A Memoir of Rhodesia, 1975

In May, 1975 I went from Zambia via South Africa to Rhodesia to do some research at the National Archives in Salisbury in the plush outer suburb of Borrowdale. Salisbury was only a few hours drive from Lusaka where I was living, but these were the days of UDI. In 1965, the self-governing colony of Rhodesia had made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the UK rather than entertain the prospect of African majority rule. The border between Zambia and Rhodesia had been closed at the end of 1973. Travellers’ cheques issued in Zambia were stamped “negotiable anywhere in the world except Rhodesia”. The solution: transfer funds from my bank in Lusaka to a Johannesburg bank, fly to South Africa, and then from Jo’burg flush with funds take a train through Botswana to Salisbury via Bulawayo.

True to form, my arrival at Johannesburg International Airport was frenetic. Last time I had been through the then Jan Smuts Airport on my way to Lusaka from Australia, security officials had to break into the left-luggage locker to retrieve my bags while holding my flight to Victoria Falls. The key stubbornly refused to open the lock and they didn’t have a spare. This time I arrived minus a visa, which led to me being escorted into the office of the head of security, who had the formidable presence of a Springbok front-rower.

“Well, miss,” he said, folding his arms, “you’re in trouble. You are not permitted to enter South Africa without a visa. You’re an educated person. You should have known that you are required to have a visa to enter South Africa.”

“The Zambian travel agent never mentioned it. I am terribly sorry, but I completely forgot that South Africa isn’t in the Commonwealth any more.”

“Hmph!” Pause. “And what is your reason for coming to South Africa?”

I explained about the need to get to the Standard Bank in Jo’burg and rushed on breathlessly about the planned research expedition to Salisbury archives to find out more about British colonial propaganda and mass education campaigns and especially about the development films made by the Central African Film Unit. “Nobody has written about them; nobody has seen them; I am just dying to get there so I can sit down and go through and document them all.”

By the time I drew breath he was looking a lot less menacing. He said he would need to make a phone call to Pretoria, and dispatched me to a holding pen to await the result. The military were everywhere. Very off-putting. After a tense half-hour I got good news about my visa, along with a stern admonition not to do it again.

I raced out the exit to find my waiting New Zealand friend Judy, with whom I had shared a group house when we were volunteers in Samoa ten years previously. Judy, now working in Jo’burg, was not surprised at the drama of my arrival; she had last seen me exiting from Samoa on Polynesia Airlines wearing only one shoe, the other mislaid at my farewell party before the last-minute dash to the airport. The rest of my luggage had gone off ahead of me by banana boat to New Zealand where I was to board a ship for England to launch what turned out to be a five-year career as a professional actress.

The omnipresence of the military, I discovered, was due to an incident in Fox Street. A young man had gone berserk and had been firing down into a city street from a high building. Urban violence in Jo’burg! Was it a taste of the future? Judy’s flat was right opposite the hospital. We heard the sirens, watched ambulances and listened to the radio reports. South Africa did not yet have television.

The big thing about my trip on Rhodesia railways was not to get my passport stamped with a Rhodesian stamp as I crossed into Botswana. That might lead to all kinds of complications in visiting other African countries and even in getting back into Zambia. The idea was to ask the passport official to stamp a piece of paper in lieu. I did have a piece of paper at the ready but I was so engrossed in conversation with a Dutch woman from Serowe who was telling me about a special trade school her husband was running in Botswana that the big moment passed unnoticed. A man in uniform appeared in the doorway and unthinkingly I handed over my passport and continued the conversation. He had gone about ten minutes when I clapped my hand over my mouth; “Oh my God! Was that the passport man? I thought he was just a train guard.” Actually the Rhodesian stamp didn’t prove a problem. They let me back into Zambia and by the time I was next going somewhere in Africa, I had a new passport.

I changed trains in Bulawayo and got in a four-berth-sleeper with three Rhodesian girls. It was still early days in the guerrilla war that was ultimately to transform Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. After UDI the African leaders in Rhodesia had realised that Britain would never move militarily against its own kith and kin. If they wanted their birthright they would have to fight for it. ZAPU and ZANU prepared to fight a guerrilla war, which began in 1972 with attacks on white farms in north-east Rhodesia.

It wasn’t until 1976 that casualties amongst the whites began to be really heavy. Few whites yet believed that the war could not be won. But the feel of war was in the air as we sped across the Rhodesian night—the girls lying in their bunks talking about blacks and “gooks” and “terrs” and the possibility of the train being ambushed. I was quivering too at the thought of the guerrillas being out there, somewhere in the night; images from Robert Ruark’s novel Uhuru about the Mau Mau in Kenya, and the troubles in the Congo, were flashing through my mind. The girl in the top bunk opposite said that her parents and their friends who had farms in the Centenary area were terrified. All the people in the district had got arms and learned how to use them. The Portuguese in Mozambique had the right idea, she said: when they found a terrorist they put him in a plane and took him out over the Indian Ocean and threw him out.

But the Portuguese had got tired of their African adventures. Mothers were no longer willing to sacrifice their sons in remote colonial wars. That was why there had been a coup in Portugal and the new government was pulling out of Angola and Mozambique. Mozambique would become independent under a Frelimo government in June.

Next morning I was sitting on the top bunk with my legs dangling over the side, having survived my dreams about terrs in the night, and reading Zelda. I adored the whole Fitzgerald ambience: the gilded youth, the jazz age, the beautiful and the damned drinking champagne out of slippers and flinging themselves in fountains. Oh the glitz of it all; part of me is forever This Side of Paradise with Scott and Zelda, the demented belle from Montgomery, Alabama; not for me the regulation Wilbur Smith novel that was at the time tucked into the hand luggage of 75 per cent of foreign tourists in Africa.

I was wearing only a bra and knickers. The others were getting very exercised about my dishabille, as it was a ritual of Rhodesia Railways that a “tea boy” would shortly appear with our early morning cuppa. “You know what those kaffirs are like when they see white flesh!” I dragged on a sweater and jeans. The tea “boy” was well into middle age and looked not lecherous but tired.

We arrived in Salisbury station. I hadn’t booked ahead. I love to turn up in a strange place and step out of the airport, bus or railway station and stand on the pavement and look up at the sky. Let the adventure begin. I decided to hit the Dominican convent for starters. I often exploit the religious connection in foreign parts. I had taught in Zambia at a Dominican convent in the bush out from the Copperbelt. (German Dominicans, and did they run a tight ship!) Anyway I asked the sisters about a good, cheap hotel. They recommended one in Third Street diagonally opposite the convent. The Dominicans had come on the First Fleet, as it were. The famous Mother Patrick had administered to the Pioneer Column and the Church had ended up with a bijou piece of real estate in downtown Salisbury.

When I first looked upon the dramatis personae seated at their white-clothed separate tables in the hotel’s dining room I thought—what a boringly normal looking lot: ladies of indeterminate age with perms and pearls, nondescript-looking males in that ghastly drab uniform of sports jacket and slacks topped off with a balding head, pink complexion and glasses but: “It was just a first impression, what good are first impressions …” It was a dramatist’s dream. What a cast of characters!

I used to adore meal times when they were all assembled at their separate tables. The cast list fell into two categories: the permanents and the transients. The permanents formed a kind of unchanging backdrop and a chorus to comment on the goings on of the transients, the more colourful flotsam and jetsam drifting into Rhodesia before the midnight hour.

The permanents would gather in the television lounge after meals in the evening and at weekends for tea and gossip, armed with their knitting and newspapers. Their response to my arrival: “Oh! Your Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, doesn’t like us very much.” After his election in 1972, Whitlam had ordered the New South Wales government to close the Rhodesian Information Service in Sydney and the Australian delegation at the United Nations to vote in favour of sanctions against South Africa and Rhodesia. I leapfrogged that one: “Oh, I’ve been out of the country so long I have no idea what Whitlam and his government have been up to.”

A number of the permanents were widows from the country, no longer spry enough to manage down on the farm, particularly if it was in the north-east operational area. For them the hotel was a little haven with cheap board and meals for long terms (I used only pay eighty Rhodesian dollars a month, special rate). It was shabby gentility—Fawlty Towers minus Basil.

My favourite widow had formed a permanent relationship with her knitting. She used to station herself in the lounge for most of the day, the better to survey the passing parade through the front door to the reception desk. Her sentry duty was punctuated by the tea ritual. Her husband was dead. One son and his wife were running the family farm, another jackarooing in Australia.

“You know what he finds really strange? The waiters and domestics are all white. That has taken some getting used to. He really likes Australia, though. He says that in many ways it is similar to Rhodesia: same climate and outdoor life, same love of sport, same pioneering tradition …”

Except that my ancestors dug their own holes.

“You must be very brave to work up there in Zambia with all the violence and all the shortages.”

There is more violence here.

“But fancy teaching black children. What about their intelligence? Don’t you find that they are rather slow? It must be very different from teaching white youngsters?”

I agreed that it was a very different experience, but this had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with enthusiasm. I had taught “white youngsters” in London and in Canberra, where I had felt I was just a functionary laid on by the state; if I wasn’t there some other bod would be slotted in. But in Zambia education was a prize and you really felt your efforts were appreciated. “Only 17 per cent of primary school pupils in Zambia get into secondary and it is only with secondary school that you have any chance of a decent job,” I told her. I could have gone on, but I thought, what’s the point of haranguing a perfectly pleasant old lady in the autumn of her life, sitting with a rug over her arthritic knees trying to make small talk?

The first of the separate tables to which I was allocated was presided over by Miss McKnight, a Jesus freak. She always wore a black suit of the type worn by senior sales ladies, and a soft white blouse with little touches of lace at the throat; her neck was festooned with medals—the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Fatima, the Little Flower and a large crucifix. Her tight little perm was dyed blue-black and her face had a thick layer of pancake with eyes and lips picked out in brilliant contrasting shades. We didn’t get on. I tried to get breakfast over with before she returned from morning mass across the road at the cathedral. After she had spent her day in some neat, precise little office—all spontaneity stifled in a bureaucratic straitjacket—she would head back to the church to do the flowers or some other little labour of pious love.

Her pet aversion was Donald Lamont, the Catholic Bishop of Umtali, the most outspoken Catholic critic of white supremacy in Rhodesia. He had been the guiding light behind “Peace through Justice”, a pastoral message issued by the Catholic bishops of Rhodesia at Whitsun 1961. Many in the Catholic community were outraged by the passage:

Though many fail to see it, or refuse through sheer selfishness to acknowledge it, the doctrine of racial superiority as taught and practised by many in this country differs little in essence from that of the Nazis …

Lamont’s parishioners had nailed a petition to the door of his church saying that the church should keep out of politics. Miss McKnight, too, was outraged.

“The Pope should have had him recalled. How dare he stick up for those murderers? Hiding in the bush. Why don’t they come out in the open and fight like men? Killing innocent women and children …”

After I tentatively mentioned the doctrine of a “just war” in the Catholic catechism and speculated that blacks in Rhodesia might see themselves as freedom fighters involved in a just war, she asked the head waiter to move me to another table. I was “creating a peculiar atmosphere”!

At my new table I found June, a grandmother in her fifties whose stiff clenched-jaw way of speaking was the result of cancer; ten years previously all her teeth had fallen out, she had lost three quarters of her lower jaw and had not been expected to survive longer than a year. But “the will to live” had pulled her through. June was the manageress of a pretentious Salisbury club: all wood panelling, dark oil paintings (surely there must have been somebody riding to hounds in at least one of them?) with the Tatler and the Illustrated London News lying on the magazine table. June loved a booze-up at one or other of the Salisbury hotels on her night off and invited me along. On the first occasion we were walking down Second Street towards one of the pubs, when she spied an African in the front seat of a car driven by a white man flashing past us:

“God, how disgusting! Look at that baboon sitting in the front seat of that car!”

I tried to remonstrate with her about this appalling language—but only the once. Over a brandy or two I learned that June’s husband and son had both been killed in “counter-terrorist” operations. She and her husband had emigrated from England. He had been in the British army and had joined the Rhodesian Defence Force; the son had been in the Air Force. She was still in deep grief; the tragedy she had suffered was of a magnitude that I had never experienced. The situation did not call for me to play the role of Miss Goody Two Shoes.

Another night June and I were sitting in the bar at the Ambassadors with a couple of businessmen. I became aware of a subtle alteration in the atmosphere: the noise level dropped slightly and all eyes were focused on the bar. I swivelled my head to look at the bar. Two Africans had just come in and were standing there waiting to be served—but they were being repeatedly passed over. The white drinkers were taking it all in with great if hooded relish; there was not the naked confrontation of Montgomery or Birmingham in Alabama; white Rhodesians prided themselves on their “civilisation”; none the less the whole scene was played to embarrass the blacks and entertain the whites. Ultimately the Africans were served; they quietly downed their drinks in a dignified manner and left; they had made their point.

June could not say African or black. No, it was always kaffir, munt, baboon or gorilla—anything simian. And yet once she invited me for dinner to the club where she worked and her relations with her African staff were excellent. She was a model of civility and even had a joking relationship with the head waiter. A split personality?

One afternoon I came back to the hotel rather late from the archives, to be accosted by the Greek chorus in the lounge. Had I heard the commotion the night before? No, I hadn’t. But it was your friend—paralytic. June had apparently come out of her room, lurched to the top of the stairs and started yelling obscenities and waving a bottle. The police had been sent for and they had managed to quieten her down.

“She was your friend; didn’t you know she was an alcoholic?”

“No.”

“She was drunk every night in that room of hers after she came back from work, some nights we used to hear her yelling. And we used to see the bottles the next morning.”

In the midst of these revelations I was called to the phone. It was June. She was at the Jamieson Hotel and wanted me to come round immediately. I hurried round and she met me at the top of the stairs looking decidedly shaky. She told me she had lost her job; she had been caught drinking at work and they had sacked her on the spot; this had sparked off the incident at the hotel. Poor June. She left the hotel and went to stay with one of her daughters. I met them once for afternoon tea at the Oasis; she looked as if the stuffing had been knocked out of her.

The other widow at the table, Mrs James, was the antithesis of June; sweet-faced, gentle, a bit dowdy, into soft suits and brooches. She had come to Salisbury from Bulawayo after selling up her nice suburban bungalow with its acre of garden with the bougainvillea, the mulberry tree and the jacaranda. The Rhodesian dream. Her two children were working in Salisbury. The Bulawayo bungalow was too full of the memories of a happy past so she was looking for a smaller unit in Salisbury with minimal maintenance. She seemed the soul of normality; I went and looked at a couple of possible units with her and had a few afternoon teas; then one afternoon on my return from the archives she asked me, rosy with excitement, if I would “pop up to her room for a minute”. I did. Oh the joy of it all; she had just come back from a séance with ouija board and all and would you believe it, the table rocked, and, guess what, the spiritualist had had a message from her husband … he wanted her to buy the apartment. Wasn’t it marvellous! And would I please come along to the next séance with her? I declined, using my research at the archives as an excuse. I just couldn’t face séancing on a Salisbury afternoon.

Occasionally as I passed by the lounge I saw a slim, wistful, freshly-widowed lady wearing pearls and neutral suit sitting by the window staring sadly out—until she walked out in the middle of the traffic in First Street in the rush hour, got knocked down by a car and ended up critically injured in hospital. “Attempted suicide,” said the lounge claque, a bit peeved that there were no more details available. Several weeks later the girl in room 14 slashed her wrists; fortunately one of the Irish engineers found her in time and there was another dash to the hospital. No back story was made available to the lounge on that one either. Another story without an end. Tsk! Tsk!

And now the flotsam and the jetsam. In the early 1970s the 250,000 or so whites in Rhodesia represented only 5 per cent of the total population as they battled to maintain their privileged, colour-of-skin existence. Emigration figured large on the agenda. In September 1973, immigration figures showed a net loss for the first time in seven years. The government was alarmed at the steadily rising emigration rate provoked by the simmering war and launched a huge publicity campaign, “Settlers 74” which included this ad in the Spectator in December 1973:

There is one last retreat where Britain’s way of life is still treasured and life has a special tempo of its own. Where endless sunny days and peaceful ways let one forget the problems of life elsewhere. Rhodesia. A land of leisurely pursuits and good neighbourliness …

While the campaign failed to reverse the trend, there were still some whites arriving to start a new life in Rhodesia. Sandra, a chic, cool blonde in her early thirties, resplendent in a navy blue blazer and gold jewellery, appeared at my table one morning from New York. (Why would anyone want to emigrate from New York? My idea of heaven: an early morning jog through the streets of Manhattan.) Sandra had just been retrenched from her job with Thomas Cook and had decided to head for Rhodesia because she had relatives who were tobacco farmers; they had their own private plane and, of course, “They are very good to their blacks. There is a school for workers’ kids and their health is very well looked after.” She only stayed a couple of weeks, the amount of time it took her to find a job and a flat. She came back from an American Fourth of July picnic with her eyes out on stalks. “The folks back home aren’t going to believe this,” she said. “I was introduced to a guy who is wanted in the US for stealing from the Chase Manhattan bank.” As a pariah state, Rhodesia had no extradition laws so you never knew who you might run into. I don’t think Lord Lucan crossed the threshold of my hotel, though.

The next blow-in was Pam, an English girl who had spent some time in Australia working in Mount Isa as a barmaid and living in a caravan; she had met some Australian bloke when she was twenty-five and he forty-five and had started to live with him; they had had a child but he had turned out to be a sadist who beat her regularly; she was desperate to take the child and leave him, but scared that he might follow. The situation deteriorated. She kept putting aside money to escape, convinced that only by leaving the country altogether could she be sure that he wouldn’t catch up with her; she heard about Rhodesia from someone at the mines. It took Pam only a week or so to find a job; live-in assistant matron at a primary boarding school in Salisbury; one perk was free education for her eleven-year-old daughter and a self-contained flat. I went to visit her once and couldn’t believe the facilities available for those kids at the price they paid; the school was heavily subsidised by the government; the fees seemed nominal for those farmers’ children, and they even had a swimming pool; while down on the farm the Africans were lucky if the farmer put up a shack on his property and hired a schoolie.

Once I went with Pam and a couple of travelling salesmen from South Africa to a nightclub. The salesmen were desperate to see the performance of some legendary stripper and insisted on sitting right up front; at one stage one of them was practically down on his knees trying to get a better view as she cavorted around with a snake. With her flabby thighs and dyed black hair the legend was well past her prime. Pam’s story had a happy ending. She wrote to me after I returned to Zambia to say that she had met “a super bloke”, a policeman whom she subsequently married.

Another Brit who arrived via Australia to seek greener fields in the dying days of Rhodesia was an ex-soldier who had seen service in Malaya then passed on to Australia where, he claimed, he had recently been a bodyguard for an Australian politician in Queensland or Western Australia, I can’t remember which. No sooner had he set foot on the tarmac than they were trying to recruit him into the army and no sooner had he arrived at the hotel than he was propositioned by an American mercenary recruiter. He opted for the Rhodesian army and asked me to type up the application for him.

The mercenary recruiter was also staying at the hotel. “Very sharp, a real natty dresser, hair short back and sides, a kind of Texan look,” I had scribbled in my diary before he was pointed out to me by the Irish engineers from Belfast, who had also been approached. They gave me his business card, a trophy which I took back to Zambia and flashed around; an American friend from Michigan was outraged and requested the card which she promptly sent to her Congressman.

The Irish engineers had emigrated so that they could pub crawl in peace at night without being disturbed by the IRA. They didn’t intend staying longer than two years because after that they would be drafted into the army. Tom had been married ten years and wanted a rest from the domestic scene; he had two small children and a large extended family. Jimmy was single and, according to Tom, “very randy”. Jimmy used go on the prowl looking for women every night after the obligatory pub crawl; his favourite was a certain hotel nearby, which “had a nice line” in coloured prostitutes.

I was told “coloured girls” fell rather easily into prostitution—partly because they often came from chaotic home backgrounds. They were also reputed to be “very sexy”. Jimmy brought one of his pick-ups back to the hotel late one night; next morning he was greeted with this note under his door: “This is a white establishment. Please do not bring coloured girls back to your room.”

The engineers did well; they soon found themselves jobs in structural engineering and were hobnobbing with the elite at weekend barbecues. Jimmy said it was all because of the Masons’ handshake which he had tried out in a couple of bars.

My final encounter was with an ex-mercenary who claimed to be a veteran of Mike Hoare’s band in the Congo. Now an accountant in Johannesburg, he had come to Salisbury for a holiday, which included a number of trips to the north-east operational area. He produced a much-thumbed book to prove to me that he had served with the legendary Mad Mike in the Congo and pointed to a grubby photograph of some mercenaries which he said included him. He was rather bitter about the whole episode as he claimed they had been cheated out of money at the end. He took me out for a drink a couple of times. In one suburban pub I noted a large jar on the counter, labelled “Comforts for the Soldiers”, half stuffed with coins and notes. The ex-mercenary disappeared from the hotel a day or so later; according to lounge gossip he had come back to the hotel late at night and been hit over the head with a bat just outside the hotel door.

I disappeared in a less sensational manner. After I had watched all the old 16-millimetre films at the archives and made copious pencilled notes from relevant documents which I typed by night on my Brother manual typewriter, I packed up my research and returned to Zambia before taking off for the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to do an MA. Five years later, in 1980, when I was writing up my PhD thesis while lecturing at the University of Zambia, white Rhodesia, that fleeting historical moment, disappeared. Robert Mugabe took over the political reins of the new African country of Zimbabwe.