “the British” were still much too numerous in senior offices). He stated at an earlier national pitso, in September, “proposal was made that I should be included in the Constitution. The British have rejected this proposal with malice and cunning. Instead, they have secretly, on their own, introduced certain clauses which have been written into the Constitution.”

He referred specifically, said the King, to Section 76 (4) and (5) which gave the Prime Minister power to sign bills. He asked two Chiefs there present, and any Member of Parliament who might be present, to confirm that these clauses had never been discussed at any time during the prolonged Constitutional deliberations in Maseru and London. As none confuted him, King Mosheshoe appears to have made a very strong point here.

He ended by asking his hearers bluntly: “Do you wish that the laws of Lesotho should be assented to by the Head of State or by the Prime Minister? Is it your wish that the Constitution should be amended or not?” The response was a thunderous “Yes” to “the Head of State” and another vociferous “Yes” to amendment.

On his return from London Chief Jonathan had rushed through four bills which aroused a storm of protest from the two opposition parties, Mr. Ntsu Mokhehle's Basotho Congress Party and the Marematlou Freedom Party founded by Mr. B.M. Khaketla, who was the King's Privy Councillor until 1970. The Emergency Powers Bill empowered Chief Jonathan to declare a State of Emergency whenever he deemed this necessary; an Internal Security Bill gave the Minister discretion to ban public meetings; the Printing and Publishing Bill empowered the authorities to intercept, open, examine or confiscate mail matter; the Societies Bill gave power to ban any organization as unlawful if the government thought fit.

A very large but peaceful meeting of protest resolved to petition the King and the British Government Representative against these Bills, but this was ignored and with Independence, on 4 October 1966, they became law in Lesotho until such time as they might he repealed, if ever. Thus the first fruits of Independence were four bills such as might have been enacted in any of the innumerable African States to the north which had fallen into dictatorships based on terror.

The King himself was their first victim. On 27 December he planned to go to Thaba Basiu, the Holy Mountain of the Basotho, to address another national pitso which was to be a prayer meeting to dedicate the people to the service of their now independent country. This was to be the last of his national pitsos. At this time the Basotho, at the several pitsos previously addressed by the King, had by their response clearly shown that they did not approve the Constitution, particularly the clauses which the King had specified.

On 22 December, five days before the pitso, Chief Jonathan's Cabinet in an emergency meeting decided to inform the King that any further attempt by him to hold public meetings in the absence of advice from His Majesty's Ministers or against the advice of His Majesty's Ministers would be prevented by the Government with the full force of the Constitution, this warning specifically applying to the proposed pitso at Thaba Basiu on 27 December. The Principal Chief of Thaba Bosiu was personally ordered by letter from Chief Jonathan not to permit the meeting to be held, but this Chief held that he could not stop the King from meeting his people.

In a last minute bid to stop the meeting, Chief Jonathan and his legal adviser drafted a document and presented it to the King, offering to repeal the clauses of the new Constitution which the King had publicly declared to have been inserted in the Constitution without discussion at any time in Lesotho on condition that the King would agree to cancel the meeting. The King studied this document, which appeared to meet the case, and returned it, signed, to Chief Jonathan. At the same time he indicated that it was now impossible to cancel the meeting as no time remained to let the tribespeople know. He undertook to go ahead and address the meeting, using Chief Jonathan's document as the basis of his address, so that he would be able to tell them that he and the Prime Minister had agreed on repeal of the clauses (Section 76 (4) and (5), as mentioned above) which had caused such uproar in the land. What the King did not know was that the Prime Minister had not himself signed the document which he submitted to 'the King, and which now bore the King's signature.

Therefore, the King set out for Thaba Bosiu with the good news; Chief Jonathan set out to stop the meeting at all costs. The Mobile Police Unit (the “para-military” force to which I have referred) appeared on the scene in force and found thousands of Basotho men and women assembled on the mountain, awaiting the King's coming. The MPU men ordered the crowd to disperse and when they did not fired into them, killing ten people and wounding many others.

The King returned dejectedly to his palace to find it surrounded by the para-militarists: Chief Jonathan did nothing by halves. No-one was allowed to enter or leave the palace. Chief Jonathan

announced to the nation that he had put the King under house arrest because he had evidence that the King was involved in a plot to overthrow the Government.

The next morning the King's Privy Councillor, Mr. Khaketla, went to see the King but was turned away at the gate. He asked for an interview with the Prime Minister and was told to put in writing the matters he wished to discuss. He thereupon wrote to ask on what charge the King had been arrested, how long he was to be kept under arrest, and “what you intend to do ultimately”. Mr. Khaketla added that as far as he knew the allegation about a plot to overthrow the Government was not founded on fact, and he suggested that an independent commission of enquiry, under a judge of the Appeal Court, be set up to sift fact from fiction and establish where the truth lay.

Chief Jonathan then offered to meet the King's Privy Councillor the next day. However, when the time came Mr. Khaketla was informed that the Prime Minister was too busy to see him, but had requested his Deputy to take his place. This Deputy then also found that he was too busy, and detailed two Ministers to the task. They listened and said they had “no mandate” to answer the questions put. They would report to Chief Jonathan from whom he would hear in due course. Chief Jonathan knows the value of the pending basket, and the King's Privy Councillor is still awaiting the reply. That evening Chief Jonathan again spoke on the radio, saying that all was quiet and under control, and the Government would rally all the force that was behind it to crush “any further uprising”.

No uprising had occurred. Simply, the man with the gun had once again proved himself king in Africa. King Mosheshoe remained in close arrest.

The wind of change had come to little Lesotho. Of the century of British Protection one may say that nothing became it so well as the way in which it was conducted during those hundred years. The pity is that it had to end so ill. But that was no fault of the patient and hardworking British administrators, devoted and dedicated men all. It was the result of machinations far from Lesotho: good liberals everywhere must have rejoiced to see the way things were going.

Chief Jonathan's next move was to summon the College of Chiefs to meet and discuss ways of disciplining the King for making common cause with the Opposition parties “in their bid to overthrow the Government”. This meeting lasted several days and was held in the palace.!'”! The King was under arrest there and the house and grounds were under the vigilance and guard of a large force of the “para-military” police.

In this atmosphere of fear and suspicion the College of Chiefs and the Cabinet on 5 January 1967, produced a document which, they claimed, the King had voluntarily signed, whereby he undertook to abide by the Constitution; to dismiss a Chief alleged to have been responsible for “the disturbances” at Thaba Bosiu; to receive no visitors without the permission of the Government (including his mother, Queen ’Mabareng Seeiso and his sister, Princess ’Mampoi); to take no part in politics; and if, in the Government's opinion, he should contravene any of these provisions, he would be taken to have abdicated automatically.

The general belief was that if the King had in fact signed this document he could only have done so under extreme duress. Under the Lesotho Constitution, for what it was worth at that point, the King's discretionary prerogative was the disciplining of Chiefs. Thus the action of the College of Chiefs, which obviously dictated the clause about dismissing Chief Reentseng Griffith Lerotholi as Principal Chief of Matsieng, was void in law. The functions of the College of Chiefs were limited to the designation of a successor to the throne or a Regent in the case of death or abdication. The Marematlou Freedom Party immediately (6 January 1967) issued a strong protest against the document, particularly the “suicide clause”, on the ground that it had no force of law.

During the furious public controversy which followed these events Chief Jonathan broadcast many statements. In one he said the deaths at Thaba Bosiu were of men “who were unfortunately dragged into this mess by the King ... This unfortunate incident is the result of a long-hatched plot between the King and the Opposition leaders to take the Government by force of arms in the hope that in the resulting upheaval the King would assume dictatorial powers for which he has always yearned”.

All this reached South African newspaper readers in the following form, in an article in the Johannesburg Sunday Times. “The moderate pro-West Prime Minister of Lesotho has smashed the Communist-inspired Pan-Africanist plot to overthrow the Basotho National Party (Chief Jonathan's party). The dramatic events exposed power-seeking King Mosheshoe as a key figure in the affair. It also brought to light the existence of a High Command of six, and a number of Communist advisers surrounding him.”

None need doubt that Communism had and has a finger deep in the Lesotho pie, but such an interpretation of the situation was ludicrous. The King, captive in his “palace”, had no means of seeing even members of his own family, let alone “surrounding himself with Communist advisers”. One of the “High Command of Six”, according to the same Johannesburg newspaper, was none other than Mr. Mokhehle leader of the Basotho Congress Party, who may well have had Communist supporters, but was on record as aiming for the abolition of the Monarchy and the Chiefs.

To keep up the appearance of calm and order restored, the King was allowed to accompany Chief Jonathan to attend Mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral “on a day of national prayer for unity and prosperity in Lesotho”. An election loomed a few years ahead and great jockeying for position was going on behind the scenes. In October 1967 Chief Jonathan sent the “Dear Leader of the Opposition”, Mr. Mokhehle, a note saying, “How about instead of an unholy marriage of convenience between you and the King, we enter into a convenience marriage with you to establish a Republican form of Government in Lesotho, and I make you President?” As no reply was received, a follow-up note was sent: “Dear Mokhehle, I am sure my suggestion to you is the only omen to the problems facing our country. The whole fate of the country lies with you and me.”

Lest the reader grow confused: all parties to this dispute at one time or another expressed directly conflicting views, according to the tactics they judged best at that moment.

Time passed, and the election drew nearer, and at a public meeting in May 1969, Chief Jonathan said:

One of the things which has retarded progress and economic development in Lesotho for a long time is the question of His Majesty King Mosheshoe II and his position according to the Constitution of 1966. Unfortunately His Majesty has associated himself with politicians who are opposed to the Constitution formulated according to the wishes of the Basotho Nation by rejecting a Government elected by the people; and these politicians with whom His Majesty is associated are full of chicanery and use his exalted name to retard the progress of the Nation.

This was an open declaration of war. Meanwhile the King remained in his “palace”, with its high security fence and strong police guard and was constantly humiliated. In 1968 Swaziland became independent and King Sobhuza II invited King Mosheshoe II to attend the celebrations. He went, taking with him two Basotho Principal Chiefs. On their return, the Chiefs' salaries were stopped because they had not obtained permission to accompany the King. All this time the King's incarceration continued: no visitors or guests without Government permission.

This led to a ludicrous incident when a chimney caught fire. The police guard remained at the gates. Crowds of people gathered round the security fence but were prevented from helping by the police, who said extinguishing fires was no part of their duty. Eventually the crowd saw the King himself climb to the roof and put out the fire by pouring buckets of water down the chimney. Meanwhile, the Chiefs who had joined in the pressure to make the King sign the “suicide document” had second thoughts and informed Chief Jonathan that by majority they “rescinded” the decision. Nothing happened, and the guard continued to stop all comers, including Chiefs, from visiting the King. They were hoist with their own petard.

The election was due for 27 January 1970, and electioneering gathered pace. Chief Jonathan did his own electioneering and toured the country up and down the new tarmac north-south road, the construction of which he claimed to be a major proof of the Government's success in developing the country. By this time, however, his Government and Party were clearly losing popularity. The new tarmac road did not mean much to people living in the remote mountain fastnesses of Lesotho: in Lesotho too, as in all the other newly “liberated” African States to the north, the lavish expenditure on new “palaces”, Ministerial cars and the like gave Mr. Mokhehle and his men plenty of ammunition to use among electors who really wanted bridle paths kept in repair, bridges across rivers which overflowed during the rains, jeep-tracks, clinics and schools.

Mr. Mokhehle was a vigorous and highly skilled electioneer, and had obviously had organizational training from experts. He was a travelled man, having trodden the familiar beaten path through adoring Labour and Liberal lobbies in London to Moscow and Peking and elsewhere. He knew how to influence the simple Basotho peasants.

Chief Jonathan, who often made wild statements and did drastic things, put on the white garment of pure “democracy” in his pre-election speech of December 1969. He spoke, he said, as a free man greeting free men and women in a free and democratic country, which owed all this to its independence in general and to his party, the Basotho National Party, in particular.

In other parts of the European, Asian and African continents, he said, nations were governed by military governments or hereditary kings or colonial masters. These men and women yearned for a free democracy such as obtained in Lesotho. He had advised the King to dissolve Parliament and now elections were to be held. If the Government were not a democratic one, believing in the right of the people to elect their own Government, they would not have called a general election. They maintained and upheld the principle that the Basotho must choose their own Government.

What Chief Jonathan said about relations with South Africa might be taken to heart by the blathering Liberal-Labour-Socialist-Communist politicos who empest the air with their ignorant imprecations in this regard:

South Africa has its own government which was elected by South Africans in accordance with the provisions of their own Constitution and laws ... It is not for Basotho to interfere in South African politics. Leave the problems of South Africa to the South Africans. This accords with the principle of independent States ... Lesotho's safety lies purely and simply in the degree to which Lesotho can maintain friendship with South Africa and also with the rest of the free world.

Wise words, and rare ones in this generation. I do not know whether Chief Jonathan later modified or recanted them (Basotho politicians, like politicians elsewhere, often reverse their utterances). But at the time they were words of wisdom which any statesman anywhere would benefit mankind by taking to heart.

Therefore, on 27 January 1970, the first elections since Independence were held. On the 28th and 29th Chief Jonathan broadcast that the elections had been conducted in an atmosphere of peace and quiet throughout the country. As the results began to come in they showed that Chief Jonathan's Basotho National Party and Mr. Mokhehle's Basotho Congress Party were running neck and neck with the rest nowhere. After the score stood at 23-23 no more results were broadcast: this was on 29 January. According to those who should know, Radio Lesotho was instructed to withhold announcement of further Congress Party gains until National Party gains caught up with them, but this never happened. The majority of gains after the blackout went to the Congress Party. The Congress Party had in fact won the election, with 35 seats against 23.

THE BASOTHO TRIBAL CHIEFTAIN: CHIEF LEABUA JONATHAN

Chief Jonathan, in accordance with all his campaign speeches and with the counsel of legal advisers who included high legal experts from South Africa's judicial capital, Bloemfontein, then prepared to hand over the Government to Mr. Mokhehle, and urgently summoned all his Permanent Secretaries, telling them to prepare for a peaceful handover. All the embassies in Maseru were informed of an impending change in government.

THE “INDEPENDENCE DAY” PRIME MINISTER: CHIEF LEABUA JONATHAN OF LESOTHO

On the morning of 30 January 1970, the day on which he had proposed to tender his resignation to the King, Chief Jonathan summoned a meeting of the Cabinet to inform its members that he was preparing to hand over to Mr. Mokhehle.

This was vehemently opposed by the Deputy Prime Minister, Chief Sekhonyana ’Maseribane, and the Minister of Finance, Chief Peete Peete. Both felt they would rather die than hand over government to Mr. Mokhehle; they alleged that he was a Communist and had rigged the elections. All other Ministers agreed.

The Chiefs' fears were not empty. This being Africa, they thought they would in fact die if “the gun” were in the hands of the Congress Party. In the context of all that has happened elsewhere in Africa where “the gun” always prevails, the Chiefs well knew what they might expect: not only that Mr. Mokhehle was committed to abolishing the Monarchy and the Chieftainship (committed, that

is, On some occasions: on others he shifted his ground for tactical reasons); he was moreover a man of unbridled threats and racial hatreds. Had he become head of the government he might have become another Amin. He was an admirer and pupil of the late Kwama Nkrumah of Ghana. During the outbreak of /iretto, or medicine murders, in 1947, when several Chiefs were charged, found guilty and hanged, Mr. Mokhehle fiercely defended the Chiefs, saying that the whole thing was “a trick of the White people intended to discredit the Chiefs”! Later he told a Black reporter from South Africa that if he won the election, “We shall do away with chiefs.” He made clear that among the Chiefs he included the Paramount Chief and his party's organ instructed its readers that the initials “P.C.” meant the malodorous polecat.

THE ZULU KING AND HIS SWAZI BRIDE, PRINCESS MANTFOMBI

Such were the thoughts of the Ministers who so adamantly opposed Chief Jonathan's decision to stand down. The result was like an earthquake in Lesotho.

In the afternoon of 30 January 1970, radio listeners were told to wait by their sets to hear a very important announcement by the Prime Minister, Chief Jonathan. The little Lesotho world stood still, as the saying is, while all wondered what they would hear. Was it to be the news of Chief Jonathan's resignation and Ntsu Mokhehle's summons to form a new government?

Chief Leabua Jonathan's voice came through: “I, the Prime Minister of Lesotho, in terms of the Constitution, hereby declare Lesotho to be in a state of emergency. The decision I and my Ministers have just made has been taken in order to protect not only the liberty of the individual but also law and order ... An atmosphere of fear and threats of violence was spread throughout the country by the Opposition on the eve of the election. On election day the elections were marred by actual acts of violence all over the country. Now that I have declared the state of emergency I hereby suspend the Constitution pending the drafting of a new one. I call upon you to remain quiet and go about your daily duties in the normal manner. Wait for further instructions.”

Mr. Mokhehle and several other leaders of his party were put under arrest. “Chief Jonathan seizes power’, cried the newspapers and the whole world was racked with the sound of liberalist sobbing at this blow to “democracy”. What happened in Lesotho was in fact exactly what had earlier happened in a score of newly “liberated” states to the north, and in less than no time each new seizer of power had been recognized and welcomed at the United Nations. The crocodile tears shed over this incident would have been sufficient to irrigate the whole of Lesotho, which at that time badly needed rain.

The captive King, of course, had no part in all this. What he might have done, had he not been deprived of all effective power, is anybody's guess. He had not old Moshesh's power to guide the nation in emergencies of State. As the reader has seen, control of the Armed Forces and Police was

vested in the Prime Minister by two clauses in the Independence Constitution which, the King alleged, had never been debated in the Basotho Legislative Council and were inserted by “the British” (at the time, a Labour Government) in the Constitution which he refused to sign. When the emergency was declared the King's two sons, aged five and seven, returning from school, were denied access to their parents and infant sister at the “palace” and were whisked off to the King's country residence at Matsieng. Thereafter they were driven into Maseru each morning to attend school and taken back to Matsieng in the afternoon, where the King's mother cared for them.

The British Government broke off relations with Lesotho and suspended British aid, which had carried more than half the country's budget expenditure. These grants in aid were later resumed then finally stopped in 1973-4.

Under the State of Emergency a new arm of the security forces appeared in the form of green- shirted youths, apparently trained in methods of maintaining “law and order”, who appeared on guard duty at the Prime Minister's mansion. I have seen them referred to in newspapers as the Lesotho “Peace Corps” (not to be confused with the long-haired apostles of peace, also so known, from America who became the object of surprise and derision when they appeared in the streets of Maseru).

Chief Jonathan felt some need to explain his reasons in declaring the State of Emergency, and once more depicted the captive King as the villain of the piece. The King (he said to forty international reporters) had violated the agreement of 5 January 1967 (which contains the automatic abdicaton, or “suicide” clause): the King had ordered Chiefs, in a meeting at Matsieng, to vote for the Congress Party; he had supported with arms and ammunition a group of men under Mr. Clement Mooki Leepa, an acting Commissioner of Police; the King's brother in the south of Lesotho also ordered his followers to support the Congress Party; he (Chief Jonathan) had consulted the King's Privy Council and received its consent before declaring the state of emergency; the Congress Party resorted to threats, intimidation, arson and violence to win the election; the Congress Party stole ballot boxes; he (Chief Jonathan) headed the list of people the Congress Party had resolved to hang; he was preventing a Communist takeover of the Government in order to protect Lesotho's Christian heritage; pro-Congress Party polling officers deliberately tampered with election results - there seemed no limit to the villainy of the King and the Opposition.

On 2 April 1970, the newspapers “reliably reported” that the King had agreed to go into exile, and the next day, 3 April, he was flown out of Lesotho in great secrecy. Journalists in Maseru were detained at the time of his departure: at Johannesburg's airport reporters were not allowed to see him. He disappeared, rumour said into Holland. Chief Jonathan told emissaries from the Freedom Party, who wished to know whether the King was going voluntarily or being forced to go by the Government, that he had a letter from the King (they were not shown it) expressing willingness to go abroad for a short rest. The Chief said the King would be away for six months at the most, possibly less.

Thus, one by one, all other characters in the drama disappeared from the stage and Chief Jonathan was left alone on it, the sole arbiter of power. Within a fortnight of the declaration of the state of emergency violent collisions occurred between supporters of the Opposition party, or those who were suspected of being such, and the para-military police, now strengthened by the appearance on the scene of Chief Jonathan's green-shirted “Young Pioneers”, who gained an evil reputation for abducting Opposition supporters by night, taking them to the veld and beating them until they lost consciousness and leaving them where they lay. The news of these things could not be kept entirely out of circulation and Chief Jonathan was eventually compelled to make a public statement about them, saying that he had investigated them and found that “a small number of incidents” had occurred: he had in consequence reprimanded “some members of the Youth League” and this had

put an end to such incidents. Meanwhile the Civil Service was being purged of persons suspected of belonging to or sympathizing with the Opposition, and during the year nearly eight hundred civil servants of all grades were summarily dismissed and their places filled with National Party supporters. Opposition supporters outside the Civil Service were served with house-detention orders, and the “incidents” continued with increasing violence.

Fear stalked the land in a measure never known there since the days of the slave-raiders and slave- traders and with the fear went hatred which was something hitherto unknown in Lesotho. If any country in Africa seemed to have hope of being spared the curse which the liberalist conspiracy had brought to all Africa north of Lesotho, it was Lesotho itself. It contained less than a million people, known for their friendliness and hospitality, and all of one tribe. There were no tribal hatreds seething and simmering below the surface, ready to erupt the moment “freedom” came. These tribal wars had cost millions of lives in the Congo, Nigeria, Ruanda and Burundi, Uganda and elsewhere.

But “politics” brought hatred into the little land, in such measure that Mr. Khaketla says of this “Reign of Terror’, “I believe there is hardly a crime in the moral code, from lust to corruption, theft to extortion, rape to arson, cruelty to vulgarity, cupidity to greed, which they did not commit with complete abandon.” (He refers to the para-military police and the Young Pioneers.)

Thus, the long process of “Constitutional progress towards Independence” found this serpent at the end of the path. Old Moshesh had rooted out tribalism and built a united Basotho nation out of the remnants of other tribes which had been scattered by the wars of King Chaka of the Zulus, but (as Chief Jonathan correctly remarked) “the peace and unity which Mosheshoe I gave us has been slowly dissipated and eroded over the years”, this erosion having begun with the introduction of “the so-called party system, thus introducing a neo-tribalism no less abhorrent than that which our Founder so painstakingly eliminated before he could even begin to build a nation”. Chief Jonathan continued, “We, the Council of Ministers and I, as representatives of the Basotho National Party, firmly believe that in like manner we too must finally rid ourselves of the party system because while it exists there appears to be no hope of attaining our ideal of one culture, one custom and one nation.”

This was the epitaph on the foredoomed attempt to transplant Westminster-type government to African soil, and none who know Africa would gainsay Chief Jonathan on this point. The legacy of liberalism everywhere in Africa has been chaos and carnage, and this will go on as long as the outer world continues, with arms from Russia and China and incitement and money from the “democracies” of England, the United States and many other western countries, to support the murder gangs in their attack on Southern Africa.

In Lesotho the violence and bloodshed were so great that Chief Jonathan agreed to discuss with the leaders of the three Opposition parties ways and means of ending the crisis and getting the country back to something resembling normal conditions. During discussions lasting several months various proposals for forming a “national government, all-party government, or coalition government” were debated and for one reason or another abandoned. During the discussions all four representatives of the parties (Chief Jonathan's National Party, Mr. Mokhehle's Congress Party, and Messrs. Tsepo Mohaleroe and Charles Mofeli of the small Freedom Party and United Democratic Party respectively) agreed that the 1970 election (the final results of which were never published, though the Congress Party's victory was clear) should be “disregarded”.

Mr. Mokhehle agreed to this “for the sake of peace”. Discussion of the matter should be closed “to stop the bloodshed”. Mr. Mokhehle also opposed Chief Jonathan's suggestion of an “Interim National Government” on the grounds that a National Government went hand in hand with a born national leader. The only one such was the exiled King and Mr. Mokhehle was on record as

desiring to abolish the Monarchy and the Chieftainship! All involved were deeply concerned to stop the violence at all costs and Mr. Mokhehle, from prison, instructed his followers to abstain from violence in all circumstances and if they were in hiding to surrender to the police. (He himself was to go into hiding four years later.)

The talks were inconclusive and eventually Chief Jonathan proposed, as a starting point for the process of restoring order in the land, that his Council of Ministers continue in office but be enlarged from eight to eleven members by the recruitment of three new members, one from each of the three opposition parties. This proposal seems never to have come to positive debate because a number of events occurred which were greatly to Chief Jonathan's advantage and proportionately strengthened his position, in Lesotho and abroad.

Chief Jonathan knew that the suspension of British aid meant that Lesotho's economy was grinding to a halt. At this point a grave drought-and-famine situation developed in Lesotho and he naturally made the most of this in his approaches to the British Government for a renewal of the grants-in- aid, and in his message to the outer world in general. As a result, British aid was resumed, and America increased from $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 its unusual and distinctively American “Food for Work” programme. (This operates in the following way: gangs of sturdy Basotho peasant women may be seen rhythmically attacking the stony soil with pickaxes as they build new roads. They are paid with mealie meal for their labours.)

All this so much improved Chief Jonathan's standing in the land, and his reputation abroad, that he was able to announce a conclusion of the bogged-down talks with the other political leaders by announcing that, “My Council of Ministers and I have decided to continue to administer the country until such time as we are satisfied that a peaceful and democratic election can be held.” This prediction of yet another election as the end in view contrasts strongly with Chief Jonathan's oft-avowed belief that Lesotho “must rid itself of the party system because while it exists there appears to be no hope of attaining our ideal of one culture, one custom and one nation.” In the event violence subsided and life in Lesotho became outwardly normal as 1970 passed into 1971, with Chief Jonathan still in the centre of the stage.

In April 1973 Parliament, having been closed for three years, was reopened by the King, though under what circumstances he had returned from his exile remains a mystery. Similarly I was unable to learn how this Assembly was assembled, or how, and by whom, it was composed. Presumably Chief Jonathan nominated the members, among whom were some from the former Opposition Parties.

Among those present were many women members. This innovation in Basotho life was originally due, I believe, to Chief Jonathan and initially it brought him much popularity.

The King said the time had come to devise “a new constitutional structure”. Ergo, back to Constitutions.

Chief Jonathan, moving the “humble address” of thanks for his Majesty's speech, reviewed “the events which had led to the political impasse which the House would be asked to resolve”. After Independence, “partisan politics had continued to drive a wedge and sow dissension among the people”, and Independence celebrations were made a mockery through the encouragement of boycotts. This disunity had resulted in “the unpleasantness of incidents such as the eruption of violence at Thaba Bosiu’”’. This situation had led the political leaders to their joint decision “that the elections of 27 January 1970 should be disregarded”.

The House had been called in order to resolve the political deadlock caused by those events. It was an open secret (Chief Jonathan now declared) that the last Constitution was not acceptable to the large majority of the people. They had accepted the Westminster Constitution not because they had agreed with “its alien nature” but because the attainment of 'Independence was their paramount aim. The proper place to work out a viable political system which would embrace national aspirations “and establish a stable future for the democratic process” was in that House, in the establishment of which the reconciliation programme had achieved a gratifying result.

Chief Jonathan reiterated that the Constitution that failed “was drawn with alien traditions over- riding our own”. Democracy was not a readymade commodity following a common pattern. If it were to work, it must develop against the historical and cultural traditions of the people among whom it must operate. It must grow from the indigenous way of life and be based directly on the institutions that are linked to the life of the indigenous people. It must follow an evolutionary rather than revolutionary development, and grow with the people and their traditions, rather than imported alien concepts. With these words (with which few people in Lesotho or outside will disagree) Chief Jonathan bade farewell to Westminster and its illusions, as Africa to the north had already done.

And then, having bidden this courteous and reasoned adieu to Westminster, Chief Jonathan bared his teeth and viciously bit the hand of the former Protector, who for decades had carried more than half of the Lesotho budget and in 1970 had saved his political life by responding to his appeal to restore the broken-off relations and resume the grants-in-aid:

While we are grateful to the colonial government for the little they have done in our country, such as providing a civil service to run the administration machinery, we are however aware that it was not colonial policy to develop Lesotho towards economic stability. At the time of independence we found ourselves in a state of abject poverty, with no roads and communications, particularly in our mountain areas. This is evidenced by the fact that the United Nations has declared Lesotho among the six poorest countries which have been earmarked for intensive United Nations assistance, for which we must be grateful. We do not belong to the group of the least developed of the developing countries because we cannot work hard but because the country is still suffering from the after effects of a colonial policy that did not prepare us for self-reliance in independence.

The Interim Assembly having been launched, the next sign of Independence statesmanship came when King Mosheshoe II and Chief Jonathan went to Addis Ababa to attend the tenth anniversary of the Organization of African Unity, the host being His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie.!'”! This body includes many upstart dictators and mass murderers, but Lesotho's entrance into it was proclaimed to the Basotho as a triumph for Basotho Independence.

At this anniversary meeting the King of Lesotho, who certainly owed his throne to the century of Protection, was content, in the modern African fashion, to attack “colonialism, racism and exploitation”. He devoted a large part of his speech to an attack on Portugal, a country which has no possible point of conflict or contact with Lesotho, stating that “Portugal has declared war on the African inhabitants in the territories under her rule.” Speaking for a country where the Constitution was suspended, one-party rule in fact in force, and the press gagged, he said a “situation where people are denied an opportunity for negotiation, and no constitutional machinery existed for the expression of their views was an invitation to confrontation and violence”.

King Mosheshoe II seemed to have forgotten about and learned nothing from his own experience at home, or his years at Oxford, and showed no sign of having inherited the statesmanship of his ancestor, King Moshesh. Chief Jonathan followed in the same vein, roundly denouncing the denial

of democratic rights to the peoples of other countries (needless to say, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal). He was particularly eloquent in his indignant attack on the “illegality?” of the “Ian Smith régime in Rhodesia”.

The King and Chief Jonathan returned from the mutual admiration party at Addis Ababa to a Lesotho where discontent was rife among Basothos who deemed themselves to have been deprived, after nearly four years of one-party rule, of the democratic right of free expression, and in January 1974 a violent insurrection broke out in the mountains of northern Lesotho, where mobs attacked police stations and killed at least one police officer. The rising, later to become known as “the clumsy coup”, was suppressed with equal violence by the para-military police and Young Pioneers, by the now familiar method of killings and burnings of Congress Party supporters.

When I planned this book the last thing I could have imagined was that the story of Lesotho would occupy so much space. In a small country with one language, one national tradition and no tribal feuds, the bloodstained sequel to “Independence” which had marked the “emergence” of all African countries to the north, seemed unlikely, and a smooth transition into some new form of life, probable. What in the event happened was a sad disillusionment but also a process of high dramatic quality, a tale that demanded to be told for its own dramatic sake. Also, it all happened in the open. Every move in the drama could be followed by any who wished. This was because, enclosed by South Africa as by a moat defensive to a house, Lesotho was not severed from the news networks of the world, as were the northern African countries, where darkness fell upon the land and the events taking place there. For instance, news of political changes in the countries to the north usually reach the outer world in some such form as this:

The Government of the dictator of Tooralay, Generalissimo ’Mbingo, was toppled today by an army coup under the leadership of Marshal "Umodso, and a military government has been set up under Grand Field Marshal ’Odit. Generalissimo ’*Mbingo's body was publicly hanged from a tree in the public gardens end message.

Then a newsless interlude until the next change of government when Marshal ’Umodso and Grand Field Marshal ’Odit are reported to have fled the country.

Lesotho is near to important centres of news-gathering and dissemination, such as Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, and these are full of writers who know Lesotho intimately and have long- standing contacts among all sections of the Basotho population, so that news of events there always gets out, despite censorships and news blackouts.

I leave the story of Lesotho as it stood, still striving to find itself, in April 1974, after seven and a half years of Independence. Then I went to look at Swaziland, the last of the three former British Protectorates to achieve Independence (in September 1968).

The story of Independent Swaziland was quite different from that of Lesotho. Swaziland had a king who intended to rule, and did rule.

38 28 ok

Chapter Nine

L'ETAT C'EST MOI IN SWAZILAND

Swaziland, I thought when I saw it in 1974, was the Lichtenstein of Africa: tiny (it is said to be the smallest country in Africa), beautiful, prosperous, contented. Where Lesotho is by nature poor, Swaziland is richly endowed. Of its three levels, the Highveld (up to 6,000 feet) has great deposits of asbestos and iron ore; the Middleveld (2,000-2,500 feet) is fine farming land, producing cotton, tobacco, pineapples, citrus fruits and dairy products; the Lowveld (500-1,000 feet) is bushland, but the grass has a high feeding value and is used for large-scale cattle grazing. Also, Swaziland, country of many rivers, has abundant water.

Only in its history has Swaziland a close resemblance to that of Lesotho. As the Moshesh dynasty built a Basotho nation by conquering or assimilating other tribes and clans seeking a home from the all conquering Zulus, so the Dlamini dynasty in Swaziland by somewhat similar methods of incorporation built the Swazi nation. Both held off others who cast covetous eyes on their land (these, in later years, included the neighbouring Boers), until in course of time the British became the Protecting Power (reluctantly: the British had enough protectorates on their hands) and the national identity and integrity of Swaziland became assured. In 1921 the present King, Sobhuza II, was installed; as I write in 1974 he is the longest reigning monarch in the world, and reigns over a country now “Independent”.

When Swaziland became a British Protectorate the long wrangle began about land-ownership. Much of the Swazi land, like that of the Indians in the United States had been taken over, under “concession” agreements, by newcomers to Swaziland, mainly South African and British, and in 1907 the British, by a “Partition Proclamation”, set aside one third of the land for the settlement of the Swazis. This was not popular with the Swazis, naturally, and one of King Sobhuza's first acts was to lead a delegation to London in 1922 with a petition to the Privy Council against the Partition Proclamation. The petition failed and the King's deputation returned home empty-handed.

Embitterment about land continued and in 1941, when nearly 4,000 Swazis were serving with the British forces, King Sobhuza again appealed to the King of England for more land for his people. As a result, a series of Land Settlement Schemes was begun, and in 1944 the Swazi areas were increased until more than half the Swazi land became available for Swazi occupation. It might be said here that as a consequence of the money and development brought into the land by the “concessionaires” the Swazi economy greatly benefited, but the sense of grievance remained.

At the time of the original grant of such concessions even Swazi chiefs were often illiterate, and King Sobhuza, long after “Independence” had been gained, recalled: “Those marks that the British and the Boers had us [i.e. his predecessors] put on their papers were strange to us and we had no idea what they would lead to. They really conquered us with paper.” That is obviously true: nevertheless, on the credit side of the balance sheet should be recorded the fact that today's great asbestos, iron ore, afforestation and farming schemes would not have occurred without the finance and knowledge brought into the little land by the “concessionaires” of yore.

While the land dispute continued, the other wrangle began, the one about “the Constitution”. The Swazis had repeatedly been promised their independence, and in 1960 the British Resident Commissioner called the first meeting to discuss a new constitution. The new Constitution was promulgated in November 1963. This provided for a multi-racial Executive Council and Legislative Council. Accordingly, a general election was held, and Swaziland's first-ever Legislative Council was opened on 9 September 1964. This new Legislative Council immediately recommended that

the 1963 Constitution be amended and provision be made for the coming of internal self-rule. Accordingly another Constitution (that of 1966) was promulgated by which the Ngwenyama, or Paramount Chief (as the monarch until then was officially designated), became known as King Sobhuza II and provision was made for the appointment of a Parliament consisting of a Senate and a House of Assembly.

Thus the well-worn path to and from Westminster again knew the tramp of many feet, and the comedy continued towards its already familiar end. One thing which makes this period much more interesting than the similar periods in other countries is that it marked the emergence into public cognizance of a most remarkable man, King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, who was to dominate the scene in the miniscule kingdom.

In April 1967 another general election was held and, to the surprise of many, it was contested by four parties. Of these, to the surprise of none, the King's party, the Imbokodvo National Movement, gained all the seats. On 25 April 1967 homage was paid to Sobhuza, now constitutionally and lawfully King Sobhuza II, by a great throng of Swazis at his new Royal kraal, Lobomba.!”"!

In May 1967 the names of the Senators nominated by the King and of the Ministers in Swaziland's first cabinet were announced and on 6 September 1968 the long Constitutional trail having reached its end, Swaziland achieved its “Independence”. The greatest throng ever seen in Swaziland gathered at the traditional annual meeting of the Swazi National Council to hear the king speak about Independence. I do not know if this very wise King turned his gaze towards the north, but the northward allusion was clear in what he said:

Freedom will not change our country overnight. But change will come and we must know the dangers. We have watched others cross the river and we have seen some of them swallowed by crocodiles. But we have learned from their mistakes. We know the dangerous places, and we will make our way through the safe waters, away from the crocodiles.

“Crocodiles!” No one can know just whom the King had in mind, but the name “crocodiles” is apposite for the Liberal-Labour-Socialist-Communist coalition which today is trying to complete the ruination of Africa.

This Parliament was dissolved by King Sobhuza II in March 1972, and new elections were held in May. These produced an astonishing result. The King's Imbokodvo Party won seven of the eight three-member constituencies but another party, led by a Dr. Ambrose Zwane, won all three seats in the other one. For the first time since the Westminster type of “democratic government” had been introduced, an Opposition appeared in the Swazi Parliament. The second Swaziland Parliament was opened by the King on 2 June 1972, the King's nephew, Prince Makhosini, having been reappointed Prime Minister.

Alas for Westminster, this Parliament had not long to live. The officially-approved narrative of events in Swaziland from which I have quoted much of the above, although dated 1973, stops short at this point and therefore does not record the events of 1973 itself, which were the most remarkable in the country's story. This was the year when King Sobhuza II showed that he would brook no “opposition” and took over as the sole, autocratic ruler of the land. There was to be no King-and-Chief Councillor, or Chief Councillor-and-Opposition confrontation in Swaziland, as in Lesotho. But the events of 1973 in Swaziland were just as dramatic, in their different way, as those in Lesotho during the decade.

The appearance of an Opposition in Parliament, even one of three members, was seen by the King as an intolerable affront to his Royal status and dignity. He had in effect governed the country for fifty years through the Supreme National Council, where democracy in the Swazi understanding prevailed: there was discussion and dissent and the Council ultimately decided what the King wished. Now, under the “foreign” Constitution, that was to he changed and his authority might be publicly challenged in this new “Parliament”.

The next affront to the King's Majesty came when one of the three Opposition members, a Mr. Thomas Ngwenya, was declared by the Government to be a non-Swazi. An almost illiterate man, he is sure he was born in Swaziland, though no written records of such events were kept in the tribal districts at the time of his birth. He appealed to the High Court and then to the Appeal Court and won both times, but was warned of bodily violence from Government supporters if he tried to take his seat, which he never did.

His appeal was based on the contention that a hastily created tribunal for disputed citizenship cases was unconstitutional. The Appeal Court upheld this, but the law which set up the tribunal bore the King's signature, so that this was a direct challenge to the King's authority, an unheard-of thing in Swaziland. All this whipped up the hostility to the “foreign Constitution” to the point of hatred and in Parliament (Mr. Ngwenya seems to have gone into hiding about this time) the Constitution was declared unworkable and the King was recommended by the Prime Minister, his nephew, to get rid of it.

The King was ready to take an action obviously already decided, and on 12 April 1973 he told seven thousand happy Swazis, gathered at the Royal Cattle Kraal, that he had dissolved Parliament, banned political parties, and introduced imprisonment without trial for sixty days, recurrent if deemed necessary. For the first time the King's new army (some three hundred well-armed and trained men) appeared on the scene. During the British period White constables equipped with truncheons and wicker shields were the only guardians of law and order, and in order to be able to equip his new soldiers with weapons they had to be exempted from the Arras and Ammunition Act of the Protection period. They looked like the typical “Para-military forces” now familiar in all the terror-ruled (“emergent states”, but up to the time I arrived in Swaziland in 1974 they had not so acted and the land was free, as far as I could detect, from the smell and atmosphere of fear which pervades those countries.

Indeed, the King's assumption of supreme power in the land caused hardly a ripple among the people. He is personally beloved and revered by the Swazis and greatly respected by the White population of his “non-racial” land.7!!

The business community even found their lives and activities eased under the King's autocratic sway. The strangling clutch of bureaucracy (the curse of most “emergent” African states) was relaxed; “going through channels” much reduced; delays shortened and decisions more quickly made. The country continued to increase in prosperity (although the petrol crisis of 1973-4 was a hard blow to Swaziland's booming tourist trade: people could no longer get so easily and quickly to the gaming tables of Mbabane, the capital, from South Africa and Mozambique).

In short, the King's deed seemed to suit the Swazis well enough. The King had justified his action by speaking of “an extremely dangerous situation that has arisen in our country”: the Westminster- born Constitution “had permitted the infiltration of undesirable political practices designed to disrupt our essentially democratic system and engendering hostility, bitterness and distress in a peaceful society”.

No revolutionary situation was known to exist in Swaziland, and the King's allusions may have referred to the detested “political parties” and “Opposition”. As to that, only one of the three Opposition members, a Mr. Mageja Mashela, attended (but took no part in) the debate calling on the King to get rid of the “foreign Constitution”. The leader, Dr. Ambrose Zwane, went into sixty days detention, but must have been (temporarily, at least) released later, for in January 1974 the newspapers reported that he was seen being dragged, shouting and struggling, from his surgery, and that was the last news of him until in April 1974 King Sobhuza ordered that he be released, and further ordered that he “pray for Swaziland” (which Dr. Zwane gratefully undertook to do). Mr. Ngwenya and Mr. Masilela are not visibly on the scene.

Meanwhile the King announced the appointment of a commission to draft a new Constitution, tailored to meet the needs of a newly-developing Black country. This commission met in the deserted Parliament building, but spent much time visiting other African countries to study their practices and experience. In most of these death or imprisonment without charge or trial was now a permanent feature of life (in Southern Africa, Botswana alone, in my experience, stands aloof from this practice of political terrorism).

Not speaking Siswati and being limited by time, distance and travel considerations, I could not do more than take samples of opinion and feeling, but I could find no evidence that King Sobhuza II's great popularity with his people has been affected by his seizure of supreme power, which, in effect, was but a return to the method of tribal rule which the Swazis had always known. It was clear that the King, from his ancestral traditions, his long experience, and his knowledge of the country and people, was convinced that the whole apparatus of Westminster-type democracy could never work in Swaziland, and particularly that “political parties”, a thing unknown in the tribal past, could only bring strife, internecine hatreds and trouble into the land.

He felt this so strongly that when the Zulu Paramount Chief Goodwill (the future King) visited Swaziland for the Independence celebrations, he even sent a message to the Zulu Prime Minister, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, warning him against “the destructive nature of political parties to a developing people”. When Chief Buthelezi later visited King Sobhuza himself, the King expressed surprise and regret at the news that, despite his warning, “‘a so-called political opposition had emerged in KwaZulu”. Chief Buthelezi was in fact having a little trouble at this time with an embryo opposition group calling itself “Shaka's Spear’. Incidentally, the future Zulu king, at present called Prince Goodwill, has recently married Princess Mantombi, a daughter of King Sobhuza I of Swaziland.

So Swaziland settled down quite comfortably to life under its all-powerful monarch (something which it understood, whereas Constitutions and parties were mysteries to it) and all seemed set fair, despite the moanings of liberals from near and far. A small cloud remained on the horizon. What would happen when the King died?

Swaziland has no law of succession as the monarchies of the West understand the term. What truly happens is hard to determine even for men who have spent a lifetime in Swaziland. By Swazi tradition the new King cannot be chosen until the King is dead and even then there is no ascertainable /aw, or tribal tradition governing the choice. The King is expected to marry several wives each year from different parts of the country and to breed more children than any of his subjects. King Sobhuza, I was told, has more than fifty wives. There is therefore no lack of male heirs, aspirants, candidates, claimants or what you will. I chanced to be in Swaziland at the time of the Kingship ceremony at Lobomba, and saw very many young warriors wearing the red touraco feather of royal lineage in their hair.

But the abundance of possible successors has no bearing on the matter. The choice and final decision lies (again, as far as one can gather in the web of closely guarded tribal secrets) in the hands of a personage unique in the community of Royal courts anywhere in the world. This is the She Elephant (Ndlovukazi), or Queen Mother.

The Queen Mother is held to be a co-monarch, almost as powerful as the King himself. The Queen Mother need not be, and as I write is not, the mother of the King. King Sobhuza's mother died and a former wife of the King then became Queen Mother. The Royal lineage, given multiple marriages and innumerable progeny, becomes tortuously difficult to follow and the Queen Mother's task is to keep it sorted out, and, if common report be true, eventually to choose the successor.

Meanwhile the present, King Sobhuza, a fine figure of a 75-year-old tribal monarch, venerated by his Swazis and respected by the White people who still are numerous in his non-racial country rules

the land and, in the words of a popular ballad of our day, does it his way.

The Swazis seem to like his way.

38 2K ok

Chapter Ten

THE “NON-RACIAL” REPUBLIC

Of the three former British Protectorates, Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland), Lesotho (formerly Basutoland) and Swaziland, Botswana alone under the leadership of a remarkable man, Sir Seretse Khama, and his consort, Lady Khama, on whom the Botswana have come to bestow the seTswana name of “Our Mother”, has been able after independence to avoid a relapse into tribalism and internal unrest generating forcible repression, and to create something like a “parliamentary democracy” of the Westminster kind.

Sir Seretse is a man of peace. Immediately after the independence ceremony in September 1966, when the Union Jack was hauled down and the new Botswana flag hoisted, he said, “We intended to establish, have established, and are determined to maintain, a non-racial democratic party State based on universal suffrage and a government which will be prepared to accept any responsible opposition within a multi-party state.” On an earlier occasion the annual conference of his party reiterated its policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states although “greatly perturbed by recent events in Africa”, an allusion to the numerous seizures of power by “coups” in the northern region. Returning to this theme in his Independence Day statement, Sir Seretse said Botswana would be “as little prepared to tolerate unconstitutional bids for power as it will resist any interference from outside”.

Sir Seretse has a task which would have daunted any of the great statesmen of the past. For Botswana, as he has said, “non-alignment” means simply “self-preservation”. His poor but enormous country, reaching deep into the territory of encircling South Africa, stands between the clamant north, loo'd'”! on by every liberal-leftist government or party in the outer world in its threats of war against South Africa, and South Africa itself, on which Botswana is inescapably dependent economically. If the Communist assault were to ensue, Botswana would lie athwart the route of attack.

As to that, the parallel between American and Communist policy in Africa, to which I drew attention in books published in 1950 and 1951 (Somewhere South of Suez and Far and Wide, Jonathan Cape), is now taking ominous shape. President Truman's programme for “saving the world from Communism” contained a Fourth Point which envisaged a “huge project of road and railway building and modernizing ports” in Africa. About the same time the then Communist leader in the United States, a Mr. Earl Browder, in a book called Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace, similarly proposed that America should underwrite “a gigantic programme for the industrialization of Africa ... large-scale plans for railroad and highway building ...”

Today the Chinese are building a naval base at Dar-es-Salaam and have already completed the Tanzam railway as far as the northern border of Zambia, the southern border of which is just across the Zambesi River from Botswana. American funds are going to the construction of north-south highways in Lesotho, which borders on the Transkei, the most vulnerable part of South Africa and the territory which has obviously been chosen by the Communists as its chief target for subversive activity in South Africa.

The possibilities and dangers are obvious. If an attack were made on South Africa, on the lines proposed by the Carnegie Endowment some years ago, and were to succeed, neither Botswana nor Lesotho would survive in their present form, and this alone dictates the shape of any statesmanlike policy; self-preservation. Sir Seretse, Balliol-educated and a barrister of the Inner Temple, in his Independence Day statement said:

“The Batswana are a peace-loving people and all races in Botswana have lived together in harmony and mutual esteem for a long period of years ... We will in no way interfere in the affairs of others. While we do and will continue to deplore any policies in any other states which appear to us to be inhuman, and we will strive by force of persuasion and example and not by force itself, for an amelioration of conditions we deem unacceptable elsewhere - we will strive to live on terms of good neighbourliness with all states which, whatever their policies, show themselves well disposed to us ... My government and I have one main object - the creation and preservation of a peaceful corner on the surface of the earth in which, in every possible field, the standard of living of the people will steadily rise and, as Batswana, we can take our place, proudly and properly, amongst the peoples of this world.”

If men such as Sir Seretse had their way in Africa the future would be hopeful, as these words show. But “peace” is today a word which arouses as much anger and revulsion in the northern parts of Africa, and in the supporting cohorts of leftist-liberalism throughout the world, as a lewd joke would have caused in a Victorian drawing-room. Only four Black leaders in Africa, by my counting, habitually use the word and they are all the targets of abuse from the Black north and the leftist-liberal world. Sir Seretse may find himself equally under Communist-prompted abuse.

THE KING'S CHIEF COUNCILLOR: PRIME MINISTER CHIEF GATSHA BUTHELEZI OF ZULULAND, ON CHAKA'S DAY

Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, who has done as much as any man could to make “Zulu” a name of good repute and to reawaken the Zulu spirit of nationhood, has consistently defended the White man's right to a place in the southern African sun and appealed to his audiences to realize that violence will not provide a solution in South Africa. For that he was jeered and booed by students at Dar-es- Salaam University until he walked out. A South African professor, returning from addressing a conference organized by the Yale and Wesleyan universities in the United States, reported that American Negroes and Black South Africans among his audiences jeered at references to Chief Buthelezi's philosophy of peaceful change and refused to listen to his argument that Chief Buthelezi had done much to raise the morale of Black Africans. They replied that terrorism was the only means of effecting change.

Another victim of the scurrilous campaign waged under Communist propaganda-control is President Banda of Malawi who has consistently refused to fan the flames of anti-White racism in the north or to support the clamour for war from Black states there. He has always spoken for peace and once paid a State visit to South Africa, where he was greeted with a great ovation from crowds of people, Black and White, in the streets. For this he was rewarded with the epithet “notorious” in a special article in the London Jimes. By June 1973 The Times was even quoting the Organization of African Unity as the arbiter of affairs in Africa which could do no wrong:

“By its refusal to abide by the Organization of African Unity's boycott of South Africa and its determination to maintain a working relationship with its White-ruled neighbours, Malawi has acquired a certain international notoriety”, proclaimed the Times in large print.

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ENGLAND 1974: AS OTHERS SEE US The caption for this cartoon reads: “That's Ponsonby-Smythe of the British Embassy in South Africa. Poor devil was caught listening to a Lions rugby match”

President Banda himself explained his invitation to Mr. Vorster to make a return visit thus: “I do not agree that we must have nothing to do with South Africa and Mozambique. I do not agree with either boycotting or isolating these territories. I do not believe in the policy of denunciation at a distance, from Addis Ababa, New York, London, Lagos or Singapore. I believe in contact between the African states north of the Zambesi and the people of the White-ruled States south of the Zambesi.”

How fair would be the future of Africa, and the world, if men in New York and London (and for that matter Australia and New Zealand) spoke in terms such as these. They have made the warmongers bitterly hostile to President Banda, but the truth is in him, not in those in New York, London and other distant places who speak like ventriloquists' dummies operated by Moscow and Peking.

The fourth peacemaker in Africa, the last of the little band, is the erudite and long-term President of the Ivory Coast, M. Houphet-Boigny, a former Deputy in the French Parliament. Like Sir Seretse, Chief Buthelezi and President Banda, apartheid is abhorrent to him, but he deals in peace, truth and reality, not in parrot-cries and catcalls. He told an American audience at Washington in October 1973 that apartheid was an internal South African problem. African States should not mount military operations against “our brothers”, the South Africans. He rejected so-called “non- alignment”, saying Africa should seek co-operation with the Great Powers in economic, cultural and similar fields, but should steer clear of the East-West political alignment. Two conditions, he said with obvious allusion, were necessary for his concept of neutrality. The first was domestic peace in individual African States based, not on force, but on social justice. Lacking domestic peace African States would not have access to co-operation with other African territories: the second condition was peace between African countries. South Africa was an African State, and its policy of apartheid was a domestic matter.

Thus Sir Seretse Khama, a man of peace, finds himself in good, if numerically small, company. The story of his life has been one of struggle and success against great odds, and he might conceivably succeed, grim though the prospects are, in the task he has set himself against much greater odds: “the creation and preservation of a peaceful corner on the surface of the earth’, the earth, in this context, being the continent of Africa, where peace, law and order have in fifteen years been shattered in the area north of the Zambesi by the “Wind of Change”, and supplanted by lawlessness, violence, massacre and war-cries.

When I arrived in Africa in November 1947 one of the first persons I met in Cape Town was Chief Tshekedi Khama, who in 1926 had been chosen by the dominant tribe of Bechuanaland, the Bamangwato, as Regent for the lineal heir of the Khama dynasty, Seretse Khama, who then was but five years old. I did not know when I met him that Chief Tshekedi was a central figure in what appeared to him to be a State crisis of great magnitude, threatening the entire future of the tribe and of the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland - this protection having been reluctantly accorded by Queen Victoria at the petition of the great Khama III in 1885, jurisdiction in the land being left with the Chiefs, with the exception and exemption of White persons. (This exception was in no sense “racist”: it was an essential precaution to take in territories where “tribal law and custom” included witchcraft and medicine-killings.) “There is no government we can trust as we trust that of the Great Queen”, King Khama said in his petition.

The preoccupation that lay so heavily on Chief Tshekedi's mind when I met him was the news he had received from Seretse, then studying in England, that he intended to marry a White woman, Miss Ruth Williams. Looking back, twenty-seven years later, the rumpus that this aroused seems ludicrous, but those were different times, and Chief Tshekedi could see nought but disaster coming from such a marriage. Before I briefly retell the tale of that furious controversy, Chief Tshekedi deserves space to himself, for he was a remarkable character and appeared in several unusual episodes, now almost forgotten.

He might never have lived to see the day of the great argument about Seretse and Miss Williams, because, at an earlier period, he was shot by two chiefs whom, in the exercise of his Chiefly functions as dispenser of “tribal law and custom”, he had ordered to be publicly thrashed. This form of punishment, in greater or lesser measure, was and today again is known and accepted all over tribal Africa, but the two men involved refused to submit to it, shot at and hit Tshekedi, but only wounded him slightly.

This matter of flogging became big in the news in 1933 when, in defiance of the White-exemption law, a White youth was publicly flogged or caned (the true facts of this episode are hard to discover), having been charged before Chief Tshekedi with assaulting a young Black girl. He was convicted and publicly flogged, or caned. Chief Tshekedi maintained that he was still considering what sentence to pass when the crowd took matters into their own hands. Whatever the circumstance, this was a breach of the law, and the British High Commissioner in Cape Town sent a punitive expedition of marines and sailors under Admiral Evans (“Evans of the Broke’’) to Bechuanaland to “try” Chief Tshekedi.

The spectacle that ensued resembled a Hollywood-type melodramatized version of “HMS Pinafore”. The punitive force, with weapons directed on the prisoner, Tshekedi, faced an angry throng of tribespeople. Admiral Evans, with the Union Jack fluttering overhead, pronounced Tshekedi guilty, suspended him from his chiefly functions, and ordered him to be banished from Serowe, then the main town of Bechuanaland.

Public opinion in England disliked the whole business and very soon an order from London cancelled Tshekedi's exile and restored him to the Regency.

This, then, was the Tshekedi Khama, Regent, who in 1947 received what Mr. Stanley Baldwin would no doubt have called “the grievous news” that Seretse intended to marry Miss Williams. There followed a furious interchange of messages, reproachful on the one side, uncompromising on the other. Tshekedi told Seretse that he did not oppose the marriage because Miss Williams was a White woman, but because her marriage to a sovereign head of the Bamangwato had not been endorsed by the tribe (on this point Seretse himself conceded that he had erred). The Regent commanded Seretse to return to Serowe to discuss this “mad idea”. Seretse remained in England.

Another cable from the Regent said, “Your proposal ... surest way of disrupting Bamangwato tribe”, and a final one added, “On no condition can we agree to your marrying an English girl”.

By then Seretse and Miss Williams had already been married at a London registry office after the Bishop of London, under pressure from Tshekedi and the London Missionary Society, postponed his agreement to a church ceremony in September 1948. Seretse cabled, “I realize that this matter will not please you because the tribe will not like it as the person I am marrying is a White woman ... In spite of what they may do or say, I shall still return home whenever you say and serve them in any capacity. Please don't try to stop me. I want to go through with it.” (Another such “mixed marriage”, in far different circumstances, occurred in southern Africa two or three hundred years earlier. Readers who chance to have my Somewhere South of Suez (1950) will find the story, an interesting one, on Pages 93 and 94.) During his honeymoon Seretse was urged by the Regent to dissolve the marriage. He replied “Dissolution unacceptable”.

The warnings of doom followed fast and furious. The Daily Mail reported from Serowe that “even without violence, if Chieftainess Ruth is allowed to come to Serowe, the disintegration of the tribe that must follow will reduce it from one of the most prosperous tribes in South Africa to poverty, thus providing another excuse for the territory to which Queen Victoria pledged her protection, to be taken over.” The Regent fired a last shot, now that the knot was tied and could not be untied: “The tribe will be blown to pieces by a single thoughtless action of my nephew.”

In October 1948 Seretse returned to Serowe to face the storm. He confronted his adversaries at a council of the whole tribe, called a Agot/a in Bechuanaland (in Lesotho, pitso). The atmosphere was coldly hostile. The Regent and members of the Bamangwato royal household solidly opposed the marriage. The same thing happened at a second kgotla. The vote was that Mrs. Seretse Khama be banned from Bechuanaland, and that he, Seretse, remain in Serowe. Seretse said he would not give up Ruth and flew back to her in London.

But tomorrow is also a day, as the Germans say, and when Seretse returned to his country in June 1949 the wind had veered. Now the whisper was going round the tribes that Tshekedi was trying to keep Seretse out in order to appropriate the Chieftainship for himself. At a third kgotla, which lasted for four days, an assembly of four thousand members of the Khama dynasty, chiefs, headmen and tribespeople, decided that in order to keep Seretse with them in the country they would accept “the White woman”.

Regent Tshekedi, the loser, took farewell of the tribe, saying: “Seretse's return has brought ruin to us ... Seretse, you can see for yourself the unrest which your marriage to a White woman has caused, for you were wrong to have married an English woman without our knowledge ... You have put an end to the continuity of succession of the chieftainship of Sekgoma's family.”

The course of this matter had still far to run before it became smooth. The great noise did not abate, and in London the Colonial Office had no rest from the commotion. The British High Commissioner agreed to a proposal by Tshekedi Khama, previously turned down, that a commission of enquiry be appointed to study the question of Ruth's tribally constitutional status, and in November 1949 this commission met at Lobatsi, where a half-century before Boer and Briton had fought each other on the road to Mafeking. The principal term of reference of this commission, as it turned out, had nothing to do with Ruth's status at all (she was by this time in Bechuanaland). It was “to decide whether Seretse was a fit and proper person to discharge the functions of chief”, a very different matter.

Seretse's supporters feared that this was a move towards barring Seretse from the tribal throne: indeed, it looked like that. Seretse, while thousands of tribesmen chanted his name outside the

court, declared that he was the rightful heir to the chieftainship and that the tribespeople wanted him as their king. He made it clear that he would not be separated from his wife. The Commission ended its deliberations without announcing any findings, so that all was left in the air.

Seretse and his wife spent Christmas in Serowe, waiting, but nothing happened until February 1950, when the British Government (Labour, at that time) commanded Seretse and his wife to London for “discussions on the future administration of the Bamangwato”. This looked like another bid to force Seretse to choose between the chieftainship and his wife and Seretse was suspicious. As he could not get from London any assurance that his wife would be able to return to Bechuanaland, he left her in Serowe and went to London alone. His suspicions were well grounded. In due course his wife received a cable, “Tribe and myself tricked by British Government. Am banned from the whole Protectorate. Love Seretse.” Seretse told the British Press that the London Government had banished him from his homeland as a “danger to the unity and wellbeing of his tribe” and had informed him that recognition would be withheld from him for at least five years. Tshekedi, the Regent, was also to be banned from the Bamangwato area of Bechuanaland “while the Chieftainship is in suspense”.

Thus Bechuanaland and the Bamangwato were abandoned and left leaderless, bewildered and resentful of the distant Government which once had meant law, order and protection to them: the only government they could trust, as Khama III had told the Great Queen.

In May 1950 Mrs. Seretse Khama bore a daughter at Lobatsi and Stretse was permitted a brief visit to see the baby. Tshekedi was also briefly allowed back to round up the great herds of royal cattle. The two men met on the common ground of resentment against the British Government's actions and Tshekedi visited Seretse and Ruth in their home, a fitting ending to the years of antagonism during which, as now is clear, Tshekedi was never prompted by motives of personal ambition or personal hostility: he simply performed his duty to the tribe as Regent in the way he thought right. If events proved his forebodings wrong, he was not alone in this. Reconciliation was complete and until his death Tshekedi resumed his role as Seretse's revered “Uncle”, counsellor and friend.

Seretse returned to London with his wife and daughter in August 1950, announcing that he wished to be considered as “an ordinary citizen” among the Bamangwato: he hoped the British Government would allow both himself and Tshekedi to return to Serowe to serve the tribe as private individuals. In 1951 Tshekedi went again to London and agreed with Seretse that they would both press for permission to live with their people as commoners. Their continued exile led to anti-British rioting in Bechuanaland and a clamour for both Seretse and Tshekedi to be sent back to their kinsfolk. The Tory Government announced in 1952 that Seretse's exile “for a minimum period of five years” (under the Labour Government) would thenceforth become “final and permanent”. Soon after, the Labour Party, sniffing the wind of political advantage, turned a somersault and began to campaign for Seretse to be allowed to take up his Chieftainship. In 1956 Seretse and Tshekedi together handed to the Secretary of State, Lord Hume, a written renunciation by Seretse and his heirs of all claims to the Chieftainship, while Tshekedi reaffirmed his earlier, similar declaration. On the strength of this the British Government announced that Seretse and his family might return to Bechuanaland and the tribe as private persons.

Thus in October 1956 Seretse returned, after six years of exile, to the acclamation of cheering crowds. He toured the country in triumph but, honouring his pledge, told a great kgotla: “Any man who thinks he will make me Chief is wasting his time.”

He was joined by his wife and daughter and their first son, whom they named Ian, and the family settled down quietly in Serowe. Seretse and Tshekedi expressed the growing demand of the Batswana for release from remote-control government by calling for the establishment of a multi-

racial Legislative Council, and in April 1959 the British Government announced the formation of such a body. At this time Tshekedi Khama was dying in London and Seretse flew to the bedside of his famous Uncle and former adversary. Tshekedi's body was flown back to Serowe and laid to rest in the Khama family burial ground there.

His nephew returned to an Africa in chaos and to a Bechuanaland which was already looked on by the leftist-liberal revolutionaries as the next objective of the “liberating” force of Communism. Through the sixties Bechuanaland felt the pressures rising around it. Seretse continued to disclaim any interest in being Chief of the Bamangwato, but this did not restrain him from participating in political life and eventually forming his own Bechuanaland Democratic Party. The future rulership of the tribe was settled in 1964 when the British Government decreed that the Khamas' eldest son, Ian, should assume the Chieftainship when he came of age at twenty-one.

Seretse did much electioneering in the pre-Independence period. He held that tribalism must be broken down, and in saying so challenged the strongest force in Africa, including Bechuanaland itself, where witchcraft and strong-medicine-killings were endemic. Everywhere in Africa the superstitious fear of witchcraft had proved stronger than the ideas of “liberation” and “democracy”, and under the witch-doctors, tribalism in its fiercest form had reappeared, bringing the tribespeople back to the days of Darkest Africa. Thus Seretse Khama and his wife, who took an active part in political life, conjured a very demon out of the bottle when they avowed enmity to tribalism.

Nevertheless, the approach to Independence was more promising than in any other of the new Black states where the process was generally a riotous and bitter one, producing more strife than “freedom”, bequeathing internecine feuds theretofore unknown, and reviving old, half-forgotten ones.

In June 1964 the British Government announced a new Constitution for Bechuanaland which had the advantage, in comparison with constitutions bestowed on other new Black States, that it was made in Bechuanaland, not at Westminster (although it followed the Westminster model). It was worked out in Bechuanaland between the Chiefs, political parties and minority groups, under the chairmanship of the Queen's representative, and provided for the division of Bechuanaland into thirty-one single-member constituencies, and a single voters' roll based on universal adult suffrage.

Of this constitution the Johannesburg Star, which was well-placed to comment, said, “Bechuanaland's new constitution is a model of racial co-operation. While we and the world critically watch the often turbulent transition to self-rule of other states in Africa, Bechuanaland has been quietly preparing for the same step right next door. The constitution is not imposed. Bechuanalanders themselves devised it, so successfully that Britain merely had to rubber-stamp it. The unanimity of the planners, tribal, racial and widely divergent political groups, is a model of co- operation and no doubt a pleasant change for Britain. It is also an object lesson to those who dogmatically assert that moderation and stable progress are unattainable by a backward, impoverished African nation.”

At the first election under this constitution, in March 1965, Seretse Khama's party gained 28 out of the 31 seats. Seretse was sworn in as Prime Minister, and set himself apart from the anti-White racists by saying, “We don't have to approve the policies of the countries with which we trade. South Africa deals with Communist countries while prosecuting Communists at home.” Of Communism itself Prime Minister Seretse Khama spoke in words which seem to me strangely delusive in so well-informed a man: “At present Communism is virtually unknown in this country, and we want to keep it that way. We have one or two Reds, I suppose, but some of these African nationalists are not bad chaps really. A South African political offender might not be an offender from our point of view. But we don't want any old riff-raff from the Republic.”

Obviously the Bamangwato tribesman knows nothing about Communism. The reality of this matter is that Botswana (as Bechuanaland now is) in the global strategy of the revolution is quite simply one of two things: a penultimate stepping-stone on the Communist advance through Southern Africa to the Indian Ocean, or an obstacle to that advance which must be crushed. This strategy, like the incident of cannibalism on the city street which proclaimed to South Africa that Communism had taken over the old African National Congress, is the product of White minds, not Black ones. Some of the worst of them, Moscow-trained or Peking-trained men with slimy trails of murder, arson and sabotage behind them, escaped South African justice through Botswana.

Botswana may only have “one or two Reds”, but being by an accident of geography a pivot-point in the global strategy of the revolution, it will never be spared the pressure of Communism within its boundaries and against its borders. When the Tanzam railway is completed the quarter-mile of Zambesi River which separates Botswana and Zambia will be the last break in the great strategic railroad from Dar-es-Salaam to the South African border, with the Communist-patrolled Indian Ocean gleaming beckoningly in the distance. Even that quarter-mile is not an insuperable obstacle now, the old wooden ferry with its outboard motors having been supplanted by a powerful craft which can carry heavy transport. Today's reader may now see whither President Truman's and Mr. Earl Browder's visions of “huge” and “gigantic” schemes of road and railway building in Africa lead and converge.

Prime Minister Seretse Khama, while repeatedly stating that he will give political sanctuary to bona fide refugees, soon found that the matter was not as simple as that. The “Freedom Route” to Zambia saw many dark figures make their way along it, whose bona fides as refugees consisted only in their haste to escape from legal penalties for proven deeds of arson, bombing, riot and murder. It also saw many dark figures coming the other way: these were the “Freedom Fighters” beloved of Mr. Harold Wilson and his supporters, the mine-layers, ambushers, killers of their own folk. In course of time, having learned by experience, the Bechuanaland Government passed a law to prevent any in the country from plotting against other nations (a laudable but hopeless task, given Communist underground tactics and their support by the West). He was resolved, said the Prime Minister, not to let his country be used “as a springboard for subversive activities against other territories”.

If he finds himself able to maintain that stand, against all the obloquy from East and West which it will bring him, Seretse Khama will deserve a high place in the ranks of men of goodwill, and might even succeed in his ambition of establishing his country as a bridge between the territories and peoples of Africa north of the Zambesi and those south of it. That would be an achievement indeed.

With his new constitution working smoothly and his prestige in the country high, Seretse Khama was off to a good start as the leader of a country on the brink of independence. For once, orderly constitutional progress had reached an orderly conclusion and Bechuanaland, a model for others to follow, continued to be the bright exception rather than the golden rule. The Prime Minister went to London in February 1966 to wind up the Protectorate and in his opening speech referred to the racial tensions in Africa and said he believed Bechuanaland, though small, had a role to play in Southern Africa and in the unnecessary conflicts between Black and White. His government's aim was to achieve a non-racial society in which each individual would have equal right of expression and opportunity, no matter what his race or colour. It would be an essentially democratic society in which men and women of different colour would live together in mutual respect and understanding, as they were already doing.

The happy ending was not to be allowed to pass without someone “walking out”. This had come to be a familiar episode in such conferences. This time it was the leader of the small Opposition party,

Mr. Philip Matante, a disciple of the late Mr. Nkrumah of Ghana, who had already attacked the Independence Constitution as “an instrument of dictatorship and Fascism”.

Apart from this solitary Bronx cheer, the Independence conference was the most decorous and frictionless one of all those which had produced the new Black states of Africa: there were no “unfair to Bechuanaland” pickets outside Marlborough House, no crowds of student demonstrators and, back in Bechuanaland, no moans of woe and martyrdom from “liberation movements”.

One most surprising thing, in the context of “emergent Africa”, happened. Seretse Khama broke with all precedent by announcing that he hoped to avoid the creation of a Defence Force, something which he could not afford anyway. (The matter of expense had not deterred or delayed the formation of “‘para-military units” in any other “emergent” state: indeed, this was always a matter of the highest priority.) Prime Minister Seretse Khama said, “It's pointless to have an army. It's wasteful and there is nobody we wish to go to war against. We firmly believe that in our part of the world, just having the two races living together in harmony is more efficient and effective than military force.” He looked to a defence treaty with Britain for his country's protection. Botswana's role in Africa would lie in “trying to bridge the gap between Black and White by example rather than the use of force”.

And that was the end of the eighty-one years of the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. One last plumed hat, one last hauling up and then down of the Union Jack, one last tiara'd Royal lady: Sir Seretse Khama (accoladed a few days before), beside him Lady Khama: on 29 September 1966, the new Republic of Botswana, under its President Sir Seretse Khama, came into being.

President Sir Seretse established himself and his government in the new capital of Botswana, Gaborone. Gaborone was but a military camp and an almost imperceptible whistle-stop when the century began. The tiny station, however, was just big enough to house a safe, which came to make the stuff of an amusing anecdote from South African war days. When the Boers took Gaborone they found the safe and blew it open, finding inside a piece of paper with the words “Sold again”, or something equally mocking. The stationmaster, at the approach of the Boers, had removed the money. Whether he reported what he had done, and where he had put the money, history does not record, but nearly fifty years later (in 1947) an old tree near Gaborone Station was cut down and a bag of gold coins fell out of a hole in it.

Gaborone was reoccupied by the British soon afterwards. Presumably the stationmaster did not reoccupy the station, or perhaps he had forgotten in which tree he had deposited the contents of the safe.

Further down the line, at Sepeitse, today's traveller may find another memento of that war and of the days when wars were chivalrously fought. The Boers were strongly entrenched on Sepeitse Hill, overlooking the railway, and the British troops occupied an inferior position across the line, which was under constant artillery fire from the Boers on Sepeitse Hill: the terrain between Boer and Briton was steep, broken and stony, and this made a frontal daylight attack on the Boer position impossible, so that a series of night attacks were made in the hope of dislodging the Boers from their commanding position. These all met with heavy small arms fire, land mine explosions, and barbed wire entanglements, but in the third one, made by Rhodesian troops, a Captain French fought his way uphill to the very entrance to the Boer fortifications, where he was killed. When the Boers later evacuated the position they left behind a large cairn of stones with a wooden cross atop of which appeared the words:

“Here Capt. French fell. He was a brave man. If any of his relations would like to know any details of his death I shall be glad to give them when the war is over if I am spared.” The officer who had the cairn and the cross erected was a Captain van Dalwig. Part of the cairn still stands.

Today Gaborone is hurrying to catch up with the jet age. It has a fine Parliament building, which, unlike others in many of the “emergent” states, will be useful as well as ornamental if President Seretse Khama succeeds in his aim of establishing a non-racial system of parliamentary government, based on universal suffrage. He has had ups and downs of fortune in his first years as President. The terrible drought and famine of 1965-6 was a bitter blow on the eve of Independence; death from hunger devastated tribal and wild life on a catastrophic scale. This was a major setback, but Britain and other countries rallied round, and in the end the rains came. An early blessing was the discovery in 1970 of a great diamond pipe (said to be one of the richest in the world) at Orapa.

Meanwhile the new capital, Gaborone, continues to grow and to take on the shape of a modern city, small, but nevertheless a city with multi-storey blocks rising, somewhat incongruously, out of the limitless surrounding scrubland. A few miles away stands an American casino-type hotel. Gaborone, like any other small city springing into existence at this point in time, has been able to profit by the experience of other, older ones and to introduce modern ideas at the start such as its main street, prettily called The Mall, which is trafficless.

Cities seem to have an attraction for human beings, almost as irresistible as the force of gravity itself. The tidings of this new thing sprouting in the savannah evidently spread out to remote places in the old Kalahari and other parts of Botswana, and soon people began to come towards it, like moths to a candle, and to squat down in the bush, make themselves some sort of shelter out of grass, sacking and pieces of corrugated iron, and wait for the city to absorb them. They may need to wait for long, for there is not all that much work to be had: but wait they will. When I was there these squatter settlements on the outskirts of Gaborone were growing fast, and bringing with them all the problems which arise in such places. Prostitution is usually one of them.

But there they were, and there, I judge, they will stay. The city had them in its spell and they looked not unhappy, nor yearning for whatever tribal homes they had left behind them. In time they will become part of the little city's life: in time it will absorb them.

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Chapter Eleven

THE CHINESE INVASION

I cannot end this story without briefly mentioning the Chinese invasion of this unhappy continent, and two of the remarkable characters whom the “Emergent States” have thrown up during the decade of “independence”.

President Kenneth Kaunda's career during the decade demonstrates anew the continuing validity of Lord Acton's aphorism: “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The erstwhile nice chap, the disciple of Gandhi and passive resistance, the apostle of non-violence, the strict and stern abstainer from liquor and tobacco, the club tennis and table-tennis player, now finds himself the head of a one-party state based on terror and fear while avowing that he will never reopen his border with Rhodesia “until the Ian Smith régime is deposed and one-man-one-vote legislation introduced”!

President Kaunda, indeed, “the Father of Independence”, finds himself neither free nor liberated. He has, and uses, the power to put people away without trial, as he himself was sometimes “rusticated” by the Rhodesians in former times. He denounces as “brutality” in others what he now does himself. He is the prisoner of pressures - which he cannot resist, chiefly from the army he put under the command of an ex-Sandhurst subaltern who in 1969, while still in his twenties, took over from the last British commander, Major-General Reed.

In 1973, under this new commander, Brigadier Chinkuli, the Zambian army, Chinese-armed, went completely out of control and became an instrument of terror, beating and killing Zambian civilians and Whites from the sheer exhilaration of possession of “the gun”. This led to their most notorious exploit, when some drugged, drunken or merely trigger-happy soldier for three hours kept up a stream of rifle-fire across the Zambesi, killing two Canadian girl tourists and wounding an American.

The power of the men around him was shown by the preposterous explanation of these murders which was issued under President Kaunda's name. This was to the effect that the soldier (“who did his duty”!) only fired when the two Canadian girls and the American began to swim across the Zambesi towards the Zambian power station, and they seemed all to be “men wearing bandoliers for the protection of explosives”. (No human being could swim these rapids even if they were not crocodile-infested.)

The father of one of the girls, Mr. Oscar Drijber, subsequently visited the scene of the murders and pointed out that at such short distance it must have been obvious that the tourists were harmless, and two of them women: he was told that the sun had been in the rifleman's eyes, so that he could not see clearly. Mr. Drijber came away with “nothing but contempt” for the Zambian authorities and soldiers, but with high regard for President Kaunda, with whom he had a brief meeting. He said he did not believe that President Kaunda issued the Zambian explanation: this was done by “people who could be dangerous to him”.

Mr. Drijber hit on the truth there, and this truth reveals the plight of the captive-President Kaunda. Nevertheless, he did put his signature to a document which aroused the angry derision of the world, including even his most devoted leftist-liberal admirers. He has in fact around him many people who “could be dangerous to him”, among them Mr. Simon Kapepwe, Mr. Harry Nkumbula, some of his Cabinet Ministers, including the Defence Minister, and Brigadier Chinkuli.

Ten years after Independence (which began, as in most of the “emergent” states, with a massacre, that of the Lumpa people) President Kaunda is in a difficult plight. His soldiers, and their cadets of the Youth Force (again, these reminded one of the Hitler Youth, and as in all the emergent countries have an evil reputation), are feared and hated by the population, Black and White. His country is infested with “freedom fighters” coming through from Tanzania or setting up bases on Zambian soil, who have created such a reputation for drunkenness and brutality that he has tried, without great success, to impede their incursions. In addition, there are some thirty thousand Chinese “workers” in his country and adjoining Tanzania, and who knows if or when they might ever depart.

Furthermore, Zambia's powerful transmitting station near Lusaka, a gift from Chairman Mao in Peking, broadcasts threats of death and destruction to Rhodesia, preparing the way for the day when they will incite the Blacks in Rhodesia to start their insurrection. President Kaunda, among his other worries, must be learning to beware of the Chinese when they come bearing gifts, for their mission is not to “liberate” Black people: it is to extend the world revolution to Africa, when the Black people would find themselves in a worse enslavement than that of the slave days.

Few can doubt this ultimate purpose of the Chinese intervention in Africa. If they were truly interested in “liberation”, then liberation should begin at home. The real motive behind the lavish Chinese investment in Africa (tanks stockpiled at Dar-es-Salaam, a fleet of torpedo boats in waiting at Zanzibar) was given away by a pamphlet distributed from the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka when it was first opened. Its title was Revolution in Africa. “Revolution”, not “liberation”.

Alas, poor Kenneth Kaunda. He was a man of infinite illusion, happy while he was fighting his way to the top, fearful and encircled by menace which he cannot handle now that he has arrived there.

He and his henchmen use detention without trial indiscriminately against all and sundry - sixteen British subjects were by March 1974 being held in prison without trial in Zambia and in neighbouring Tanzania and Malawi. (This happens everywhere in “liberated” Africa with the exception, up to now, of Sir Seretse Khama's Botswana.) This, and the unchecked behaviour of the Zambian Army, para-military police and Hitler-Youth-Like Green Corps, has produced all- pervading fear and dread in the land.

In London, the Junior Minister for African Affairs, Miss Joan Lestor, when questioned about the plight of these sixteen people, blandly answered that they were being held “under legislation for the preservation of public order”; there was “no legal requirement for eventual trial”, but some detainees “eventually” came to court after six-monthly reviews. It will be seen that Socialist language varies greatly from country to country: what is brutal dictatorship in one is merely “legislation ... without any requirement for eventual trial” in another.

The state of unrest engendered by lawlessness in Zambia compelled President Kaunda in April 1974 to introduce hanging for “armed gangsters”. Several persons had recently been killed or wounded by ambushers on country roads or in unlit suburbs of the towns. Once again the President's statement on the incidents was vague and devious. He blamed “aliens” for the wave of violent crime. The public, however, had long known that, apart from the misdeeds of the army itself, the crimes were committed by the terrorists whom the President himself allowed to set up training camps and bases along the border. Their presence in Zambia is well known and beyond doubt, but the Zambian officials, from the top down, insist, to the audible jeers of the populace, that “not one terrorist base” exists in Zambia. Public excitement runs so high that a meeting called by a woman Member of Parliament broke up in disorder when she refused to advocate public hanging. Another woman Member, on television, proposed that convicted thieves have an arm or hand cut off.

President Kaunda has so far resisted pressure to introduce public hangings or amputations, but might yet have to yield and emulate General Amin in such matters (as I write, a film showing Aminist troops machine-gunning victims tied to stakes is drawing large crowds in Paris). He has in the past yielded to pressures around him, as in the case of his signature to the preposterous statement about the murders of the Canadian girls, and the equally ridiculous allegation that the Rhodesian Air Force had bombed a Zambian village “with hand grenades”. President Kaunda is in a sorry plight, not from outer menaces but from rivals and enemies within his own camp, from the “freedom fighters” who terrorize his own people, from an army which has run wild, and from his Chinese guests.

Thus Africa to the north of the Zambesi sinks back into the slavery of the Arab slave-raiding days, and the shadow of its doom lengthens towards the southern part, while ecstatic cries of “liberation” come from the Socialist countries outside Africa, and particularly from Wilsonland. There, a new figure appeared on the darkling scene, Miss Joan Lestor, new to me but no doubt well known to others better informed, who received an especial mandate from her superior in the new British Government to look after African affairs. She, like Mrs. Roosevelt of yore, is accessible to any “freedom fighter” from Africa and the results will in due course be witnessed by readers (I fear to their cost). In her early weeks in office she hastened to Zambia and under her aegis British representatives in Africa began to behave like clowns, lacking only the string of sausages and bladder of lard.

This occurred when a rugby football team from the United Kingdom came to play a series of matches in South Africa. Orders arrived from London that British representatives were to have no social truck with these players and, thus prompted, British representatives in the southern part behaved in ways which would have shamed Caligula's horse. Englishmen in this generation have grown used to feeling humiliated by the acts of British politicians, but these people, in their zeal to score a mark in Mr. Wilson's good books, went even further than the hysterical Tories who cheered Mr. Chamberlain's “peace in our time”.

I became aware of this toadyism among bearers of the British name abroad even before the boycott- order from Wilsonland. I met a beardless ambassadorial satellite somewhere in Southern Africa where there was also a Rhodesian representative. To my horror, I heard this callow sycophant telling people at parties, in a loud voice, that he had requested the authorities and other diplomatic acquaintances not to invite him to any function where “that man” would be present. I surmise that this youth hoped that a tick for zeal, might be put against his name on the draft list of candidates for some future K.C.M.G. The good saints Michael and George, if they can see what goes on here below, might hurl their haloes to the ground at the thought of the purposes for which their names are like to be taken in vain in the next decade.

In the present case the zealots in Southern Africa hastened to carry out the Wilsonian (or Lestorian?) edict. Not content merely to keep quiet, they virtuously announced that they would shun all social contact with these footballers, and at once return any complimentary tickets that might be sent them. In private diplomatic chit-chat the term “banana republic” is sometimes used to denote a low form of human life. These types would have ill become even a banana republic.

This digression was caused by indignation at the doings of the latest Socialist expert on African affairs, an apt successor to Mr. Arthur Bottomley and Mrs. Judith Hart. If any future Shakespeare should stage the drama of our generation, Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Judith Hart and Miss Joan Lestor would be well cast for the parts of the Weird Sisters. Miss Lestor, while in Africa, did not visit the legless and armless Black babes at Tete and Nampula hospitals. Miss Lestor just missed being in Zambia when another Canadian girl was shot. A Zambian warrior (the same one?) perceived a motorcar with two women approaching and valiantly fired at it. He hit one of them, a Dutch lady,

but missed the other, who was Canadian. Miss Lestor went, as a homing pigeon, to Zambia, where she expressed approval of General Spinola's coup in Portugal, announced that Mr. Smith's Government in Rhodesia now was imminently about to “topple” in consequence, and returned to London to preside vociferously over the premiere of a scurrilous Communist film about South Africa, at the National Film Theatre (R8.00 a ticket). The audience was largely composed of young ladies (and not so young ladies) of the theatre; members of The Profession are always quick to respond to any cause offering the prospect of “good publicity” (and free publicity at that). These charming ladies are the Unity Mitfords and Hitler Maedels of The Left, and in the last ten years the late Miss Nellie Wallace seems to have been almost the only female performer of note not to have marched in their ranks.

At the very moment when Miss Lestor was fulminating against South Africa's treatment of Black workers from this platform, a Black South African woman, Mrs. Lucy Mvubelo (general secretary of the all-Black National Union of Clothing Workers in South Africa) was telling the annual conference of the International Labour Organization at Geneva (6 June 1974):

... recent advances in job opportunities for Blacks represent a miracle ... Our voices are now being heard and our opinions noted. Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable for a Black trade union leader to address a White meeting in South Africa. Now it is possible.

The reader might note, if he so wishes, that the truth, once again, is different from the leftish-liberal vituperations. Early in this Book I said what Mrs. Mvubelo said at Geneva: that during my years in South Africa the lot of all races and sections of the population had vastly improved (save for the Coloureds) and added that this process of improvement would continue if it were allowed, but the leftist-liberal conspiracy was organized and mobilized to prevent that and to reduce the remaining orderly part of Africa to the ruination of the northern part. The advent of a second period of Wilsonism, with the promise of “unconditional aid” to the murder gangs, brought an immediate quickening of this process, as if a stick had been poked into a nest of hornets. “Freedom fighters” trained in and armed by Moscow and Peking flocked to London and were dined, wined and toasted there. Miss Lestor hastened to Lusaka to herald the obsequies of Rhodesia. The clamour for war increased and the liberal-leftists of the world swelled its volume: the further they were from the impending shambles, the louder they cried “Forward”, and the more money they put into the collecting box to make Africa free!

To revert, after this digression, to the unhappy President Kaunda, temporarily uplifted in prestige and spirit by the visit and encouragement of a member of the British Government, an emissary of Wilsonism, he might well wish himself back in his happy days as a schoolmaster. His next-door neighbour, the Mgwazi President Dr. Kamuzu H. Banda of Malawi, also has troubles, but not so many as President Kaunda, and he deals with them in different ways. For instance, he has not the Chinese with him, as yet anyway, but they are just across the fence. Also, although he cannot quite prevent the “freedom fighters” from sneaking through the bush on his border with Mozambique and foraying across it, he does not encourage them or allow them to set up camps and bases in his territory. President Banda is, also, a very different man from President Kaunda, having spent many years in America, Scotland and England before he returned to his native Nyasaland to become its father of independence. Round about the end of the Second World War, I chanced to visit some friends in a north-western part of London where I grew up in the years up to 1914. From them I heard of a Black doctor of the neighbourhood who was highly respected and well liked by the people of that part, a Dr. Banda. I also saw him across a street, a man in a London shopping throng, unremarkable, but destined to become one of the first Black heads of state in post-colonial Africa.

His international background may account for his different approach (from that of such as Kaunda and Nyerere) to his task of governing Malawi. He was and is a Black nationalist, and a leader of such. But as a responsible head of government and arbiter of his country's policy, he thinks peace better than war, discussion more useful than tom-tomming, rational words and deeds preferable to rodomontade and threats. He speaks as statesmen used to speak. Thus this Black leader is on record as uttering almost the only wise words that have come out of Black or White mouths, in Africa or about Africa, “in the last decade”:

I do not agree that we must have nothing to do with South Africa, Rhodesia and Mozambique. I do not agree with either boycotting or isolating these territories. I do not believe in the policy of denunciation at a distance from Addis Ababa, New York, London, Lagos or Singapore. I believe in contact between the African States north of the Zambezi and the people of the White-ruled States south of the Zambezi.

For stating such beliefs as this President Banda, like Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of Zululand, is vilified by the leftist-liberal-controlled press of the world as a traitor to the Black cause.

Despite his long international experience and background, President Banda, when he came to rule over Malawi, like all the other leaders of new Black States (with one exception) accepted, and put in practice, the political truism that tribal peoples newly thrust into “independence” cannot be ruled by Westminster-type party politics. He brooks no opposition. He expels, bans and imprisons. Thirty-five thousand Jehovah's witnesses were forced to leave Malawi in 1973. He acts against journalists, Black or White, who in his opinion embarrass his government.

As a professional writer who was put on Hitler's death list, banned in Soviet Russia, and surreptitiously removed from circulation in most countries of the world, I am strongly opposed to suppression of the press, but in one case personally known to me President Banda was abundantly justified. This was when a report of a clash between Malawi and Portuguese troops near the Mozambique border was published.

It was an obvious “liberationist” fabrication, intended to produce the impression of a war situation, like the story printed in The Times in July 1973 of a “massacre”, of which the Archbishop of Lorenco Marques said, “Neither the site of the alleged massacre exists nor has any massacre of the type described occurred.” Since that story appeared, and despite its certified falsity, the world press has been wide open, without scrutiny, to any “massacre” or “atrocity” story put about by the lie- factories in Dar-es-Salaam, Lusaka, Peking or Moscow.

President Banda set a good example by scotching that particular lie at its start. Unhappily, this is the generation of lies and vipers, and the good example will not be followed.

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Chapter Twelve

INTERIM BALANCE SHEET

I finished a year of travel around the countries of Southern Africa, which took me into all the zones of so-called “freedom fighters”, and at the end concluded that the world is in the grip of homicidal maniacs, all eager to sacrifice Africa on the altar of the world revolution. The southern part was entering the pre-Munich period of abandonment and betrayal. The vultures were gathering, and no clairvoyance was needed to foresee the outcome. A schoolboy who had done his twelve times table could, without chewing his pencil, find the answer to this sum in simple addition:

THE WEST THE EAST Money Aircraft Arms plus Missiles Incitement Arms and Bombs Loans Loans

equals ...

WAR ON SOUTHERN AFRICA

A man who endured the experience of Munich could but feel himself sick with shame to see men at the head of affairs all over the world today conniving to bring about another such holocaust in the name of “freedom” and “liberation” (just as Mr. Chamberlain called his deed “peace in our time”). Indeed, to watch England from afar during these twenty-five years has been like watching someone dear dying from cancer.

Unhappy Africa, to stand in the way of the World Revolution's global strategy just when it was supposed to be “emerging” into the bright morn of “freedom”. The Black people of Africa, born and bred to witchcraft, in the northern part have already torn each other to pieces under the spell of this new superstition, and are on the verge of destroying each other in the remaining southern part, to serve a cause hidden from, and incomprehensible to, them. Of all peoples they most deserve pity for the fate that the witch-doctors of the outer “civilized” world have prepared for them. When I began my journey, millions of them had already slaughtered each other for their own re- enslavement, and still the witch-doctors in the West and East scourged them on with cries of “liberation” and “bloodbath”. All the horrors that were perpetrated on defenceless human beings during the Second World War pale before the outrages that Black people have been bewitched into inflicting on each other in the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies.

As 1973 drew to its close the foul shape of worse things to come loomed up in November when Mr. Wilson, electioneering at Blackpool, promised “unconditional aid” to the arson-abduction-and- murder gangs. Any Englishman who remembers the feelings of horror and embitterment with which he heard the news of Munich will understand my feelings when I read this in a southern Africa newspaper:

In giving the Labour commitment to the “Freedom Fighters”, Mr. Wilson deliberately cast his eyes to the upper balconies of the conference hall, where his words were greeted with howls of delight from “observers” of the banned African National Congress of South Africa and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He explained that “We [i.e. the Labour Party] have restated the role of Britain in the

world fight for freedom.” He welcomed to the conference “those who are leading the fight for freedom in Africa and elsewhere”.

I like to hope that readers may remember Mr. Wilson's words and see how much freedom for the Black people comes out of his “restatement of Britain's role in the world fight for freedom”.

Thus encouraged, the clamour for war grew and spread. In Uganda General Amin offered himself as “commander of Africa's liberation war”. People outside Africa have since then been enabled by a film shown all over the world to see for themselves what “liberation” looks like in Uganda. As a prize, Soviet Russia sent a large consignment of arms to Amin, who publicly thanked the Soviet Ambassador. This was in March 1974, and the contagion spread to Libya, which offered to supply General Amin with MIG 17's. Norway announced that it was tripling its “aid to freedom fighters”, and in April General Amin urged the Organization of African Unity, which has a membership of some forty “new” states, to form a combined military force to fight “the White south”.

This proposal was enthusiastically supported by the Zambian Foreign Minister, who said the struggle would be costly but they must be prepared to pay the price. “The price” would be paid by many others than Zambians: President Mobutu of Zaire (the Congo) once offered to put his armed forces, numbering nearly 40,000 men, at the disposal of President Kaunda in the event of armed conflict between Zambia and Rhodesia.

By the latter part of April 1974, Mr. Wilson was again Prime Minister, committed to “unconditional aid”, and promptly on 1 May a leading “liberationist” arrived in London with outstretched hand to claim “the bond”. Dr. Agostinho Neto, leader of the Popular Liberation Movement (MPLA) which operates with Chinese arms in the northeastern bush and forest land of Angola, said MPLA was “largely armed and financed” by what he called “Socialist countries”. (Ah, our dear Socialists: yesterday, the high priests of disarmament: today, the best customers of the arms industry.)

He was received with great honour in the lobbies of Parliament, and went on to claim the bond from a Miss Joan Lestor, described as “the Junior Minister responsible for African affairs”. Miss Lestor, no doubt a Shakesperean scholar, was prevented from replying “not any drop of blood”, had she so wished, by her superior's pledge of “unconditional” aid.

In Holland a rare voice was raised against all this aid for the murder gangs when De Telegraaf attacked the Netherlands Minister for Development for “dragging the Dutch people along in giving aid to African terrorists”, but this still, small voice was lost in the general clamour for war at any price. The Americans kept quiet but were in fact supporting both sides with arms and money. They sponsored, by these means, the Roberto massacre in Angola of 15 March 1961, which began the thirteen years' ordeal of Portugal in Angola and Mozambique. The Americans today are financing the great north-south road through Lesotho which in the global strategy of the world revolution is to be used for the invasion of South Africa.

The Chinese simultaneously are building the great north-south railway from Tanzania to Zambia which would serve the other flank of the invasion.

In Tanzania and Zambia are already some 35,000 Chinese soldiers disguised as “railway workers”, and carrying in their packs Chairman Mao's little book, containing the edict: “Every Communist must grasp the truth: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Zambia itself is swarming with “freedom fighters” and their camps and arms depots. In England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in all those “socialist countries” which have been financing the revolution, the clamour for war in Africa increases.

Behind the scenes, where all this is organized, the process is being stoked up to a climax, perhaps this year of 1974, perhaps in 1976. Whatever the time already chosen the climactic event is clear to foresee.

In April 1974, while the howling of the jackals continued, the Portuguese general, Spinola, of whom I told in an earlier chapter that he published a book on Portugal and the Future, and was bowler-hatted for it, de-bowler-hatted himself, and used the armed forces to arrest the Portuguese President, Prime Minister and two other Cabinet Ministers and maroon them on the island of Madeira. He went on to dismiss all the Governors in Angola and Mozambique, most, if not all, of the generals and university professors, and put Portugal and its overseas territories under a junta, or military government, said to be provisional. He also released large numbers of political detainees, organized triumphant homecomings for exiled Socialist and Communist leaders, and sent out emissaries to Mozambique who seemed to be begging Frelimo, the main body of killers, to make up and be friends.

This fantastic affair was evidently long-prepared and organized behind the scenes. The true motive and meaning of it was not and never will be, admitted, but the essential nature of the stroke was clear from the howls of delight with which it was received everywhere in the leftist-liberal world, where coups d'etat by generals are not normally popular. The Wilson Government in London could not wait to recognize this “rebel régime”. The B.B.C. gleefully announced that the coup might trigger off “a bloodbath”.

The British Foreign Secretary, by this time a Mr. James Callaghan, with equal joy revealed that the (socialist) Foreign Minister in the Spinola Government had assured him that this Government would do “all in its power” to help enforce sanctions against Rhodesia.

In fact, the air was afoul with the smell of Munich, and all the world rejoiced at what it saw to be a surrender to Communist Russia and China, the Socialist countries, the Communists in the American State Department and Council on Foreign Relations; and the defeat of the Portuguese, Black and White, military and civilian, who from the day of the Roberto massacre in 1961 for thirteen years had borne the brunt and burden of resistance to the hirelings of the world revolution.

The author of the coup, General Spinola, in the book of which he was also the author, contended that victory in the wars against the hireling killers was impossible by military means, and proposed a federal form of organization for Portugal and the Portuguese possessions overseas. I said in an earlier chapter that greater independence from the central government in faraway Lisbon was something which would certainly appeal to the Portuguese in Africa, who long had felt that the distant central government did not sufficiently understand their needs and interests (for example: the defencelessness of Angola when the massacre of 1961 burst on it).

I added that I could not see how such a reorganization of the Portuguese home-and-overseas- structure would prevent or hinder the revolutionary conspiracy in the outer world from continuing to pay and arm the killers in the Congo, Tanzania and Zambia, or deter the Chinese and Russian Communists from their obvious design of taking over Africa.

General Spinola's book, the credo of his coup, proffered his federal-reorganization plan as a feasible alternative to the military victory which, by general accord, could not be gained against killers in the bush and jungle who were limitlessly financed and armed by the whole outside world (with very few exceptions).

Implicit in his proposal was the promise that Portugal, if the Spinola plan were adopted, would continue to be one entity, a federated republic comprising mainland and overseas possessions and a

population united by history, culture and language. If the General's coup were to achieve something like that, it might vindicate him, but at the start of his undertaking the prospects are ominous. At first, anyway, the foreign-armed and foreign-financed killers showed no sign that they wish to return to Mother Portugal's bosom and resume their place as good citizens among the others. Indeed, China and Moscow would hardly permit that, and London and Washington would join with them in prodding the murder-gangs into continued, and increased, activity.

Sad would be the day if, after twelve or more years during which Portugal has set an example of steadfastness and loyalty to the corrupted other world, the junta were to bring the matter to end in fiasco. I think of the butcher of Quitexe and his daughter, who fought off hundreds of howling, hashished killers and survived the day. I think of the doctor of Carmona who in a few hours improvised the defence of the town and succeeded, with only its civilian inhabitants and five soldiers in driving the blood- and drug-crazed mass back into the bush. What must they feel today when they hear that the junta is sending envoys to offer unconditional peace to the murder gangs.

Portugal, which opened up the new world five centuries ago, is the last of the great nations, and the world would be much poorer if the leftist-liberal conspiracy were, octopuslike, to wrap its tentacles round it. I found, with surprise in these decadent days, that the Portuguese are still a great family, spread over the earth. Goa was overrun by the Indians in 1961, but the Portuguese Goanese still had a choice of many Portuguese territories to which they could go, and I met several of these Portuguese Goanese in Mozambique and Angola: incidentally, Portugal, with its long history, ignores such trifling interruptions and Goa is still listed as part of Portugal today (though for the nonce “occupied”) in official Portuguese literature. For the Portuguese, despite the present “military occupation by foreign powers”, the situation has not changed since the early sixteen hundreds, when an official Portuguese Council stated, “He who is born and lives in Goa or in Angola is just as much a Portuguese as he who lives and is born in Lisbon.” This has held good until the present day, in all the territories which the Portuguese discovered and settled five hundred years ago. In Mozambique I met a young soldier whom I took, from his looks, to be Chinese. He was in fact Chinese by race but a Portuguese because he came from Macao, where ninety percent of the inhabitants are racially Chinese but hold fast to their Portuguese nationality: they are “Portuguese”, not Chinese, and this is still so today despite, or perhaps because of, the monstrous Communist China set up by President Roosevelt and his successor at their doorstep. In a little town in the interior of Angola I met a young nurse, also of Chinese appearance. She, too, was a Portuguese from Macao.

To have retained the allegiance of peoples so distant and so different through all the centuries, is a stupendous achievement, and one that should be maintained. The group of generals who so suddenly and efficiently took the fate and future of Portugal in their hands in April 1974 could only justify themselves if they wisely administered this unique heritage. They will be under enormous pressure to succumb to the leftist-liberal conspiracy and to let Portugal sink into the widening area of the revolution.

General Spinola's coup occurred in April 1974 and as quickly as Mr. Chamberlain's promise of “peace in our time” dissolved in disaster, just as quickly did General Spinola's vision of a federated Portuguese Republic comprising Portugal's mainland and overseas territories, with a greater degree of autonomy, dissolve (did General Spinola really believe in it? Did Mr Chamberlain really believe he had preserved peace in our time?).

Within three months the harassed General Spinola had been forced, by the methods familiar to the elders of the world revolution (strikes, demonstrations, increased terrorist bombing and burning) to abandon the idea of the great Portuguese federation, of autonomous territories still all under the Portuguese flag. By July he was gravely warning the nation of the danger of “anarchy” (the obvious

result of a violent interruption of an orderly process with a history of five hundred years), and, while he negated Portugal's past, plaintively rebuking the trouble-makers with the words “We must not negate our past’. He had in fact brought Portugal to the Austria-Czechoslovakia phase, when realization dawns that the wolves cannot be held off by throwing babies to them. In August the surrender and collapse (to the international conspiracy) were complete. The Lisbon Government announced, not of its own right but through the House of Helots in New York, that it had pledged itself in that quarter to begin immediate negotiations with the terrorist organizations in Mozambique and Angola for the transfer of power. Shades of the Angolan massacre of 15 March 1961! Within a few weeks of his great coup, while Portugal and its territories were in chaos and the leftist-liberals everywhere were exultingly crying “liberation ... freedom ... democracy”, it was clear that General Spinola had played a Kerensky-like part, and short of a miracle had destroyed the great Portuguese family.

Clearly, the Third-War-time-fuse ignited by the “wind of change” speech of 1960 was sputtering to its scheduled end: another planned and contrived war. Almost every highly-placed politico in the world had done his stint in its preparation, deluding the mob by lying talk of “freedom” and “liberation” in Africa. Indeed, the only one in a high place who did not join in the incitement was President Nixon of the United States, who had been marked down for destruction ever since he, by skilful questioning, led the Soviet agent and traitor of Yalta, Alger Hiss, to convict himself. The power of the conspiracy was never so plainly shown as in the worldwide attack on this President, the purpose of which was obviously to put another man from the Woodrow Wilson-Roosevelt stable into the White House in 1976. If that happens, the world may say good-bye to the United States it has known for two hundred years, as it has already seen the disintegration of the British Empire and the decay of England. It has been pitiful, to a veteran of these things, to see the idiot- faced mob, all over the world, muttering “Watergate” with the knowing leer of the halfwit on its face. If its masters desired, it would equally readily go about mumbling “Watercloset”.

A bad world, my masters, this of the Nineteen Seventies. As the song says, “When will they ever learn ... when will they ev-er learn!”

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Chapter Thirteen

THE UNABATED STORM

Sir Winston Churchill, looking back on the years of the Second War, called one of his four volumes of its history The Gathering Storm, and in the writing evidently planned to carry the narrative through to the passing of the storm and the emergence of a peaceful heaven from behind the dissolving thunder clouds. In the event, he knew before he died that the storm had not passed (“I have achieved everything I set out to achieve in order to achieve absolutely nothing”), and that the alliance of the money power in New York and the Communist revolution in Moscow had cheated him of his sole aim (“... Our aim? I can answer in one word. Victory ... victory at all costs”.)

In these mournful circumstances his visit to the United States in 1946 and his call for closer co- operation between “the British and American peoples” had the hollow ring of an empty hope, perfunctorily expressed. A gallant fighter to the last, he made this final appeal but knew when he made it that he stood already on the grave of the “simple and honourable purposes” for which, he said, his country had entered that war.

Thirty years later, in 1974, his “gathering storm” was still there, blacker and more ominous than ever. The forces which had defeated him planned that it should burst, this time, over Africa, at least at the outset, and then continue its tornado-like gyrations in an ever-widening radius of destruction until the world revolution was complete and what remained of the twenty centuries of Christian improvement looked like Hiroshima after the bomb.

1974 brought a sudden, steep rise of the needle's track on the chart showing the beat of human expectancy and fear. Two events showed the quickening thrust towards a new calamity of the forces which have made the Twentieth Century wars, and their enormous, juggernaut-like power, which none as yet has been able to withstand. These events were the Spinola stroke in Portugal, which destroyed the last great nation and its worldwide family from within, and the enforced resignation of President Nixon in the United States; this tragically revealed the dependence of American Presidents on, and their utter helplessness against the alliance between the money power in New York and the revolutionary high command in Moscow which had converted the military victory in the two wars into a triumph only for the world revolution.

These two upheavals were dark shadows cast on the contemporary scene in 1974 by the morrow's coming events, and the pace was obviously accelerating towards some climax. Both the Spinola and the Nixon crisis showed the might of the revolution backed by the money power. General Spinola's leap in the dark was in fact a surrender to Communist armed might built on money from America and four months after his coup he was still struggling to sort out the anarchy which he had brought about.

In Mozambique the murder-gangs, prompted by their Asiatic masters, continued, despite all the talk of negotiation and independence, to murder and burn, and were clearly under orders to stop at nothing less than complete and unconditional submission. Here and there General Spinola appeared to be attempting to stave off chaotic collapse by a local rearguard action, but his vision of a future Portuguese federation of independent territories united by history, tradition, culture, language and a common Portuguese flag seemed to be doomed: the vultures gathered over the last of the great nations.

The cock crew as officers of the gallant Portuguese army in Mozambique announced that they would join in with Wilson's War against Rhodesia, and others, in Angola, publicly announced that

they would let wouldbe terrorists from South West pass through Angola without hindrance, on their way to be trained in the Congo (Zaire) by the savages who committed the massacre of 15 March 1961, the ones whom Portuguese people, Black, White and Brown, though unarmed and unready had thrown back across the border. The effect of General Spinola's coup was to ensure the completion of the African tragedy. Four months after his intervention he bore on his shoulders the face of doom: embitterment and disillusionment were etched deep into it, as well they might be. He had sent the oldest of the empires crashing into the abyss of chaos, like all the others before it: the Turkish, the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the British, the French, while the American one was already on the brink.

Even more ominous than the Spinola crisis was the Nixon one of this year of disgrace, 1974. The first-ever resignation of an American president was brought about by pressures which he could not resist, and it showed more clearly than ever before that the once-great American republic was in truth utterly delivered to the Communist world-revolution, financed from the start and until now by the money-power in New York. President Nixon was not the first, only the most important man to be politically assassinated for challenging the authority of the grand alliance between money-power and revolution, to which President Woodrow Wilson, 1917 (as America entered the first war) committed his country with the words (2 April 1917):

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia.

President Wilson, when he said that, knew what his Congressional hearers did not know: that the Bolshevik revolution has been financed by the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. He was the captive of a group of men committed to the idea of world revolution, and during the fifty- seven years (that is, up to now) which followed his speech the Soviet Empire has always been shored up and vitalized by infusions of American money.

After the First War the stomach of the American Republic revolted against Mr. Woodrow Wilson and the men around him and three presidents (Messrs. Harding, Hoover and Coolidge) followed who would have none of “foreign entanglements” of the Woodrow Wilson sort. They were all in time and turn smeared into political oblivion and with the coming of President Roosevelt the process was resumed. After the Second War Soviet agents were uncovered in the American Government and for once public opinion became restive, so that the chief of them (the man who in effect turned the Allied victory into defeat at Yalta) was exposed, tried for perjury and convicted.

That was in 1949 and at that point the political assassination of President Nixon in 1974 was determined. The reason was that Congressman Nixon (as he then was) by dint of extremely astute questioning led the traitor to convict himself out of his own mouth. Mr. Nixon was never forgiven for this and all through the next twenty-five years his name produced paroxysms of fury among the Leftist-Liberals of America.

This was the real truth of the Nixon affair in 1974, and the name “Watergate” was coined merely for the delusion of the imbecilic mob. I said at the start of this book that the conspirators would destroy President Nixon “if they can”, and they could and did.

In fact, a case for President Nixon's impeachment might, in a sane world, have been made against him on quite different grounds. As President, he found himself unable to withstand the pressures of these dark powers behind the scenes who, although Mr. Harry Hopkins was long since dead, carried on his policy of “doing things for Russia which we could not do for other nations without discussion”, and were equally insistent that there be no “discussion” about this policy, that it must

continue “without reservation”. Thus President Nixon, despite his achievement of 1949 and his obvious knowledge of the revolutionary conspiracy and its methods, when he went to Moscow in 1973 took with him seven million dollars worth of direct private investments in the Soviet Union. He also almost wrote off some eleven billion dollars of war debts, reducing the 10,800,000,000 dollars owed to 820,000,000 dollars.

Prodigious gifts, but they were not enough to expunge the memory of his offence of 1949, when he exposed the traitor in the American Government. For that, he had to be politically assassinated and he was. The vendetta will not cease with his retirement: it will be continued for ever. Meanwhile, America and the world are left with an United States now openly envassalled to the world revolution, and as long as there are American presidents, the fate of Mr. Nixon will be with them like writing on the wall.

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Appendix

I am conscious of the fact that a new generation of readers has grown up since I began writing books and gained some repute with them, and many, if not most, of those who may read this book will know nothing of me or of any experience I have which might qualify me for pontificating about world affairs in general and African ones in particular. Moreover, I have only written two books (this is the second) in the last twenty years and am thus unknown to most of those who came of age during that time.

I will not try to introduce myself and my experience by listing the posts I held, the travels I made, and the books I wrote. I was fortunate to find in The Blossoming World (the second volume of the autobiography of a much better known writer, Mr H.E. Bates, published by Michael Joseph) what Mr Bates wrote, in 1971, about my first book of a series, Insanity Fair (1938). This will introduce me to those new readers and I quote some passages with grateful acknowledgment to Mr. Bates:

... by the year 1935 ... it already seemed to me that war, sooner or later and probably sooner, was inevitable ... Man had been insane enough in 1914; I found it a matter of excruciating and impossible difficulty to believe that he could be as wildly insane again and yet in my heart I was utterly convinced, though against my will, that soon he was going to be.

I was fortified - the word is ironical if you care to read it that way - by the dispatches then being sent to London by The Times Berlin correspondent, Douglas Reed, who was presently to expand these dispatches into a book called /nsanity Fair, which Jonathan Cape published. My most awful fear having been confirmed by Insanity Fair, | begged that Cape should send a free copy to every member of Parliament, a suggestion that Rupert Hart-Davis received with the wearily ironical sentence, “My dear boy, what's the use? They can't read anyway.”

The most terrifying thing about Reed's book was the accuracy of its prophecy. He had watched, listened and had been horrified by what he had seen and heard in Germany ... Here, as in some hideous glass ball, the future was set out with terrifying accuracy for all to see: the Saar, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Danzig, Austria, Belgium, France and lastly, of course, England. Every ghoulish prophecy, and a thousand more that we didn't yet know about were eventually to come true with uncanny, bitter, sickening accuracy. And it seemed to me that Reed set out his arguments with such power and cogency that no one of right mind could deny them. I certainly could not: everything intelligent and civilized in me told me that we had looked into a glass darkly and had seen the black, diseased, doomed face of Europe's future ...

DR.

Some blank space remaining on this page as the book goes to press enables me, without re-paging, to bring the tale of the African tragedy up to date.

The betrayal of Angola and Mozambique has bequeathed the anarchy in the Portuguese territories which was bound to result from General Spinola's intervention, and the outcome, if any clear outcome is to ensue, cannot be foreseen. The spectacle of his emissaries negotiating a “transfer of power” to the massacrists of 15 March 1961, in Angola, and with their kind in Mozambique must make the angels weep.

One small item on the credit side, that of truth, emerges from the chaotic scene this General has produced. The deposed and exiled Portuguese Prime Minister, Dr. Caetano, who bore so much of the brunt of the years of resistance to the leftist revolution, in his turn has published a book, Testimony, in which he spells out the Unacceptable Truth that America patronized and supported the Roberto murderers in Angola and similarly supported the Frelimo murderers in Mozambique.

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Acknowledgements and Sources

I had great courtesy and help from the authorities in all the Southern African countries and territories, particularly in the Communist-insurgent areas (a more correct description than “Terrorist”) where my small undertaking would never have got off the ground, as the modern saying is, without the hospitality of Rhodesian and Portuguese military pilots, convoy commanders and cavalrymen, officers and troopers, Black and White. Black Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, as well as Goanese Portuguese and Portuguese from Macao, all helped me on my way. The following list of publications includes those which I found most helpful in dealing with the various countries and territories individually. I have then added a separate list under the umbrella heading, “World Revolution”, of which these several localized events are part. Without understanding the global concept little real information or enlightenment about what is going on in South Africa can be gained.

SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa, Anthony Trollope, ca 1870

An African Survey, Lord Hailey, Oxford University Press Somewhere South of Suez, Douglas Reed, J. Cape, 1950 History of Africa, D.L. Wiedner, London, G. Bell & Sons Ethnological Elements of Africa, R. Gayre of Gayre, 1966

SOUTH WEST AFRICA

The Land God Made in Anger, Allen and Unwin, 1969

South West African Yearbook 1971-2-3, Windhoek, S.W.A. Publications Ovambo, Mouth African Dept. of Foreign Affairs, 1971

TRANSKEI Where Rainbirds Call, Basil Holt, Cape Town, Timmins, 1972

ANGOLA

The Fabric of Terror, B.J. Teizeira, New York, Devin-Adair The War In Angola, Ronald Waring, Lisbon, 1961

Angola on the Road to Progress, Michael Charman, 1971 Angola, Economic Dynamic, Optima, Sept. 1973, Johannesburg

BOTSWANA

Botswana Notes and Records, Vol. 4 1972 Botswana Society

Botswana National Development Plan 1973-8, Parts I and II, Ministry of Finance, Gaborone Primary History of Botswana, Roy Gardner, Longman, 1972

White Queen in Africa, Eric Robins, Hale, 1967

Ruth and Seretse, John Redfern, Gollancz

LESOTHO

History of Independence, D.T. Sixishe, Maseru, Govt. Printer

Reopening of Lesotho Parliament, 27th April 1973: speech of Leabua Jonathan Lesotho 1970: An African Coup, B.M. Khaketla, London, Hurst

MALAWI

Banda, Philip Short, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974 Guide to Malawi, Blantyre, Dept. of Tourism Livingstone's Lake, Ransford, John Murray

MOZAMBIQUE Portugal Today, Lourengo Marques Dept. of Information Portuguese Africa, Lisbon, Foreign Ministry, 1973

RHODESIA

The Battle for Rhodesia, Douglas Reed, Cape Town, H.A.U.M., 1966 The Man and his Ways, Salisbury, Min. of Information, 1973

People and Projects, Salisbury

Mr Ian Smith on Settlement, June 1973, Salisbury, Min. of Information

SWAZILAND

Swaziland Today, Mbabane, Swaziland Printing Co., 1973

Inside Swaziland 1973, Mbabane, Swaziland Broadcasting Service

The Story of Swaziland, J.F. Scutt, Mbabane, Swaziland Printing Company, 1973 Swaziland Tries Independence, National Geographic Magazine, August 1969

ZAMBIA Bwana - Go Home, Hitchcock, Cape Town, Timmins, 1973

ZULULAND (KwaZulu)

Shaka's Heirs, John Selby, Alien and Unwin

The Zulu War, David Clammer, Cape Town, Purnell

The Zulus, Hoseph Judge, National Geographic Magazine, Dec. 1971

Events in Africa since the Second World War have in truth been part of the process of World Revolution, with the Black people as pawns in the game. The Revolution, confined to its original area from 1917 to 1939 by obvious complicity between persons on both sides who were in a position to shape events at the war's end, was extended to the middle of Europe and the coast of China. The next move in its global strategy is to take over Africa and in this process, which has been going on since the 1950's, Soviet Communism and powers ostensibly opposed to it are once more synchronizing their actions behind the scenes. Thus to understand that what is happening in Africa is not merely a spontaneous upsurge of “Black Nationalism’, but an engineered product of White brains, a working knowledge of world revolution under its several masks, Communism, Liberalism and the like, is necessary and I append a brief list of works which cover this wider aspect of the matter.

The C.F.R. Conspiracy To Rule The World, Gary Allen (American opinion), 1969

Communist Revolution in the Streets, Gary Allen

The Worldwide Conspiracy, Ivor Benson, Durban, Dolphin Press

Message from South Africa, Ivor Benson

Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, Cape, 1951

Somewhere South of Suez, Douglas Reed, Cape, 1950

When World Government Moves In, Douglas Reed, New York, Economic Council Letter, June 1953

None Dare Call It Treason, Stormer, Florissant, Missouri, Liberty Bell Press

Braam Fischer, The Man With Two Faces, Vermaak, Johannesburg, APB Publishers, 1966 War in Africa, Venter, Cape Town, Rousseau, 1973

Terrorism, Morris, Cape Town, Timmins, 1971

Winter in Moscow, Muggeridge, 1932

The Thirties, Muggeridge, Haniish Hamilton, 1940

The Decade of The Great Liberal Death Wish, Muggeridge, New York, Esquire, December 1970 Chronicles of Wasted Time, Muggeridge (Part I), Collins, 1972

The Fabric of Terror, Teizeira, New York, Devin-Adair Co., 1962

Terrorism in South Africa, Jacobs, Peterson and Yarborough, New York, American Affairs Assn. The Silent War, Shay and Vermaak, Rhodesia, Galaxie Press, 1971

Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam, Sit Robert Thompson, Chatto and Windus, 1966

Several of these books are now only to be found at some libraries. From the shelves of others they have vanished and librarians consulted by me have said they were aware of the process but could not identify the source or catch these leftist book-burners at their work. A leading authority in this field, the late Mrs Nesta Webster (World Revolution; Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, etc.) once told me she had been warned by a British publisher that if she wrote “against the revolution” she would find herself unpublishable. Her works are in fact almost impossible to obtain today.

For those who wish to follow the story of the transfer of American treasure to the revolutionary citadel, from Woodrow Wilson's initial credit of $325,000,000 channelled through Koen, Loeb & Co. the day after Wilson's war against Germany speech on 2 April 1917 down to the present day, the Diaries of Major Racey Jordan, New York, 1913, are invaluable, also Prof. Antony Sutton's National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (Arlington House, New York, 1973).

FOOTNOTES 1: Somewhere South of Suez, Jonathan Cape, 1950. 2: The allusion is to Insanity Fair, Jonathan Cape, 1938, see Appendix.

3: Reproduced with permission of, and grateful acknowledgement and admiration to, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge from one of his book pieces in Esquire, New York.

4: This quotation, and the later one from Mr. James Burnham, are both from The Fabric of Terror, Devin Adair, New York, 1965, the authentic story of the massacre.

5: On the occasion described on the previous page one of Holden Roberto's henchmen, asked about

199

the sawmill massacre, replied “with a broad grin, "Yes, we sawed then lengthwise’.

6: The Second war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, and Mr. Churchill evidently knew what was to be cooked up behind the scenes at Yalta, because he said on 13 May, from London: “We have yet to make sure that the simple and honourable purposes for which we entered the war are not brushed aside or overlooked in the months following our success and that the words “freedom”, “democracy” and “liberation” are not distorted from their true meaning as we have understood them. There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police governments were to take the place of the German invader.”

7: A place where, apart from the control of coffee marketing and research, experiments in human relationships, of much interest to seekers after knowledge in this particular field, are carried on.

8: Voici l'Anglais avec son sangfroid habituel, or, Here comes the Englishman with his usual bloody cold.

9: General Spinola's coup, so joyfully welcomed by the leftist-liberals of the outer world, brought more alarm than satisfaction to responsible Black leaders in the White-governed south. Chief Kaiser Mantanzima of the great, about-to-become-independent Transkei, in obvious allusion to the events in Mozambique and Angola, said at Umtata in June 1974: “South Africa is our common home; we do not want the status quo disturbed by external revolutionary forces, forces of people who are avaricious and anxious to set foot on the rich soil of our country. ... Where we have to differ with the South African government we will differ as a family and not try to fight one another when we have common enemies outside the Republic.”

10: By this phrase, Unacceptable Truth, I mean simply truth, which is naturally unacceptable, and inaccessible, in a world where all means of public information, press, radio and television, are today controlled and financed by the leftist-liberalist conspiracy, with the proportionate brainwashing effect on the mob or multitude.

11: They are the Transkei, with some three million Xhosas; the Ciskei, with a million; KwaZulu with four million Zulus; Lebowa with about a million and a half Sotho-speaking people; Venda, with 350,000 people; Gazankulu with 730,000 people; Bophuthatswana with 1,700,000; and Basotho-Quaqwa with 25,000.

12: Mr. Msomi is a Shakesperean scholar, and his Umabatha is an adaptation of Macbeth to a Zulu background (little adaptation was needed, for the story of intrigue and murder for the succession runs through earlier Zulu history as through that of Shakespeare's Scotland).

13: Thirty-eight chiefs, headmen, witchdoctors and tribesman had been hanged in a preceding twelve-month.

14: I described a typical case of a medicine-killing in an earlier book (Somewhere South of Suez, Jonathan Cape, 1950), and need not repeat the ghastly story in detail here. People who know the Basotho best deny that they know this practice to be a crime; they are tribal-law-abiding men. The murders are committed to obtain the strongest remedy, as they believe, against threatening dangers. A chief, seeing his authority reduced, calls in his witchdoctor, who “smells out” the person who by witchcraft has caused the situation. The victim is caught, taken to some remote place, and has parts of his body taken while still alive. These are used to strengthen the chief's medicine horn, the symbol of his authority.

15:A minor postscript to contemporary history: the Basotho servants of an American friend of mine temporarily resident in Lesotho, after Independence told him they wished the British were back: when they were here, “there was law”.

16: See Lesotho 1970, by Mr. B.M. Khaketla, C. Hurst, London, 1971.

17:In fact this was an old building, the former British Residency, and only by courtesy can it be called a “palace”.

18:Attested photostats are in existence.

19:In this century of yesterday's-hero-today's-villain-yesterday's-villain-today's-hero this aged monarch is a typical figure. The object of universal sympathy and compassion in the ’thirties, when he was driven from his country by an unprovoked aggressor, he was restored to his throne by Allied troops in 1941. A large memorial in Saint Matthew's Church in Addis Ababa, set up by him, records his gratitude “to the forces who fought in the campaign for the liberation of Ethiopia’.

Pride of place in the central panel is, rightly, devoted to the South African troops who took a leading part, yet ever since the war Haile Selassie has led the howling against South Africa.

20:Not far away the new Parliament building was in construction, on the Westminster model, with all the trappings of Speaker's Chair, presented by some other Constitutionally-minded Commonwealth country, offices for all the Ministers, Sergeant at Arms, archives and press. When I visited it in 1974 it was deserted save for a woman in the Enquiries office, who had a friend with her; this friend, in the sociable Swazi manner sat on the floor in a corner, and suckled her baby.

21: The term “multi-racial”, currently popular, is in my experience meaningless. “Non-racial”, as , y y practised in Swaziland, has effective meaning.

22: Of the several meanings of the word “loo” the one used in this case is “loo: to incite dogs to the chase” (the Greater Oxford Dictionary).